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Saskia de Wit Joins Garden and Landscape Studies as a One-Month Research Awardee

Posted On January 09, 2017 | 10:01 am | by Press | Permalink

We are pleased to welcome Saskia de Wit who joins Garden and Landscape Studies as a one-month research awardee from January 9 to February 7, 2017.

Saskia de Wit is an assistant professor at the University of Technology in Delft, where she helped establish a master track in landscape architecture and now teaches landscape architecture, planting design, landscape theory, and history. She also leads her own office, Saskia de Wit Garden and Landscape, with realized works in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

While studying for her master’s degree in landscape architecture at Wageningen University, she was introduced to the notion of landscape architecture as a transformation of the existing landscape. During an exchange year at Delft University, architecture and an integral connection to urbanism were added. Her interests in both the garden and the characteristics of landscape are expressed in several books, papers, and articles, notably The Enclosed Garden (coauthor Rob Aben; 010 Publishers, 1999), and Dutch Lowlands: Morphogenesis of a Cultural Landscape (SUN Publishers, 2009). Gradually her focus deepened on the garden as the most condensed expression of landscape—as a core of the discipline of landscape architecture—and in 2014 she finished her PhD research on “Hidden Landscapes: The Metropolitan Garden and the Genius Loci.”

Currently she is working on transforming her PhD research into a book for a broader audience. While at Dumbarton Oaks, she will be working on two essays on the role of interstitial spaces in the metropolitan landscape and on the sensorial properties of place. These notions come together in her understanding that interstitial spaces might hold keys for opening up often-hidden landscape qualities “underneath” the metropolitan tissue, qualities that can be defined as “place,” if they can be perceived as such.