2017 Recipient of the Richard Brettell Award in the Arts
Landscape architect Peter Walker is the 2017 recipient of the Richard Brettell Award in the Arts. Walker’s work includes the transformation of the UT Dallas campus and the design of the sculpture garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
A renowned landscape architect with over 50 years of experience in practice and teaching, Peter Walker is the mastermind behind the ongoing campus enhancement plan at UT Dallas, which includes the magnolia tree-lined mall, the trellised plaza, and the wooded area surrounding University Parkway. The scope of his concerns is expansive — from the planning of cities to the design of small gardens– with a particular emphasis on civic design, corporate headquarters, plazas, academic campuses, and urban renewal projects. Exploring the relationship of art, culture, and context, he has challenged traditional concepts of landscape design.
After graduating from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Walker banded together with his professor Hideo Sasaki to found Sasaki, Walker and Associates in 1957, which later became The SWA Group. Walker spent seven years building up the company’s reputation as an internationally-recognized urban design firm before forming Peter Walker and Partners (now PWP Landscape Architecture) in 1983.
Walker also designed the landscape for the Nasher Sculpture Center in downtown Dallas in collaboration with Renzo Piano Workshop. Framed by live-oak and cedar-elm allées, rows of holly hedges, and a series of stone plinths, the garden design at the Nasher provides a stunning outdoor gallery for the museum’s collection of sculptures.
The firm’s architects challenge traditional concepts of design, and they frequently join with renowned architects to create significant projects. Advocating a landscape that responds to — as well as influences its environment — Walker has collaborated with architects of such stature as I. M. Pei, Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Yoshio Taniguchi, Ricardo Legorreta, and Helmut Jahn.
Over the years, Walker’s firm has received honors and awards and won numerous design competitions, including the National September 11 Memorial in New York, the United States Embassy in Beijing, and the Library Walk at the University of California, San Diego.
“I can say without fear of contradiction that Peter Walker is the dean of American landscape architects.”
Richard Brettell
PWP Landscape Architecture: Building Ideas
John Dixon Hunt introduces PWP Landscape Architecture: Building Ideas with a discussion of how we read landscapes and, hence, how they are designed with the reader/client in mind and the historical implications of such efforts. Peter Walker, Gary Hilderbrand, and Gina Crandell trace the history of Peter Walker’s various firms from the 1950s until 2000, and Jane Gillette discusses some recent projects in terms of using consultants to further design ideas. Twelve finished projects, seven works in progress, and three competitions, from roughly 2000 to 2015, demonstrate the firm’s goals and achievements with an emphasis on the expansion of landscape architecture from the surrounds of buildings to self-sufficient entities that express the highest accomplishments of both ecological function and design.
Talks
Before the Memorial: Toward a Landscape of Commemoration
April 11, 2017
The University of Texas at Dallas
Whither Art History in Dallas? The Arts District or The University of Texas at Dallas Campus?
(also with Dr. Richard Brettell and Gary Cunningham)
April 12, 2017
Public forum
Nasher Sculpture Center
Rebuilding Campus: The University Landscape
April 13, 2017
The University of Texas at Dallas
