The Mechanical and Biological Merger

Darla V. Lindberg is a registered architect and Professor of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University. She is the first woman in the over 100-year history of the department to be tenured and promoted, and then to be promoted to full professor. She recently held a two-year Endowed Chair of Design Innovation for her work in systems dynamics as it affects thesis thinking in design. She also gave a TED talk on the question 'What motivates influential people?' She grew up on a 1500-acre grain farm in North Dakota where, as natural systems farmers, life and living were both seamless and expansive. Located in the middle of the Bakken Shale, one of the largest oil developments in the United States, she witnessed the horrors of coal strip mining in that powerfully productive landscape. Not surprisingly, her undergraduate architectural thesis tackled environmentalism, strip coal mining, land reclamation, and corporate greed in the design of a Scheduled and Unscheduled Maintenance Facility and Headquarters for North American Coal Corporation.