Lecture Series: Maggie Tsang, AIA 

Monday, March 4, 2024
5:30pm - 7pm
Freeman Auditorium in the Woldenburg Art Center,
Tulane's Uptown Campus

This lecture is open to the public.

This lecture is presented by Maggie Tsang, Assistant Professor at Rice School of Architecture, and Co-Founder and Managing Principal of Dept.

In the discourse around climate change, science and engineering can often dominate the conversation with solutions-oriented approaches to complex social and environmental problems. While this type of expertise can be valuable and necessary, it excludes other modes of practice and study that integrate multiple perspectives and multiple forms of knowledge. Given the histories of urbanization, displacement, segregation, and disinvestment; and given our current condition of environmental risk and crisis, new ways of understanding and working with the environment are needed. In this lecture, I will explore the concept of “tending,” as a form of design practice. “To tend” means to regularly behave in a particular way or have certain characteristics; “To tend” also means to care or look after something or someone. Through a series of landscape and urban design projects and research endeavors, this lecture will examine the act of tending as a means of exercising agency in the context of radical environmental transformation.

Maggie Tsang is an architect and urbanist and co-Founder of Dept., a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in Houston, TX. Dept.’s work ranges in scale but focuses primarily on the relationship between ecology and infrastructure with an emphasis on the Gulf Coast. Current projects include a 5-acre park on Buffalo Bayou in Houston and 54-acre ecological restoration project along the Indian River Lagoon in Central Florida. Dept. was recently awarded the 2022 League Prize from the Architectural League of New York and has also received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Florida Chapter and the American Planning Association, Gold Coast Chapter. Maggie is also Assistant Professor at Rice School of Architecture where her teaching and research focuses on issues of climate adaptation, floodplain urbanism, and community resilience. She is currently leading a multidisciplinary research project with the Department of Civil Engineering and Department of Sociology on Community-Oriented Stormwater Infrastructure for Sims Bayou.

Questions? Please reach out to Sean Huff, TuSA Executive Administrative Assistant, at shuff1@tulane.edu.

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