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Wilkins Essay Receives Medal from American Society of Landscape Architects

Craig Wilkins, lecturer in architecture, received a 2020 Bradford Williams Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects for his 2019 essay, “Innervisions.” The essay appeared in the Avery Review, a monthly journal of critical writing on architecture published by Columbia University.

Wilkins — who received a 2017 National Design Award from Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — is a hip-hop architectural theorist, architect, artist, academic, and activist. His creative practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes.

In “Innervisions,” Wilkins offers a critique of the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, designed by MASS Design Group. He reflects on race, power, and space in the United States, investigating the way the histories of Black Americans are narrativized, remembered, and memorialized. “As the memorial and its companion museum make perfectly clear, the memorialized incidents of racial violence are not the isolated incidents so many work so desperately to believe,” wrote Wilkins, who served as the Belluschi Visiting Professor and a visiting fellow in design for spatial justice at the University of Oregon’s College of Design and School of Architecture and Environment for the winter 2020 term. “No, they are part of a legacy of indefensible, systemic brutality visited upon the Black body across the land that spans centuries.”

The Bradford Williams Medal recognizes exemplary works of writing about landscape.Two medals are presented each year by the editorial advisory committee of Landscape Architecture Magazine. Wilkins was recognized for writing in general media that pertains to landscape. The other medal, for a work of writing in Landscape Architecture Magazine, goes to Nicholas Pevzner at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read Wilkins’s full essay here.

Faculty: Craig Wilkins ,