Faculty Research Highlights
Nora Wendl publishes Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth
In May 2025, Associate Professor of Architecture Nora Wendl published Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth with The University of Illinois Press. Shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and praised as “lyrical, propulsive, and incredibly clear,” Almost Nothing examines the role of Edith Farnsworth in the creation of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass home.
From the Press: “Nora Wendl’s audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sex-and-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. An eminent physician and woman of letters, Farnsworth left a rich trove of correspondence, memoirs, and photographs that Wendl uses to reconstruct her voice. Farnsworth’s memories and experiences alternate with Wendl’s thoughts on topics like misogyny and professional ambition to fashion a lyrical examination of love, loneliness, beauty, and the search for the divine.”
Wendl’s research and teaching subverts the received narratives that underpin architecture historiography by engaging feminist practices to create essays, books, installations, photographs, and films that offer new forms and frameworks for historicizing the built and unbuilt environment (Faculty Profile).
Visit the University Illinois Press page for more.
Katya Crawford and Kathleen Kambic to publish The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture
The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture by Katya Crawford (Professor and Department Chair, Landscape Architecture) and Kathleen Kambic (Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture) will be published with the University of New Mexico Press in September 2025. Blending history, interviews, and case studies, The Design Competition is the first book to investigate the role of competitions in shaping the discipline of landscape architecture.
From the Press: “Divided into five sections, the book provides an overview of the history and development of modern design competitions, includes interviews with world-renowned landscape architects and designers, offers a pedagogical approach to competition studios as part of a college curriculum, showcases award-winning designs from landscape architecture faculty and students (including built projects), and reflects on future directions for landscape architecture design competitions.”
Crawford’s research focuses on the ephemeral landscape and its power to engage and reveal social and environmental systems (Faculty Profile). Kambic’s research interests include water infrastructure, marginalized urban space, feminist political ecology, and landscape design theory; she is also an affiliate with the Water Resource Program, the department of Georgraphy and Environmental Studies, and the Women, gender & Sexuality Studies Program at UNM (Faculty Profile). Together with Ane Gonzalez Lara, Crawford and Kambic were awarded third place in the 2016 Hornachuelos International Design Competition and first place in the 2017 What’s Up Paris International Design Competition (both hosted by ReThinking Competitions).
Visit the UNM Press page for more.
Baker H. Morrow publishes The Horse on the Sidewalk
Baker H. Morrow, Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture, has published The Horse on the Sidewalk with Casa Urraca Press in Abiquiú. Set in post-war Albuquerque and centered on the life of Gil Wheeler, The Horse on the Sidewalk has been celebrated as a series of stories that will “delight the reader with their minimalist precision, their eccentric humor, and the off-the-wall details of their no-bull realism.”
From the Press: “Together, Gil and his friends navigate their just-built junior high and the desert landscape beyond their neighborhood—a new suburb that, much like their young lives, is brimming with both fresh possibility and the promise that not all dreams will come true.”
A professional landscape architect and founder of the firm Morrow Reardon Wilkinson Miller, Baker Morrow has been teaching at UNM since 1975. Morrow is author of eleven other books, including Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes (1995, revised edition, 2016) and Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of the American Southwest (with V.B. Price, 2008) (Faculty Page)
Visit the Casa Urraca Press page for more.
