Professor Robert Thayer, Jr.

Biography

I'm a retired professor and the founder of the Landscape Architecture Program in the Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis. Hired in 1973, I have been conducting research continuously since, moving from early scientific, quantitative investigations of public landscape response, to major scholarly works of theoretical synthesis. For my entire career, I have been guided by the premise that landscapes, both designed and vernacular, are critical in the transactional communication between humans and the natural and built worlds. My early work on landscape perception, solar energy, wind energy, and water conservation was later to be enveloped by the slippery term "sustainability".  Through my research (aided by an early technical background) I pioneered a movement in landscape architecture that recognized and analyzed the role of visible technologies (now subsumed within the term "infrastructure") in the semiotics of landscape meaning and sustainable planning goals. Out of this, I began a search for the proper place and scale to locate sustainable solutions, and concluded that the bioregion...a territory defined by natural, rather than political, boundaries...is the proper venue for future landscapes that have the resilience necessary to withstand the degree of change facing local, and global populations.