Contact
Email: ghilderbrand@gsd.harvard.edu
Biography
I am a landscape architect with a deep and abiding interest in the urban forest canopy. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I am the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice, and it’s my honor to be the current Chair of GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture. I am also a founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a 25-year landscape architecture practice with studios in Cambridge and New Haven.
As a teacher, writer, and practitioner, I employ multiple outlets for applying my passion for the history and traditions of my discipline and their bearing on the challenges of today and the future—especially while facing the major global crises of our time, climate and environmental justice. At GSD, my colleagues and I have been studying the potential for major expansion of urban canopy in Geneva, Athens, Paris, Los Angeles, and other cities. Recent and current professional commissions include the repositioning of New York City’s landmark Lever House on Park Avenue; design of the Raphael Rief Innovation Corridor and related projects at MIT; a major expansion of visitor services and sculpture space at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY; nearly two decades of renovation and expansion of the Olmsted Brothers campuses at Harvard Business School and Duke University; and the Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan and related projects for my home city, Cambridge, MA.
Recognitions include Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, and the 2013 ASLA Firm of the Year award. I was the fortunate recipient of the 2017 ASLA Design Medal, the society’s highest design honor.
Publications include three widely acclaimed books and two dozen essays, featured in Arnoldia, Landscape Architecture, Topos, Harvard Design Magazine, Architecture Boston, Clark Art Journal, New England Journal of Garden History, and Land Forum.