Timothy Davis, the National Park Service’s senior historian for historic structures and cultural landscapes, will lecture on landscape design, engineering, and the American legacy of national park roads as a part of the Callison Distinguished Lecture series on Wednesday, Sept. 28, at 5 p.m.
The lecture will be held in Cleveland Hall Room 30E on the Pullman campus and is free and open to the public.
Davis, combining his knowledge of photography, ethnography, history, and cultural geography, has written and lectured widely on roads, parks, and parkways. His work interprets the relationships between people and the places they construct and inhabit, both physically and imaginatively.
His most recent publication, National Park Roads: A Legacy in the American Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2016), tells the story of national park roads in a manner that is accessible to the general public yet rich with information for engineers, planners, landscape architects and others engaged in the stewardship of natural and cultural resources as well as transportation management.
The book has garnered praise from John Stilgoe, Harvard’s Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, who lauded it as “a gracefully written, impeccably researched, major study of importance not only to Americans but to anyone interested in public access to regions of scenic, historical, or ecological significance . . . a work of lasting value, with no book remotely on its scale or in its class.”
The 2016 Callison Distinguished Lecture series is sponsored by the WSU School of Design and Construction and generously supported by CallisonRTKL, an architecture, design, planning, and engineering firm.