Kathryn Gustafson

Kathryn Gustafson, the Landscape Architect, established her practice in Paris in 1980, working as a sole practitioner in collaboration with architects, artists, and engineers.
Kathryn initially studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City before moving to Paris to study landscape architecture at the Ecole Nationale Superieure du Paysage in Versaille, France where she obtained her Diploma in 1979. Through her private practice, she has won a series of high profile landscape projects including the corporate headquarters for Shell, Esso and l’Oreal near Paris, a new park in Terrasson la Villedieu which has become a listed landmark, the Square of Human Rights in Evry and Square Rachmaninov in Paris.
Kathryn Gustafson now works throughout the world with the two offices, Gustafson Porter in London and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol in Seattle.

Kathryn Gustafson: Art of landscape

United States landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson has been awarded the contract to create the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial fountain in Hyde Park, London.

Harmony is the key to Kathryn Gustafson's work.

It is about harmony between the land and the mind, body and soul, she says, and harmony between the site's past and how it can be adapted for the future.

She also says she tries to create spaces where people can shelter from the incessant barrage of information that fills their daily lives - to create places of serenity and clarity.

Or "a space to ride the waves of a diverse world", as her partner, the architect Neil Porter, describes the memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales.

Gustafson combines these factors with a contemporary style and sensuous, artistic signature.

Among her past works are stylish new designs for electricity pylons for a French electricity company, a courtyard in Whitehall and the Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut.

She has designed gardens for the French headquarters of petrol companies Esso and Shell, giving the latter a view of a flower garden shaped like a question mark.

Her pedestrian bridge in Costa Mesa, California, has a flank of bougainvillea running along the walkway in mid-air, with posts jutting out to symbolise birds in flight.

She is also planning a cultural park on contaminated ground inside an old gasworks in Amsterdam, and designed the interior of the Great Glasshouse, the centrepiece of the new National Botanic Gardens of Wales.

American Museum of Natural History

In the medieval town of Terrasson, France, her gardens on a steep hillside next to a 15th Century abbey were dubbed "imaginary gardens" because of features like rushing streams that would appear in the open and then quickly be hidden again.

She says she studies the sociology, light and history of sites before coming up with designs that will complement all three.

"Her designs can be interpreted as surgical acts of healing, where the land is skilfully draped and sown as if to hide past torments," one commentator said.

Her 20 years of experience in landscape art followed an earlier career as a fashion and fabrics designer in New York and Paris.

Although she grew up in Washington state, she based herself in France after changing direction and taking a landscape architecture course in Versailles.

As she was finding her style, she worked with the renowned architect Jacques Sgard, sculptor Igor Mitoraj and the Pompidou Centre's structural engineer Peter Rice.

Many of her projects were in France until she set up offices in Seattle and London in 1997.

She has now become one of the world's best-known landscape artists, winning a prestigious Chrysler Award in 2001.

She has also been made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architecture, and won the Jane Drew architecture prize in 1998.

"I'm very connected to the land," she says. "I can feel it physically inside me."