Visiting Scholar Joseph Disponzio presents his research:

My work centers on the transformation of garden design at the end of the 18th century; in particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the French landscape designer, Jean-¬Marie Morel (1728 1810). I argue that by the beginning of the 19th century, garden design had transformed into the discipline of landscape architecture; Morel is a central figure in this development. Further, I argue that landscape architecture is a distinctly “modern” profession, one that emerges in parallel with a rising bourgeois class, and the beginning of the modern city and state. The overall context of my work is the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and involves the intersection of natural sciences, philosophy, and aesthetic theory of the era. My work falls within the broader scope of paradigmatic changes in intellectual and cultural history wrought in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Joseph Disponzio is a landscape architect with the New York City Department of Parks of Recreation and a lecturer at Columbia University. Formerly associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia, he has also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Bryn Mawr College. He is a noted author and scholar of garden history, specializing in the picturesque garden tradition. His latest book is Territories: Contemporary European Landscape Design.

Joseph Disponzio was a Visiting Scholar at the CCA in 2002.