BIOGRAPHY • Kathy Poole

Works of landscape architecture are more than “open space.” They are full—full of history, full of healthy biology, full of beauty, full of meaning. And they are more than “nice” or “beautiful.” They are vital, comprise basic structural elements, provide critical functions, and fulfill necessary roles for community life. They are infrastructures, requisite and utilitarian components in making cities and communities. Like other utilities such as electricity, stormwater, roads, gas, streams or forests, built landscapes are indispensable to our everyday lives. And like all of the arts, great works of landscape architecture are necessary to the continued fulfillment of our humanity.

All of Kathy Poole’s efforts are geared to returning landscape architecture to its legacy as not only a garden art but also an urban art, as a critical infrastructure for modern life. Her research of what she calls Civic Hydrology demonstrates the significance of historical water-related infrastructure for contemporary practice and explores its future potentials. Using national and international precedents, she emphasizes the application of ecological principals in design and explores how reframing our conceptions of ecology are necessary if the project of biophysically healthy landscapes is to be successful. Her Civic Hydrology research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Landscape Architecture Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and the Sacharuna Foundation. Her web-based project Evolutionary Infrastructure: Boston’s Back Bay Fens, undertaken as a Fellow of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, is award winning and nationally recognized. Her scholarly research and design work have been published nationally (and soon internationally) and have been the recipients of prestigious awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects and Landscape Forum. Her ecologically concerned scholarship, designs, and writings on its teaching have made her a recognized scholar on the subject. Her most recent project, completing a book, The Life of Water, explores ecological themes through a series of mappings and essays that suggest how we might more rigorously discover the latent potentials of sites’ expressions.
Kathy Poole began her design career as a piano performance major, as she believes that what she practices is music in three dimensions. She developed her joy for making at Clemson University while fulfilling an architecture degree. She completed her Master of Landscape Architecture degree at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, garnering the department’s top honor, the Charles Eliot Award, along with one of the University’s top fellowships, the Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship. Her experience in the academy includes eight and a half years teaching, mostly at the graduate level. She was the recipient of two teaching fellowships and was part of a group of colleagues pursuing the better integration of ecology in design, which resulted in a book, Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning (Kristina Hill and Bart Johnson, eds).

Her professional practice experience has been developed through work with strong firms and includes projects throughout the United States as well as a selection of overseas countries, most notably England and Egypt. Her range of projects includes new towns, urban and suburban parks, farms, large residential gardens, brownfield sites, urban redevelopment, health care complexes, transportation routes, and water utilities.
Currently, Kathy Poole is principal of her own firm, POOLE DESIGN, pursuing a unique model where professional practice, scholarly research, and guest teaching are blended into a synthetic pursuit of built landscapes as healthy and culturally significant places that strengthen and clarify citizens’ relationships to the land they occupy. She is a popular speaker, invited to lecture at universities and conferences nationally and abroad.