Karen M'Closkey, "Synthetic Patterns"

Karen M'Closkey, a founding partner of PEG office of landscape + architecture, is a licensed landscape architect in the States of Pennsylvania, California and Michigan. She has over ten years of experience working on a variety of award-winning landscapes.

Karen is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches core design studios, advanced option studios, and contemporary theories of landscape architecture. Her advanced options studios explore techniques for working with repetition, ornamentation and surface modulation as a means to produce new forms of topography. Her book titled Unearthed: the Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) utilizes a selection of work by this highly regarded landscape architecture practice as a vehicle by which to gauge recent disciplinary trends. She received a research grant and publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The David R. Coffin Publication Grant from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Other writings include "Synthetic Patterns: Fabricating Landscapes in the Age of Green"(Journal of Landscape Architecture, Spring 2013), "Not Garden" in VIA: Dirt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), "Criticality in Landscape Architecture: Origins in 19th-century American practices, in Modernism and Landscape Architecture, 1890-1940" (Washington D.C.: National Gallery Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, forthcoming 2013), among others. Her focus considers the use of design techniques and the environmental values they manifest in both Modern-era and contemporary landscape designs. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Keith VanDerSys), entitled Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (Routledge Press), situates the emerging expressions of pattern in landscape architecture.

Karen received a Masters in Landscape Architecture with distinction from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture with distinction from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).