MONDAY | SEPT 25 | 4:00 PM | AB100

Join us for the first lecture in our CAP Guest Lecture Series this fall with Brenda Williams, FASLA, NOMA, principal and director of preservation planning at Quinn Evans.

Throughout her 30-year career as a landscape architect, Brenda Williams, FASLA, has focused her passion and empathy for understanding human connections to landscapes, developing methods to support, strengthen, and adapt significant landscapes for the people to whom they are meaningful. Her work has a strong emphasis on landscapes in the public realm, where she champions appropriate access, recognition, preservation, adaptation, and interpretation of culturally significant sites. Recognized as a national leader in the conservation of cultural landscapes, she has developed award-winning design, planning, and stewardship solutions for significant cultural landscapes at National Parks, National Historic Landmarks, and sites of regional and local importance throughout the United States. Brenda’s visionary thinking led to improved processes that position significant landscapes for continued study, relevance, and resilience, enabling present and future stewardship professionals to preserve and interpret our legacy sites for generations to come.

Her work to acknowledge, celebrate and protect significant indigenous sites has facilitated the creation of an “entirely different dialogue” between groups culturally connected to landscapes and those positioned to guide their management. With generous guidance from tribal representatives, she has developed best practices for inclusion of indigenous peoples in guiding planning and design for associated sites. She has applied these practices to multiple projects at Effigy Mounds National Monument, Blood Run/Xe, Fort Snelling at Bdote, Indian Mounds Cemetery, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site.

During the program participants will: 

  • Be introduced to cultural landscape processes and ways they are integrated into planning and design projects. 
  • Learn to apply key terms and find information about cultural landscape standards and guidelines for use in planning and design projects.  
  • Understand ways to integrate contextual and historical exploration of sites in the planning and design process for projects. 
  • Learn ways to apply collaborative design strategies for engagement with difficult topics and support communities towards reconciliation and trust-building.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Write caplectures@bsu.edu for information.

We have LACES credits for landscape architects.