Pioneer Information
Born in Waterbury Connecticut, Spirn earned an A.B degree from Radcliffe College (now Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University) in 1969 and an M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts (now Stuart Weitzman School of Design) in 1974. She studied art history at both institutions, briefly pursuing a PhD at the latter.
From 1973 to 1977 Spirn served as a landscape architect and planner at Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd in Philadelphia, contributing to projects ranging from park design to plans for entire regions and cities, including Sanibel, Florida and The Woodlands, Texas. From 1977 to 1978 she worked at Roy Mann Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before joining the faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1979.
In 1983 Spirn joined the Landscape Architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming Department Chair in 1986. She served as Chair until 1993 and remained on the Penn faculty until 2000. Soon after her arrival in Philadelphia, Sprin published the influential treatise, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), broadening the public’s consciousness about nature in cities and how design can improve urban living. Sprin later published The Language of Landscape (1998), Daring to Look (2008), and The Eye Is a Door (2014).
While at Penn, in 1987, Spirn founded the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, which works with neighborhoods in the Mill Creek watershed. Its mission is to “restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education.” Spirn continues to serve as its director.
Since 2000 Sprin has been the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 Sprin was inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She resides in Nahant, Massachusetts.
