Visionary of
Landscape
Acclaimed landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Fashion Design, creates innovative and beloved public spaces around the world
KATHRYN GUSTAFSON
“Design is design. It comes from the same brain. Only the materials change.”
What is your vision for the future?
Gustafson designed the dramatic landscaping at the site of the Eiffel Tower, one of the most iconic tourist attractions in the world.
By Linda Angrilli
Find the “soul” of a place and create a landscape that fits it perfectly. Be true to its history, culture, and natural environment in every element (composition and structure, stone, plants, water), so it seems to simply belong there. And provide beauty and moments of surprise, bringing visitors back again and again to discover something new. That’s the philosophy of the renowned landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson. Inspired by art, she favors paths that disappear intriguingly around a bend; trees that frame a lovely view, as in a painting; and varied perspectives, up, down, near, far. When it all works, she says, the journey through a landscape is nothing less than sensual, emotional, even poetic. For forty years people have loved the public spaces she’s built all over the world.
In 1971, fresh out of FIT, Gustafson headed to Paris and worked as a fashion designer. She gave it up after six years (“too fast, too many collections, the ethics were terrible”) and spent a winter in a beach house in Seattle, taking stock. “We were all hippies, just hanging out,” she recalls. “Someone said she was going to do landscape architecture, and my head exploded. I’d never thought of it before, but I just knew. I’m so lucky I found this field. It fits me like a glove.” The switch wasn’t strange, she says: “Design is design. It comes from the same brain. Only the materials change.”
Also, of course, scale and time. If fashion is fleeting, urban landscapes are enduring. Gustafson’s work is literally set in stone. Leading teams of architects, other landscape architects, engineers, and horticulturists, she designs and builds large, sometimes massive public sites in cities around the world. Each landscape not only becomes a vibrant destination for many thousands, even millions, of visitors, it claims a place in the minds and lives of those who walk its paths in every season, meeting under its shady trees and taking in its views and changing light. Every detail of the visitor’s experience, even beyond conscious thought, is shaped by the landscape architect’s vision, skill, and yes, art, from the curve of a fountain to the color of the stone.
As a founding partner of two firms, Gustafson Porter + Bowman, based in London, and previously GGN in Seattle, from which she’s retired, Kathryn Gustafson has an international portfolio of high-profile projects, from the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London in 2004 to the National Museum of African American History and Culture site in Washington, DC, completed in 2016. There are projects all over Europe, and in Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Beirut. Budgets range from 2 million to 100 million dollars. Her lifetime of achievements in the field was recognized in 2019 with the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, the highest honor the International Federation of Landscape Architects can bestow.
Since 2018 (with pauses for the pandemic and the Paris Olympics), she’s been restoring the site around the Eiffel Tower, one of the world’s most iconic landscapes, attracting 10 million visitors a year. The project was awarded through a major international competition, which required designing six separate areas totaling more than 130 acres, with the tower at the center. The plan won a prestigious gold Global Future Design Award in 2024.
Because of age and heavy use, historical areas needed restoration, and the visitor experience, marred by overcrowding and lack of services, needed improvement. Ecological sustainability, biodiversity, and accessibility were critical considerations. In addition to renovating soils, pathways, surfaces, and walls, Gustafson’s plan calls for a host of improvements, including new vantage points for viewing the tower itself; flexible spaces for events like concerts and exhibitions; and necessities like baggage check, dining services, and toilets, tucked discreetly among the trees.
It’s a complex, multilayered project that’s not only culturally and politically sensitive but hugely expensive. “It’s a pain,” Gustafson says. “And it has to be drop-dead gorgeous.”
The first phase, around the Fontaine de Varsovie in the Jardins du Trocadéro, was completed in March 2024. In this phase, the firm restored soils, lawns, and pathways; planted 26 cherry trees and 15,000 shrubs and perennials; and provided visitor services while controlling the flow of pedestrians, nice for tourists, but also necessary to avoid soil compaction.
Of the six areas designed for the competition, Gustafson thinks four will be built, because of costs and the byzantine politics surrounding a site that arouses such passion. “So far, I’ve been successful,” she says. “One of my worst critics saw it and said, ‘I didn’t know it could look like that!’”
