Cheryl Barton
| Cheryl Barton | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Erie, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Bucknell University, Harvard Graduate School of Design |
| Occupation | Landscape Architect |
| Awards |
Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture 2004 |
| Website | toocb |
Cheryl Barton is an American landscape architect and founding principal of the San Francisco-based Office of Cheryl Barton. A Fellow and Past President of the American Society of Landscape Architects, she has completed a wide range of national and international projects in the US, Europe, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Bolivia. Her work includes national and local public parks, urban open spaces and master plans, cultural landscapes, college and institutional campuses, public art installations, corporate landscapes, and ecological master plans. Barton has received an Individual Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. She was featured in the 2012 documentary, Women in the Dirt.
Cheryl Barton grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. She received a bachelor's degree from Bucknell University in Fine Arts and Geology, and studied architecture and photography at the Boston Architectural Center. She received a master's degree in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Barton cites witnessing the devastation of Lake Erie as a young child as influential in her decision to pursue landscape architecture. While on a Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University, Barton visited Temple of the Sun in Incayllacta, Bolivia; there she realized that the landscape "is a powerful medium of expression, a medium that can transform place and bridge cultures, and in so doing it can transform human values." Barton also discusses the influence of the gardens of 17th century French landscape architect André Le Nôtre, of which she says: ‘To see something deliberate and controlled juxtaposed with the unmanicured enhances the perception—and, I think, the appreciation or "seeing" of each. That is an experience I use constantly in my work: strong juxtapositions of the "natural" with "cultural interventions," which make people see, appreciate and, hopefully, care for their environments.’
Barton develops her philosophy of the integration of design and ecology and "landscape urbanism" further in a Boston Globe op-ed published in 2003 while she was a juror for the Rose Kennedy Greenway design competition: "Parks can be instrumental in solving larger urban and ecological or infrastructure problems, such as storm drainage, air quality, water supply, and the demolition (or construction) of expressways. If grounded in a regional ecology, parks can simultaneously accomplish social and environmental goals… Parks are expected to be much more than they have been at any time in the past. They are layered in meaning and richly stratified in function—something more than that experienced only through our eyes. They are powerful vehicles for reconnecting us to the land and to each other, and for enriching our very urban existence."
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