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Pairing landscape architecture ideas with the method of an anthropologist results in a unique and more holistic project, as Harvard University Associate Professor Gareth Doherty will explain at his lecture in S. R. Crown Hall’s Upper Center Core at 5 p.m. on November 19.

Landscape fieldwork combines landscape architects’ projective skills and tools for site analysis—drawing, measuring, photographing, or remote sensing—with the observation, field notes, and unstructured interviews that is core to the ethnographic methods used by anthropologists, all as an integral part of a design process. “When we do thick description, it leads us to thick prescription,” Doherty says. This approach aligns with the mission of the Master of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program, which advances landscape design education toward design justice—centering lived experience, equity, and participatory fieldwork as essential forms of design intelligence.

Doherty is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies. He is the author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State.

The 2025 Peter Lindsay Schaudt Lecture in Landscape Architecture of the Master of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism is co-hosted with American Society of Landscape Architects Illinois.