A Different Model: SITELAB’s Laura Crescimano on Shaping Place and Designing for People
By Gail Kutac
Laura Crescimano is the Co-Founder and Principal of SITELAB urban studio, a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary urban design and strategy firm committed to designing transformative physical spaces, processes, and programs to grow and improve cities and neighborhoods. With over 20 years of expert urban design and entitlements experience, Laura believes that the built environment can be a catalyst for social change, and every day continues to advance ambitious developments that benefit its surrounding communities.
In June of 2021, the City Council of San José gave the go-ahead for Google to build its San José Downtown West Mixed-Use Plan — slated to become the largest multi-modal transit hub on the west coast — that boasts a fully net-zero environment across 80 acres.
SITELAB urban studio is the lead urban designer for the project, where they created a plan that is an extension of Downtown San José, where urban life and nature coexist. Rejecting the traditional office campus, this plan welcomes the local community, designed to connect surrounding neighborhoods and offer a range of experiences for San Joséans. In her interview with Gail, Laura talks about ambitious developments and social change, advising those just starting their careers to find your kindred spirits.
GK: How did your interest in the built environment and urban planning first develop?
LC: I was always interested in art and drawing as a kid. When I went to college, I thought I was going to study English literature, and I started out on that path. I was interested in literature because I was interested in human nature, how we interact, and what makes us tick as people. But truthfully, I got to the Middle English part of my major and thought, “I don’t know if this is actually for me!” At the same time, I took my first architectural history lecture - this was at Yale - and I was just blown away. I realized for the first time that the intersection of places, the built environment, and buildings all shape how we interact and reveals things about us - about power structures, about human nature. A lightbulb went off, that this was a place where I could use my creativity and drawing and put that together with thinking about place. I have gone from studying architecture to urban design, and it really is that journey of always looking for how I could be in that role of shaping place.
Rendering of Downtown West, Gateway View. Courtesy of Google.
What did you learn about yourself during your formal education?
As an undergrad, even though I majored in architecture, I was able to study architectural history and theory through a great program at Yale where you could choose another discipline within architecture, so I got the best of both worlds. I got a humanities education and participated in design studios and I’m really grateful for that. I went to work for a professor and I can’t remember how she phrased this exactly, but she said there are two kinds of people and that designers are more love-hate people and an academic is fascinated by things as opposed to love-hate. I’m definitely a fascinated person, so I was thinking I’d be an academic, but although I didn’t become one, being a fascinated person has served me very well in the field. Curiosity is what drives me.
How did you get your start in the field, and what were some key milestones as your career progressed?
I went to grad school for a Masters in Architecture, still thinking I was going to become an academic and teach architecture and study architectural history and practices. Through the process, I realized that I wanted to be in the mix and to be out where I could be practicing, engaging and shaping things, and being more hands-on. I think I felt too removed when I was in academia.
I got involved in politics at school. I ran the women’s group, Women in Design, which has continued on for several generations and has done great things at Harvard GSD. I wasn’t very good at staying in my lane! I wasn’t very good at focusing on studio in and of itself. Even my thesis was not on a building -- it was a fleet of customized Winnebagos for a political movement. So, I turned grad school into a great opportunity and I came out of it with a fellowship to do research to study spaces of protest around the world.
“...being a fascinated person has served me very well in the field. Curiosity is what drives me.”
I worked part-time for a professor who was doing a strategic design study on healthcare, particularly experiences and outcomes for those who experience a stroke. This sounds like a far cry from an architecture masters, but it was really about multi-faceted thinking, seeing patterns, and bringing together different experts and perspectives to rethink things. My experience was very eclectic! So for a long time, I wondered how the pieces would fit together. I went on to work in small design firms and then Gensler, and I found myself migrating towards more urban design and more engaged work. It all became much more clear when I applied for a teaching job, ironically, that I didn’t get. I had to write an essay to tell my story and make all these pieces come together, and that gave me the “ah-ha” that it does make sense! It really did align around this interest in public space, in the civic, human qualities of place, and in how our cities grow, and that there is value in a process that is both strategic and creative. That helped cement the work I was already doing. I started to move more explicitly towards designing for people and thinking about my design role as creating platforms for cities, people, and communities. Being a bridge between landscape architecture, architecture, programming, policy, and community engagement - that all started to gel. That’s the thing - instead of having to choose one of these things, I got to do them all.
Around that time I was lucky to meet Evan Rose, an urban designer ten years ahead of me. It was like we were speaking the same language off the bat, so we decided to take a leap and start SITELAB together in 2012.
Where are you in your career today?
SITELAB has twenty people, and the firm is nearly ten years old. We’re really lucky to have developed an incredible team, and it was intentional that Evan and I named the firm SITELAB instead of naming it after ourselves - that was always embedded in the vision. It’s an amazing thing to see, SITELAB isn’t just mine anymore, it’s a whole team and there’s an ownership and a creation of what SITELAB is by everyone, so that’s been pretty amazing.
Rendering of Google’s North Bayshore Wild Gardens. Courtesy of Google.
Rendering of Pier 70, View of Slipways Commons, looking north. Courtesy of Brookfield Properties and SITELAB urban studio.
That’s a rare quality in this industry, we all want our names on everything.
It is! Many of the things I’ve done at SITELAB have been a reaction to wanting to do it differently than what I was seeing. That’s been one of the challenges, that I didn’t fit in the models that I was shown when I was younger. That was a big struggle for me, particularly in grad school, and now it is an opportunity.
Did you feel like you didn’t fit any model because of your divergent interests?
