faculty
Frederick Steiner
Dean, School of Architecture
Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture
GOL 2.308 | office
+1 512 471 1922 | phone
The University of Texas at Austin
School of Architecture
1 University Station B7500
Austin, TX 78712
Education
Ph.D. (City and Regional Planning) University of Pennsylvania, 1986M.A. (City and Regional Planning) University of Pennsylvania, 1986
M.R.P. (Regional Planning) University of Pennsylvania, 1977
M.C.P. (Community Planning) University of Cincinnati, 1975
B.S.D. (Graphic Design) University of Cincinnati, 1972
Frederick Steiner is the dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he was director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, Arizona State University (ASU) and taught planning, landscape architecture, and environmental science at Washington State University, the University of Colorado-Denver, and the University of Pennsylvania. As a Fulbright-Hays scholar in 1980, he conducted research on ecological planning at the Wageningen University, The Netherlands. In 1998, he was the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an Academic Fellow of the Urban Land Institute. He is a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Dean Steiner has worked with local, state, and federal agencies on diverse environmental plans and designs. These activities include analysis of watershed level growth management for the upper San Pedro basin on the U.S.-Mexico border, preparation of a master plan for landfill site in Phoenix as a member of an artist-landscape architect team, involvement in the development of the Arizona wetlands and riparian protection program, the visual resource assessment and streamside reclamation efforts as part of the development of the Verde Valley greenway in Arizona, the design and implementation of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service agricultural land evaluation and site assessment system, the Teller County/ City of Woodland Park Growth Management Plan in Colorado, the conservation plan for the Missouri Flat Creek watershed in Washington and Idaho, the establishment of the Blackstone Heritage Corridor in Massachusetts and Rhode Island with the National Park Service, and the farmlands protection and rural housing plans for Whitman County, Washington. He initiated a multidisciplinary team of environmental scientists, planners, and designers in the exploration of the future of a 130-square-mile "undeveloped" northern portion of the City of Phoenix. He collaborated on the design of two prototype sustainable communities as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Sustainable Development Demonstration Grant Program. Currently, he chairs the five-county Envision Central Texas Project, having served on its board of directors and executive committee since ECT was established in 2002. He was part of the UT curatorial team that organized an exhibit on the resilience of the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans for the 10th Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale. In 2005, he was on a team, selected from over 1,000 entries, to be one of five finalists in the United Flight 93 National Memorial Competition in Pennsylvania.
Dean Steiner has served as a city planning commissioner and helped to initiate a local civic improvement group. He has worked with community groups as well as national environmental and conservation organizations. He chaired the academic planning committee for the new ASU-East campus at the former Williams Air Force Base and served on the steering committee for the new campus master plan as well as on the landscape planning committee. From 1993 to 1999, he served on the board of trustees of the Desert Botanical Garden and chaired the long-range planning committee for the garden, which produced a new master plan in 1998 that led to a $16 million capital development campaign. He was on the board of directors for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and chaired the planning committee, until the Center merged with the University of Texas in 2006. The Center is now part of the School of Architecture and the College of Natural Sciences.
Dean Steiner has written numerous books, articles, and papers. His books include: Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead (Island Press, 2002) and The Living Landscape (McGraw-Hill, 1991, translated into Italian by Maria Cristina Treu and Danilo Palazzo, Costruire il paesaggio: Un approccio ecologico alla pianificazione del territorio; second English edition, 2000; first Chinese edition, 2004; second Italian edition, 2004; paperback edition, 2008, Island Press) and Soil Conservation in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). He co-edited To Heal the Earth (with Ian McHarg, Island Press, 1998), Ecological Design and Planning (with George Thompson, John Wiley and Sons, 1997), and A Decade with LESA: The Evolution of Land Evaluation and Site Assessment (with James Pease and Robert Coughlin, Soil and Water Conservation Society, 1994). He has two new edited volumes in 2006: The Essential McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature (Island Press) and Planning and Urban Design Standards: Student Edition (with Kent Butler, John Wiley & Sons).
He teaches courses in the areas of environmental impact assessment, landscape analysis, and landscape architecture theory. Dean Steiner received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in city and regional planning and a Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Master of Community Planning and a B.S. in Design from the University of Cincinnati. Dean Steiner received an honorary M.Phil. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic.