William Shivers
Education
University of Virginia, PhD in the Constructed Environment (ABD)
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Master of Landscape Architecture
Louisiana State University, Bachelor of Landscape Architecture
Biography
William Shivers is a doctoral candidate at the UVA School of Architecture and a lecturer. His work focuses on the ever-changing value and necessity of trees and forests in the creation, expansion and maintenance of the American Landscape. This work seeks to leverage the discipline of landscape architecture as synthetic, working to intersect neighboring disciplines and methods. He specifically examines culturally and ecologically significant species in the American landscape with a current focus in the geographic periphery, where he interrogates human-nature constructs, power dynamics, and center/periphery relationships through multiple analytical methods. This temporally spans the 19th to 21st centuries and works to project forward in a destabilized climate and fractured natural security.
He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation sited in Hawai’i, where he is applying this thinking and work on the cultural and ecological landscape of the Big Island and ‘Ohi’a Lehua Forests.
Recently, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Auburn University College of Architecture, Design and Construction. Shivers is a received a Master of Landscape Architecture with distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he received the ASLA award of Merit for academic excellence. He also received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University where he was awarded the ASLA award of Honor for academic excellence as well. His work has been published in Places Journal, Landscape Architecture Frontiers, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. He has presented internationally at the Conference on Landscape Architecture, Responsive Cities Symposium, International Conference on Social Sciences, among others, and been a critic at the GSD, Kent State University, Colorado State University, and UVA. Shivers most recently has worked with the World Monuments Fund on cultural landscape work in West Africa. His practice experience includes working with Merritt/Chase, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, and Design Workshop on domestic and international projects with public and private clients. His work has been awarded nationally and locally from the American Society of Landscape Architects, World Landscape Architecture, and Architect Magazine.
Research Interests
Environmental History
Cultural Landscapes
Political Ecology
Climate Adaptation
Cartography
Landscape Representation
CV
Expanded Statement on Research
“O ka lau’au o ke kula e noho ana
I ka ‘aina, o ka la’au o ka ‘aina
e nalowale aku ana.”
The Trees of the plains will dwell on the land;
the trees of the native land will vanish
The American landscape is fundamental to American identity. America’s national security is predicated on its natural security. The landscape is the grounds to which democratic ideology is tested, reiterated, enforced, and remade. Practices of landscape architecture and the discipline has been active in this process of nation-building and nation-dreaming. For the discipline and profession of landscape architecture to radically accept its role in the creation, expansion, and maintenance of the American landscape is for it to interrogate and recontextualize landscape history and the roles it has played in the country’s successes and failures.
This dissertation is framed within the American periphery, where the frontier is constantly being remade. Focusing on Hawaii provides the space to evaluate plantation histories, struggles of Hawaiian legitimacy, white supremacy, and assimilation into the active democratic project of America. Further, the dissertation positions culturally and ecologically significant species as a means to nest competing approaches and frameworks together, highlighting the transdisciplinary power of landscape history and analysis. ‘Ohi’a Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) becomes the focus of the project, alongside other key species, to ground multiple topics. The tree is both the first pioneer species after lava flows, establishing and dominating Hawaiian forests, but also a deep component of Hawaiian cultural identity and folklore. Yet the stability of these forests and broader cultural landscape is at risk with the emergence and spread of a new aeolian pathogen killing the trees: Rapid ‘Ohi’a Death.
Multiple methods are interwoven into the project. First are primary sources in American and Hawaiian environmental history alongside landscape history and theory. Second is the assembly of archival imagery including maps, photographs, postcards, travel posters, and fine art. Third is fieldwork photography taken on trips from 2021- 2024. Lastly are multimedia geospatial and abstract drawings made with available data through analogue and digital drawing tools.
Together, the dissertation projects the role of landscape architecture, its histories, and analysis in the (re)making of the American landscape in the 21st century. The project provides a means to critique current trends of solutionism like mass tree plantings in an era of a destabilized climate. Additionally, it offers a synthetic approach towards understanding the United States as a biopolitical project. As Rachel Carson writes, “It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.”
Select Publications
Shivers, William. 2023. “The Tree at the Center of Collapse: ‘Ohi’a Lehua and Hawaii’s Future” Landscape Architecture Frontiers 10 (5): 84-91. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-1-050050
Shivers, William. 2021. “It's Not Like the Postcard.” Places.
