Faculty Profile
Matthew Dallos
Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture
In both research and practice, I’m fascinated by the possibilities of plants within design and culture. From meadows to forests to weedy parking lots, I find myself studying plant communities and human communities to understand how we as designers might work alongside plants to create more meaningful, durable, and ecologically-significant places.
If I have a favorite tree species, it’s Acer negundo, Box Elder. Junk tree: that’s what this species is often called. It tends to break and fall over, and it drops so many seeds that it forms thickets. Individuals often don’t live very long. But when it falls over, it tends to resprout vigorously; when it forms a thicket, it secures otherwise degraded stream banks; when it breaks and then dies, it does so slowly, offering at least a decade of habitat for woodpeckers. To me, the species speaks to the type of resilient, multi-species plant thinking we need to incorporate into our designs.
I venture frequently into allied fields such as ecological restoration and ecological forestry. These fields advance dialogues about process, disturbance, complexity, ecological rigor, and temporality that challenge my own thoughts about design.
My writing has been published in Places, Chinese Landscape Architecture, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. I also wrote a travel/history book about the Adirondacks—In the Adirondacks: Dispatches from the Largest Park in the Lower 48, published by Fordham University Press.
Prior to ESF, I completed a PhD in Environmental History at Cornell University. My dissertation was titled “Americans in the Wild Garden: A History of Close-to-Home Wildness” and dug into the ways Americans have invited (or not invited) wildness into close-to-home places over the past century and a half. Before that, I was a graduate student in Landscape Architecture at Penn State University, studying the spatial structure of infrastructural systems.
Beyond my teaching and research, I design private and public plant-focused landscapes at Thicket Workshop.
Current teaching
LSA 433/633 Planting Design + Practice
LSA 799 Capstone / Thesis Development
LSA 470/670 Thematic Design Studio