Katherine Harvey has over 20 years of experience as a design professional integrating spatial practices with deep design thinking. Her training as both an architect and landscape architect is aligned with the practice’s goal of breaking down boundaries between the design disciplines to create holistic experiences.
She has led a range of projects from large scale masterplans to urban districts to botanical gardens. Katherine has a particular interest in large scale sites and complex landscapes which integrate ecosystems with the built environment. She has led RIOS’ master planning work for as One Beverly Hills, Descanso Gardens, and La Casa de Maria coordinating across disciplinary boundaries to create new opportunities for landscape resiliency.
Her recent plans have addressed water independence and disaster recovery all while balancing human experience and fostering stewardship. She is passionate about landscape architects tackling carbon neutrality and has led the practice in building guidelines for maintaining accountability in RIOS projects. Katherine has taught studios and lectures at the University of Southern California and continues to engage academia as an invited critic and through design mentorship.
As part of World Landscape Architecture Month, we have been speaking to landscape architects about landscape architecture and the future of the profession. We got the chance to speak with Katherine Harvey, a Creative Director and Partner at RIOS based in Los Angeles, California, USA.
WLA: What is the most rewarding part of being a landscape architect?
As landscape architects our work creates transformation, taking latent, underutilized, or underappreciated places and setting them on new trajectories. This work requires deep understanding of what’s there and defining the opportunity which is underlying the surface of the existing site. This is detective work but also the work of provocation: What if? This is an essential question in our toolkit for framing the future. You can see this in our work at Lynn Wyatt Square where a former concrete island plaza has been transformed into a dynamic and welcoming urban stage that will activate and amplify the theatre district for years to come.
WLA: What is a key issue that is facing the landscape architecture profession?
Responding to and anticipating the effects of climate change on the environments we design is a key issue for our future. We need to change the way we build projects, how we select materials, specify and install plants, how projects are assembled and how they will one day be disassembled. Yet we also need to help clients and communities to anticipate and plan for adaptation. What we assume today will not be what we will be working with tomorrow, that unpredictability requires an agile mindset and we need to bring people along on that journey. You can see this demonstrated at Palm Springs Park where both a desert adapted plant palette and an intentional calibration of heat island through materials and palm canopies seeks to both situate people in place and make them stay because the attention to thermal comfort.
WLA: How do you see the future of landscape architecture?
I think we will continue to broaden the role of landscape architecture in instigating change within design practice. There have been periods where landscape has been treated as accessory to design. Yet we increasingly prove we are much more adept at addressing the questions of our time. Whether that is about changes in our environment, how we engage culture in the public realm, or how we address historic disinvestment, landscape architects have the breadth and passion to foreground and confront these big challenges.
Thank you to Katherine for taking the time to answer World Landscape Architecture’s questions.