Professor Emeritus Julia Czerniak, RLA, ASLA is dean of the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. At Syracuse University, she taught studios as well as seminars on landscape theory and criticism. Czerniak is educated both as an architect and landscape architect and her research and practice draw on the intersection of these disciplines. She is also the creative director at CLEAR, an interdisciplinary design practice that focuses on urban landscapes in Rust Belt cities.
Although the techniques, scales and products of her research vary, Czerniak’s work focuses on the physical and cultural potentials of urban landscapes. Recent design research advances landscape as a protagonist in the remaking of Rust Belt cities, from a series of public space interventions along a derelict creek to ecologically and spatially rich streetscapes for a newly planned campus of Syracuse University.
Czerniak’s work as a designer is complemented by her work as educator and writer, which in all cases advances design as both a way to enable new ways of seeing, imagining, valuing and acting within our challenged anthropocentric environment and the agent of a socially and ecologically rich public realm. Large Parks (Princeton Architectural Press) and Case: Downsview Park Toronto (Prestel) focus on contemporary design approaches to public parks and the relationship between landscape and cities. Formerly Urban: Projecting Rust Belt Futures (Princeton Architectural Press) examines potential futures for shrinking cities. Other writings include essays in Third Coast Atlas (Actar); Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the History of Architecture (Wiley & Sons); Landscape Infrastructure (Birkhauser); Landscape Alchemy: The Work of Hargreaves Associates (ORO Editions); Fertilizers: Olin Eisenman (Institute for Contemporary Art,); Landscape Urbanism (Princeton Architectural Press); Assemblage 34 (MIT Press) and Harvard Design Magazine. Czerniak lectures and teaches internationally, most recently delivering keynote lectures at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, the Large Parks in Large Cities conference in Stockholm, the Open Space Summit in Brussels and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects annual conference.
