Tag Archives: Prof Catharine Ward Thompson

OPENspace Co-Director, Prof Catharine Ward Thompson, honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award

From left to right: Prof Frederico Meireles Rodrigues, Prof Catharine Ward Thompson and Dr Ellen Fetzer. Photo taken by Anna Rhodes.

Professor Catharine Ward Thompson has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) annual conference in Brussels on 10th September 2024.

The award is given to a leading figure in Landscape Architecture, for contributions to research, education, and public service. Catharine has served on the ECLAS steering committee and was involved in hosting an early ECLAS conference in Edinburgh in 1994. She was part of a small group of European colleagues who secured the funding of an EU Culture programme Thematic Network project on Landscape Architecture education, called “Le:Notre”,  in 2001.

Catharine was presented with the award by ECLAS president Dr Ellen Fetzer of Nuertingen Geislingen University, Germany, and ECLAS Secretary-General Professor Frederico Meireles Rodrigues of University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Portugal.

Jeroen de Vries, Catharine Ward Thompson, Richard Stiles and Karsten Jorgensen after writing the first ‘Le:Notre’ bid in 2001

Read more about the ECLAS Awards 2024 and other awards recipients: ECLAS Awards 2024 – ECLAS

Prof Catharine Ward Thompson’s essay published in ‘Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden’

Catharine Ward Thompson has a short essay published in ‘Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden’, a book edited by Ana Kučan and Mateja Kurir and published by Birkhäuser in October 2023. In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, and the garden as a place of enchantment and rapture. The book is in part a tribute to the work of the late Slovenian landscape architect, Professor Dušan Ogrin, whose work over many decades to support education in the profession was untiring, international and inspirational.

Mediaeval flowery mede/pleasaunce: illustration from Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose),
Master of the Prayer Books, Bruges, c. 1490–1500.