Landscape Architect Maura Rockcastle to Present "If at First an Idea Isn't Absurd" Lecture on March 30

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Mill 19 is a project located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was done in collaboration with Ten x Ten, DIRT Studio and MSR Architects. (Image courtesy of Ten x Ten)

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Maura Rockcastle will present a lecture at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 30, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

Rockcastle is a co-founder and principal of Ten x Ten, a landscape architecture and urban design practice in Minneapolis that is grounded by a shared curiosity and passion for experimentation and agency.

In this lecture, titled "If at First an Idea Isn't Absurd," Rockcastle will explore landscape architecture as an investigation, an experiment, an ever-evolving draft dependent on activation by people, habitats and time. As well as how landscapes are never fixed, nor finished. Rockcastle will also discuss the current work of Ten x Ten, and how their approaches to working, making and organizing create resilient, flexible and immersive landscapes. With the firm celebrating its first year in practice in April, this lecture will inevitably touch on the process of starting a contemporary landscape office and will reflect on the questions we are asking as we build our practice.

As a landscape architecture firm, Ten x Ten collaborates with visionary clients and teams to co-create immersive, future-focused landscapes that will adapt to social, economic and environmental transformation. Capitalizing on creative alliances between fields, the firm operates comfortably within a shifting set of disciplinary boundaries. The firm designs for resilience and flexibility, monitoring what makes places thrive, adapt and be loved long after they are built.

Their work tests, questions and responds to the magic latent in each site. It challenges two worlds: the normative environment of professional practice and the unconventional investigation of transformation. The firm seeks answers to seemingly simple yet critical questions: What do we see? How do we imagine? How do we organize? How can we document the complexity of a site and deconstruct it through various modes of seeing and making? These answers take various forms — from installations, castings and collage to video, photography and drawing. This way of working starts a dialogue about possibility and establishes unexpected points of departure for future transformation.

Rockcastle has extensive experience working on large-scale projects, managing and navigating multi-headed stakeholder groups and handling complex public processes. With a background in printmaking and sculpture, she balances a rigorous design approach with a conceptual sensibility rooted in process.

Rockcastle moved home to Minneapolis after eight years spent in New York City, working for James Corner Field Operations and Snøhetta. Upon her return to the Twin Cities, she established the Minneapolis office for Tom Leader Studio and managed the RiverFirst Priority Projects. Her professional experience is focused on cultural and institutional public realm projects, including the High Line Section 1, Shelby Farms Park Masterplan and Times Square Reconstruction. Many of these projects have received national awards for design excellence, preservation and innovation.

Rockcastle graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture and printmaking from Cornell University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Ian McHarg Prize for Excellence. She has taught design studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Yale School of Architecture and now teaches at the University of Minnesota College of Design.

This lecture qualifies for AIA Continuing Education System learning units.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.