In some ways, fashion prepared Gustafson for landscape architecture. Her easy chic and her no-nonsense confidence seem suited to either field. By the time she got her master’s at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage in Versailles, she had her FIT education and professional design experience. She’d been making clothes since she was 13. “I already had my style. To a project presentation at ENSP in the disco era, I wore a silver suit with a turquoise piece on it; I had made a model of a landscape in gray clay with a sparkly turquoise river. The teacher said, ‘It’s the same.’”
Gustafson says nobody taught her how to design, but FIT equipped her with the skills to build her own designs, like drawing and how to use different fabrics. She learned how knitting machines work, and she found art history compelling.
A vivid memory: “I walk into the studio and there’s this man, the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. He was Guatemalan, six feet tall, in leather hot pants, with thighs to die for. He used to dance on Broadway. He became my best friend. He graduated before me and went to Paris and found us an apartment. As soon as I graduated, I got on a plane.”
She adored design but hated the industry. She left when the company copied a fabric rather than buy it from the makers. Landscape architecture suited her. Growing up in Yakima, Washington, she skied and rode horses, and, with her four siblings, was expected to help in the family’s garden, where her father tended the trees and shrubs, and her mother the perennials and roses. Water was scarce, but the valley turned a vibrant green when irrigated for farming. “You were highly aware of the value of water,” she says. She often designs fountains and, lesson learned, uses precious resources with care and reuses materials when possible. She traces the undulating forms often seen in her work back to the mountains of her girlhood.
To create a successful public site, Gustafson says, landscape architects need to understand the total environment: natural, political, and cultural. “Working in different countries, whether it’s Korea, Japan, or Australia, how do you understand those sensibilities and make a place that fits? If you don’t, you’re just building a chain hotel that’s the same everywhere.”
She studies each site’s history and geography (“back to the Ice Age”), culture, and existing materials—native plants, local stone, textures, colors, the shapes in the composition. If it sounds like she’s talking about art, she is. “I chose to do landscape architecture as an art form,” Gustafson says. In a talk about her work, she told students she admires J. M. W. Turner’s paintings, where in the distance, “[t]here’s always someplace to go. The sun or moon or light is an object of desire.” Her landscapes create a similar sense of moving toward a destination, a place beyond what’s visible.
Her devotion to art, especially sculpture, can be seen in her method of beginning each project by modeling her design in clay. This lets her understand how it works in a way virtual representation does not. It’s then rendered in plaster and digitized in 3D, and the dimensions are enlarged to the scale of the site. The limestone, granite, or marble (for walls, paving, fountains, and more) is then cut with computerized machines. This might be done in India, Italy, or China, but for sustainability, she prefers it to be quarried and cut as near to the site as possible, to keep shipping distances to a minimum.
For Gustafson, landscape architecture is about creating a journey of discovery. “It’s a walking art. As the architect, you figure out how people move through that experience so they’re constantly discovering. One of the main ways you do that is by changing what their eye sees by moving them up or around through space. You also take advantage of seasonality—the extraordinary changes in light, colors, textures, and temperature. It’s the same place, but the experience, the activities, become different.
“Then there’s the technical part: How do you build it, make sure the plants grow, use the right resources? People don’t appreciate how complicated it is.”
Though her work has a certain signature—“a basic simplicity, pretty stripped down and minimal, not too many different materials. Very sculptural and compositional”—it’s never the same. “I always try to do something new,” she says. “I’m not interested in repeating something that’s been done, either by myself or somebody else.”
An innovative feature she did in 2000 for the American Museum of Natural History in New York was a courtyard covered in a quarter-inch sheet of water with jets that kids can splash in. “It made so much sense, but it had never been done before. Now it’s everywhere in the world.” (A bonus in New York: At night, the Hayden Planetarium is reflected in the water.)
Once built, public sites require maintenance, which is beyond the architect’s control. If a donor doesn’t provide a big endowment for upkeep, Gustafson says, “it’s a crapshoot.” Budgets, politics, and changing priorities can get in the way. Her solution: “Build a place so loved that people protect it. They say, this is my neighborhood, my park, my life. They pressure the city or form associations that maintain it. A huge goal of my work is to make a landscape that grabs people, holds them.”
