Landscape Architecture :: Kristina Hill

Faculty

Department Faculty

Professor

Associate Professor

Assistant Professor

Lecturers

Luanne Smith
Nhon Truong

Visiting Scholars

Students

KRISTINA HILL

New: See Kristina's essay on defining excellence in ecological design in Harvard Design Magazine, March 2003.
Also, her edited book, Ecology and Design , is now available from Island Press (2002).
Her new book on Landscape Urbanism: Theory and Case Studies is due out from the University of Washington Press in 2004.

Kristina's current work is on developing urban design principles and prototypes that emphasize sustainability and ecological health. Her background includes work on landfills and contaminated sites in Europe and on the East Coast of the United States. But here in the Pacific Northwest, the pressing issue is whether urban development can coexist with the salmon populations that both pass through and live in urban waterways. Kristina's research, consulting, and teaching are focused on trying to address this problem by altering the "skin" of the city to change the quality, quantity, and timing of water flows through an urban landscape.

For her, this means looking at new functions for old forms, and sometimes a need to invent new forms for the most common elements of urban space, like roadways, parking lots, parks, and residential yards. If these alterations can be made in a cost-effective way, she says, cities could significantly reduce their environmental impacts and increase the odds that sensitive species like salmon will be able to live in our cities with us. She also believes that we may simultaneously be able to improve our own chances for health by making it less likely that water contamination will enable the growth of organisms associated with human diseases.

Her recent design projects, working with students and professional colleagues, have included designs for a linear waterfront park , a 100-acre low-income housing area (including street rights-of-way), residential parcels in an urban watershed , and a quarter-mile long section of a degraded urban creek passing through a residential neighborhood. Kristina was also involved as a founding member of UW's Urban Ecology IGERT Program, funded by the National Science Foundation in 2001. In this curriculum as well as in the Urban Ecology Lab , where Kristina has worked with Planning Prof. Marina Alberti and their graduate students, she uses her combined background in ecology and design to inform her scientific research on the relationships between sites and landscapes, and seeks to draw implications from this research for the innovations needed in urban form and function.

Kristina teaches undergraduate and graduate studios with an emphasis on understanding ecological processes in urbanizing regions. She uses landscape ecological concepts to help students perceive the city through a very different "lens," and links these concepts to the historical design vocabulary of landscape architecture and urban design through form. She also advises Master's theses in the Department, has created an on-line self-study course ( LA 440 ) for design students to learn computing tools, and is the Director of the MLA Program. Her past research has focused on articulating a theory of category definition for spatial models, and on the influence of gender on environmental values.

Kristina received her doctorate in landscape architecture with a minor in ecology from Harvard University. She also has a Master's in Landscape Architecture from Harvard, and a Bachelor of Science in geology from Tufts University. Kristina studied drawing and sculpture at the Boston Museum School, and spent a year at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dept. of Physical Geography at the University of Stockholm, and spent four years as a professor at MIT before joining the faculty here at the University of Washington.