Assistant Professor Liat Margolis presented at the In the Terrain of Watter II at PennDesign on April 9.

Continuing the conversation from the spring 2011 symposium, this event was structured around a series of talks and conversations enlisting contemporary thinkers who are willing to go beyond addressing water simply as a design opportunity or an environmental challenge. Participants came from across disciplines and the globe – joined in their intentions to re-imagine our relationship with water, challenge current visualizations, and probe projects and design thinking that constitute water, its visible and invisible presences, in fresh ways.

Liat Margolis is a landscape architect, researcher and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto. She is also the principal investigator of GRITlab (Green Roof Innovations Testing Laboratory), where she examines the environmental performance of green roofs, green facades, and solar technologies. Margolis is the co-founder and former director of Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Materials Collection, and former director of research at Material ConneXion, Inc. in New York City. She is the co-author of the book, Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture (2007). More broadly, Liat Margolis’s research focuses on the knowledge transfer of multi-performance materials and technologies across disciplines, particularly in relationship to performative landscapes as urban infrastructure. In Margolis’ recent research and instruction, she has also focused on water and wastewater infrastructure in arid climates; investigating the intersection between the natural and fabricated as ecology and technological invention. She received her Bachelor degree in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.