The Critical Landscapes Design Lab
The Critical Landscapes Design Lab is a group of designers focused on people-centered landscape architecture. The lab believes that our age's critical challenges, including adapting to changing climates and achieving social and racial equity, demand an in-depth understanding of human aspirations and limitations. The Critical Landscapes Lab engages with diverse audiences and a myriad of pressing socio-ecological issues across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, where the design disciplines—and especially landscape architecture—can help imagine better futures. The lab's focus recognizes a need for a critique of Western canons of knowledge, leading to new design and theoretical possibilities for landscape architecture.
Gareth Doherty (Principal Investigator)
Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and principal of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to landscape architecture, applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methodologies to design and theory. His work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Doherty addresses these issues through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How the Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025), and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture.
Pol Fité Matamoros (Lead Research Associate)
Pol Fite Matamoros is an architect and urbanist from Barcelona with a PhD in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent research and teaching appointments include Research Associate at the Critical Landscapes Lab, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), for the project "Atlas for a City-Region: Imagining the Post-Brexit Landscapes of the Irish Northwest," and instructor of the core courses "Cities and Sites" and "Urban Design Fundamentals Studio" at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design.
Mariano Gomez Luque (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Mariano Gomez-Luque is a professor of Urban Theory and Design at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), co-director of FORMA, an office for general architecture based in Córdoba, Argentina, and an affiliated researcher at the Urban Theory Lab in the University of Chicago. His research explores the intersections among the design disciplines, critical urban theory, and science fiction studies, with an emphasis on the status and potential of architectural production under conditions of planetary urbanization. Mariano holds a Doctor of Design (2019) and a Master of Architecture (2013) from Harvard GSD.
Rajji Sanjay Desai (Research Assistant)
Rajji Desai is an experienced Urban Climate Researcher-Designer at CBT Architects since January 2020, focusing on climate change impacts on urban design in the Middle East and the USA. Desai recently served as an Emerging Leader for Climate Action at the UAE Embassy in Washington, DC, where responsibilities included crafting strategic climate adaptation policies for COP28 in Dubai. Previous roles include Climate Communications Research Associate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where Desai co-organized significant exhibitions and conducted research on homelessness and climate risks. With a robust academic background, including a Master's degree from Harvard University and a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of Mumbai, Desai has contributed to various research and teaching positions, emphasizing social equity, urbanization, and affordable housing.
