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| We make the places
that bring people together with the land.
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Design Workshop is an award-winning,
international firm practicing landscape architecture, land planning,
urban design and tourism planning. We combine principles of smart
growth, sustainable design and environmentally sound planning to reconcile
economic needs with the preservation of scenic, cultural and community
values. At the present moment, the firm comprises 140 designers, planners
and support staff in 10 North and South American offices in Aspen,
Denver, Santa Fe, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Lake Tahoe, Asheville,
N.C., São Paulo, Brazil, Santiago, Chile and Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
Our pioneering efforts have been recognized with more than 70 awards
from such organizations as the American Society of Landscape Architects,
the American Planning Association and the Urban Land Institute.
FIRM HISTORY
Design Workshop was born in academia. In 1969, Joe
Porter and Don Ensign were teaching landscape architecture at North
Carolina State University when they decided to found the firm, naming
it not for themselves but for the collaborative process with which
they taught.
Their earliest projects engaged them in planning new
communities in Columbia, Maryland, and Raleigh, North Carolina,
as well as resort work on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Large
ski-resort projects brought them to the western United States in
the early 1970s, where they began to develop expertise in mountain,
desert and prairie ecology. A focus on urban design and strategic
services resulted in the founding of the Denver office, followed
by an expansion throughout the West. In the late 1990s, the firm
added three offices in South America and in 2002, it established
both a North Carolina office and a strategic alliance with the Canadian
firm LANDPLAN in Calgary.
From national parks to urban centers, from civic
plazas to secluded sanctuaries, Design Workshop has worked in some
of the world’s most beautiful and most challenging environments.
In addition to environmentally sensitive projects in residential,
golf-course, ski resort and campus work, the firm’s current
portfolio also includes the redevelopment of several former industrial
sites to create large transit-oriented, mixed-use projects and the
creation of sustainable new communities with significant public
spaces.
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