Matthew Seibert
Education
Master of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture
Bachelor of Arts, University of Texas at Austin, Humanities Honors Program
Biography
Matthew Seibert's work aspires to encourage one to rethink their position and relation to the world as the first, fundamental step in a theory of change towards a just, more promising future.
His research and teaching challenge dominant modes of knowledge production with specific attention to land relations. Land and our relationship to it is foundational. It is in the design of novel tools and methods that push one to rethink their position and relation to their surroundings that I see the first, fundamental step in a theory of change towards a just, more promising future. This practice and pedagogy in support of a world where many worlds and worldviews are not only welcome, but desired, is built first by creatively interrogating conventional ways of knowing through strategic disorientation. Disassembly of presuppositions, cultural constructions, and power structures then enables a radical rebuilding of self, community, and environment in new and powerful ways. One must look backward and inward to orient the march forward.
What of our perceptions of reality must change for reality itself to change? Start with the Land.
Matthew's work has been recognized by organizations from the American Society of Landscape Architects to the US Environmental Protection Agency, exhibited across the country from New York to San Francisco, and published internationally. Most recently, he released the card deck Lithium Laterals: A Mineral Tarot for public sale. Part cartomancy, part spatial association, part lateral thinking, Lithium Laterals is a tool for constructing counternarratives to the dominant trajectories of the green energy transition. His research with collaborators has been published by Routledge Press in Atlas of Material Worlds: Mapping the Agency of Matter, a highly designed narrative atlas investigating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. He is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled The Dark Side of Green: A Narrative Atlas of the Costs and Cautions behind our Clean Energy Utopia, an edited collection of scholars and activists employing immersive first-person narrative descriptions and rich imagery to tell the oft-revealing stories of contestation, exploitation, and complication within the landscapes upon which the world’s green energy transition depends.
Matthew's academic career follows his work as a landscape designer for Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in NYC, contributing to such projects as Hudson Yards and pro-bono design research on the Gowanus Canal.
Grounded in the belief of a world of many worlds[1]—be they constructed by self-organized groups or by idiosyncratic individuals—Matthew's pedagogical approach meets students as existing world-builders, witting or unwitting. He sees students not as constructions to be broken down and slates cleared before being rebuilt in the image of a prototypical designer, as many design pedagogies do, but rather as individuals with rich backgrounds and value systems to be examined, challenged, and ultimately cultivated into unique and personal voices of design expression. He aims to do this at all levels of instruction. From first-year studios to mid-career seminars to final-semester research studios, he asks students to study and question their assumptions and dispositions before establishing a conceptual stance in developing final design propositions. How this is achieved is based on the course and level of student, resulting in wide recognition through numerous national and state ASLA student awards, CELA student awards, publications with students as co-authors, media exposure, and even a built project in the Beijing Garden Festival.
Key educational objectives sampled across syllabi that help to render hislarger philosophy of teaching include:
- Discover, develop, and render a uniquely individual practice as one provocative worldview among many for alternative and just futures.
- Develop a vocabulary of tactics to challenge or subvert dominant, often Western, methods of knowledge production, to value, expand, and synthesize other ways of knowing.
- Situate the role of architectural and ecological design as necessarily in coalition with socio-political and activist framings to catalyze change.
- Gain fluency in employing representational tools and techniques—of both analog and digital origin—as not only illustrative but as investigative and generative means to probe experience and phenomena across place, space, and time in pluriversal world-building.
- Foster new immersive representational methods to dynamically engage a diverse and increasingly digital public.
[1] A worldview and cosmos of numerous, divergent socioecological practices that not only coexist, but flourish. Cadena, Marisol de la, and Mario Blaser, eds. A World of Many Worlds. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke Univ Press, 2018.
Though quite diverse in its expression, Matthew's research is best collectively understood through its methodologies challenging dominant modes of knowledge production in how we relate to the land. Design is much more than simply the design of objects or spaces. In fact, its greatest power may lie within the questioning and creating of ways of thinking and acting. In employing alternative ways of knowing and immersive representational tools, the resulting projects of this research trajectory seek to uniquely cultivate a pluralistic understanding of the world. This practice, in support of “a world where many worlds fit,”[1] was first developed by creatively interrogating traditional epistemologies—the solutionism and apparent objectivity of science and engineering, the anthropocentrism of the humanities, and the universalism of history. It employs three core methods of decentering: 1) using human perception in iterative body-schema simulation, 2) incorporating the nonhuman in more-than-human narratives, and 3) exploring history through parafictional design research.
More newly, these branches of deconstructive research have grafted into a united focus on the green energy transition, often cast as humanity’s best hope for survival in a changing climate. Projects under this banner are doing several things: illuminating the perpetuation of a fossil fuel capitalist[3] approach of relating to our shared world hidden beneath a greenwashed ecomodernist[4] utopia, offering and rendering just alternatives through transdisciplinary world-building, and further crystallizing a theory of change based in designed disorientation as the first critical step for reorientation and forward movement. The earlier subjects of bodily physiology, material ecologies, and historiographical design—as initial lines of research—are no longer rarefied thought experiments largely confined to a kingdom of ivory towers. They are now tangible subjects dovetailing in collaboration with diverse disciplines, collaborators, and audiences in a time of political and climatic turbulence. Perhaps most importantly, they now harbor the seeds of a just and pluralistic future that can concretely inform policy, economic systems, and social justice.
Products from this collective research have been honored with national and international awards from such institutions as the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture; received media attention from local and national outlets like UVA Today, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Fast Company; awarded nearly $100,000 in grant funding from internal and external sources like UVA’s Environmental Institute and the New York Sate Council of the Arts (sponsored by the Van Alen Institute); resulted in multiple book contracts and chapter contributions; and presented at conferences, exhibitions, and invited lectures around the world.
[1] Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee, Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
[3] Matthew T. Huber, “Energizing Historical Materialism: Fossil Fuels, Space and the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Geoforum 40, no. 1 (January 2009): 105–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.08.004. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). Michelle Willaims and Vishwas Satgar, Marxisms in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2013).
[4] Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy and movement based on the belief that science and technology can solve the climate crisis and enable human flourishing without changing our underlying economic systems and exploitative relation to land and its natural resources. “An ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO,” An ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO, n.d., https://www.ecomodernism.org/. George Monbiot, “Meet the Ecomodernists: Ignorant of History and Paradoxically Old-Fashioned,” The Guardian, September 24, 2015, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned.
LAR 6010. "Elements of Landscape Architecture." Fall 2018 - present. First-year, first-semester core studio.
LAR 7210. "EcoTech III - Regenerative Systems." Fall 2020 - present. Third of a four core course EcoTech sequence focusing on regenerative design tools and practices like bioremediation, regenerative agriculture, and prescribed fire.
LAR 8020. "Milton Land Lab: A Mesocosm for Situated Knowing." Spring 2021 - spring 2022. Advanced research studio focused around design-build workflows at UVA satellite site, Milton Airfield.
LAR 7550. "Gaming Landscape Representation." Spring 2018 - spring 2020. Elective seminar focused around game engines as tools for landscape analysis, representation, and communication.
