If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
What is RFC?
Rural Futures Collaborative is an emerging design initiative with the aim of bringing design thinking and research into rural environments. The need for an expanded design thinking into rural environments emerges from a 21st century design discourse centered on urban development and critical urban issues, leaving the needs of a vast
majority of our world outside of cities unaddressed. This initiative is meant to define what a rural discourse looks like within the halls of academia, how designers can serve rural communities, and what design practice looks like across rural landscapes.
Who is in the collab?
LINDSAY BURNETTE
Lindsay grew up in the rapidly shrinking middle zone between rural and urban, in the foothills of Northern Colorado. As a kid, she raised rabbits and showed sheep with her local 4-H. Her summers were spent helping her dad in his film processing shop in Wyoming and traveling rural America for her mom’s barn preservation program. In her high school and college years, those summers evolved into working on CSA farms in Colorado and Sweden. Before pursuing her masters in landscape architecture at Penn, Lindsay did urban agriculture and community development with AmeriCorps in Portland, OR and as a Fulbright researcher in Seoul, South Korea. Lindsay currently works at Studio Balcones in Austin, TX and sits on the board of the Multicultural Refugee Coalition, which provides dignified, fair-wage work for refugees through a regenerative farm and a sewing studio.
CLAY GRUBER
Clay was raised on a working cattle ranch outside of Joliet, Montana. He grew up involved in agriculture and working as a wildlands firefighter for the US Forest Service before receiving master’s degrees in architecture and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Clay spent four years as a designer at Nelson Byrd Woltz in New York City, where he contributed to their Conservation Agriculture Studio and the design of residences and public institutions. He is passionate about applying design thinking in creating healthy and resilient communities, ecologies, and experiences.
ZACH HAMMAKER
Zach grew up in the valleys of Appalachian central Pennsylvania working on his family’s land. His passion for the environment was fostered by time as a backpack guide in Southern Colorado and his pastoral upbringing. He established his own firm and practiced in the Delaware Valley as a landscape designer before completing masters in both Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s spent his tenure since, teaching Landscape Architecture and working with public interfacing design centers, engaging in design and conversation around large-scale contemporary issues of climate, culture, and the environment in coastal and agricultural communities.