Chris Reed is Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, and Principal and founder of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, a Boston-based strategic design and planning practice.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism has distinguished itself internationally for a hybridized approach to public works projects rooted in infrastructure, functionality, and ecology.  Stoss is the recipient of the prestigious 2012 Smithsonian / Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in the category of landscape architecture, which recognizes remarkable and exemplary work in park and garden design and urban planning. Other recent awards include the 2012 BSA Urban and Campus Planning Award for Herinneringspark in West Flanders, Belgium; the Waterfront Center’s 2011 Top Honor Award (Excellence on the Waterfront) for The CityDeck in Green Bay, Wisconsin; the 2010 Topos International Landscape Award, in recognition of the, “Theoretical and practical impulses the firm provides to the advancement of landscape architecture and urbanism as dynamic and open-ended systems”; and a 2008 Emerging Voice designation by the Architectural League of New York.  

The practice has also been selected as a finalist and winner in a number of international open space design and urbanism competitions, including the Huangpu Riverfront / Block ES4 in Shanghai, China; Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee, USA; the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, Canada (which also won an EDRA / Places / Metropolis Award); and the Safe Zone garden installation at Grand-Metis, Quebec, Canada.

The firm’s work has been published around the world, including a volume titled StossLU, by C3 Publishers of Korea, which featured an introductory essay by Charles Waldheim.  The firm’s work will also be featured in an upcoming volume in Ohio State University’s, Source Books in Landscape Architecture series, with critical essays by John Dixon Hunt, Jane Amidon, and Jason Kentner. Current and recent work includes public waterfronts, brownfield reclamation projects, urbanism proposals, interim landscapes, and large-scale infrastructures and open spaces across North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.  These projects include The Plaza at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Phases 1 and 2 of The CityDeck in Green Bay, Wisconsin; the Detroit Works Project Long-Term Strategic Framework; and Bass River Ecological Park on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Reed’s research interests are two-fold.  His more recent teaching-based research focuses on issues of infrastructure and urbanism in the contemporary North American metropolis, particularly in greater Los Angeles and metropolitan New York.  Reed is also leading the Critical and Projective Ecologies Project, which looks at the various impact of ecological research and thinking on design practices; as part of this work, he organized a conference at the GSD in 2010 and is co-editing (with Nina-Marie Lister) an upcoming volume of research and drawing titled, Projective Ecologies, to be jointly published by ACTAR and the GSD in 2013.

Reed received a Master in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and an AB in Urban Studies from Harvard College.