KEN SMITH WORKSHOP
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE URBANISM ART
Ken Smith, Principal
Ken Smith is one of the best-known of a generation of landscape architects equally at home in the worlds of art, architecture, and urbanism. Trained in both design and the fine arts, he explores the relationship between art, contemporary culture, and landscape. His practice, Ken Smith Workshop, was established in 1992 and is based in New York City. He is committed to creating landscapes, especially parks and other public spaces, as a way of improving the quality of urban life. Much of his work pushes beyond traditional landscape typologies—plaza, street, and garden—to landscapes that draw on diverse cultural traditions and influences of the contemporary urban landscape. Smith’s approach is directed at projects of varying scales and types: temporary installations, private residential gardens, public spaces, parks, and commercial projects. With a particular emphasis on projects that explore the symbolic content and expressive power of landscape as an art form, the Workshop specializes in the investigation of new expressions in landscape design. Ken Smith is a graduate of Iowa State University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has taught and lectured at Harvard, the City College of New York, and other universities and institutions around the world. Smith’s work has been published widely in the popular and trade press. Ken Smith is licensed as a landscape architect in New York, California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Kentucky, and Virginia. He is a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects. KEN SMITH WORKSHOP Ken Smith Workshop is an award winning design firm with experience in a wide variety and scale of projects. The firm practices landscape design primarily in the realm of public space. Typical design problems involve making landscape space within the context of existing, reworked or complex urban fabric. This requires a strategic approach in making the strongest conceptual landscapes within the limits and possibilities of the site’s infrastructure, context and program. This has led to pushing beyond traditional landscape typologies of plaza, street, and garden to conceptualize landscapes that are hybridized from diverse traditions and influences of the contemporary culture. Experience and experimentation are combined with the goal of producing landscapes of the highest conceptual and artistic quality. Emphasis is placed on providing personal service and addressing landscape problems, which require special effort. Each site, program and client are dealt with individually, giving attention to developing solutions specific to the project. Ken Smith Workshop is based in New York City.

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