Anne Whiston Spirn
Anne Whiston Spirn is an award-winning author, landscape architect, photographer, teacher, and scholar. Her work is devoted to promoting life-sustaining communities: places that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, artful, and just, places that help people feel and understand the relationship of the natural and built worlds.
Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on ecological urbanism, landscape literacy, and photography as a form of inquiry. She is the author of four books: The Granite Garden, The Language of Landscape, Daring to Look, and The Eye Is a Door.
In the 1970s, Spirn worked as a landscape architect and planner in professional practice at Wallace McHarg Roberts and Todd in Philadelphia on projects ranging from plans for an entire region to a single city to designs for parks. Several won awards, and some, like Woodlands, Texas and Sanibel, Florida, are considered landmarks. Spirn was on the faculty of Harvard University from 1979 to 1986, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where she succeeded Ian McHarg as chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. She has been at MIT since 2000. In addition to teaching, Spirn lectures widely in the US and abroad at colleges and universities and as a keynote speaker.
Spirn graduated with honors from Radcliffe College, where she studied art history, and from the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a master’s degree in landscape architecture. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University. Her work as a whole has been honored on several occasions. In 2001, she received the International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind.” In 2018, she won the National Design Award and the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Medal from the International Federation of Landscape Architects. In 2020, the American Society of Landscape Architects presented her with the ASLA Gold Medal.