Louise Mozingo

Urban design and planning; design history; social and cultural factors in landscape design.

Fundamental to my dedication to landscape architecture and landscape architecture education is a commitment to the collective public landscape—streets and forests, parks and bus stops, schoolyards and overlooks, dog runs and sidewalks, promenades and creeks, wildlife corridors and light rail platforms, wilderness and downtown squares. As I wrote for insertion into the department’s website a couple of years ago, our task as educators and students is to imagine, make, preserve, renew, and reconsider how those landscapes are part of our present and will continue to be part of our future. Landscape craft—the particularized, attentive shaping of site to form the intimate to immense spaces that we share—must substantiate our commitment to the collective public landscape by a collaborative process of decision-making, elegance of form, and engagement of the evocative. These landscapes should be beautiful, ecologically constructive, socially vital, and built to endure. This requires us to be observant, critical, and demanding of our students, our society, and ourselves.

Louise Mozingo is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning. She is a member of the Graduate Group in Urban Design of the College of Environmental Design and Director of the American Studies program of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies in 2017. A former Associate and senior landscape architect for Sasaki Associates, Prof. Mozingo joined the department after a decade of professional practice. In 2009 she became the founding director of a research interdisciplinary team at the College of Environmental Design, the Center for Resource Efficient Communities (CREC) dedicated to supporting resource efficiency goals through environmental planning and urban design.

Mozingo’s articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Places, Landscape Journal, Journal of the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Geographical Review, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.  She has contributed chapters to Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson (2003) edited by Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, Healing Natures edited by Robert France (2008), and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (2008) edited by Andrew Blauvelt. Mozingo’s book, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (MIT Press), won 2011 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category, the 2014 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians for the best book in landscape history, and an American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Communications in 2014.

Mozingo has been the recipient of Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship for Studies in Landscape Architecture, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture Award of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching, Writing, and Service, and the University of California, Berkeley Chancellor's Award of Recognition for University and Community Partnerships. She has lectured widely, including Harvard University, University of British Columbia, University of Oregon, Yale University, Stanford University, MIT, and the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.