Sara Zewde

Abstract

In her work as a novelist, the late American writer Toni Morrison introduced notions of “dis-membering” and “re-membering”—the latter, a series of acts of rebuilding a collective corpus through the gathering of disparate parts. Morrison’s idea of re-memory is necessarily collective, in which people work together to gather their fragmented histories, lost or discarded, to reclaim a sense of wholeness. Landscapes, like memory, are not static but are continuously reconstructed through cultural and ecological processes. What might it mean to frame the work of landscape architecture as a participant in the act of constant retrieval?  What if landscape architecture positioned itself as a part of the collective process of discernment, to witness, honor, and support the elements of place that endure? In Morrison’s framework, change is not the wedge between the past and the present—rather it is the essential device for the collective and constant work of re-membering, and thereby, by extension in my own proposition, essential to the profession of landscape architecture.  I will explore these questions through a selection of Studio Zewde's recent work.  

Biography

Sara Zewde is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Named to TIME magazine’s TIME 100 Next, Architectural Digest's AD100, and *Wallpaper’s 300 People Shaping Creative America, her practice is celebrated for its design methods that sync culture, ecology, and craft. In parallel to her design practice, Sara serves as Assistant Professor of Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is currently writing a book on her research retracing Frederick Law Olmsted's journeys through the Slave South. Sara holds a master’s of landscape architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a master’s of city planning from MIT, and a BA in sociology and statistics from Boston University.