Dept. is a landscape architecture and urban design studio that provides creative, useful, and adaptive design responses for the public and the environment.

Dept.

The Court is a renovation of the Seaside Motor Court, designed by Scott Merrill and built in 1989. The project reintroduces a native coastal scrub forest into two interior courtyards and creates a new café and streetscape along Scenic Highway 30-A. 

The design of the Court's landscape emerged from a desire to create privacy between a shared central lawn and the hotel's private cabin units. Instead of a fence, subtle sand dunes with planting create natural screening and lush views for guests. The planting palette showcases North Florida’s unique coastal scrub landscape: sand live oaks, sabal palms, palmettos, and a mix of scrub flowers and mints create a variegated landscape. The curb stones are made of custom tabby concrete block that draws on a traditional, regional method of forming concrete with dense shell aggregate.

The smaller northern courtyard functions both as a stormwater catchment area for the entire site and a tupelo grove. Finally, along the scenic highway, new decking, planters, and a seating area engage the sidewalk to create a more urban and dynamic streetscape setting.

Client: Seaside Community Development Corporation
Collaborators: Florida Haus, Artisan of Seagrove Beach, Thos. Stein Inc., Potter Landscaping
Size: 30,000 SF

Seaside, FL

The Court

Dept. is working with Buffalo Bayou Partnership on the Gravel Silos and Stormwater Crossing, which are two adjacent sites   located on the East End of Buffalo Bayou in Houston’s Second Ward neighborhood. 

On the west side of the project site, The Stormwater Crossing is a natural area along the Buffalo Bayou trail system that takes advantage of the site's naturally low elevation to provide a neighborhood stormwater retention space and  wetland. The park bolsters a historic gully and connects to a constructed wetland that  cleans neighborhood stormwater runoff by recreating the historic "prairie pothole" landscape of the Gulf Coast prairie ecoregion. The Buffalo Bayou trail traverse the constructed wetland and continues downstream to the Gravel Silos. 

Formerly the site of a concrete and gravel operation, The Gravel Silos  celebrates the remaining relics of the area’s industrial past – four large concrete silos, ‘rocks’ made of disposed concrete slurry, and buried concrete walls. The Gravel Silos are repuprosed and adapted as an event space, a waterfront overlook, and a flexible garden. Through selective removal and reuse of materials, the open spaces around the Gravel Silos honor the history of the site while integrating additional walkways, gathering areas, and seating.

The Stormwater Crossing and Gravel Silos are part of the larger plan for the South Bank Trail, which was designed in collaboration with SWA Group for Buffalo Bayou Partnership's Buffalo Bayou East Master Plan. 

Houston, TX

Gravel Silos and Stormwater Crossing

Dept. completed the concept design for a 1.5 mile-long segment of linear bike and pedestrian trail for Buffalo Bayou Partnership. The trail segment is located between Jensen Drive and Tony Marron Park within Buffalo Bayou East. Unlike areas of Buffalo Bayou Park, further upstream, this segment of Buffalo Bayou is adjacent to both ongoing and inactive industrial uses. The concept plan  relocates the existing trail out of the floodplain while celebrating key industrial relics in the area, including four concrete gravel silos, and creating accessible public spaces that front the bayou.   

The concept design focused on the development of four sites along the trail: The Stormwater Wetland Crossing, the Gravel Silos, the Velasco Street Crossing, and the Woodland Bridge.    

The concept plan was developed further in  collaboration with SWA as part of the desing of Buffalo Bayou East's South Bank Trail.

South Bank Trail Concept Design

A collaboration with Rice Grounds Facilities Engineering and Planning, 

 is a living installation that explores the social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of alternative landscape maintenance practices.

The 10,000 square-foot installation replaces an area of mowed lawn on the Rice Campus with a prairie garden. The prairie is given form through a process of selective mowing, thereby reducing mowing costs and impacts on campus and providing a new public garden.

