Landscape Architect Kathryn Gustafson

The Sky Is Mine More Intelligent Life

American-born Kathryn Gustafson is called the ‘grande dame’ of landscape architecture.

Rights of Man Square. ‘Envy’. It is interesting to note that most of Gustafson’s French works deal with some strong artistic statement. Her designs can be interpreted as surgical acts of healing, where the land is skillfully draped and sown as if to hide past torments. This particular attitude clearly makes Gustafson’s work unique in France. The landscape as art movement never really reached this country, and most professionals would never think of themselves as artists, but simply as pragmatic problem solvers in line with a particular urban tradition. Gustafson is, therefore, definitely different from her peers in that her work appears each time clearly as an artistic act. She prefers to work over disrupted terrain, where she need not consider the notion of terroir or any other burdensome cultural referent to place. Her conceptual and artistic approach sets her apart from the rest of the French profession where the reference, not to say reverence, to place always plays a key role.Gustafson has a dozen projects around the globe, run either by her firm of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, covering America and Asia from Seattle, or by Gustafson Porter, her European practice, whose walls in Kentish Town, north London, are hung with plaster moulds of her original clay designs.

She is a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a medallist of the French Academy of Architecture, and a recipient, from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, of the Sckell Ring of Honour, which sits on her small hand like a heavy gold knuckle-duster.

Most recently, Gustafson’s Seattle firm won the Landscape Architecture Award in the 2011 Cooper-Hewitt National Awards.

More Intelligent Life informs that Gustafson is working with British architect Norman (Lord) Foster developing six blocks of downtown Washington DC, reinstating an expanding the original 18th-century alleyways that ran between them.

“Each project takes five years on average,” she says. “You get to know a city very well.” She is also working there with Adjaye, on an African-American museum, due to open as part of the Smithsonian in 2015; it will have a “rain garden” and a pool symbolising the ocean crossed by the slave ships.

Critics and curators say that Gustafson’s greatest contribution is the re-introduction of the human body to site design. She agrees: ‘For me, the form of the land and the form of the body come together somehow.” A former fashion student and 1970s design professional, critics maintain that the sensual draping of clothes has strongly influenced her landscape work.

Gustafson Gutherie Nichol Ltd is a refreshingly gender-balanced group of professionals. Founder is seated on sofa, white collar.

Urban Parking Garage in Bloom

Lurie Garden Chicago website

The Lurie Garden, built by Gustafson Gutherie Nichol Ltd,  in Millennium Park is an urban oasis emerging from a harmonious blend of symbolism, landscape design and ecological sensitivity. Its design pays homage to Chicago’s transformation from flat marshland to innovative green city, or “Urbs in Horto” (City in a Garden).