Jane Wolff
Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design

Jane Wolff's design research work investigates the hybrid landscapes that emerge from interactions between natural processes and cultural interventions. Her subjects have ranged from western Netherlands and the California Delta to post-Katrina New Orleans, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay and the metropolitan landscape of Toronto, but her projects have the same aim: to develop language for these difficult—and often contested—places that can be shared among the wide range of audiences with a stake in the future. Based on the premise that proposals for the future must be inspired by a clear, synthetic understanding of the past and present, Ms. Wolff's projects translate documentary information into tools for design: Bay Lexicon (2014), commissioned by the Exploratorium, comprises an illustrated dictionary of the landscapes of San Francisco Bay; Gutter to Gulf (2009-13), a collaborative research and teaching project at the University of Toronto and Washington University in Saint Louis, disseminates essential and previously unavailable information about hydrology and hydraulics in post-Katrina New Orleans; and Delta Primer: a field guide to the California Delta (2003) illuminates the contested and largely invisible landscape at the centre of California’s economy and ecology.

Ms. Wolff holds a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Bay Lexicon. Photo courtesy Exploratorium