On Wednesday, Feb. 12, Sara Zewde, a landscape architect and founding principal of Studio Zewde, gave this year’s Lee Frank Lecture in Art History. The lecture, delivered to a packed, engaged room of students and faculty, was introduced by Associate Professor and Chair of Art History Brian Goldstein. Zewde, assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, took attendees on a journey through the intersection of landscape architecture, culture, and history, discussing her study of legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as well as her own work in the industry.
A thread that ran through the lecture was Zewde’s exploration of the legacy of Olmsted, who is often referred to as the father of landscape architecture. Olmsted is most well known for his hands in designing Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. His work has had an immense impact on American landscapes and Zewde’s own research and practice have been deeply influenced by him. During a pivotal point in Zewde’s life, she decided to retrace Olmsted’s steps through the South during a fourteen-month period in his life.
In the lecture, Zewde noted the ways in which the landscapes Olmstead recorded have changed since his travels. In multiple instances, she found that the landscape had been altered in ways that obscured the dark pasts of slavery and segregation entrenched in the land. The examples she gave of this phenomenon revealed that landscape architecture could be used as a socio-political tool towards the same means while appearing quite different across various cases. In one instance, a Black burial ground in the South was covered by a park with a gazebo and towering oak trees; Zewde discovered the headstones that Olmsted had carefully recorded across town. In another case, another burial ground had been turned into an underpass with a highway running through it.
As Zewde pointed out, landscape is a powerful tool, and it can be used to either protect or obscure history. For her, understanding Olmsted’s Southern journey — often regarded as a “wayward youth” phase of his life — was central to grasping how landscape architecture could be harnessed as a tool for social change. In his travels, Olmsted observed and documented the deep societal impacts of slavery, an experience that would influence his later work in park design.
Following her discussion of Olmsted, Zewde spoke about her extensive experience, including projects ranging from national parks to urban spaces across the nation, from Seattle to Philadelphia. Throughout the lecture, she emphasized her belief that landscape architecture — being present in many facets of life — remains often underappreciated, despite it both signifying and shaping our culture. Zewde’s lecture focused on how landscape architecture can serve as a powerful tool to provoke thought, heal societal wounds, and reimagine public spaces.
Through her landscape architecture firm, Zewde has led several design projects with a focus on blending site interpretation with cultural narratives. She is focused on creating spaces that allow people to feel a deep sense of belonging. She first highlighted the Mander Campus in nearby Philadelphia, a park project located near the neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion, as an example of how thoughtful landscape design can foster connections, provide refuge from violence, and honor community heritage. She described meeting with the community in Strawberry Mansion by hosting a block party influenced by local traditions and having residents create collages about what they loved about the park. They used these collages to find patterns in the values of the community and then designed the park using the information. For example, many people used the park as a space to have family gatherings, so they made sure to include ample space for picnicking.
Another noteworthy local project Zewde discussed during the lecture was her involvement with the revitalization of the Graffiti Pier in Philadelphia. Originally an abandoned coal pier, the site became a cultural landmark for the city’s graffiti artists and was especially important to the broader graffiti community because Philadelphia is the birthplace of the practice. Much like the case of the Mander Campus, the firm aimed to engage with the local community throughout the length of the project. This proved especially important for the project, as there had been previous attempts to limit public access to the pier, and renovation attempts were seen as gentrification efforts. With rising tides threatening the pier’s physical structure, Zewde’s team was able to engage with the local community by framing the project as one to save the pier, rather than simply transform it. The challenge of preserving the site’s “gritty” cultural integrity while addressing practical needs like ADA compliance and flood resilience demonstrates Zewde’s innovative and careful approach to landscape architecture.
Finally, Zewde touched on the Beacon project in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where her firm combined environmental sustainability, seasonal plantings, and a respect for local Native voices in her effort to transform the building and surrounding land. The history of the site was fascinating — the preexisting building had originally been built by the Nabisco company and was one of six identical structures built across the country. This practice is in stark contrast to the approach Zewde and her team took in transforming the space.
In conversation with local Native people, Zewde was struck by their sentiment that “we’re all just passing through.” Furthermore, she noted the ironic fact that we often attribute human names to the land we rely on rather than naming our children after natural elements, as is common in many Native American cultures. Keeping these conversations in mind, the site was transformed into a space that better reflects Native history. The building, which is on the banks of the Hudson River, was shown to be at risk of flooding in environmental modeling, so they opted to design the landscape with mitigation of this risk in mind. In this process, they made sure not to frame water as “the enemy,” ensuring that it was still a part of the site, while not posing a direct risk. Keeping with the sentiment that “we’re all just passing through,” Zewde’s team chose to repurpose many of the site’s pre-existing materials and to plant native plants that would be low-maintenance and good for the land and each other.
For Zewde, these three projects are underscored by a central theme of her work: the belief that landscapes, though often seen as static, are living, evolving entities that can be used to engage in critical conversations about history, race, and society. She spoke about how her work seeks to challenge the traditional boundaries of the field and reimagine landscape architecture as a space for social healing, reflection, and community engagement. Her message was clear: landscape architecture should be expansive, inclusive, and open to new possibilities. Ultimately, Zewde’s 2025 Lee Frank Lecture offered much more than a discussion on landscape architecture — it was an invitation to rethink how we engage with the spaces around us and how these spaces, in turn, shape the stories we tell and the legacies we leave behind.
