Job title:
Senior Lecturer, Landscape Architecture
Role:
Programme Director, EMiLA
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkLisa Mackenzie is a Senior Lecturer in The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and a practising Landscape Architect. She has led on the development of the European Masters in Landscape Architecture for the University of Edinburgh for the last several years and is the Director of this highly innovative programme.
Lisa is an advisor to the Scottish Government through her work in the Design Review Panel of Architecture and Design Scotland.
Lisa teaches and lectures internationally with previous visiting professor roles at the Aichi Prefecture University of Fine Art and Music, Japan, The Rhode Island School of Design, USA, The Univesity of Pretoria, South Africa, and a 4 month post living and teaching in Versailles at the National School of Landscape Architecture.
Before taking up her current position at ECA, Lisa spent five years in practice with Grant Associates where she was a member of the Landscape Architectural team that designed Accordia, Cambridge (Winner of The Stirling (British Architecture) Prize 2008) and Whiteness, Ardersier (Scottish Design Awards 2006 - Placemaking). In 2014 Lisa won the public vote for An t'Eilean, an Island Gallery space within Inverness Campus in the Scottish Highlands.
Lisa's research, teaching and practice unite in seeking strategies that explore the potential of indeterminate, open practices to empower people in processes of landscape change. Her work is localised and site specific but universal and determined in its pursuit - calling on students and communities to become responsible members of the bio-community.
Programme Director of The European Masters in Landscape Architecture - EMiLA
Lisa is course organiser for the final design project in both graduating years at ECA and teaches theory courses through the second and third years of the MA in Landscape Architecture. Lisa is an active PhD supervisor.
Research Themes
Landscape Change
Indeterminate processes in Landscape Architecture
Reading Landscapes and Sense Experience
Socio ecological orders and disorders
Research Activities
A recent single commission An t-Eilean, in the Highlands of Scotland has allowed Lisa to merge and distil her research interests and translate her investigative priorities into the fabric of a public space for experimentation and engaged action.
Imagining Natural Scotland
The Valentine Project
With Victoria Bernie, Artist, John Darbyshire, Ecologist, Fraser MacDonald, Historic Geographer.
The Valentine Project is an exercise in graphic archaeology, an attempt to mine the complex questions of landscape, ecology and representation in Scotland towards alternate strategies of participation. Lisa continues to work on and advance the investigative themes that this project, seeking new forms of public discursive practice.
Uses and Meanings of Chinese Walls: Past, Present and Future