Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovative designer in building regenerative landscapes and with interdisciplinary design education. In both academic explorations as well explorations at her design practice, Bargmann’s on-going research continues to excavate the creative potential of degraded landscapes. Her graduate design studios and courses focus on the design potential for productive futures of fallow cities. Bargmann teaches critical site-seeing as a means to reveal multiple site histories, giving legible form to complex processes, offering renewed relationships for communities in tired and toxic surroundings.
Applying this research at her small design practice, projects at the D.I.R.T. studio explore past and present industrial operations and urban processes in relationship to ecological systems, cultural constructs and emerging technologies. From closed quarries to abandoned coal mines, fallow factories and urban railyards, Bargmann joins teams of architects, artists, engineers, historians and scientists to imagine the next evolution of these working landscapes. Along with a degree in sculpture from Carnegie-Mellon University, Bargmann earned a masters in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design followed by a Fellowhsip at the American Academy in Rome. Bargmann’s work was awarded the National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. TIME, CNN and Newsweek, along with national and international design publications have recognized Bargmann as leading the next generation in making a difference for design and the environment.