More info can be found at our Prairie Plots 

Prairie Plots

The Machine Garden transforms a defunct coffee roasting plant into an occupiable rooftop garden in Houston's  East End.

Following a detailed inventory of existing rooftop equipment, the proposed plan relies on the selective removal and demolition of equipment parts and accessories to create a series of intentional gathering areas of different sizes. The remnants of the building's coffee roasting equipment are recast as sculptural figures in the garden surrounded by planting and supplemented by a cooling mist system that provides thermal comfort in Houston’s hot climate.

Machine Garden

The Good Neighbor Stormwater Park is a community park that functions as a stormwater retention basin to reduce flooding for the neighborhood. The park design was the winning design of Van Alen’s “Keeping Current” competition to reimagine the use of North Miami’s “repetitive loss properties,” or flood-prone residential lots.

With input from community members and residents, the Good Neighbor Stormwater Park was developed as a localized floodplain management approach that integrates green infrastructure and community-oriented open space. The central basin exposes the shallow water table while providing additional storage space for stormwater. The new walking path winds around the central basin and moves through a demonstration garden of several South Florida habitats, including pine flatwoods, hardwood hammock, marsh, and cypress slough. In addition, an oversized blue pipe serves both as a play structure and seating and conveys flood water to the central basin.

Finally, Dept. collaborated with Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier to create public artwork and signage that draws attention to the fluctuating water levels in the central basin as well as calls out relevant flood hazard information. The park therefore benefits the city’s Community Rating System and proposes a model for alternative land use of flood-prone vacant land in at-risk communities.

The project was completed in 2020 with contributions from The Rockefeller Foundation, Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Miami Foundation, Target, and Terra Group; as well as The Nature Conservancy and Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

 Van Alen Institute, Urban Impact Lab, Adler Guerrier, Andrew Aquârt, Forerunner, Inc.


North Miami, FL

Good Neighbor Stormwater Park

Dept. is working with Windsor, FL to develop the landscape plan for the new North Village, which is situated along the Indian River Lagoon on a barrier island in South Central Florida. The project connects the new development site to the lagoon, extending the estuary to support habitat for wildlife, increase biodiversity, and provide an adaptive landscape for the barrier island. 

Formerly a citrus grove, the 54-acre North Village site  is an opportunity to   create an estuarine landscape that  supports the unique ecosystem of the Indian River Lagoon. One of the most biodiverse estuaries in North America, the Indian River Lagoon has suffered from the impacts of development: loss of biodiversity,  pollution, poor water quality, and wetland decline.  Modeling development as a form of stewardship, the North Village  is  dedicated to ecological landscape practices: from the design of littoral edges that support wetland plants and habitat to the establishment of maintenance procedures that reduce irrigation and artificial fertilizers. 

The stormwater  management strategy includes two wetlands; a freshwater wetland that filters run-off and improves water quality through aquatic planting, and a brackish wetland that is connected to the Indian River Lagoon, which  extends the estuarine habitat and supports natural tidal  flushing. Connecting the two wetlands is the "Slough," a coral stone crossing that celebrates the relationship between the two wetland areas.  The overall hydrological approach to the  North Village also anticipates sea-level rise and storm surge impacts by creating a diversity of  salt-tolerant plant communities.

Indian River Lagoon, FL

North Village

Dept. redesigned the planting surrounding the Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University. The project was part of a renovation of the student center and cafe, originally designed by Thomas Phifer.   

The planting around the perimeter of the building emphasized a diverse palette of plants native and adapted to the Houston region. The area is highly trafficked  especially during the shoulder seasons when school is in session.  A mix of evergreen subtropical plants, specifically primoridal species, and semi-evergreen perennials provide a consistent layer of planting year-round whereas bunch grasses and flowering pollinator plants creating pockets of seasonal change. 

Rice University

Brochstein Pavilion

Dept. is working with New York based interior designer Billy Cotton on a 1-acre residential garden in Houston. The landscape plan celebrates the bayou ecologies of the region through various curated garden rooms. This project is completed.

