Chris Reed, professor in practice of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and founding principal of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, has been honored with a 2026 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award in the Urban Design category for Triangle Park, an urban forest built on a former traffic island in Cambridge’s Kendall Square.
The roughly one-acre site, once barren industrial land, now holds close to 400 trees across more than two dozen species surrounding a compact public plaza. Rather than pre-selecting a handful of “best” species, Reed and his team deliberately overplanted and let natural selection guide the forest’s composition over time. “We weren’t trying to predict up front the three or four species that might do best,” Reed told Fast Company. He sees the approach as a model that other cities can adapt: “Cities are full of these leftover sites.”
Reed previewed much of this thinking in a 2023 essay for the GSD, “The Forest for the Trees (and the Birds, and the People, and the Planet),” which described Triangle Park as a demonstration project for Cambridge’s Urban Forestry Master Plan and argued that cities need to rethink how they plant and maintain trees to close canopy gaps in environmental-justice communities. As he wrote then, “This small city forest is impactful—and the social and environmental benefits will continue to grow and intensify over time, just as the trees themselves grow.”
Stoss and Reed were also honored for their work on Boston’s Moakley Park with the World Landscape Architecture 2026 Outstanding Award in Concept/Public Space Design.
Located along Boston’s waterfront and serving neighborhoods including South Boston, Chinatown, the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester, Moakley Park is being transformed from a largely single-use recreational facility into a resilient, multi-functional community park. The plan brings together equitable public access, recreation, ecology, and climate resilience, creating new opportunities for athletics, play, gathering, and connection to the waterfront.
The initiative had previously won the Holcim Foundation Grand Prize (North America).
The Moakley Park Preliminary Resilience Plan, according to Stoss, “addresses critical climate challenges including coastal flooding, stormwater management, and urban heat. Integrated flood protection, green infrastructure, more than 500 new trees, and native coastal plant communities strengthen the park’s ecological performance while creating a more diverse and adaptable landscape. Community engagement has also been central to shaping the park’s future programs and priorities.”
