Landscape architect Andrea Cochran may have grown up in suburban New Jersey, but she strongly identifies with the West Coast, where she’s lived and practiced for the last 30 years. Her highly sculptural and modernist designs consistently garner media attention and awards; since 2004, in fact, the only year she didn’t win an honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects was the one in which they asked her to be a juror.
Like her work, Cochran is both elegant and warm, and that delightful paradox shows up in projects that include museum sculpture gardens, housing project courtyards, and children’s play spaces. Last July, she collaborated with the architect/artist Susan Narduli in a competition-winning design for the San Francisco Veterans Memorial, which is slated to open in the fall of 2013. Garden Design caught up with Cochran recently to dig below the surface of her clean, crisp designs in order to better understand the aesthetics and process of this walking force of nature.
Our slide show of Cochran's landscapes is accompanied with a Q&A with Cochran.
Sourcebook: Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture is based in San Francisco (415/503-0060); acochran.com). A collection of her work, Andrea Cochran Landscapes, by Mary Myers is available from Princeton Architectural Press.