Knollwood Residence

Pine in the Sand is a living installation and public artwork at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA. A monument to impermanence, the installation invites visitors to reflect on environmental change and the labor of maintenance and upkeep.

The installation is comprised of a mound of sand planted with a pitch pine, 

 and partially contained by a ring of concrete barriers. Opposite the mound, rows of granite benches form pew-like seating. Visitors are invited to interact with the installation by playing around the pile and raking the sand with provided tools. Through the seasons, the sand shifts, the tree drops its needles and grows, and small animals burrow and move in. The installation acts as a register for environmental change and draws attention to the labor of maintenance and the interdependence of human and natural systems.

Pine in the Sand was the winning entry for the fourth cycle of the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition.

 Cambridge Landscape Company, Pine & Swallow Environmental Services, New England Specialty Soils


Cambridge, MA

Pine in the Sand

A small garden that balances privacy and collectivity in a shared outdoor space for two accessory dwelling units. 

Dept. is working with HR Design Dept. to design the landscape for the renovation of two bungalows and two new accessory dwelling units that are part of the Menil Collection's campus in Montrose. The garden's primary feature is a partial "fence" comprised of ground-runner and curved palms that creates a playful boundary between the two lots.

Menil ADUs

to develop a neighborhood framework plan in Houston's Second Ward for developer Concept Neighborhood. The plan creates an identity for the district by foregrounding walkable urbanism through the design of the public realm as well as through testing different mixed-use density scenarios across multiple sites. Specifically, Dept. focused on the connecting disparate open spaces within the district with an urban promenade that  links the light rail to the Buffalo Bayou trail system. The Concept Neighborhood Framework Plan received an Honorable Mention  from the Architect's Newspaper for Best in Urban Design and Masterplan in 2024.  

Concept Neighborhood Framework Plan

The North Miami “Repetitive Loss” Vision Plan is a city-wide plan that addresses the future use of North Miami’s flood-prone residential properties, or “repetitive loss properties (RLP).” The plan outlines a vision for RLP sites as a network of small stormwater retention parks that work in tandem to reduce flooding for North Miami residents.

If a homeowner files a flood insurance claim of more than $1000 twice or more in a 10-year period, their property is deemed a "repetitive loss" (RLP) by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Given the increased frequency of flooding and the impacts of sea level rise in North Miami, this phenomenon has become more prevalent. In response, through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance program, the City of North Miami acquired an RLP site and in 2019 commissioned a concept design, pilot project, and vision plan to address the use of future RLP acquisitions.

The plan outlines a vision for RLP sites as a network of small stormwater retention parks that provide multiple benefits. Importantly, this approach can reduce flooding, mitigate the impact of vacant or abandoned lots, introduce open space uses that contribute to broader community well-being, protect residents that cannot afford relocate, and restore habitats and recharge groundwater. The parks can also score within multiple activity areas of FEMA’s Community Rating System and therefore lower the cost of flood insurance city-wide. 

Rather than lay vacant, RLP sites can be leveraged as a form of stormwater infrastructure that is visible, accessible, and public-facing. Through dimensional standards, lot typologies, standard planting palettes, maintenance guidelines, zoning recommendations, and illustrated plans, this vision plan provides a roadmap for the city to develop future RLP sites into stormwater parks. Beyond the city, the document also serves as a model for other cities and communities confronting a similar phenomenon of repetitive loss properties. 

 Van Alen Institute, Urban Impact Lab, Forerunner, Inc.

Repetitive Loss Vision Plan

Gumbo Gardens is a booklet and an exhibition for gardeners, dirt-lovers, soil sisters, city-dwellers,
and plant nerds. It presents Houston’s soil, colloquially
known as ‘Gumbo Soil,’ as matter in motion - dirt that has been formed by eons of geological transformation and that is still undergoing change.


