Not so long ago, Nina Chase (MLA II ’12) stood beside her Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) classmates, enjoying commencement week activities. This year on Class Day, Chase—co-founder of Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture—will be a featured speaker at these activities, welcoming new graduates to the alumni community.
Co-chair of the GSD Alumni Council for the past three years and a council member since 2018, Chase has been engaged with the GSD in varying capacities since 2010, when she entered the master of landscape architecture II program. The years as a GSD student, she notes, “had an outsized impact on my career overall, especially my view of how landscape architecture fits into the design world. The people I met, and the expansion of what I knew landscape architecture could be . . . it was transformative.” Indeed, two principles imparted at the GSD—the significance of building connections and the value of communication—continue to guide Chase’s practice today.
Approaching the end of a four-year bachelor program in landscape architecture at West Virginia University (WVU), Chase decided to pursue a master’s degree. “The GSD,” she recalls, “was the only place I wanted to go. In an undergraduate professional practice class at WVU, we each researched a different national firm—Michael Van Valkenburg Associates, OLIN, EDSA. . . .” Chase researched the only woman-led firm on the list, Martha Schwartz Partners. “At the end of the project, a classmate presented a slide listing the firms’ principals and their education credentials, and every single principal had gone to this place called the GSD. I vividly remember thinking, ‘I have to go to there!’” Ultimately Chase did, and she soon experienced a “full-circle moment”: her first studio, which explored ecotourism in Greece, was taught by Schwartz.
Nearly 15 years later, Chase still finds herself drawing on concepts encountered in her GSD classes. The course “Leading the Design Firm,” which addressed the logistics of opening and running a practice, has served her well as a business owner; in 2017, after gaining experience at the Boston-based practice Sasaki, she established Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture with Chris Merritt (MLA ’17). As a principal and a designer in general, another GSD lesson has proved crucial for Chase. “The class ‘Communications for Designers’ was just incredible,” Chase recalls, in that it taught her a range of techniques to distill the complexity of her projects and convey their value to different audiences. “I learned how to communicate at the GSD, and how to build connections outside the world of landscape architecture,” says Chase.
What’s more, the MLA curriculum broadened Chase’s understanding of the discipline’s reach. “The GSD allowed me to expand the grounded, traditional landscape architecture education I received at WVU to an urban scale. At the GSD we were thinking about natural systems and cities,” she explains. Referencing a studio on sea level rise in New York City and another on the Chicago River, Chase continues, “I took many classes about urban American post-industrial landscapes; those projects really shaped much of my current work.”
Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (where Chase resides) and Indianapolis, Indiana, (Merritt’s home turf), Merritt Chase holds a unique appreciation for the challenges faced by post-industrial urban areas, and the firm has garnered widespread acclaim for creating public spaces across Middle America. Recently Chase and Merritt were named fellows of the Emerson Collective, an organization that, among other initiatives, supports innovators dedicated to strengthening communities through site-specific interventions. As part of the Local Leaders cohort, Chase and Merritt will continue their work in downtown Indianapolis refashioning Monument Circle, the city’s civic center, from a traffic circle into a human-scaled environment for interaction and connection.
As the initial project in Indianapolis’s South Downtown Connectivity Vision Plan, part of the city’s resiliency strategy, Merritt Chase installed a temporary park in Monument Circle, which will soon return for its third summer as the firm works on the area’s long-range plan. Monument Circle Park consists of a series of verdant circles, trees, and plantings that providing garden-like and shaded places for play, activities, and community engagement within a space formerly dedicated to auto traffic. In addition to enlivening the social realm, this recurring pop-up park doubles as an advocacy tool; as Chase explains, “we are trying to show that by investing in public space on a traffic circle in the middle of downtown Indianapolis, by making the space a park and partially closing it to traffic, there can be a huge benefit.”
Chase’s earliest foray into short-term installations came in 2015, prior to cofounding Merritt Chase, with the award-winning Kit of Parks—a portable kit that, in five minutes, assembles into a flexible pop-up parklet and play area. Such tactical urbanism or temporary placemaking now features regularly in Merritt Chase’s projects, as part of larger planning work or projects that have longer timeframes. “When we are working with a community to fundraise for a project and we need to get funders and people excited about the project,” says Chase, “we’ll do a short-term installation or prototype of the permanent project to build momentum for the long-term vision. It’s very much part of how we think about planning and built work. The short-term work is about communication and advocacy.”
Vision plays a role not only in Chase’s design work, but also in her efforts as a disciplinary ambassador for landscape architecture. A primary avenue of Chase’s advocacy is volunteer service, in Pittsburgh and nationally, as well as for the GSD. For eight years she has served on the GSD Alumni Council, the main representative body of the school’s 15,000 alumni. Such work allows Chase “to continue to advocate for the profession and the value of landscape architecture. The process of urban design and city building has sometimes, but not always, included landscape architects,” she notes, “but it should always happen with landscape architects at the table. If we’re thinking about the future of a city, collectively we should be thinking about how to integrate natural systems and cultural systems, and to ensure that the identity of places is reflected in the public realm.”
In addition to providing a platform for advocacy, board service offers opportunities to make connections within and beyond the discipline—a critical component of a successful designer’s career. For Chase, being part of the GSD community has been “an incredibly life-changing experience—just being able to tap into this network of people who are leaders at firms and other schools across the country, and becoming part of that supportive community.” Chase initiated this process while she was a student at the GSD, and she advises current students to do the same. “Becoming part of that community starts with the design work you do in school, learning as much as you can from your incredible professors and classmates, and then there is the other side of it . . . getting outside the trays, off your computer, and participating in events like lectures, the Halloween Party, the Beaux Arts Ball. It may seem silly in the moment,” Chase concedes, “to spend time at Beer & Dogs at the end of the week. It’s just happy hour, right? But that’s where lifelong connections get made. For us as a firm, those connections became relationships that have continued to expand our interests and support our practice. So much of our work today was made possible because of connections from when we were at the GSD or because of the GSD,” asserts Chase.
Reflecting on her Alumni Council participation, Chase notes that “it’s been a wonderful way to stay connected with the GSD.” As co-chair, she has worked to increase the council’s visibility among alumni, students, and school’s leadership and faculty. “The alumni are such an incredible resource, and we’re everywhere. On the council, we continue to build out the GSD network. We’re a constellation of people who are leaders in our communities; we meet twice a year at Gund, and then we all go back to our home regions and continue to make connections locally. To me, that’s the power of the GSD,” says Chase. “My goal has been to help facilitate those connections.”
*All images courtesy of Merritt Chase.