Maria Goula is a Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. She is a licensed Architect and a Landscape Architect with a Ph.D. in Landscape Design Theory. For over 20 years she taught and worked professionally in Barcelona, Spain. She develops research on coastal tourism, with a focus on the interpretation and reinvention of leisure landscape patterns in an era of multiple uncertainties. The spectrum of her research covers the history of Mediterranean coastal tourism and expands to Landscape Architecture inquiry methods on the coast and leisure, internationally. As a designer, she is mainly interested in translating interdisciplinary knowledge on the coast into design protocols. For the latter she developed the concept of the second coast which operates as both a pedagogic tool as well as a lens to address heritage, memory, and resiliency on the coast. Since 2007 she lectured broadly on this concept in more than 25 Institutions in the world: USC, SEBS, Rutgers, OHIO State, UVA, in the US, SLU, Academy of Amsterdam, EMiLA Summer school, ECLAS, AUTH, NTUA, Universita degli studi di Ferrara, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad de La Salle Colombia, Department of Architecture of Florence, Catalan Institute of Land Use [Institut Català de Sòl], Universidad de Alicante, University Polis, Albania, Cornell University [online open seminar online to Cornell and Ithaca community].
In the core of her practice and research resides an ambition to unveil, speculate and reflect on intrinsic values of ordinary landscapes in constant change. Maria is considered an expert in Mediterranean semiarid ordinary landscapes, a term she coined in her doctoral thesis, where she investigated how a particular application of design traditions in combination with conventional environmental values and cultural practices have excluded certain kinds of dynamic landscapes, such as torrents. The elaboration of landscape cartographies is the main tool to address the latter in order to enrich planning policy-making and design tools for resilient landscapes. Her awarded contribution as a leading researcher for the creation of landscape specific cartographies for two Landscape Catalogues commissioned and coordinated by the Catalan Landscape Observatory forged her experience beyond studio work. With her research on contemporary urban design, on contemporary cartography tactics, with the direction of Ph.D. candidates, and moreover, with collaborative and participative pioneer design work, she is working on reversing the attitude of design disciplines towards the aforementioned landscapes.
She is a foundation member of the scientific and organizing committee of the European/ International Landscape Biennial of Barcelona since 2000, a disciplinary event that gathers ground-breaking professionals and academics and is considered as one of the most important design critique platforms for Landscape Architecture worldwide. Maria is member of the Board of Foundation Landscape Architecture Europe-LAE, Wageningen, Netherlands, as well as a member of the Board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture. [JOLA].
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