About MSP

MSP creates artistic, functional, and sustainable landscape designs. Our work addresses the impacts of climate change, and provides for happy, healthy communities.

Profile

Martha Schwartz Partners (MSP) designs and implements creative landscape solutions for plazas, parks, institutions and corporate headquarters as well as large-scale masterplans and urban regeneration projects.

Our expertise allows us to nurture communities and the environment in spaces where humanity and nature can be in balance. By appreciating how landscapes and communities impact on each other, we create sustainable spaces which people enjoy, and which also encourage biodiversity and protect the planet.

With offices in London, New York and Shanghai, MSP creates artistic landscape designs for projects in over 40 countries. MSP’s nature-based approach encourages city leaders, planners and engineers to appreciate how the public landscape can deliver environmental, economic and social sustainability.

We are involved in academic research to continually improve our understanding of how we can protect and regenerate natural ecosystems to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Hailing from all over the globe, our diverse team of landscape architects, urban planners, horticulturalists and project managers works successfully across all scales and cultures, including the most challenging urban and social contexts.

Since 1980 MSP has been regularly recognized for its contribution to the field of landscape architecture. The firm has received many international awards, including the ASLA Landmark Award, the British Association of Landscape Industries Regeneration Award, the Chicago Athenaeum Award for Best New Global Design, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and the Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence.

Process

MSP’s working process reflects our global understanding of how contemporary urban landscapes and the public realm work in practice. We consider the full diversity of urban factors: how group interests, social, cultural, economic and political forces interact to produce the space of the city. We encourage collaborative dialogue among the different viewpoints, so we can appreciate the various requirements and them through our design.

We evolve the project from the inside out, through the inclusive design charrette with clients and stakeholders. The design charrette is a high-energy brainstorming process that allows all participants, on an equal footing, to work through the project issues and envision possible outcomes. This energetic exchange culminates in a consensus on a basic direction which underpins further development by MSP.

This collaborative process is supported by MSP’s signature, innovative thinking. Our creativity challenges the conventions that limit the ways in which we imagine how people can live in cities. Rather than designing for the lowest common denominator - as may happen when there are many vested interests - MSP finds fresh concepts to create expressive landscapes that gratify stakeholders. There are often surprises; there is always cultural relevance, and an appreciation of the local ecosystems and their response to climate change.