WEDNESDAY | MAR 19 | 4PM | AB 100

Award-winning landscape architect Shannon Nichol will speak at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 19, in AB 100 as part of the Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning’s guest lecture series.

Ms. Nichol, FASLA, PLA, LEED AP, is a co-founder of GGN and stewards GGN’s distinct approach to design and collaboration, bringing curiosity, humility, humor, and deep creativity to the firm’s projects.  

Her designs – including San Francisco’s India Basin Waterfront Parks, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and the Gates Foundation Campus – are widely recognized as distinct landforms and welcoming places embedded in local history, culture, and native ecologies. Shannon’s recent and current projects include the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center, and the Seattle Residence: Native Gardens.  

Lecture topic

The March 19 Ball State lecture, titled “Seeing and Drawing” is geared toward students and designers early in their careers in landscape architecture or related fields. “One of the frequent questions we encounter from young professionals is how the traditional first steps of objective site analysis and listening can translate into design that is not only contextually responsive and technically sound but also personally creative and intuitive,” Ms. Nichol writes. “Deformalizing the boundary between the existing place and your design concepts, as well as the boundary between your personal interests and your work, can help to enrich every task as well.”

Referencing GGN’s 25 years of work – as well as some off-piste personal studies in plant propagation and ecology – Ms. Nichol will share examples of design-driven efforts to visualize the real ground of each place. Over time, these efforts have become increasingly hands-on and intuitive.

Project examples from the Lurie Garden to the Burke Museum’s Camas Meadow go beyond mapping, data, and timelines and into personal interpretations, face-to-face storytelling, and, always, lots of graphite drawings on cheap printer paper.

4 learning objectives

  • How to help people (including yourself) see and communicate the unique existing qualities of each place
  • How to use drawing as a personal tool to bring your creative and strategic thinking to the forefront so that your tasks feel like design and not like mere task completion
  • How self-education and hands-on experimentation in new technical areas can recharge your design work and empower you
  • How being humble and curious – and readily saying “I don’t know” – can be superpowers in even the most high-stakes design projects

Biography

Ms. Nichol is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (Seattle). She and her partners received the Smithsonian’s 2011 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture, and GGN received the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award. Her projects have been recognized with the ASLA National Awards of Excellence, ASLA and AIA Honor Awards, Tucker Design Awards, Great Places Awards from the Environmental Design Research Association, and Pacific Horticulture’s inaugural Design Futurist Award. 

She has been engaged in a wide range of activities and board positions around her longtime advocacy for considerate design, hand drawing, native plants, and walkable cities. While she considers nearly everything to be relevant to design and landscape, her “other” interests include car design history, hill running, illustrative art, and non-fiction books.