For nearly thirty years HMWhite has practiced the principle that a designed landscape is among the most enduring forms of cultural expression and environmental accountability. As a collective landscape and urban design practice, the firm’s work inspires to create beauty and discover unexpected and memorable sensory experiences. We are committed to the transformation of cities and communities. The work seeks to fuse the dynamic elements of the natural world with cultural, ecological, social, and artful forces to promote healthy living and enhance human engagement. Executed within a diverse set of regional locales, innovation is sought through collaborative research and the firm’s science-based design approach. While each work is rooted in global thinking, its local execution strives for potent community input into the soundness of its utility, material, and cultural expression – yielding the unique genus of each place.

We are relentless in seeking ways to bring landscape into the human experience to deepen the restorative and healing properties gained from the natural world and its references. Be it a public plaza, streetscape, campus, or rooftop landscape, we balance open space access with its performative requirements. Conventional boundaries between architecture and landscape, infrastructure and beauty, are relentlessly explored to balance environmental performance and positive human interaction. Each project’s approach embodies a process where facts inform, intuition guides, and problem-solving reveals a site’s distinct voice and spirit. This approach is sustained throughout each project’s successful maturation - from its initial concept through to its construction and ultimately through the under-valued need of securing its sustainable long-term landscape management.

HMWhite has been recognized with numerous national and international design awards, including honor awards from both the national and local Chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects, American Institute of Architects, Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, European Centre for Architecture Art Design, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, Urban Land Institute, NYC Public Design Commission, Municipal Art Society of New York, and Time Magazine’s Best Design of the Year. Its works have been widely published and featured in several books and countless architectural and design periodicals. The firm has been a reoccurring nominee for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.

EXPERTISE

HMWhite’s broad domestic and international talents of landscape architects, designers, and planners capitalize on its multiple decades of combined experiences to effectively collaborate with clients to create self-sustaining models that promote long-term economic vitality and value. The integrated performance of each landscape’s environmental, social, economic, and material component is paramount to our process to ensure its success. We seek innovation through multi-disciplinary research that is sourced in years of developing productive associations with specialists in the environmental science, horticultural, engineering, art, and allied design industries. These project teams work seamlessly with a shared design philosophy that unites and distinguishes the firm’s work:

Each situation is unique: each setting deserves meticulous assessment, rigorous analysis, and thoughtful synthesis

Each client’s program deserves a balanced and creative solution, sensitive at all levels to the natural systems and cultural history of its context