Rosetta S. Elkin

Rosetta S. Elkin is a landscape architect, researcher, and educator whose work explores the entangled politics of plant life. Her publications—Tiny Taxonomy (2017), Plant Life (2022), Landscapes of Retreat (2023)—foreground plants not as background matter but as active agents within design, ecology, and politics. As founder of Practice Landscape and director of the Pratt Institute program, Elkin positions landscape architecture at the intersection of creative research, horticultural practice, and critical humanities.

Landscapes of Retreat, a book by Rosetta S. Elkin, is informed by land-based practice, observation, and paying close attention to the multifaceted changes occurring in landscapes and their impact on communities. The second edition of this award-winning book (originally published in 2022), which gained considerable attention within the landscape architecture community, has been released this […]

The book Forest Urbanisms brings together underlying ideas, the concept of forest urbanism, and global practices and research that engage with forests through a critical and nuanced lens. Using the world is forest as the guiding principle, the authors put the forest in a central role of the spatial organization across regions, scales and quantities – from a solitary tree to an interplay of buildings and trees. This expanding notion of forest expects new morphologies and typologies of forest urbanism. The authors open the controversies regarding humankind’s relations to forests and offer thinking tools past the greenwashing paradigms.

Halloween evening in Brooklyn, New York. Outside, a menagerie of children milled the sidewalks in spooky costumes seeking offerings of candy. At the same time, a smaller coalition of diverse students, faculty, and researchers gathered inside Higgins Hall at Pratt Institute to engage in a tricky debate over public trailways, the return of indigenous lands, […]

Practice Landscape works with the living environment as designers, researchers, and gardeners. Our work encompasses a range of scales and landscape types, from regional landscape adaptations to large public parks, to intimate gardens and private landscapes. Practice Landscape was started in 2006 by Rosetta S. Elkin and has prioritized garden-making, public exhibition, open access publishing, and horticultural research for nearly two decades. […]

Adaptation in a Landscape of Retreat After a major storm event in December 2010 numerous residential lots along the shoreline transferred to municipal jurisdiction when landowners took initiative to retreat to higher ground. These lots are divided from the escarpment by Route 132, Québec’s longest highway, and a critical access route for a largely rural […]

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