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John KoepkeAlthough John Koepke has many roles, including award-winning designer, department chair, educator, and researcher of Native American landscape design, the element that runs through them all is his role as interpreter and translator. This in part stems from his background. A member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Tribe of the Ojibwe, Koepke frequently works with Native American tribes, often acting as the facilitator between the tribeand non-Native American designers.While a professor at the University of Washington, he worked with students to help the Tulalip tribe of Puget Sound create a tribal museum. Koepke also led a design studio in which students worked with the Point Gamble S'Klallam tribe on design proposals for the development of several historic, entertainment, and commercial sites. For those projects he played a critical role in interpreting the tribal culture for the students. He adds, "I helped to bring the technical resources of the school to bear on the cultural resources of the tribe in an appropriate way." More recently, Koepke was closely involved with the design of the Battle Point Historic Site and Culture Education Center of the Leech Lake Band of the Ojibwe in Minnesota, this time working with the tribe as part of a team of local designers. In a similar vein, much of Koepke's other design work has been creating parks, trails, and zoos, projects requiring both ecological revelation and cultural interpretation. In 1996 he won a design merit award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects for the Cannon Valley Trail Master Plan. One of his most recent projects has been the creation of an outdoor diorama and exhibit at the Bell Museum of Natural History. Drawing on student work from a design studio, Koepke and sculptor Ian Dudley created a new entrance to the museum that tells a story of Minnesota's environments through bronze sculptures, native plantings, construction materials, and spatial design. Koepke's recent research has also been focused on revealing what might otherwise be hidden or unintelligible. In 1993 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study the sites of eight ancient Native American communities. "In the history of landscape architecture, very little has been written about what Native Americans have done in North America," he notes. "There are many fascinating sites that have been chronicled by archaeologists but not by landscape architects." The central question Koepke asks is "how did Native Americans design the landscape they inhabited?" Most recently, Koepke collaborated with a team of archaeologists and a geographer in studying the ancient city of Cahokia. Northern Illinois University Press will publish their book, Envisioning Cahokia: A Landscape Interpretation. In addition to his Native American research, Koepke is part of a CDes team working on the department's Laurentian Vision project. This project is bringing residents, community leaders, and mining and power companies of Minnesota's mining region in the Mesabi Iron Range together with designers and researchers from the University. By reclaiming depleted mines in innovative ways and planning for the eventual reclamation of existing and future mines, the stakeholders and CDes team hope to preserve the landscape's other important natural resources and ensure the region's economic and ecological viability. His strong interest in environmental science has lead Koepke to collaborate with other CDes faculty on the Ecological Design Education Project, which studied how to incorporate ecological literacy and thinking into the design curriculum of the college. This project has lead to the CDes Living Labs Consortium and Project, whose mission is to investigate and promote ecological innovation in the teaching, research, and practice of landscape architecture, architecture, and interior design. Most of Koepke's efforts, however, are spent as chairman of the landscape architecture department. Koepke is nationally recognized for having helped create the collegial, collaborative atmosphere with much interdisciplinary work that the department enjoys today. He also helped create a shared vision for the department, one of seeing its mission as integrating art and ecology. |
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