Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Reed.
Chris, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in New Bedford as a working-class kid, son of a funeral director and nurse. Great fishing town–we used to get fresh fish, sometimes whole cod, right off the boat from our fisherman neighbor. Learned a lot about diversity and the richness it brings from the folks I knew in New Bedford–and first started to be interested in cities and the design of cities there, particularly because of its cool old industrial buildings and historic waterfront.
I then got an amazing chance to go to college at Harvard, do a one-year architecture program through Columbia University in New York and Paris, and subsequently pursued a Landscape Architecture degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It all changed my life, but the girl I wanted to marry (now Paige Scott Reed) was here in Boston, at law school. So I came back, worked for a landscape architecture firm that was doing major waterfront and university work around the world, and was able to work on the public park at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock before I left and started my own firm, Stoss. Paige is a practicing attorney in Boston, former General Counsel at MassDOT and the MBTA, and we live in Brookline with our 3 kids. I am also a Professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and get to travel a lot (my daughter says too much; my boys say not enough!). I spend my non-work time juggling kids’ baseball and hockey schedules with my wife (she does most of it).
I keep my sanity by running on Southie’s beaches and in the parks and waterfronts of whatever city I’m in. Love it here, love getting out into the world.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth, no way! Lots of bumps, lots of accelerated advances–just gotta persevere, put your head down, and move forward. Right now, at 48, half the world views me as too young, the other half as too old. Which means we are pretty much just right.
I love the challenge of doing something new, of trying to bring new perspectives to the ways in which we think about cities and public space–in ways that account for climate change, and for a significant and continuing shift in urban demographics. This approach, by nature, means shifting people’s mindsets on what is possible, on tapping into people’s imaginations–and then forging realistic paths forward. In this way, we’re not just designers, we’re educators, advocates, even entrepreneurs.
But it takes some amazing people to make good things happen. A supportive family, talented and hard-working colleagues at Stoss, an amazing faculty and student body at the GSD, and some terrific collaborators across the country and around the world… all these folks help, in very significant ways, to move through the bumpy stretches.
Please tell us about Stoss Landscape Urbanism.
We are landscape architects and urban designers that specialize in urban and landscape revitalization. We bring cities and open spaces back to life.
Here in Boston we designed Harvard’s Science Center Plaza just adjacent to Harvard Yard, on an old pedestrian crossing, and we designed the landscape for the renovation and expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. We are designing three more parks for the City of Cambridge, and we are working with the City of Boston, with the developers of the L Street Power Plant in Southie, and with the New England Aquarium on new waterfront plans that will help these neighborhoods and institutions adapt to sea level rise while providing new opportunities for waterfront access and open space. We now have offices in both Boston and Los Angeles, and are working on public space, development, and institutional projects across the country (St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, LA, for instance), and in various parts of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
We don’t think of landscape as decorative, we think of it as contributing meaningfully to the social and environmental life and health of cities. How can landscape take on contemporary challenges like climate change, demographic and economic shifts, social and cultural debate? Frederick Law Olmsted’s work in Boston is a great model, open space and recreation with integrated flood control, habitat creation, transportation (parkways and public transit), and access to new neighborhoods. We’re doing a similar thing, but adapted to 21st-century issues.
I’m extremely proud of the recognition we won in 2010 and 2012, respectively, receiving the Topos International Landscape Award and then the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture–not for the awards themselves, but the fact that both recognized our innovative approach to landscape and urbanism. But I’m even more proud of the firm we are today, with amazing people in two cities, working their butts off for a just, equitable, environmentally and socially healthy future they believe in.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Our Dutch neighbor, married to a Portuguese woman, handing a whole cod to my Mom over the fence, just after returning from a fishing trip. Happened a lot.
Contact Info:
- Address: Stoss Landscape Urbanism
54 Old Colony Ave 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02127 - Website: www.stoss.net
- Phone: 617-464-1140
- Email: admin@stoss.net
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