Garden Design Lecture: Kathryn Gustafson

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With practices in Seattle and London, and work that takes her everywhere from Singapore to San Antonio, peripatetic Washington native Kathryn Gustafson is one of the most internationally recognized and decorated landscape architects working today. 

Gustafson’s projects—predominately large-scale civic, institutional and corporate parks, memorials and plazas—are deeply researched and astutely designed to encourage meaningful public engagement.

Among the dozens of imaginative and celebrated spaces her teams have completed are the recently opened Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London, Millennium Park in Chicago and the first major landscape installation to be part of the Venice Architecture Biennale, a garden so complex and evocative that remnants have been preserved in place to this day.

Currently, Gustafson and her London partners are the leading landscape architects for the Olympic Village for the 2024 Olympics in Paris, where she lives when she in not on Vashon, a rural island within commuting distance to Seattle.   

Sculptural is the word most often used to describe Gustafson’s visually arresting landscapes composed mostly of earth, grass, water, stone and sky. “Sensuous, beguiling, serene," are other apt descriptors, according to Gary Hilderbrand, professor of landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, who puts Gustafson’s earth works on a plane with those of revered American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi.