Award-winning landscape architecture duo to visit the Stuckeman School

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Diane Jones Allen and Austin Allen, the duo behind Design Jones LLC, which was the recipient of the 2016 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Community Service Award, will give a lecture at 6 p.m. on Nov. 1 as part of the Stuckeman School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and also will be livestreamed by WPSU at watch.psu.edu/stuckemanseries. Jones Allen and Allen are speaking as the recipients of the Department of Landscape Architecture’s 2021 John R. Bracken Fellowship.

Titled “Cooling Water: A Source of the African American Cultural Imprint in the Landscape,” the lecture will focus on how water has shaped the design process and the imaginations of the African American cultural and social experience within the American landscape.

Based in New Orleans, the focus of Design Jones is environmental justice and racial equity. As the principal partner of the firm, Jones Allen has continually sought to take advantage of how landscape architecture can improve the lives of those living in historically underserved communities. The firm has worked to enrich the cultural and ecological vitality of cities and regions along the southern coast of the United States, as well as in Haiti. In New Orleans, the firm has completed many projects that re-embed the city in landscape systems while enhancing the cultural significance of the built environment.

Some of the firm’s most notable work includes the redesign of Hayden Plaza in New Orleans to restore the existing sculpture design and provide new seating, lighting and landscape planting features to reimbue the plaza with a cultural significance to continue honoring the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. In Haiti, Design Jones worked to rebuild and restore the city of Jacmel, a city that was influential to the architecture and urban design of New Orleans, after a devastating earthquake.

In addition to her practice, Jones Allen has been a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas, Arlington, since 2014. Prior to her appointment at Texas, she taught at Morgan State University for nearly eight years.

A respected author, Jones Allen penned “Lost in the Transit Desert: Race Transit Access and Suburban Form,” published by Routledge Press in 2017, and is the co-editor of “Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity,” Island Press, 2017. She also is part of a cross-disciplinary team that won the 2020 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation Research Prize, which focused on examining social justice in urban contexts.

A participant on the 2017 ASLA Blue Ribbon Panel on Climate Change, Jones Allen serves on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation as vice president of education for the 2021 year. She also was appointed as a garden and landscape studies fellow at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2021-22 academic year.

Jones Allen received her undergraduate degree in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and went on to receive a master of landscape architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned a doctor of engineering degree in transportation engineering at Morgan State.

Austin Allen’s background in landscape architecture and documentary film reflects his dedication and approaches to problem-solving and recovery projects in urban environments. He is an associate professor of practice in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas, Arlington, where he currently serves as the interim director of the landscape architecture program. Allen was the inaugural Bickham Chair at the Louisiana State University in the College of Art and Design’s School of Landscape Architecture. He also was an associate professor and chair of landscape architecture at the University of Colorado, Denver, and an associate professor of film and communication at Cleveland State University. 

Allen received the Distinguished Alumni Award in March 2017 from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently on the board for the Black Landscape Architects Network and is a member of the Honorary Committee for Olmsted 200, the national celebration of Frederick Law Olmsted’s 200th birthday in 2022.