Julie Bargmann, Fall 2026 Marvin Adelman Lecture: DIG

Join us in the Film Forum at The Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts for a lecture by Julie Bargmann, DIG. This lecture is the Department of Landscape Architecture's Marvin Adelman Lecture as well as a part of the fall 2026 lecture series, How Can Landscape Architecture Have Actual Agency?

Landscapes are hard, all messy and complex. Sites are tough, many toxic and degraded.  Neighborhoods are complicated, uniquely layered and deserving a deep dive into evidence that lays the groundwork for authenticity.  “Good design” isn’t enough: environmental regeneration, social equity, savvy resourcefulness and sheer joy is required.  Be it a coal mine, a shipyard, a city full of polluted soils, and all sorts of abandoned sites and culturally charged landscapes, DIRT digs deep, carefully and empathetically to find what matters, to let form and process emerge from the place, and design the landscape with a generous vengeance.

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovator in the design and building of regenerative landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio in 1992 to research, design, and build projects with passion and rigor. Raised in New Jersey, Bargmann is forthright and unafraid to provoke debate to tease out what matters most about places. She is the inaugural recipient of the 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Prize in Landscape Architecture, and has received the American Academy in Rome Prize as well as Residency, and the National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. After thirty years of teaching generations to take risks and do good, not just design, she was recently named Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Virginia.

Image credit Mark Shaw for portrait of Julie Bargmann.