Voices from the USA: Shaun Rosier

After completing his PhD studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in 2021, Shaun Rosier has continued to attain acclaim for his teaching abilities and is now an Assistant Professor within the School of Design at Virginia Tech in the USA.

Shaun's teaching awards are stacking up, with three in 2025 - the J. Stoeckel Design Lab Teaching Excellence Award, a Lecture/Seminar Course Teaching Excellence Award and a New Faculty Teaching Award - and capped off this year by a Faculty Award for Excellence in Studio Teaching (Junior Level) from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.

Shaun: “We are in a discipline that demands a lot of us as teachers. We can't shy away from that part of the job like some other academic disciplines where research is foregrounded over teaching. I feel like I am constantly having to rise to the challenge that the students, professional expectations and my own curiosity sets out. I iterate every year on my approach, sharpening my research-informed teaching methods to coach my students to be better designers than I ever could be". 

In June 2025 Shaun was back in Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington briefly to deliver a public lecture based on his work theorising an aesthetics of the underground and underland(scapes). "It was a real pleasure to have an opportunity to contribute back to the body of work happening at VUW’s landscape programme," says Shaun.

Last year he also responded to an opportunity to be remotely featured in the celebrations that took place for the milestone 50th anniversary of the School of Architecture, now known as the Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation (FADI).

Photos: Stephen Olsen

This meant being ‘heroed’ on a floor to ceiling banner on show at the Te Aro campus displayed to celebrate past graduates and a chosen project or two.

The one other landscape architecture alumni featured was Diccon Round, whose banner text highlighted the influence of Megan Wraight's mentorship on the trajectory of his career. It went on to state that "work with Snøhetta in Norway and Oman expanded my understanding of place-based design, with highlights including Wellington's Taranaki Street diving platform and the Muttrah fish market canopy. Now at Wraight & Associates, I continue to draw on these experiences, blending imagination, collaboration, and cultural responsiveness".

While sharing a disappointment that there was not a more even sampling among the 50 banners representing past cohorts of talented multi-disciplinary graduates, Shaun says it was an honour to take part. "I did some research and it turns out there had been 8,846 individuals who graduated from the Faculty overall, so it meant something to be one of the 0.56% of selected alumni".

Shaun grew up in the Wairarapa where he attended Kuranui College. He says that prior to arriving at FADI he "couldn't have given you any sense of what landscape architecture was", adding "the vast majority of our culture sees the word 'landscape' and there is this language connection immediately to 'landscaping' which is taken as a proxy word for gardening".

"My parents would have been even less aware. I'm also not sure any of my whānau would have picked me for having a great sense of creativity. I was always inquisitive however and I believe curiosity takes you where you need to go much better than creativity alone. My wife always makes fun of me now for wanting to know the 'why' behind everything. I think my curiosity around the 'why' of how landscape experience works drove me through my education and still does in my current research and teaching".

The profile published for publicity during the FADI anniversary noted that a pivotal moment for Shaun in his time in the Faculty was a studio project led by Associate Professor Peter Connolly.

“I remember being blown away by how Peter talked about landscape. Things suddenly made sense. What struck me, and has informed everything I still do today, is how he emphasised connecting what you experience on the ground in landscape to how you do large-scale urban structuring moves. Being able to oscillate between these scales was intoxicating and left me with a sense of design authority for the first time in my studies.”

Amongst his ongoing mahi, Shaun has enjoyed coordinating a landscape architecture lecture series at Virginia Tech "bringing in some cool cats from far and wide". This included leading practitioners from firms like Biohabitats and Nelson Byrd Woltz and talks spotlighting ecological and cultural design, alternative landscape futures, and resilience planning.

An indication that Shaun enjoys rocking the boat of academia, is evident in his choice of Feral Landscape Futures as the title for his personal website. It speaks to a conceptual approach to landscape architecture that he says "has been bubbling away for a while out of an uneasiness with where predominant ideas of landscape design, measurement, evaluation, and production are, and have been, heading".

He has had success closing out a series of research projects and in progressing his vision for a Feral Landscapes Futures Lab.

Not bad for someone who had put landscape architecture as his second choice after his first year of FADI, where it had been easy to be clouded by an impression the entire place was either architecture or building science.

Shaun: "Thankfully this has changed a lot with a greater representation for landscape, but it is something the programme has to be constantly vigilant of. I think what really made me stick with landscape architecture though was how much it gave me the capacity to design unique and powerful experiences with land and water - the ability to design something special that can be felt, just as a musician does, was something I found incredibly empowering and interesting".

By this time next year, Shaun will have submitted a portfolio of all his activities and achievements over the past five years of what amounts to a long probation at Virginia Tech. "The US system is quite different from New Zealand. Based on this I'll either receive tenure, or the university can say 'thanks but no thanks' to you".

It’s not a game of basketball but it’s hard to envisage anything but a slam dunk. Of course the return of a ‘prodigal graduate’ would be great, but meanwhile … Let’s Go Shaun!

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Education, #Around-the-worldStephen Olsen