Meet the Interns: Eleanor Davol

What brought you to the Lab and what do you hope to gain from this experience? 

I am a Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) candidate at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, with a background in environmental science from Barnard College. Born and raised in New York City, I’m especially drawn to the boundary where water meets the urbanized edge, and to designing public coastal infrastructure that works with natural systems rather than against them. I’ve worked at SCAPE Landscape Architecture and SWA Group, and I’m interested in how ecological methodology can be more fully integrated into landscape architecture—both in pedagogy and in practice. I’ve been following the Stone Living Lab’s work for a while now and am so grateful to join their team this summer and help bridge the design and science worlds in meaningful, real-world work.

Tell us a little bit about your internship. 

This summer, I’m working with the Stone Living Lab to expand its work into green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), working with Dr. Katie Dafforn and Dr. Yang Yang. As part of this effort, I’m conducting stakeholder interviews with advocacy groups, City of Boston agencies, and design firms to compile and map information on current and planned green stormwater infrastructure across the city— what’s been implemented, what’s working, and where challenges remain.

This research will help identify where the Lab can best support its partners, particularly through monitoring and evaluation of existing projects and co-design of new GSI approaches tailored to Boston’s context. The goal is a project report that will inform how the Lab moves forward with its GSI work.

What’s next for you? 

I am going into my final year of my MLA program this Fall. My final design thesis will focus on the future of the Boston Harbor Islands. I’m excited to stay in touch with the Lab and carry forward what I’ve learned here into that work and beyond.

Eleanor scribing during one of Dr. Jarrett Byrnes’ trips to Thompson Island for biological monitoring.

Do you have a favorite experience you’d like to share? 

I recently went out to Thompson Island (proposed as Cathleen Stone Island) to help the team with some fieldwork, which I loved! I really loved zooming all the way into the tiny scale of the quadrat used for ecological monitoring and thinking about how that connects back to bigger landscape patterns. As a landscape architecture student, it was a cool reminder of how much range of scale matters, and how that can shift the way you think about the whole site.