Chad Manley is a teacher and designer. He is the founder of Chad Manley Practice in Landscape and Building Arts. Based in Vancouver, BC., his practice traverses a weaving of landscape, architecture, film, and ecological recovery. His built and immaterial work float amongst the complex continuums of culture and nature, and reflect ancient and contemporary imperatives within the Cascadian cultural-bioregion. A Fellow within the School of Landscape Architecture, Chad’s teaching in Tennessee reflects a curiosity in the specific ecologies and legacies of industrial modernity in the Southeast. His studios and courses encourage contemplation on the understudied and quiet voices of our world, whereby diverse cultural ephemera and ecological phenomena form a basis or ascent towards meaningful conversation. Whether in studio or practice, ‘empathic collisions’ are encouraged within the design process, yielding open and non-prescriptive pathways which alternate within the concentrations of rigor-and-play, hunch-and-belief, history-and-future.

Abstract

The mudpuppy regency. Hawk posh. 

Leopard frogs and vernal ooze, 

Cardinals and sins, in arrested wave form

Kroger’s pasture and refuse shotguns. A platonic liquid carton 

Bagged out and oxygen sagged, 

PU lined guts and humid grubs, tread over

The chimeric, the ganglial, the plenty - this is them: the urban stream. 

On April 8, the A+A’s auditorium will host a musical and filmic event, dedicated to the rights of water in Knoxville’s urban streams. Join multi-instrumentalist and singer songwriter Daniel Kimbro, along with UT SoLA’s Chad Manley, as they attempt to weave and wander through an audio-visual imaginarium of waterculture and riparian ethology. Parts elegiac, parts hopeful hallucination, the performance will ask what it might look, feel, and sound like, for a river to dream. Borne through film, storyboarding, stop-motion animation and musical accompaniment, the night welcomes you to reimagine Knoxville’s First Creek watershed as a polymorphic being: a leviathan resurfacing in our consciousness, and a limbic network for civic buoyancy.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Fund.

Information about visitor parking is available online.