Gary R. Hilderbrand appointed chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

Harvard Graduate School of Design announces Gary R. Hilderbrand, M.L.A. ’85 as new chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, effective July 1, 2022. Hilderbrand is the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor-in-Practice at the GSD, where he has taught since 1990, and Founding Principal and Partner of Reed Hilderbrand.

Hilderbrand succeeds Anita Berrizbeitia, MLA ’87 professor of landscape architecture, who joined Harvard GSD as a design critic in landscape architecture in 1991. Appointed in 2015, Berrizbeitia is the 14th chair of the oldest landscape architecture department in the world, and only the second woman to hold the position.

“Gary’s sensibilities as a teacher and as a practitioner are one and the same — his unyielding efforts to reconcile imminent, often intractable forces of urbanization with ecological sustainability, cultural history, vegetative regimes, and thoughtful kindness are central to his pedagogy and practice both. I could not be more delighted he has accepted this appointment, and I am excited for what is to come under his leadership of the department. I also look forward to celebrating Anita’s important tenure as chair of the department and thank her for all that she has brought to the school,” said Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture.

“I’m humbled and honored in equal measure by this appointment, and I am grateful to Dean Whiting for her confidence and support,” Hilderbrand said. “For more than a century, Landscape Architecture at Harvard has positively shaped discourse in research, teaching, and practice in the field. We continue that legacy forward with renewed urgency in the face of ever more dramatic environmental and social upheaval. I’m grateful for Professor Anita Berrizbeitia’s remarkable and humane intellectual stewardship over the past seven years, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the department and the school to uphold the commitment to design leadership that is demanded of us in this time. We stand well prepared.”