Landscape Architecture Professor Awarded Prestigious Rome Prize
A focus on the integration of agroecology in contemporary urban environments.
University of Texas News
Apr 23, 2021
Excerpt:
Lickwar’s research and practice investigate the powerful connection between the vegetal world and human well-being, with a focus on the integration of agroecology in contemporary urban environments. She is a registered landscape architect with more than 15 years of experience in the design and construction of culturally significant gardens and civic landscapes, including the National World War I Memorial, the Newport Beach Civic Center Park, the Glenstone Museum, and the National September 11 Memorial in New York.
Her proposal “Promiscuous Cultures: Agroecology and the Orto Urbano” will examine remnant and lost practices of traditional agroecology in the Fascia Olivata Assisi-Spoleto of central Italy, and will speculate on how their recovery can inspire novel hybrid forms of urban agriculture in Rome. Through a series of hybrid drawings that analyze the forms and practices of coltura promisuca, or mixed cultures, Lickwar will tell the story of the region’s transformation from a landscape of intensive mixed cultivation to one of extensive mechanized monocropping. She will then reinterpret this lost practice of layering and overlapping distinct vegetal forms for contemporary, urban adaption through a series of speculative proposals.