The project was part of the "Big, Hot, and Sticky" exhibition at the Architecture Center Houston (Summer 2024) and consisted of a published volume and several models and drawings. The resulting booklet, printed by 

, is divided into five sections
that outline ways to think about and work
with the soil for Houston’s ecological
health and the benefit of
the environment.

Gumbo Gardens

Remnant Nursery is an digital exhibition for the Architectural League of New York's 2022 League Prize: Grounding. The full exhibition can be found 

As landscape architects and urban designers, we work with the ground in a literal sense, moving and making dirt. From the garden to the city, landscape mediates social and ecological relationships by fundamentally transforming the ground. While our work is sensitive to the conservation of fragile ecosystems, we also invite the challenge of working within disturbed sites and hybrid environments that foreground the messiness of urban ecologies.

In the Houston metropolitan area, rare vestiges of the region’s once-vast Gulf Coast prairie remain. Cared for by local stewards, these remnant landscapes host a diversity of endemic species uniquely adapted to Houston’s hyperlocal climate and soil conditions. However, many of these prairies have been destroyed to create strip malls, gas stations, supermarkets, and residential subdivisions. While protecting endemic landscapes is important, in the context of rapid urban expansion, alternatives to conservation and preservation are also necessary.

 is a temporary nursery established to rescue plants from threatened Gulf Coast prairies and distribute them to Houston’s residents. The nursery invites community members to facilitate a process of plant migration. In the landscape industry, typical nurseries sell a limited palette of commercially viable individual plant species. In contrast, Remnant Nursery provides sample swatches of excavated plant communities, each containing a multitude of endemic plant species growing together.

In distributing these plant communities, the nursery aims to extend the life of the prairie within Houston’s urban landscape. When planted in backyard gardens, roadway medians, or other urban sites, these rescued plants build up soil health; increase groundwater infiltration; reduce maintenance and emissions affiliated with lawn equipment; and bolster biodiversity and habitats for urban ecosystems.

While rooted in the specific ecology of Houston, 

 proposes a model of collectivity and exchange within the broader context of climate adaptation and urban transformation.

Supported by Rice School of Architecture; with thanks to Jane Reierson.

Arch League Prize 2022

Remnant Nursery

Garden Ecologies: Environmental Transformation and Care was a two-day symposium hosted by Rice School of Architecture and the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation on urban ecology, landscape practice and management, and climate adaptation.

The symposium provided a critical perspective on gardens, not simply as private retreats, but also as trans-scalar spaces that can engage issues of urban expansion, environmental transformation, and climate change. Garden Ecologies  expanded on traditional notions of the garden and gardening through three areas of focus: garden history, landscape design practice, and land management. Through these topics, the symposium reflected on the garden as a test bed for novel ecological entanglements and as a medium for exploring contemporary topics such as settler colonial histories, labor, domesticity, industrialization, ecological conservation and restoration, and models for intervention, stewardship, and practice.

Taking place in the epicenter of the Gulf Coast region—where extraction and ecology collide—this symposium invited discussion from both academia and practice on the garden as a potential space of environmental transformation and care.

Moderator: Brittany Utting
Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Rice University; Cofounder, HOME-OFFICE

,
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Virginia

,
Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Trinity University

,
K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of Literatures in English, Bryn Mawr College

Moderator: Mariel Collard
Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute; Founding Principal, Collard Tranquilino


Principal of FORGE Landscape Architecture; Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Susana Rojas Saviñón and Hortense Blanchard

,
Director, Test Plot; Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Southern California

Moderator:
Isaac Stein
Design Principal, Dept.


Elizabeth Weaver Director of Horticulture, Cornell Botanic Gardens; Lecturer, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University

, Ph.D.
Conservation Manager, Buffalo Bayou Partnership

Garden Ecologies: Environmental Transformation and Care is organized by Maggie Tsang, assistant professor at Rice University, with Randy Twaddle, executive director at the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in Hempstead, Texas, in partnership with Rice Architecture, Rice Center for Environmental Studies, and Rice Office for Research.

