Environmental Planner and Landscape Architect to Give Public Lecture

October 4, 2007

Internationally renowned environmental planner and landscape architect David Blau, who will be visiting the Penn State University Park campus October 9–14 to be honored as a Penn State Alumni Fellow, will give a free public lecture at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 11, in 112 Forest Resources Building. The title of his lecture is “Creating Environmental Change: The Fusion of Design and Science.”

Blau, who earned a B.S. in landscape architecture in 1968, has worked for EDAW, Inc. in San Francisco since the mid-1970s. He is currently directing the ecological restoration of the 15,000-acre San Francisco South Bay Salt Ponds and is also preparing a land conservation plan for 140,000 acres in the California Sierras. With a passion for large-scale, complex, interdisciplinary work that fuses design and ecological science, he has led the building of EDAW’s environmental practice and guided the firm through its evolution from a local, traditional landscape architectural firm into an international practice with 33 offices and more than 1,500 professionals. Blau has been responsible for many of EDAW’s award-winning environmental resource plans, water resource management plans, open space and conservation plans, and river parks and greenways.

Blau graduated first in his class in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State and then went on to earn a master’s degree in city planning at Georgia Tech in 1970. He has received more than 20 national and state awards for his innovative work and was elected a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1998. In 1999, he received the College of Arts and Architecture’s Alumni Award.

As part of the Alumni Fellow program, Blau is participating in landscape architecture classes and meeting with students and faculty. The Alumni Fellow award is the most prestigious award given by the Penn State Alumni Association.

Contact: Amy Milgrub Marshall, alm157@psu.edu or 814.863.2104