We make ideas real.

EinwillerKuehl Landscape Architecture was founded as a collaboration of friends in 2012. An award-winning landscape architecture and urban design practice based in Oakland, California, the practice is known for guiding generative collaboration and interdisciplinary design innovation across a range of project types and scales. 

We have no manifesto, instead we practice landscape architecture with curiosity, building the firm based on experiments rather than a fixed idea. Our practice is grounded in learning by doing which includes learning from failures, realizing new opportunities by paying attention to what happens, and finding inspiration in unexpected results. The philosophy of the firm is a practice of intuition. Our ideas evolve through an ongoing practice of building and reflection which strengthens our intuition.

Our design happens in real life and through the efforts and talents of real people.  We appreciate ecology, plants, real materials, and things which are low tech. Our goal is to let built projects speak for themselves. We know the right organization of living and non-living elements can be clever, efficient, delightful, and even transcendent. We avoid puffery in describing design as we like simple and direct language.

The beautiful problems we need to solve are often the source of ideas. Founded by two daughters of doctors, the firm is grounded in the broader idea of health for people, plants, and animals. We see health in ecological systems as well as in social connections and believe they can both be built. In our experience, their construction depends on attention to feet and inches to create the conditions for system success. We are curious about dimensions, alignments, proportion, and geometry.

We practice in communities and work at remaining in the right relationship. This starts with our community inside the office. We tinker with how we communicate, collaborate, encourage individual voices, and celebrate.  We consider the firm a living entity which changes with people, projects, and current events. We promote leadership at all levels.  Each person in the firm selects a hat of unique expertise and has time allocated for developing their expertise within our community. Our professional colleagues as well as clients are also part of our community. Most of our work happens within 400 miles of the office, which deepens our relationships to local nurseries, quarries, craftspeople, geology, native plants, and local communities. When our end user is the local community, we strive to make meaningful connections with people, and we are always exploring how to create longer term dialogues that extend past the construction of a site.

All the work of the firm is adaptive reuse of land that links the past, present, and future.  To start with we look back in time to the undisturbed landscape that predated ownership.  We consider histories and stories and the importance of connecting to local people through their current understanding of a place.  Lastly, we evaluate our work by what it offers the future and how well we are addressing the challenges of climate change and social resilience through our designs. We like to see what happens when two things are in dialogue and that always includes a dialogue between history and future.

Two word poems all written by EK except:

*Phillip Krohn

**Muhammad Ali