Kate Larsen, Director at Snøhetta, has designed and built vibrant, beautiful, and highly functional public spaces for over 20 years. Kate lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and is a registered Landscape Architect in the state of New York (United States). Her expertise includes designing in tight urban conditions and navigating large, complex client and stakeholder groups within public and cultural institutions. Kate delights in weaving existing sites and cultural histories into designs to bring new life to already loved spaces. WLA had the chance to hear from Kate about her experiences working in New York, her role as a director, and what currently captivates her about the profession.
Your career has involved working at various firms in New York. What do you think draws people to work as landscape architects in New York?
I am very grateful to have worked at a number of wonderful firms so far in my career and to have contributed to so many projects I’m proud of. I think people are drawn to New York City for its energy, opportunity, and community. It probably goes without saying, but there are so many people here and so much going on. With that, comes opportunity. We are very fortunate to have a proliferation of firms of all shapes and sizes doing great work. I recently joined the ASLA-NY Advocacy Committee, and through that work, I was reminded that, being a large city, we have so many more programs and opportunities for landscape architects to get involved in the profession. That’s not necessarily the case in many other places in the country, as many chapters simply don’t have the quantity of landscape architects that we do.
I would also suggest that many landscape architects are drawn by the city itself. That was quite the case for me. The dynamic quality of the city and the incredible diversity of its inhabitants is unique. We’re all mashed together in the public sphere, and the fact that the sometimes highly designed, sometimes completely ad hoc nature of our built environment is constantly being engaged feels like an exciting testing ground for our work. New York wouldn’t be New York without its public spaces and our iconic “I’m walking here!” moments. I would also go so far as to say that the same qualities that serve landscape architects well also serve New Yorkers well: curiosity, endurance, patience, a healthy balance of optimism and skepticism, and a passion to fight for what you believe in.
Working as a Director at Snøhetta involves serving as a designer, technical director, and in business development. What do you find rewarding about working across different parts of the practice?
On any given day, I might contribute to a handful of different projects, participate in a business development meeting, and handle a few scattered operations or firm-leadership questions. Wearing so many hats is that this has allowed me to work with a wide swath of people within the firm. I find the act of getting to know a teammate, understanding their own unique “language” and working to help facilitate conversation between parties really satisfying.
Snøhetta is an amazing and talented group of people from a diverse set of backgrounds, schools, and disciplines of study and practice. From junior designers who have never set foot on a construction site and need help finding their voices in field reports to the finance team that has a specific language to describe project budgeting, everyone thinks and learns a little bit differently. The same holds true for individuals outside of our office – client teams, stakeholder groups, consultants, collaborators. It is a joy to find ways to collaborate, whether that be through words, drawing, or messy collaborative design sessions, all in for the mission of bringing forth the best possible outcomes in our built work.
Landscape architecture is an ever-evolving profession and study. What currently interests you about the field?
I always come back to the delight of seeing a project built. My greatest professional joy is to be in the field participating in the hands-on, life-sized shaping of our world, whether that be from regular site observation, plant layout, mockup reviews or other tangible tasks. Working with contractors, though sometimes challenging (and I have a number of family members in construction, so I know they say the same about designers), is always also humbling, educational, and rewarding.
I was recently explaining to a coworker that a particular benchmark that we had shown on a plan with a northing and easting survey point and elevation correlates to a physical disk embedded into the sidewalk. Her response was, “that’s so quaint!” which made me laugh but also was another reminder that what we do is — and always will be — tied to the physical built world. This perhaps is relevant to landscape architecture more than any other design profession, as we work with the literal earth.
Our profession is ever-evolving, as you say, but I am most interested in something that hasn’t necessarily changed: the desire to create and construct beautiful, functional, durable, sustainable and forward-thinking public spaces for people to enjoy. I hope that in our evolution, we can develop tools that let us get out from behind our computers and into our worlds, out into our sites, more and more.
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