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Mark Francis is Professor and past Chair of Landscape Architecture at
the University of California, Davis where he founded and
directed the Center
for Design Research for
twenty years. He works at the intersections of landscape
architecture, environmental psychology, geography, art, and urban
design to explore the design and meaning of built and natural places.
His work is concerned with the theory and design of urban and
community landscapes. Trained in landscape architecture and urban
design at Harvard,
MIT
and Berkeley,
he is a founding partner of CoDesign/MIG,
where he has designed projects in the United States and abroad. At UC
Davis he is a member of the Institute
for Transportation Studies
and the John
Muir Institute for the Environment.
He is author of more than 70 articles and book chapters translated into a dozen languages. His books include Urban Open Space (Island Press 2003), Village Homes (Island Press 2003), The California Landscape Garden (University of California Press, 1999), Public Space (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Meaning of Gardens (MIT Press, 1990; Kajima Press, Tokyo, 1997), Community Open Spaces (Island Press, 1984), and The Healing Dimensions of People-Plant Relations (People-Plant Council, 1994). His work has appeared or been reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, American Horticulturist, Pacific Horticulture, Progressive Architecture, The Whole Earth Catalog and Landscape Architecture. His book The Meaning of Gardens, edited with Randy Hester of UC Berkeley, was selected as one of the best garden books by The New York Times and is widely used as a text in architecture, landscape architecture and the humanities. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, writing in The New York Times described him as "a national leader in advocacy planning".
Mark has received awards for his research, writing, planning and design from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association, and the California Local Government Commission. He has received eight awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards Program, including the Centennial Medallion, their highest design award. He is the only person to receive ASLA professional awards in all four categories of design, urban design and planning, communication, and research. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Architectural & Planning Research and serves on the editorial boards of Landscape Journal, Journal of Planning Literature, Environment & Behavior, Children and Youth Environments and Design-Research Connections. He is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), Trust for Public Land (TPL), American Community Gardening Association (ACGA), Urban Land Institute (ULI), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), and Nearby Nature in Eugene, Oregon. He has also served on and chaired several national and international awards juries including the EDRA/Places Awards Program, the American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards Program, Orange County Great Park Designer Selection Jury, MAC Open Space and G3 International Design Competitions in South Korea, 13-acres International Design Competition in Vancouver and the CalTrans Excellence in Transportation Awards in California.
He has provided invited testimony to Congress as well as local and state commissions on open space and community design. He has served as an appointed member by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to the USDA's National Urban Forestry Advisory Council (NUCFAC) and is past Chair of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), where he co-founded the EDRA/Places Awards (with Places Editor Donlyn Lyndon). His research has been funded by the Graham Foundation, Landscape Architecture Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, JJR Foundation, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Arts, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Elvenia J. Slosson Endowment for Ornamental Horticulture, UC Berkeley's Beatrix Farrand Fund, and Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He has received the Ralph Hudson Environmental Fellowship, was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1999 for his contributions to knowledge in landscape architecture, and is listed in Who's Who in America. Mark was elected a Fellow of the Institute for Urban Design in New York City in 2006.
His design work is concerned with public space including urban gardens, community open space, nearby nature, and urban places. Built examples include the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park and mixed use complex at Harvard University, Central Park and the Davis Farmers Market, Davis Commons and E Street Plaza in Davis, California, Mission Creek and Plaza in San Luis Obispo, and the award winning Davis Greenway Plan which was adopted in 1990 as the Open Space Element for the City of Davis General Plan. His design for Central Park and the Davis Farmer's Market has been cited as "a new model for urban parks" by the Urban Parks Institute and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund . The project received a Centennial Medallion from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1999 as one of the most significant designed landscapes of the past 100 years and an Ahwahnee Merit Award for one of the best projects built in Western U. S. in the last 10 years from the American Institute of Architects, American Planning Association, and Local Government Commission. He recently completed the Master Plan for the 100-acre $8 million Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park for the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He was an invited finalist with architect Giancarlo De Carlo to design Giardini di Porta Nuova, a major new urban park in the center of Milan, Italy. He has also served as a garden design consultant to Cornerstone Festival of Gardens which opened in 2004 in Sonoma, California.
Examples of his publications include Informing Places (Places 2003), Parks as Community Engagement: A Guide for Mayors (Urban Parks Forum, American Planning Association, 2003), Seven Realms of Children's Participation (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2002), and Village Homes: A Case Study in Community Design (Landscape Journal, 2002). His work on Proactive Practice was recently translated and published in German and Italian. He presented an invited paper entitled Geometries of Garden Meaning at the Horticultural Geographies Symposium at the University of Nottingham in September 2003. He was co-organizer of the "Participatory Community Design in the Pacific Rim" Symposium funded by the University of California Office of the President Pacific Rim Program and held in Seattle in September 2004. He is co-editor of (Re)Constructing Communities: Design Participation in the Face of Change, which includes papers from the symposium published in 2005.
Mark was commissioned by the Landscape Architecture Foundation in Washington, D C to develop a case study methodology that could be widely used in the profession of landscape architecture. His report was published by LAF and the Herberger Center for Design Excellence in 1999 and Landscape Journal in 2000 and led to LAF adopting a major initiative entitled Case Studies in Land and Community Design. He was asked by LAF to develop the first three prototype cases. The first two, Village Homes: A Community by Design and Urban Open Space: Designing for User Needs, were published by Island Press and LAF in 2003. He is currently developing a third prototype entitled Healthy Public Space: A Teaching Case Study. His case study method has been recently adopted and republished by the American Institute of Architects as part of their AIA Case Study Initiative and by the Active Living Research Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Mark is a member of and teaches required core courses (LDA 201 and LDA 220) for graduate programs at UC Davis including Geography, Community Development, Transportation Technology and Policy, Tourism Studies, Horticulture and Agronomy, and Social Theory and Comparative History. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at UC Davis in landscape theory, urban open space, community design, and public space.
He is currently co-directing an international research project entitled "Open Urban Spaces" (OPUS) on culture and public spaces in European Capitals of Culture. The project, with University of Stavanger, Norway, Liverpool University, Technical University of Graz, Austria, Danish Royal Academy, and Swedish Royal Academy, is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Mark is also currently developing a manuscript on the theory and design of "mixed-life places" for use in urban design and landscape architecture.
BOOKS
Mark Francis' The Meaning of Gardens was a key book in turning landscape architects away from the sterility of abstract modernism - Tom Turner, Landscape Design, 2001.
The
California Landscape
Garden Public
Space
By: Mark Francis and Andreas Reimann
(University of California Press, 1999)
By: Mark Francis, Lisa Cashdan and Lynn Paxson
(Island Press, 1984)
By: Stephen Carr, Mark Francis, Leanne Rivlin, and Andrew
Stone
(Cambridge University Press, 1992)
By: Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester
(MIT Press, 1990)
DESIGN PROJECTS
Davis' Central Park is recognized as a national landmark for outstanding landscape architecture - American Society of Landscape Architects, 1999.
TEACHING / STUDENTS & STUDENT WORK
AWARDS & HONORS
GRANTS & FELLOWSHIPS
INVITED LECTURES & KEYNOTE ADDRESSES
BOOK FOREWORDS/JACKET QUOTES
Carr, S., M. Francis, L. Rivlin and A. Stone. "Needs in Public Space", in M. Carmona and S.Tiesdel (Ed). Urban Design Reader. London: Architectural Press. 2007. (Republication of work of "most influential writers of the last fifty years")
Book Reviews in Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2006 and Gender, Place and Culture, 2006
3/18/09