One such beloved place is the polished black wall outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s gleaming and smooth, evoking the water that Africans were forced to cross when they were brought to America; the rounded edge is almost muscular, like a shoulder, honoring the labor of the enslaved people who built much of Washington’s infrastructure. “It’s got a lot of symbolism,” Gustafson says. But it’s also practical. “It takes the sun, it warms up. Food trucks are there, everybody sits on it. It’s become the place where people meet in DC. Who would have guessed?”
Another memory: “I was in Jamaica, and a young woman, maybe 18, asked what I did. When I said landscape architect, she asked what I’d done. I mentioned the museum. She looked at me and said, did you do the black wall?” Gustafson smiles. “I said yes. The black wall.”
Highlighted projects
EIFFEL TOWER SITE
Paris, 2019-Present
The city of Paris is planning for a future of resilience, increased biodiversity, and reduced pollution, all requirements for the design competition to restore and renovate the historical site around the Eiffel Tower. For their winning entry, chosen from 42 submissions, Gustafson Porter + Bowman proposed a unifying axis of greenery with the tower at its center, connecting the area’s key historical sites, including the Palais de Chaillot, the Champ de Mars, and the École Militaire. The area is now closed to traffic except for emergency vehicles and buses, so the plan turns the traffic circle at the Place de Trocadéro and the Iéna Bridge over the Seine into green spaces for pedestrians. New views of the Eiffel Tower are created, along with spaces for pleasure and contemplation. Phase 1, the renovation around the Varsovie Fountain, was completed in 2024.
CULTUURPARK WESTERGASFABRIEK
Amsterdam, 2006
This early but defining project for Gustafson Porter + Bowman developed a former gasworks outside Amsterdam into a park and recreation area, providing large public event spaces as well as intimate natural landscaped areas with native plantings. It’s considered a model of “brownfield” reclamation, transforming a polluted industrial site into a vibrant gathering place for surrounding communities. “Many of the principles of sustainability that we use today were established then,” Gustafson says.
The project was comprehensive, involving historical restoration of buildings, innovative soil and water reclamation measures, and engagement of many stakeholders to ensure that city and community needs were met. The site now features a cultural center for the arts in an ecologically sustainable environment.
Redevelopment of this brownfield site was complicated by the discovery of huge amounts of toxic material, including cyanide and asbestos. Netherlands law prohibits moving pollution to another place, so Gustafson’s team had to find ways to deal with it safely onsite, adding five years to a five-year project. They built up berms—raised areas in which the pollution could be contained—and covered them with clean soil for plants to grow without exposing horticulturists to the contaminants. The berms also provided a sound barrier for the noisy rail line that remained on the site.
During the planning stage, Gustafson and GP + B partner Neil Porter worked nightly from Seattle with engineers in London to calculate the amount of soil needed and incorporate it into the design. “It was truly an engineering/landscape design collaboration that really made a difference in treating the pollution,” she says.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Washington, DC, 2016
Designing the site around the iconic museum created by David Adjaye and Phil Freelon had deep significance for Gustafson. First there was the symbolic presence of the museum amid so many monumental institutions of American history, civic life, and culture—the Washington Monument, the White House, the Mall, Museum Row. “The museum is about diversity and joy,” she says. “As an architect, you want to respect the historical area, and you want it to seem like your site has always been part of it.”
There were also practical matters. Constitution Avenue, where the museum is located, floods every year, so her team built high above flood level so art can be moved in and out without getting wet.
Security was a huge concern. “You need anti-bomb walls all around, that trucks can’t get through, yet you’re trying to make an open, welcoming space. We built stepped walls covered with plantings so you can’t see them, but I can tell you, it’s totally bulletproof.”
She wanted to incorporate the idea of crossing water, an experience of all Africans coming to America. When her water feature fell to the budget ax, she instead designed a glass-smooth black wall, 5 meters wide and 300 meters long, that evokes water.
