University of Texas School of Architecture Lecture Series: Rosetta S. Elkin

Join The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture for a lecture with Rosetta S. Elkin Practice Landscape, Pratt Institute, on Monday, October 26th at 12:30 p.m. at Goldsmith Hall (GOL 3.120). A recording will be available on the Texas Architecture YouTube channel following the live event.

As a designer and a scholar, Elkin’s work aims to elevate the role of plants in human life by exploring the concealed characteristics of non-human behavior. Her work experiments with the ways in which we compose our worlds, blurring the traditional boundaries between research and practice. Drawing on a decade of multidisciplinary research, Elkin’s lecture will address the scalar ambitions of landscape architecture by unpacking the rise of tree-planting campaigns, as described in her recent publication Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, the work reexamines the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act; rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social.