Bart Brands, director and founding partner of the renowned Dutch landscape architecture firm Karres en Brands, has been appointed the inaugural Ian McHarg Senior Design Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Over the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years, Mr. Brands will lead a series of innovative design activities within the School and beyond.

“McHarg had a massive influence on Dutch landscape architecture, and like McHarg Bart brings big ideas to big problems,” said Richard Weller, co-executive director at the McHarg Center, professor and chair of landscape architecture, and Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism at Penn.

As a director and founding partner of Karres en Brands, a highly awarded international landscape architecture and urban design practice based in the Netherlands, Mr. Brands has led numerous landscape projects around the world. He played a major role in the hugely successful design of Federation Square in Melbourne, Købmagergade in Copenhagen, De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery in Amsterdam, the feasibility study for Cross River Park in London and, more recently, the development of the masterplan for Oberbillwerder in Hamburg. In recent years, he has worked primarily on campus planning and design, including the transformation of the Delft University of Technology and Science Park Amsterdam; for both projects Mr. Brands acted as supervisor.

Mr. Brands was a visiting lecturer at, among others, the TU Berlin; ETH Zurich; Academy of Architecture (Amsterdam/Rotterdam); Utrecht School of the Arts; Fuse Öresund Talks, Malmö; the International Landscape Master, Milan; TU Dresden; University of Edinburgh; University of New South Wales in Sydney; and University of California, Berkeley. He was also a member of the Beirat Tempelhof, an advisory committee for the development of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and adjunct professor at the RMIT University in Melbourne from 1998 to 2014. Currently, he is a visiting lecturer at the Technische Hochschule OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Detmold.

The Ian L. McHarg Design Fellowship is a two-year appointment in the department of landscape architecture at the Weitzman School. The purpose of the fellowship is to afford an accomplished practitioner and/or academic the opportunity to curate a two-year research-by-design project that will critically advance the discipline of landscape architecture. The fellow will teach a combination of advanced design studios and seminars, give a public lecture and actively disseminate the outcomes of their research project through both exhibition and publication.

Mr. Brands’s appointment is one of a series of initiatives leading up to the launch of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology (Almanac October 23, 2018), when the multiplatform exploration of the legacy of Ian McHarg (Almanac March 20, 2001), Design With Nature Now (Almanac September 11, 2018), opens June 21, 2019.