Thursday, June 28, 2007

Alumna Receives Fulbright Fellowship to Finland

Ann Komara (MLA’84, MAH’01) has accepted a Fulbright Fellowship at the Helsinki University of Technology’s School of Architecture for the spring semester of 2008. Komara is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Colorado – Denver, and principal of Ann Komara Landscape Design and Research in Denver. During her residency in Finland she will participate as a visiting critic in design studios and offer a class on twentieth century American landscape architecture. Komara has a special research interest in the work several mid-century practitioners, an area of interest that she directly traces to her studies under Emeritus Professor Warren Byrd. She has recently published on Denver’s Skyline Park by Lawrence Halprin, and a monograph on Halprin is forthcoming through the Cultural Landscape Foundation and Spacemaker Press.
Komara notes that although gardens dating to the eighteenth century exist in Finland the profession of landscape architecture is relatively new in name; nonetheless, hundreds of projects dealing with landscape design, cultural landscapes, urban planning, and community development flourished in the twentieth century. Komara will be working with Professor Jyrki Sinkkila, Chair of Landscape, on a research project dealing with themes of modernity in Finnish landscape architecture. They are interested in design relationships between the United States and Finland during the period of modernism – a question predicated in part by a donation to HUT of books on landscape architecture in the post-World War II period. Komara’s proposal also includes writing a critique of a contemporary project – the Länsivälyä highway connecting Helsinki with Tapiola and Otaniemi. This essay is intended to promote awareness in the United States about a significant built work offering lessons in best practices for multi-modal transportation planning, landscape planning and design.
In summer 2007 she is co-teaching for the eighth time a “Finland Study Abroad Program” with Taisto Mäkelä, Professor of Architecture. These programs laid a foundation for cultural exchange and the Fulbright opportunity. Their premise is that “Designers have a unique window into other cultures through drawing – it opens and records a sensitivity to the ways people create and respond to site, place and daily life.”