Symposium: Garden Ecologies, Day 2

Garden Ecologies is a symposium and collaboration between Rice School of Architecture and The John Fairey Garden that invites speakers to the Houston metropolitan area for a two-day symposium on urban ecology, landscape practice and management, and climate adaptation. The symposium will provide a critical perspective on gardens, not simply as private retreats, or spaces of colonial control and exploration, but as a medium for engaging issues of climate change, environmental transformation, and ecological relationships and entanglements. Garden Ecologies expands on traditional ways of understanding the garden and gardening by through three areas of focus: Garden Ecologies in history, in design practice, and in land management. Through these topics, the symposium reflects on the garden as a space for negotiating settler colonial histories, issues of scale and urbanization, domesticity and industrialization, ecological conservation and hybridity, and models of intervention, stewardship, and practice.

 

In the Gulf Coast region, where the industries of extraction and unique coastal ecologies collide, Garden Ecologies invites discussion from academia and practice on the garden as space of experimentation, adaptation, and long-term engagement with the built and natural environment.

 

 

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund; the William B. Coleman Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture; and the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series Fund. Garden Ecologies is supported by the John Fairey Garden, the Rice Center for Environmental Studies, and a Rice Office for Research Subvention Grant.