Lounging outside of Garden District Coffee, the new director of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture takes a long sip of his dark java before speaking.
“While I am the director, I’m only a small part in the bigger picture of our school,” said former assistant professor Bradley Cantrell. “Without the students approaching design and landscape architecture with some sort of passion and rigor, I can only do so much. My faith in the school is in the student body.”
Students in the landscape architecture program will get the chance to prove Cantrell right once he officially begins as director in January 2013.
Cantrell, 37, was chosen for the job after a search for candidates outside of the University came up short. Ken Carpenter, interim dean of the College of Art and Design, then began a conversation with the landscape architecture faculty about considering an internal candidate.
“Brad’s name came up repeatedly,” Carpenter said. “He was not recommended by everyone, but out of the 13 members of the faculty, excluding himself, his name came up eight to 10 times as a suggestion without me prompting.”
Cantrell moved to Louisiana in 2005 but has lived in various places around the world. Born in South Korea to military school teachers, Cantrell traveled overseas, spending time in places like Japan and Germany, where he graduated high school.
He then studied at the University of Kentucky for his bachelor’s degree and Harvard University for his master’s degree — both in landscape architecture.
After graduating, Cantrell worked in a landscape architecture job in Boston while simultaneously teaching at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.
During his stint at Harvard, he met Elizabeth Mosso, his colleague at the time and eventual director of LSU’s Landscape Architecture School. Mosso contacted Cantrell in 2005, asking him to interview at LSU, thus beginning his tenure as a Tiger.
“Once I came to Baton Rouge, came to New Orleans, I realized how rich it was in landscape and history,” Cantrell said. “I felt there was a lot of opportunity for me at LSU.”
Cantrell said being appointed to director is a “great honor,” but a drastic change in his job description. As a professor, Cantrell was focused on teaching and researching, but as director he can use his own experiences to facilitate other faculties’ teaching and research while composing a vision to propel the program forward, he said.
“My hope is that I can help push the program forward without forgetting its past,” he said. “I feel like I have a good relationship with most of the faculty. Ideally, I have their trust, which is something I’ll continue to earn, but with that I’ll be able to make some big moves in the evolution of the program.”
Initially Cantrell plans to brand the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture as a program. He said he must ensure the faculty possesses a single vision of where the program is going in order to move forward.
He plans to expose students to a range of landscape architecture practitioners so they can understand how the information they’re learning is applied outside the walls of academia.
Finally, he’s seeking more unity within the program by tying all steps of landscape architecture together into a more composite form of learning. For example, he said the way students think of design needs to tie more into areas like the technology used in landscape architecture.
Cantrell said landscape architects in Louisiana have a heads up on those around the globe as they are facing issues such as rising sea levels and climate change directly. These issues are prevalent in other parts of the world but at a slower rate than Louisiana, he said.
Louisiana has a “laboratory” that doesn’t exist anywhere else, Cantrell said. Landscape architects in the state can take what they’ve learned about problems they faced in Louisiana and apply that knowledge elsewhere.
“I don’t have plans of leaving, but when that day comes, my belief is to take that spirit that I’ve seen in Louisiana and address problems that are going to be similar around the world.”