Garden Ecologies Symposium

CO-SI or "Community Oriented Stormwater Infrastructure," is an  interdisciplinary collaborative research project with Rice University's School of Architecture, SSPEED Center, and Department of Sociology that seeks to understand the ways in which stormwater infrastructure has previously contributed to social inequity in Houston. The project, which is funded by the Rice University's Sustainable Futures Grant will develop alternative approaches to flood risk reduction through hydrological modeling, social geography, urban design, and landscape planning. 

Unique rainfall, ground, and soil conditions in the Houston region require specialized stormwater management. Large-scale engineering solutions are disadvantageous for several reasons: first, they are costly and time intensive; second, they tend to be disconnected from the fabric of the city; third, and importantly, because engineered solutions focus solely on flood reduction, they exclude other important factors, including community benefits, environmental or ecological resilience, and equity. In contrast to single-purpose, large-scale engineering solutions, Community-Oriented Stormwater Infrastructure is localized and seeks multiple benefits. For example, stormwater retention spaces can function simultaneously as resilience hubs, public spaces, or restoration areas, thereby contributing to community wellbeing.

Through mapping, analysis, and design scenario development, the team will identify and model equitable, neighborhood-based flood hazard mitigation and adaptation approaches for flood-prone communities in Houston. The project is supported by Rice University’s Sustainable Futures Fund and includes collaborators Prof. Philip Bedient, the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering, Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the SSPEED Center, and Prof. Elizabeth Roberto, Assistant Professor of Sociology.

CO-SI Research Initiative

The research argues that coastal resilience on barrier islands is produced through the protection of private property. It examines the impacts of rebuilding, reconstruction, infrastructure investment on the physical deterioration of the barrier island. The project proposes an alternative to status quo development that works with, not against, a dynamic landscape.

On barrier islands of the eastern seaboard, vacation homes occupy a majority of the land use, with properties held as financial assets rather than primary residences. With each successive storm as well as with the slow onset of sea level rise and accelerated sediment erosion, taxpayer dollars are disproportionally allocated towards the re-stabilization and reconstruction of damaged homes and infrastructure. The resilience of barrier islands points not to an ecological capacity to withstand system shocks, but rather to the persistence and preservation of capital in the form of private property in predictably volatile environments.

The primary case study takes place on Hatteras Island, NC; commonly known as the Outer Banks. The case study tests the viability of a Sand Trust, a nonprofit land trust, that promotes the phasing out of development by incentivizing coastal retreat. One of the tools proposed by the Sand Trust is a digital platform that integrates real estate investment data, historic erosion rates, and projected sea level rise to paint a more accurate portrait of climate risk and encourage land donations.

The project also visualizes the spatial and environmental impact retreat: the process of unbuilding, the transformation of land use from private houses to public open space, and the resulting dynamic landscape. By rethinking prevailing development logics, this project demonstrates how a barrier island can ultimately resume its ecological function as a coastal defense line.

This design research was awarded the Harvard Graduate School of Design Master in Design Studies Thesis Prize in 2019.

The Court

Seaside, FL

Gravel Silos and Stormwater Crossing

Houston, TX

South Bank Trail Concept Design

Houston, TX

Prairie Plots

Houston, TX

Machine Garden

Houston, TX

Good Neighbor Stormwater Park

North Miami, FL

North Village

Indian River Lagoon, FL

Brochstein Pavilion

Rice University

Knollwood Residence

Houston, TX

Pine in the Sand

Cambridge, MA

Menil ADUs

Houston, TX

Concept Neighborhood Framework Plan

Houston, TX

Repetitive Loss Vision Plan

North Miami, FL

Gumbo Gardens

Houston, TX

Remnant Nursery

Arch League Prize 2022

Garden Ecologies Symposium

Houston, TX

CO-SI Research Initiative

Houston, TX

Lines in the Sand

Hatteras Island, NC