The 2025 Alfred Caldwell Lecture in Landscape Architecture is hosted by The Alphawood Arboretum at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program, and the Office of Community Affairs and Outreach. This year, we are especially happy to also partner with Villa Albertine / Consul-General of France in Chicago.

Paris-based philosopher Emanuele Coccia will deliver the 2025 Alfred Caldwell Lecture in Landscape Architecture, titled “The Museum for Contemporary Nature,” at the College of Architecture beginning at 5 p.m. on April 16 in S. R. Crown Hall’s Upper Center Core. The lecture will explore natural preservation. Coccia notes that Anthropology has shown that it is thanks to the invention of the garden and agriculture that the human species invented the city: a mechanism that gives the relationship with other species a stable spatial form, an expression of the Earth’s landscape and not just its experience. It is therefore only through the city and its construction that we can reinvent a new relationship with all the species on the planet today.

Coccia is an associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales  (the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). He is also the author of The Life of Plants, Metamorphosis, and Philosophy of the Home.

The Alfred Caldwell Lecture in Landscape Architecture invites speakers who, like Caldwell, hold strong positions on landscape architecture, design culture, ecology, democracy, poetry, and literature; and whose life’s work embodies the ethical aspirations of humanity.

The Museum for Contemporary Nature Anthropology has shown that it is thanks to the invention of the garden and agriculture that the human species invented the city: a mechanism that gives the relationship with other species a stable spatial form, an expression of the Earth’s landscape and not just its experience. It is therefore only through the city and its construction that we can reinvent a new relationship with all the species on the planet today. What we call ecology – the science of the relationship between species and between them and the space that hosts them – is actually the most universal form of architecture and urban planning.