Dorothée Imbert

Title • Chair of the master's program in landscape architecture at Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Education • Professional degree from Unité Pédagogique d'Architecture No. 1, in Paris, plus master's degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.

Personal • Married to Andrew Cruse, a visiting assistant professor at the Sam Fox School, one son, lives in the Central West End.

Landscape designer Dorothée Imbert was born in Paris: City of Light, boulevards and parks.

Shortly thereafter, Imbert moved to Milan, where her father worked for the 3M Co., of St. Paul, Minn., but remained most influenced by the urbane nature of her native city. After getting a professional degree in architecture, Imbert left Paris for the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned master's degrees in architecture and landscape architecture.

In 2010, Washington University lured her to St. Louis from Cambridge, Mass., where for a decade she had taught landscape architecture at Harvard. In St. Louis, Imbert took on the challenge of building a master's program in landscape architecture at Washington University's Sam Fox School.

From living in Paris, the Bay Area and Boston, how do you compare those locations to St. Louis?

To me, what strikes me still is the scale and the expansion of the blocks, the size of the streets and roads, the fact that it is so difficult to walk and have a kind of human measure of the city. It's like I look at the plan and still have trouble reading how far away this place is going to be. Forest Park is a fantastic resource. You look at it and you think, this cannot be, but it's ultimately one and a half times the size of Central Park.

So to me the thing which is most fascinating about St. Louis is the lack of relation between density and size. I'm used to cities being dense and more constricted. In St. Louis, it's kind of the opposite. It's both wider and emptier.

What do those characteristics say about St. Louis?

It's different. It's not good or bad. Paris is a fantastic city to visit and experience but in terms of looking at it from a design perspective or from a kind of interventionist perspective it doesn't leave you a lot of opportunities. While if you look at a city like St. Louis it really makes you think about the potential of design and thinking in terms of systems, in terms of open space, in terms of program, in terms of land use and what landscape architecture and other disciplines could do for the city.

What three things you would change about St. Louis?

My first wish would be a transit system which would be really about walking or having access to the city at a human scale. The MetroLink is great. But it's not quite functioning for me in terms of something which I can hop on and go somewhere. It's great when I went downtown. I was able to come back to the Central West End. But even to go to school it's not that convenient. So something that would be where the stops would be shorter or that there would be connections to bicycle routes so that it would be an intermodal system.

My second wish would be to really recognize our position within the agricultural context of the region and make that a showcase for the city. It already is part of the identity of certain neighborhoods but it really would be about getting local food and supporting local agriculture to provide not only food for the city but also that it could seen as invigorating certain neighborhoods.

And the third one is, again, tying it to the kind of memory of the Midwest, where you have the fantastic street trees. We are seeing the tree as the enemy in the urban context when, in fact, to me the tree is very much a kind of possible wealth of the city in terms of shade, in terms of cooling and heating of architecture and in terms of protecting the car. When you look at nice streets, it's ultimately the streets with the big trees. It's not the streets which are baking in the sun and have only asphalt.

Given your interest in agriculture, what is your opinion of projects like the FarmWorks agriculture and aquaponics development planned for some old factories north of downtown?

I think they're fantastic in terms of potential revitalization of areas and also getting youth involved, providing work opportunities, also educating people about how food is grown and how you can work at composting and vermiculture and aquaponics. I also think those projects should be designed in a way that they become pieces of architecture themselves or pieces of landscape architecture themselves. I think they should be projects beyond fixing urban blight or helping the disenfranchised segments of the population and should be really about demonstrating how the productive landscape A) works as a system and B) can be part of the everyday landscape in every type of neighborhood.

What are your thoughts about the plan to redo the Arch grounds and the design of a lid over Interstate 70 to connect the grounds to the rest of downtown?

... I think it's a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous project that could be realized. I really hope that it doesn't get bogged down and there is sufficient support to make it happen. The Arch is absolutely stunning. I take people who come from New York, who come from Paris, who come from Tokyo and have seen a lot of architecture. And every time there is this kind of incredible awe that overcomes them because it is stunning. It is a stunning piece of design, of craftsmanship and it's sublime, in a sense. That it is in St. Louis is such a tribute to the people believing in such a vision.