In having different interests and in being a woman. At the time, it felt like the focus was on more formal arrangement and the human side was less important - that was very confronting for me. I know these things cycle in schools, so hopefully, that’s less true now. I also think that I genuinely enjoy and believe in collaboration and at the time, it still felt like the model of the “hero” architect was so strong. The idea of starting your own firm felt like it followed that hero model, and that didn’t fit for me. So when I was younger, I didn’t contemplate having my own firm, I just thought, “That’s not the way I work.” I didn’t know until I started the firm that you could do it and not be that way.
The goals for SITELAB internally have been to be a different model of design and practice, more engaged and socially focused, both internally and externally. It really is a collaboration and it really is everyone bringing their talent to the table.
Are there any other challenges you’ve encountered along the way?
I’m also now a mother, so running my own business and parenting, all during COVID-19 - that has been a new experience! I do think it’s important to see that it can be done, that you can do both. For me, it has been accomplished in the leadership of everyone in the office. Giving them room to grow has given me the opportunity to do both of these things.
“While design is my tool, I am interested in making more democratic places and making ways for more people to participate in how our cities grow and in what shapes our homes and our spaces.”
A couple of topics you were interested in during your education and early career, protest spaces and healthcare settings, are socially focused issues of the built environment that are so relevant and important today.
Absolutely. For us, the throughline is the way of thinking. We’re not healthcare design experts, and we work across a lot of different project types. It’s in the process, in the approach to the inquiry, the interest in bridging between the physical and the non-physical, and the ways we communicate. We’re very interested in making drawings that are clear and accessible - you don’t need a design degree to read all of them. Even in the internal work with clients, we try to lay out the factors affecting things to make a decision. It isn’t just, “Oh we made a thing, do you like it or not?” Or, “This is our creation and it has to stay intact.” It’s very much an open process to bring all of this thinking together to make something better. That works for clients as well as with community members because if we can make more clear what is happening, we can have a better conversation and we can participate more. So that really is our ethos in our process.
What have been some highlights of your career so far?
Meeting Evan Rose and starting SITELAB - I couldn’t have planned or dreamed that up, it was such an incredible opportunity and meeting of the minds, and I wouldn’t have taken the leap without him and his confidence really, in retrospect. It was so exciting to chart out this new thing.
Now a highlight is watching the team grow and being able to continue on. Evan passed away in 2015 and while it was obviously personally devastating, there were also the questions of, “What happens next? Will we be able to continue? Will clients still trust us? What does this look like and can I do it on my own?” It is an amazing thing to look at it now, six years later, and see how we’ve thrived. I know he would be so excited at the work that we’re doing and the team.
At SITELAB we do annual retreats and they’re always such an amazing thing to see what everybody is bringing to the table, but it’s also amazing to see what they want to do in the world and the questions that they’re asking.
I don’t know of anyone else who has been in your situation of losing a co-founder so early in their career. When that happened, who did you turn to, to help fill the co-leadership you lost?
There was no filling his shoes. People did say to me, “You need to find a new partner.” My reaction at the time was, “There are a lot of firms run by one person. Why can’t I do that?” There was a part of me that was resistant and I turned to the team, much smaller at the time, about four or five people. I went to a group of different people as advisors. And in a lot of ways, I just had to be heads-down for a while, so we turned to the work. It was just to get through the immediate situation in the first year. And then we did start to look at it from more of a place of excitement, asking, “Who else do we want to be part of this?” We’ve gone through different leadership structures and have had different principals join. One of them, Michel St. Pierre, was actually my old boss so I think that is also a special thing to hire your boss! He was nearing retirement but thought it would be a fun last job. So he worked for three years and now is officially retired - I stretched it out as long as I could [laughs]. So we’ve gone through different cycles but I think we are also a very particular kind of office, and there’s a lot of opportunity for people who are growing within.
SITELAB urban studio hosts open house for Pier 70 in October 2019. Courtesy of SITELAB urban studio.
Who are you admiring right now?
A studio that I have admired for a couple of years now is KDI, Kounkuey Design Initiative. They’re based out of LA and former classmates, but I don’t know them personally, I am just a fan. They are a community-focused studio that started out doing work in Nairobi. I think they are an incredible model for charting your own path and being mission-driven. It’s been exciting to watch them grow.
An article I recently read that has been on my mind is an interview with Roberto Bedoya who is the Cultural Affairs Manager for Oakland, CA. In it, “Belonging is a Sticky Word,” he talks about creative placemaking, equity, and belonging, and it’s good at challenging how we do things and thinking about what it means to be authentic in this work.
What is the impact you’d like to have in or on the world? What is your core mission?
While design is my tool, I am interested in making more democratic places and making ways for more people to participate in how our cities grow and in what shapes our homes and our spaces. That’s in how we practice, how development works. It’s from our vantage point of design: how can we communicate in more transparent ways, how can we create opportunities for more voices?
That’s awesome. In one write-up about you online, I read a statement about you questioning or trying to reduce car culture. I don’t often see people coming out and saying that, but I appreciate it!
I think sustainability is really core to equity and to thinking about how we live on this planet. It’s very immediate in a way it hasn’t been in the past. We’re looking at how all of these things can come together and not be siloed.
What advice do you have for someone starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
My advice is in two parts. First, find your kindred spirits, find your people, people that you admire. Go outside of your circle or your own office because that’s how you learn new things, but I think it also creates opportunities for being entrepreneurial or finding your own path. The second part of the advice is just that - don’t be afraid to chart your own path. Don’t think you have to have the model or follow the model.
In terms of would it be different for women, I don’t think the advice is fundamentally different but I do think that it’s important for women to take initiative and to take credit. It can be harder to do that as a woman and it’s important, even if it feels uncomfortable.