A Hybrid State: DLANDstudio's Susannah Drake on Rigorous Research, Unique Skills, and Adapting Infrastructure for Climate Change
By Amy Stone
Susannah C. Drake, FAIA, FASLA is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture. A global thought leader on climate adapted infrastructure and urban design, her design work for transformation of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway has inspired a national movement to heal the wounds made by urban highways. Her work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.
Susannah’s Coastal Urbanism planning work for the RPA 4th Regional Plan calls for climate migration to higher ground. In 2020 her Gowanus Canal Sponge Park project won the inaugural Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Climate Action. Most recently she unveiled bold plans for how to protect and preserve cultural and ecological assets of the National Mall in Washington DC. In her interview with Amy Stone, Susannah talks about being scrappy and developing a firm from getting to know her community, advising young architects to maximize their time to do what they love.
AS: How did your interest in architecture first develop?
SD: I would say it started at Dartmouth College where I majored in art history and fine arts. I took a class about design thinking taught by engineering professor John Collier and professor Peter Robbie who trained as an architect. It opened my eyes to the world of making and to pathways I might follow to become a designer.
MoMA Rising Currents, courtesy of DLANDstudio
What an impactful class! How did you transition into architecture after Dartmouth?
After graduating, I worked for about three years for an architect named Mark Mitchell, a Dartmouth Alumnus from the class of 1956 who attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design under Josep Lluis Sert. It was a tiny office and we worked mostly on designing libraries. There were such incredible people there who taught me so much about design and communication of my ideas through drafting, lettering, and model making. It was a great primer for my architecture education and felt like a second undergraduate degree in many ways.
When an issue of Progressive Architecture arrived in the mail one day, I discovered landscape architecture. I had never heard about the profession and I thought it was really intriguing. Growing up I had wanted to be a botanist, but interest in arts, math, and humanities took me in another direction.
My father, a geophysicist and professor, was always explaining tectonics and geomorphology of the surrounding landscape. He also gave me a copy of John McPhee’s book Encounters with the Archdruid which left me with the impression that the biggest issue facing society was loss of our natural landscape.
A year in a landscape architect’s office in San Francisco helped clarify my decision to pursue design degrees at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At Harvard I chose to do both the MArch and the MLA over a very intense five-year period.
What did you learn about yourself while you studied Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the GSD?
I learned that hard work really pays off. I learned the importance of rigorous research, because it proves your scheme and approach. I learned to communicate through design. I was transformed by that program. It gave me confidence to be a leader.
“I learned the importance of rigorous research, because it proves your scheme and approach. I learned to communicate through design. ”
Those are such great tools to use throughout your career. Tell me about your next steps after graduation.
After graduation, I needed to figure out who to work for, especially because the two fields each had their individual licensure requirements. There weren’t many firms in New York that had both architecture and landscape architecture. It was the time before there was a large-scale realization of the importance of infrastructure as a design focus. It was also before every big architecture firm started using ‘greenwash’ - to suggest knowledge of the environment - as a loss leader for their building projects.
I decided to pursue the architecture license first and went to work for Beyer Blinder Belle because they had a focus on larger planning and adaptive reuse of post-industrial infrastructure. While I did not get to work on the projects that initially attracted me to the firm, I did work on some that were even better including historic theaters, and the redesign of the plaza and public spaces of Rockefeller Center.
I was also working almost directly with the partners as a designer. When I got pregnant, everything changed.
Tell me about that.
Motherhood completely changed my life. I never had to be the full-time nurturer before, so that was a huge transformation. Maternity leave was incredibly valuable to me. I took a long leave - 14 months off - and in that time, I got really involved with my community. I would sit out on our stoop in Greenwich Village and as I nursed my daughter people would stop and talk to me. I got to know everyone on the block and every issue going down in our neighborhood. I became president of the block association. It was an incredible education. My block had many people who were disciples of or even partners with Jane Jacobs in her fight against Robert Moses. The experience was priceless.
When I went back to the office, I was not given the same level of responsibility. As a result, I started looking for another job and was hired by Dennis Wedlick to work on a really interesting project in Aspen, Colorado. I liked the job and the people a great deal but was lured away to Rogers Marvel Associates to develop their infrastructure practice and support their campus design work. In the new job I took on a greater leadership role that helped me learn lessons about attracting talent, developing teams, and leading projects. It also helped me define the focus of my own professional vision. In 2005 I left RMA to start my own practice but got an irresistible call from Allied Works to join their New York Office and lead a significant open space and infrastructure project around the United Nations. When that project went on hold, I resumed my original path and founded DLANDstudio.
DLANDstudio’s vision for the QueensWay Rail to Trail.
You said you always knew you wanted to start your own firm. What were the ingredients to that? How did you springboard into starting?
I have a unique background, a unique mix of skills, and an unusual way of looking at the world in relation to natural systems and built systems. In working for others, I always sublimated my ideas to others. Ultimately, I had things I wanted to say that I could not communicate while working for other people. I’m happy to work with other people and I love collaborating, but I felt there were important things that needed to come from my voice.
Tell me about you starting DLAND. What was the impetus and what have been the big steps since starting your own firm?
I was scrappy when I started. I did not have some big project and I wasn’t taking a big body of work or client away from a former firm. My firm emerged from relationships that I was developing as a new parent. Talking to people while dropping off my kids at school and saying, “Hey, I’m starting a firm,” worked well. I started doing small residential projects both for country houses and Brooklyn brownstones. A lot of it came through the parent network. Work also came from consultant relationships, friends in my broader professional network and squash partners in the real estate industry.
