Berrizbeitia

The GSD is pleased to announce the appointment of Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture as of July 1, 2015. Berrizbeitia is currently professor of landscape architecture and director of the Master in Landscape Architecture degree programs at the GSD.

Berrizbeitia is a landscape architect specializing in theory and criticism of nineteenth and twentieth-century public landscapes in the United States and Europe, with particular interests in material culture, design expression, and the productive functions and roles of landscape in processes of urbanization. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes centers on the creative hybridization of local and foreign cultural practices as a response to a centuries-old process of global cultural exchange; the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization; and the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.

At the GSD, Berrizbeitia has taught design studios and theory of contemporary practices, investigating innovative approaches to the conceptualization of public space, especially on sites where urbanism, globalization, and local cultural conditions intersect. She also leads seminars that focus on significant transformations in landscape discourse over the last three decades.

Editorially, Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series (Routledge, March 2015); editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2009), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Rockport, 1999), which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have also been published in numerous books and journals, and she serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture and on the advisory board of the South America Project. She has also served on major competition juries in Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Madrid.

A native of Caracas, Venezuela, Berrizbeitia studied architecture at the Universidad Simon Bolivar before receiving a BA from Wellesley College and a Master in Landscape Architecture from the GSD in 1987. Since then, she has taught in various capacities at the GSD, including as assistant professor of landscape architecture from 1993 to 1998 and as professor of landscape architecture since 2009.