James Corner - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born in 1961, Corner received a Bachelor's degree with first class honors in 1983 at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. He then received a Master's Degree in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Certificate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. He was employed by Wallace, Roberts and Todd on the New Jersey Hudson River Waterfront Development; for Richard Rogers and Partners on the redevelopment of the Royal Docks in London; and for William Gillespie and Partners on the design and implementation of the International Garden Festival Park in Liverpool.

Corner began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 where he taught courses in media and theory, as well as design studios. He was elected Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department in 2000. As a professor, Corner's landscape design and environmental research and teaching interests are based upon "developing innovative approaches toward landscape architectural design and urbanism." He has also served as a visiting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1998 and at the KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm, Sweden in 1999.

Corner's practice, Field Operations, was initially formed in collaboration with architect Stan Allen, but the partners chose to focus on their individual practices in 2005. The firm is at the forefront of the landscape urbanism movement, an interdisciplinary approach that, in theory, amalgamates a wide range of disciplines including landscape architecture, urban design, landscape ecology, and engineering, among other subjects. Corner argues that it is an approach that focuses on on process rather than a style and that it marks a productive attitude toward indeterminacy, open-endedness, inter-mixing, and cross-disciplinarity.