Mary Pat McGuire, PLA

About Prof. Mary Pat McGuire

Mary Pat McGuire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and serves as Dean’s Fellow for Research in the College of Fine & Applied Arts, stewarding the implementation of the Publicly Engaged Research Option (PERO). McGuire has additional faculty appointments in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. From 2021-2024, she was Chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program for which she led a curriculum review process and organized recruiting, admissions, and thesis. McGuire is a licensed landscape architect in Illinois and Virginia, with previous licensure in California (2006 – 2012). Prior to her academic career, McGuire practiced landscape architecture for a decade including for Peter Walker and Partners in the San Francisco Bay area and Conservation Design Forum in Chicago.

Research and Teaching

McGuire’s research and teaching in landscape architecture is broadly focused on interdisciplinary design of the material, topographic, infrastructural, and social ground of cities and regions. Specifically, her work explores urbanized land as a primary site and medium for adaptation and transformation in the context of shifting ecological, infrastructural, urban systems and climate change. Much of this focus has been on the urban surface of pavement and determining where and how to depave and retrofit communities. Research, including original mapping and community-scale design projects to address urban flooding, is published on the Water Lab website. In 2022, McGuire founded Depave Chicago to create processes and tools for communities to collectively and directly remove pavement and to renature and transform land into healing, adaptive, and life-supportive landscapes. McGuire examines the role of interstitial sites—the liminal spaces and surfaces of urban land—as opportunities for spatial and performative “editing” through subtraction, hybridization, densification, cross-sectional thickening, temporality, and combinations thereof. These topics and methods form the basis of her design studios and seminars so that students may also learn to see new unexpected opportunities for design in their educational work and later in practice. With an interest in design as research, she also serves on the editorial board of GroundWorks, the publication of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (A2RU).

Public Engagement, Collaboration, and Support

McGuire’s work is collaborative and interdisciplinary. She works in partnership with geologists, engineers, social scientists, NGOs, CBOs, federal agencies, municipalities, schools, communities, and artists. Together, they’ve created strategic design interventions to address rainwater, heat, air pollution, and equity and to facilitate community agency, supporting implementation investments totalling $15M in the Calumet region. She and her collaborators created a seminal compendium website of design and planning guidance for green stormwater infrastructure—Illinois Groundwork— to disseminate research-based design guidance to support professionals, public agencies, and communities. She is currently contributing to a multi-partner, vegetation buffer, air-quality improvement project for Chicago Public Schools located next to highways in Chicago. McGuire’s research collaborations and academic practice have been supported by the National Sea Grant program (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/NOAA), US-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Wright-Ingraham Institute, Walder Foundation, Landscape Architecture Foundation, Morton Arboretum, University of Illinois Campus Research Board, Illinois Extension, and the Brenton and Jean Wadsworth Endowment Grant, among others. 

In public and professional realms, McGuire serves on the committees and/or is a member of the Greater Chicago Watershed Alliance, the Calumet Stormwater Collaborative, the Trust for Public Land’s Technical Advisory Team, the National ASLA Climate Action Network, co-chair of the ASLA Great Lakes Regional Climate Action Seminar series, and she serves the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) in various capacities. McGuire received the CELA President’s Award in 2022.