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 has distinguished itself internationally for a hybridized approach to public works projects rooted in infrastructure, functionality, and ecology.
Stoss is the recipient of 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.” Stoss was also named a Finalist in the Landscape Design category of the Smithsonian / Cooper Hewitt Museum’s National Design Awards in 2008 and in 2010, and has been selected as a finalist and winner in a number of international open space design and planning competitions, including the Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee, the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, and the Safe Zone garden installation at Grand-Metis, Quebec, Canada. Stoss was named a 2008 Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, and its proposal for the Lower Don Lands in Toronto received a planning award from EDRA / Places / Metropolis. The firm’s work was been published in a volume published by C3 Publishers of Korea in 2007, and will again be featured in an upcoming volume in the Source Books in Landscape Architecture series by Princeton Architectural Press. Current and recent work includes public waterfronts, brownfield reclamation projects, interim landscapes, and large-scale infrastructures and open spaces across North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The CityDeck in Green Bay, Wisconsin; Erie Plaza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bass River Park on Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Stock-pile in Radcliffe Yard all opened in 2009-2010.
Reed’s research interests include infrastructure and urbanism in the contemporary North American metropolis, with a recent focus on Los Angeles; the recalibration of engineering and infrastructural technologies toward an expanded and hybridized notion of a landscape-based urbanism; and a reconsideration of the meaning and agency of ecology in design practices and design thinking. He hosted a conference in spring 2011 titled Critical Ecologies, which featured lectures from a range of prominent ecologists, anthropologists, architectural theorists, physicists, sociologists, and designers.
