The big questions that confront society in the 21st century will require teams of researchers who cross disciplines. The CDes faculty profiled on these two pages are among those who exemplify interdisciplinarity.

By Jane King Hession, M.Arch. '95

A common theme links the research, University affiliations, and professional partnerships of College of Design (CDes) landscape architecture professor Lance Neckar -- an overarching interest in how design and sustainability intersect. Neckar is committed to exploring ways in which designers can work cooperatively with scientists, politicians, and the community to solve serious global and environmental issues. He said he has "always been involved in transdisciplinary projects," positioning him well at a time when design fields are undergoing revolutionary changes that will require disciplines to work together in new, more networked ways.

The Institute on the Environment, established by the University in 2006, is an example of such a collaborative initiative. Neckar joins 14 other founding fellows appointed to represent their academic units: the Colleges of Biological Sciences; Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences; Liberal Arts; and Veterinary Medicine; Humphrey Institute; Natural Resources Research Institute; Institute of Technology; and Law School. According to Neckar, the institute will focus on creating an intellectual framework for resolving problems that arise in the environment where society and science meet. It will also increase the University's capacity to raise the level of public discussion and to affect policy in Minnesota and globally.

In December 2006, the Institute on the Environment (in partnership with Bonestroo Environmental and CR Planning), was selected by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources to develop a statewide conservation and preservation plan. Neckar serves on the core management team for the project. Using applied research and multidisciplinary problem solving on the state level, the team will take a "broad, long, visionary view of the key nuts-and-bolts issues involved," said Neckar.

They will look forward to midcentury and examine essential resources, including air, land, water, fish, and wildlife and quality of life issues in Minnesota to propose "a new kind of conservation plan." Accepted patterns of settlement, construction, neighborhood design, roads, transportation modes, storm water management, and resource consumption must all be reexamined, reevaluated, and redesigned in concert if future environmental crises are to be avoided. Neckar is particularly interested in research on developing "transportation system and street and neighborhood designs," that provide more choices and potentially reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled, while also reducing stormwater impacts through innovative landform, street, and infrastructure design.

Transportation is also the focus of a $1 million research grant awarded in August 2006 to the University's Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Neckar, a CTS research scholar, was instrumental in structuring the proposal and serves as coprincipal investigator with CTS director Robert Johns. The interdisciplinary study, housed in the Federal Highway Administration, will examine "how good transportation design enhances communities," he said. John Carmody, director of the college's Center for Sustainable Building Research and Ann Forsyth, director of the Metropolitan Design Center, as well as faculty from the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs and Departments of Geography and Civil Engineering, will investigate best practices across four areas of inquiry: economy, sustainability, aesthetics, and public participation. Ultimately, the study will be used to educate the public, community designers, and transportation professionals about the processes and benefits of effective transportation planning and design.

Neckar also serves as associate director of CDes's Center for World Heritage Studies (CWHS), established in 2004 in partnership with UNESCO/World Heritage Center. Under the direction of associate professor of architecture Arthur Chen, a main objective of the center is to help preserve endangered world heritage sites in developing countries.

Cranbrook, an educational community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, approached CWHS last year for assistance in placing Cranbrook on the United States "tentative" list, a precursor to nomination and inscription as a world heritage site. The campus, already a National Historic Landmark, is famous as an educational center for 20th-century design. It is also the largest and most intact ensemble of buildings and gardens designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Neckar served as the point person in securing the project grant. Project principals are research fellows Carole Zellie and Nancy A. Miller (Architecture).

Neckar, a St. Paul resident, was recently appointed to the mayor's task force for the reuse of the Ford Motor Company assembly plant, which will close in 2008 after more than 80 years of operation. The city charged the task force to "propose a mixed-use development for the site that will represent a fitting legacy for both the Ford Motor Company and the city of St. Paul." The task force is considering the reuse of the plant and site both locally and globally. When the plant closes, 1,500 people, who know how to build cars and trucks, will lose their jobs, yet at the same time the world faces a crisis on carbon, to which vehicular emissions contribute. Neckar sees the Ford plant study as an opportunity at the nexus of society, technology, and environmental science to create urban systems with transport technologies that will be sustainable on a metro scale in the 21st century.

New technologies and an assembly plant in present-day St. Paul may seem a long way from the sublime 200-year-old landscape and architecture of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, England -- a subject on which Neckar is a published expert -- but he disagrees. "The perspective of history is always helpful in identifying problems," he said. At Castle Howard he was interested not only in the spectacular gardens and architecture, but also in the complex, underlying "earthwork," established by the architect and dramatist John Vanbrugh. The earthwork, the "land, water, structures, and vegetation are all part of an ensemble that works together and has had a long run already," he said.

In that regard, the landscape architecture of Castle Howard, a conservation plan for Minnesota, the preservation of modern campuses, and the reuse of the Ford plant in St. Paul all begin with the same question, Neckar said, "What are the fundamental moves that must be made so we can design a substructure and infrastructure that allow a culture to form and thrive?" Only when we understand the earthwork of any situation, can the ideas of the future be built.