Envisioning Landscapes: The Transformative Environments of OJB

Visionary landscape architecture firm OJB reveals the guiding principles behind its award-winning work in this new, expanded edition of its debut monograph

OJB Landscape Architecture challenges the conventional boundaries of its field, emphasizing placemaking as a mechanism for healing, community-building, and celebration. At its core, the award-winning firm believes that landscape is a social and collective tool for integration, reclamation, and healing. This principle guides all of the firm’s projects across sectors, from its designs deepening our relationship to nature, such as public parks, and sites promoting restorative healthcare, such as campuses for hospitals and wellness centers, to large-scale urban landscapes conceived to reconnect and revitalize communities, such as the acclaimed RiverFront in Omaha and the other multi-project narratives in which landscapes connect and build on each other over several years to create thoughtfully realized and impactful environments.

In this new, expanded edition of OJB’s debut monograph, the pioneering firm shares its remarkable and meaningful work- and the philosophy that drives it - through fifteen projects of varied typologies across the United States. Beautifully illustrated with more than 200 color photographs, Envisioning Landscapes also includes a new foreword by The Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster.

Founded in 1989 by landscape architect James Burnett and now led by partners across the country, OJB Landscape Architecture has grown to more than one hundred professionals working across six offices. OJB is the recipient of more than 150 significant national and international awards, including several national awards for the creation of urban parks that return civic engagement to the forefront of cities. OJB is the recipient of the 2020 National Design Award in landscape architecture from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the 2015 Firm Award from the American Society of Landscape Architecture.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a Harvard Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellow. His biography of the architect Philip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 2018.

Christopher Hawthorne is Los Angeles's first Chief Design Officer. Prior to that, he was the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2018, the architecture critic for Slate, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.

Brad McKee is a journalist who focuses on landscapes and public affairs. He was the editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine from 2010 to 2020. He lives in Washington, DC.

Peter Walker is an internationally recognized landscape architect and founder of PWP Landscape Architecture. Over five decades, Walker has designed parks, gardens, corporate headquarters, urban landscapes, campuses, museums, and memorials around the world. Among his significant projects are the National 9/11 Memorial in New York, the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, MD, and the Barangaroo waterfront renewal project in Sydney, Australia, which won an American Architecture Prize for Landscape Design of the Year.