The Knowlton School is saddened to report the passing away of Norman Booth, former section head and professor of landscape architecture at the Knowlton School.

Booth spent most of his professional career teaching landscape architecture at the Ohio State. He attained the rank of professor and served as head of the Landscape Architecture Section from 1996 to 2003. He was honored in 1999 by being designated a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects. Booth retired from academia in 2004.

“I have loved every minute of it,” reflected Professor Emeritus Norman Booth in 2018 to a gathering of former students, colleagues, and Knowlton School alumni following the presentation of the Norman K. Booth Endowed Scholarship Fund at the office of MKSK in downtown Columbus. “I was very fortunate to be present when there were a lot of other faculty around me who had the same passion. Because of them I grew as a teacher.”

At the scholarship fund event, Brian Kinzelman, FASLA (BSLA ‘77), Principal at MKSK, reflected on the legacy of his former teacher: “Norm possesses the rare combination of a keen design sense, soft-spoken delivery and a warm/engaging personality. As I know I speak for the hundreds of the students that he mentored through the years at Ohio State, he was always approachable and helpful in assisting us in working through problems, test ideas and generally in nurturing us into full grown practitioners. Many of us would not be where we are in our careers but for Norm and his dedication to our education.”

During his teaching career, Booth authored two widely used landscape architecture textbooks, Basic Elements of Landscape Architectural Design in 1983 (reprinted in 2012 as Foundations of Landscape Architecture) and Residential Site Design in 1985. Booth co-authored Residential Landscape Architecture with his colleague James E. Hiss in 1991.

As detailed in Testing Grounds: 100 Years of Landscape Architecture at the Ohio State University, Booth’s work had an influential impact on the design education model, “integrating elements of traditional site planning and environmentalism with a graphic style derived from 1950s modernism and the new informality of the 1970s.”

Taken from Testing Grounds, Norman Booth reflects on how the landscape architecture section evolved in the early 1970’s:

I was hired about a year or two after Jot Carpenter was hired [1972], at the beginning of a rather rapid buildup and enlargement of the program, so we were all rather young faculty with virtually no reaching experience prior to starting to teach. We pretty much had the ability to shape the program, and during the  ‘73-’74, ‘75 time period there was a lot of effort put forward to define what the program was all about and to set the course for many years to come. I think the core of that was a weekend retreat - we went to Mohican State Park for a whole weekend - and out of that came the direction that the program would take for the next twenty-five, thirty years. Even though that evolved over time and always changed, the core of that was really set early on in those years, and I think there were a number of things that were unique. One, that we had the ability to do that, and two that there was a lot of emphasis on making a program where the graduates were prepared to walk into an office, either a private practice or government service, so that students we're job-ready and had the necessary education and background.

Norman K. Booth was born in Syracuse, NY and  attended Syracuse University and the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), where he graduated magna cum laude in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture. He received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois in 1972.

Booth married Gail C. Zink in 1986. The couple enjoyed traveling, hiking, and kayaking lakes and rivers in western Michigan.

Booth is survived by his wife, sister Nannette Gagliostro (Michael) of Roanoke, VA, nieces Shannon and Rebecca, and nephews Kevin and Scott.

Donations in his memory can be made to the Norman K. Booth Memorial Scholarship in the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, the Landscape Architecture Foundation, or the Community Foundation of Oceana County, Pentwater, MI.