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Lance Neckar is a teacher whose work includes both scholarship and practice. In 1989 he was awarded the Outstanding Educator Award by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture [CELA]. He is also the recipient of CALA’s Ralph Rapson Teaching Award and the Roy Jones Research Award. His publications include scholarly articles on modernist pioneers Christopher Tunnard and Warren Manning and two important essays on the work of H. W. S. Cleveland, designer of the campus and the Minneapolis park system. The first was published in The Regional Garden in the United States (Dumbarton Oaks) and the second, co-authored with Minnesota alumnus and Clemson head, Professor Dan Nadenicek, is part of an introduction to Cleveland's seminal work, Landscape Architecture, as Applied to the Wants of the West (University of Massachusetts). Neckar has also been engaged in a long term study of Castle Howard, in Yorkshire, England. In his "Castle Howard: An Original Landscape Architecture," which was published in Landscape Journal, Neckar traces Castle Howard's early development into an expansive and complex landscape and its unique position in the history of landscape architecture distinct from the great landscape gardens of England. His more recent work on sublimity and its baroque roots at Castle Howard will be published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2004.
Although an accomplished historian, Neckar is an urban designer, and for him, the two fields are constantly interacting. Neckar, aided by Associate Professor Robert Sykes and a team of research fellows, specialists and assistants produced a major project on the relationship between transportation, regional growth and water sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Transportation [MNDOT]. As part of the Urban Design Section of the Transportation and Regional Growth Study, Neckar and department colleagues investigated subdivision design approaches that can reduce or stabilize the number of vehicle miles traveled by residents and that preserve and enhance the hydrologic functioning of the landscape. Neckar notes that planning on the watershed level was advocated by Cleveland and that "it's an idea about suburban design that has guided this project."
His practice has recently focused on historic landscape preservation. He currently leads a master plan project for the LeDuc House and Grounds, a pattern book house in Hastings, MN, designed by Calvert Vaux set in an A. J. Downing-inspired landscape. He is also the lead designer for the restoration of Mayowood, the estate of Dr. Charles H. Mayo, with his brother Will, a founder of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
Neckar brings these diverse experiences into the classroom, teaching a studio on urban form, an advanced landscape architecture history course, and guest lecturing in the introductory courses on landscape architecture history and historic preservation. He has won several teaching and research awards and is the recipient of Honor and Merit Awards from the Minnesota Chapter of ASLA. Neckar also coordinates the college study abroad program and, with Architecture Department Associate Professor Arthur Chen, leads students to Portugal and Italy.
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