Keywords

Landscape / program-based design, sustainable social-ecological integration, environmental aesthetics, public space, affordable housing, cultural center types, evolutionary visual practices

Biography

Frederick Pearsall is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture where he has taught there since 1987. He teaches and coordinates graduate and undergraduate design studios, including the new first-year architecture studio, a seminar-workshop on ecological architecture, and a lecture-workshop introducing non-majors to the interconnected ideas and practices of modern art and architecture.

His research, theoretical and applied, seeks to advance the larger project of sustainability and social hope through the construction of more resilient, supportive, and aesthetic worlds with systems-thinking and –design of hybrid systems combining construction and nature, and human activity systems through programming. From a disciplinary standpoint this research also included the development of new, related approaches to foundational design.

His firm, Romm + Pearsall, has long been committed to environmental justice in the redevelopment of inner-city communities through ‘grass-roots’ planning initiatives and the related design of affordable housing and public space. Recognition for this work led to his collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro on a proposal for the new Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta for which he developed a new approach for re-connecting site-based ecologies and histories--human and natural.

He received his undergraduate training and A.B. in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, undergraduate training in architecture at Cornell University, and graduate training in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.