Bradley Cantrell is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. He is currently the Professor and Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. He has held academic appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. His work in Louisiana over the past decade points to a series of methodologies that develop modes of modeling, simulation, and embedded computation that express and engage the complexity of overlapping physical, cultural, and economic systems. Cantrell’s work has been presented and published in a range of peer-reviewed venues internationally including ACADIA, CELA, EDRA, ASAH, and ARCC.
Cantrell’s research and teaching focuses on digital film, simulation (modeling), and responsive technologies to examine landscape form, process, and phenomenology. His work in digital representation ranges from improving the workflow of digital media in the design process, to providing a methodology for deconstructing landscape through compositing and film editing techniques. His work in media has been recognized through a range of venues and has engaged both public and private clients.
Cantrell is the co-author of two books that focus on digital representation techniques specific to the profession of landscape architecture. The first book, Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture, connects traditional analog techniques and methods of representation to similar digital methodologies. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture won a 2012 ASLA Award of Excellence and has become a standard text for many landscape architecture programs as well as professional reference that is currently being published in its second edition. The second book, Modeling the Environment, explores an approach to digital modeling that is specific to environmental design and landscape architecture. The methodologies highlighted in the book foreground environment, topography, and temporal processes through the lens of the digital composite.
Addressing the synthesis of computation and ecology, Cantrell develops and designs devices and infrastructures that create complex interrelationships between maintenance, evolved processes, and environmental response. This approach specifically addresses the interface between old modes of representation and direct connections to ecological processes. In collaboration with co-author Justine Holzman, Cantrell published Responsive Landscapes by Routledge in the Fall of 2015 entitled. Responsive Landscapes highlights a range of case studies in architecture, landscape architecture, computer science, and art that employ responsive technologies as mediators of landscape processes.