Cafe Botanique, October 21, 2010, 6:30 p.m. - Mitchell Hall

From Finland to North America: Landscapes, Buildings and Cultural Change

By Arnold Alanen, Ph. D. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Dr. Arnold Alanen, professor emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is at the height of his career as a distinguished cultural landscape historian. He has written extensively about cultural landscapes and cultural resource preservation, with a concentration on company towns and planned communities, rural areas, national parks and immigrant settlements. While many of his publications feature the American Midwest, he has also included places across the United States, as well as in Finland, Norway, Canada, Australia and Japan.

Join Dr. Alanen as he shares his insights into the Finnish immigrant story and the world the immigrants built in North America. What ideas about wilderness, clearings, farmsteads, trees and wetlands did the immigrants bring with them? What did they discover about making places in North America? How did the sauna change when it crossed the Atlantic Ocean?

A third-generation Finnish American, Dr. Alanen speaks and reads Finnish and is a founder of Landscape Journal, the first refereed publication for landscape architectural research in North America. As an advisor to the National Park Service, Dr. Alanen has documented cultural landscapes in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin. 

He has been a W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow in Finland, a Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki and has been selected as the third Finlandia Foundation National Lecturer of the Year (LOY 2009-2010).


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