BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A new firm in L.A. thinks it’s time to turn up the volume on landscape architecture.

From the August 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Earlier this spring, Kelly Majewski, Affiliate ASLA, was one of more than 100 designers in Los Angeles who attended Design for Dignity, a one-day “congress” convened by the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to identify ways to alleviate the city’s homeless crisis. But for Majewski, a landscape designer, the takeaway may not have been what the organizers hoped. “I got asked by multiple architects, once they found out I did landscape architecture, what I was doing at this conference,” she says. “I heard it three times. Which just blows my mind.”

Majewski founded Superjacent, a new landscape architecture and urban design studio, with Tony Paradowski and Chris Torres in January 2016. And it’s interactions like those at the AIA conference that inspired the three partners to make visibility one of their central tenets. “We came up with a list of things we wanted to try and accomplish, rules that we’ve set for ourselves,” Majewski says. “One of them is ‘Get Loud,’ and part of that is [this] idea that people are still pigeonholing what we do.”

All three designers—who have a blend of backgrounds but overlap with landscape architecture—grew up in Southern California and met while at local firms: Majewski at Melendrez and Paradowski and Torres at Rios Clementi Hale Studios. They’re currently working on a handful of projects from temporary workstations in Paradowski’s garage. “It’s a two-car garage, though,” Majewski says with a laugh. “That’s what I like to tell everybody.”

If the digs are modest, their mission is anything but. On top of expanding public awareness of the profession, the partners at Superjacent (a term they stumbled upon while researching the geology of the Los Angeles Basin that means “overlying, or on top of) hope to “become the next voice for landscape in Los Angeles,” Majewski says.

It’s good timing. Downtown L.A. is in the midst of a hurried and ungainly transformation, and the drought, combined with several high-profile, landscape-scale endeavors, not least the planned restoration of the Los Angeles River, has elevated the profile of landscape architecture in the city. “Some of the nastiest, stickiest issues in the city—if we could figure [them] out in L.A., we could figure [them] out anywhere,” Torres says.

There’s another advantage, too. For a city of nearly four million people, L.A. has a serious shortage of landscape architects, says Kelly Shannon, International ASLA, who directs the landscape architecture program at the University of Southern California, where Majewski will be teaching a studio course in the fall. Shannon was on the winning team of the Pershing Square competition, and she thinks it’s high time for some new blood in the city. “I’m really supportive of Superjacent and new firms breaking into the scene,” she says. “I think it’s really, really necessary in Los Angeles.”

Timothy A. Schuler, editor of Now, can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com and on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.