Kamni Gill

Kamni has an undergraduate degree in English Literature, and a Masters degree in urbanism and planning. She then applied a strong interest in design and ecology to a professional degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Kamni is a landscape architect with over 11 years of experience on projects in the United States and Switzerland. Kamni developed expertise from the residential to the regional scale in construction and detailing, habitat and river bank restoration, storm water wetland design, bioengineering techniques, forest design and management and grading and topography through work as a lead designer on projects at Hargreaves Associates, the Bioengineering Group (a consortium of engineers, hydrologists and ecologists), and Geller Associates. She was the principal of POD design in Switzerland where she completed a range of residential and public projects and honed her skills in planting design. A strong basis in practice has led to a teaching philosophy that is strongly rooted in landscape architecture criticism and analysis of seminal projects in the fine arts and landscape architecture.  

Before coming the University of Manitoba, Kamni was an assistant professor at the University of Sheffield, the top-ranked school for landscape architecture in the UK years and is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She brings a rigorous, inventive focus to her teaching and endeavors to inform practice with a strong theoretical and historical framework. Kamni actively recognizes that knowledge in landscape architecture is expressed through the built project and encourages her students to think through landscape ideas by through drawing and making. Most recently, she has participated in the Summer Institute Indigenizing Curriculum in the Faculty of Arts and is committed to addressing questions of social justice and reconciliation in her curriculum design.

EVLU 3012 Site Morphology and Grading
EVLU 3008 Studio: Networks and Infrastructure
EVLU 4013 Studio: Possible Urbanisms
EVLU 4016 History of Landscape and Urbanism

Kamni engages in three broad areas of landscape architecture research:

• Visual methods in landscape
• Urban trees: New tree types for the 21st century
• Soils and structure of cities

She is an editor of the Journal of Landscape Architecture, responsible for Thinking Eye, which supports visual and design methodologies in landscape architecture and allied fields.
She has completed both analyses of tree systems in modernist landscape architecture and examines how the spatial planting of trees expresses particular social, cultural and ecological considerations and how new tree types might respond to the challenges of climate change and social equity. Her interest in trees also extends to the use of wood in construction design work and collaborative installation of trees.
 
More recently, Kamni is conducting research on how soil and surface configuration condition movement distinctive ecologies and the human experience of cities.  

Book chapter

• 2015. Movement and the Sequential Section. In: Jones, P. and Meagher, M. eds. Architecture and Movement. 1st ed. London: Routledge.

Conference papers and public presentations

• 2018. Urban Ground: materials, form, meaning. Winnipeg Design Festival [Re-]search. September 28.
• 2016. The Urban Grove. On the return of the woods. Fondazione Benetton Studie Richerche. Treviso. 18-19 February 2016.
• 2016. Making Research:  Robert Irwin and Richard Long. Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the ECLAS 2015 Conference: Landscapes in Flux.  September Tartu Estonia. SPECIAL SESSION ON ART AND LANDSCAPE.
• 2014.The Redress of the Grove.  Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the ECLAS 2012 Conference: Power of Landscape. 21-23 September. Porto. European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools.
• 2012. Small is big: Local Interventions and the Power of Accumulation.  Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the ECLAS 2012 Conference: Power of Landscape. 19-22 September. Warsaw European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools.

Peer-reviewed Journal Papers

• 2019. Making Research: An examination of the art-based methods of Robert Irwin, and Antony Gormley and their potential for enriching landscape architecture practice and research. Submitted to Landscape Research (accepted, currently being revised).
• 2018. The grove as an urban tree planting type: The case of Nagele, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 38:4, 269-292.

Reflective essays, visual essays and interviews

• 2017. "An ethics of landscape architecture," JoLA 3/2017
• 2017. "On Time", JoLA ,2/2017
• 2016. ‘Field”, JoLA 3/2016. TE Selected Shorts
• A series of three visual works examining “field.”
• 2015. “On Emptiness’ JoLA 2/2016.
• A critical reading of Tempelhof Field, Berlin that explores the cultural values manifest in urban clearings and empty spaces.  
• 2015. Gill, K. ed. ‘The Critical Visual,” Journal of Landscape Architecture, 3/2015. A visual essay from drawings solicited from 50 academics and practitioner.
• 2014. Gill, K.  Blanchon Bernadette. 2014. ‘Critical Invention.’ JoLA 1-2014: 4-5.
• 2014. ‘In Conversations with: Tim Ingold. Crafting Landscapes” JoLA Being Specific: 50-51.
• An interdisciplinary reflection on the media of landscape architecture from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist.
• 2013 Gill, K. Shannon, K. Rinaldi B. ‘The expanded field of landscape architecture.’ JoLA 5.
• 2013. ‘In Conversations with: Herbert Dreiseitl.’ JoLA Water landscapes: 74-75.