Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/496780
Principals Gary Hilderbrand and Doug Reed 170 CULTURED COURTESY OF ALAN WARD e have a great history here of typologies we call campus, including the U.S. Naval academy and CIA," says landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand. The campus model, while not new, is one that has proven effective with master plans for projects—for both academic and cultural institutions that Hilderbrand and Doug Reed with their 45-person firm have implemented. According to the landscape architect and design professor, the origins of campus life are rooted in the Latin term "Campus Martius"—the translation being "field of mars." "The main ingredient of a campus organization is a coherent, continuous landscape structure," he says. "In the last 20 years we've seen this remarkable evolution in the discipline," says Reed, the other partner of the Cambridge-based landscape firm. Reed claims the interdisciplinary scope of their work has evolved to now embrace numerous allied fields including preservation, cultural geography, archaeology, urban planning, ecology and biological sciences, to name a few. "It's very exciting and we really enjoy interfacing and overlapping with all that," says the Louisiana-bred Reed. The two architects have been friends since the 1980s when they were students enrolled in the masters program in landscape architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Both remained in Boston, with Reed joining the landscape practice of Susan Childs, where he was a member of the team—along with architect Stan Eckstut and artist Mary Miss—who created South Cove, one of the first truly collaborative public artworks installed in Battery Park City in New York. During that period, Hilderbrand engaged in academic and scholarly pursuits at Harvard, where he continues to teach landscape architecture today. Reed started his own firm in 1993 and together with his college chum, they submitted work to landscape design competitions. "We knew early on that we shared values and common interests that related to design," says Reed. After winning a number of commissions, including the Leventritt Garden at the Arnold Arboretum —a three-acre horticultural display and research garden in Boston that included 150 species of shrubs and vines—the two formalized their practice in 2000. Moving forward the mantra "dedicated to an art of purposeful transformation" became a theme. For the last 15 years, their firm has worked for cultural institutions in a range of topographies and geographical locales—from the Parrish Art Museum (Watermill, New York) and the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts) to most recently, the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, New York). At present, there are master plans in the works for the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), The Contemporary Austin (Austin, Texas) and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts). "They have high aims and great intelligence," says W