I kept my overhead low. Income from the first projects financed desks and computers. The office was on the ground floor of my home in Brooklyn Heights. The small office felt like a family. We attracted smart talented people, many of whom became parents - mostly moms - while working with me. I tried to provide a lot of flexibility for them. From the start I installed remote systems for people to work from home if they needed and places for nursing and pumping.
Apart from those first residential projects, another way we grew the firm was with grant funded projects on topics of interest to me. A grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) helped me develop the vision for my office. The crash in 2008 presented a significant challenge so I started applying for larger grants. It takes a while to get a grant, but it can take just as long to get paid from a public agency. Grants are awarded based on the quality of the proposal rather than politics, which is also helpful for an emerging practice.
“My firm emerged from relationships that I was developing as a new parent. Talking to people while dropping off my kids at school and saying, “Hey, I’m starting a firm,” worked well.”
It sounds like you’ve evolved the practice over the years and had some really formative growth to push DLAND to the direction it has now. Where do you feel like you are in your career today?
Career wise, I am having a bit of a transitional moment and am in a hybrid state. In 2019, I took a teaching position at the University of Colorado Boulder Program in Environmental Design. Pursuit of a teaching position that could enable research from larger scale systems analysis to prototyping made the position attractive. Having developed a significant body of work related to coastal resilience, I also wanted to expand my work to include areas where water shortage and heat are significant problems.
There are few benefits in a pandemic, but the rise in remote working and digital communication has helped me manage the combination of teaching and practice more easily. With less time commuting, traveling for reviews and lectures, and project meetings, I have had more time to think. The result is that I will finally be publishing a book about the firm’s Sponge Parktm project in 2021.
What have been some of the biggest challenges to date?
Certainly starting out on my own from scratch. As a designer you not only have to do good work, but you also need to create your identity. This is something that should be taken very seriously.
I also think it is harder if you are a woman. I almost hate to say that because I was not raised with that mindset, but ultimately there are structural issues that I have worked to change. It is easier however to change rules than attitudes.
DLANDstudio’s Tidal Basin Plan in Washington D.C. to Protect and Secure History and Ecology.
Absolutely. Who are you admiring right now and why?
My first thought is my mom, who is the rock in my life. She is 92 and she is just so, so smart. She comes from a generation of women that were essentially shooed out of the workforce. With all her smartness she nurtured, cared, and supported me and my three sisters. My grandmother is a big inspiration to me as well. She was a suffragette and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College.
I’d say many women in my life have been an inspiration. There are women from Harvard who were incredibly supportive. I remember Professor Lily Herman telling me, “Susannah, you really need to maximize every minute of your day because you’ve got a lot to do. You know, when I’m watching TV, I’m also labeling slides.” Seems funny now in the age of powerpoint, but slides were a real thing. These little strategies were about more than time management - they were supportive human relationships.
There are so many in practice as well. Great leaders, Jill Lerner of KPF. Mentors, peers and clients including Frances Halsband, Kim Yao, Annabelle Selldorf, Rosalie Genevro, Anne Rieselbach, Abby Hamlin, Diana Reyna all had meaningful roles in my career. Trinity Simons from the Mayors Institute. My business partner and associates Sandra Chuck, Krista Bentson and Julia Chmaj.
I do have some heroes that I admire with whom I do not have a direct connection including Kate Brown, Carol Gilligan, and Naomi Oreskes - they are rock stars.
I love that you absorb so much from the women around you. I think it’s great to have more distant people to admire but I love that your eyes are open to the value you are getting from the community and network you have around you.
What is the impact you want to have on the world? What is your core mission?
That is easy. It is adapting infrastructure for climate change. I have been working on aspects of this for my entire career: trying to change the systems that shape our built environment to make them more responsive and reflective to natural systems. I am not jumping on a bandwagon. I am the bandwagon.
“...there does not have to be a prescribed path to becoming or being a designer. Life is not always linear. PEMDAS does not matter. Remember that order of operations? Parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. This isn’t math. It is life.”
If you could go back, what advice would you give your younger self?
Be more political. Be mindful of the decisions you are making, but I think you need to also be flexible to allow chance to take hold. I met my current husband through a chance introduction, and it was a fateful thing. You know, relationships really impact your life - how you live it, where you live, what you do. Also, I think whatever your circumstances are, it is great to embrace the community in which you are living and really make the most of it.
The other thing that I might do differently is to prioritize my approach to academia differently. A lot of designers go into academics and have vestigial practices on the side, but I did the opposite by having my focus on practice and keeping academics on the side. What I recognize now is that the choice I made is harder and perhaps a lot less sustainable. I think there is a lot of societal legitimacy given to theory that might not necessarily be given to practice. So that is something I might do differently, but maybe not. Tim Shuler, a writer for Landscape Architecture Magazine, recently called me the OG. It made me smile.
What advice do you have for those starting out?
Always look forward. Design your life to maximize the time you have, to do what you love. Whether that is designing or experiencing nature, cooking or being with family and friends. Whatever it is, just design your life so you are not wasting time. The smallest of decisions about daily logistics can have a big impact. As designers, who is better at figuring all those things out than us?
Also, there does not have to be a prescribed path to becoming or being a designer. Life is not always linear. PEMDAS does not matter. Remember that order of operations? Parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. This isn’t math. It is life.