![]() If a plant were to fail as a mass planting, say, a plant you hadn’t tried before, that would be a big problem.”Ĭochran has received well-deserved recognition over the past decade-she was inducted as a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2007, was named a finalist for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture in 2006, 20, and in 2009, Princeton Architectural Press published a monograph of her work. We’re then able to apply what we’ve learned to public projects that can’t afford to take risks. ![]() We’re able to try things out in an area that’s safer, and the risks are understood. We’re working with clients that are willing to take risks. What we learn on the residential side allows us to develop our craft of building things, because all our projects are built. She expounds on the diversity of project type in a recent interview posted on the ASLA website, “About half our work is high-end residential work, and the other half is institutional and commercial and affordable housing projects. Cochran’s 15-person studio has been the recipient of international recognition in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a wide-range of design publications.Īndrea Cochran Landscape Architecture is distinguished by its diversity-the firm tackles a variety of project types and scales. After working in collaborative partnerships for over 10 years, she founded Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture in 1998. Born in New York City, Cochran attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and lived all over the northeast, with short stints in Colorado, Tennessee and Athens, Greece, before moving to California in 1981. The firm also creates full-scale mockups to view the project in its entirety and enhance some of the details that you can’t see in smaller scale drawings or models (3).Andie Cochran FASLA, MLA ’79 has been living and practicing landscape architecture in the San Francisco Bay area for over 30 years. She uses a multitude of different ways to create the drawings for her designs including hand sketching, physical models that she makes and computer software such as AutoCAD (3). Cochran makes frequent trips from the studio to the site and sketches the space and her impressions of it. ![]() The Children’s Garden project that she did shows her love for Cor-ten steel and how well she is at designing with it. Her favorite material to use is Cor-ten steel because she says, “ It can provide grade changes, but with the thinnest of edges, so for me it’s more like being able to draw on the land rather than having this big concrete or heavy stone wall” (2). Materials that she’s taken an interest to include Cor-ten steel, aluminum, gravel, stone, concrete, glass, plants and acrylic. After this she begins to actually select some of the materials that she will be using in the design, which she handpicks herself for each and every design. She pays attention to the light in the space, surrounding plants, plants she may use and also materials that she may use for the design. Next she starts to incorporate art into the process, which makes her designs so beautiful and elegant. Her process consists of visiting the site and recording her initial response to it, she also takes into consideration whatever the client wants and lastly whatever makes the space functional and inviting. The design process of Andrea Cochran is quite unique, but extremely effective and it shows that in her designs. ![]() It also shows how clean and organized her designs are which is quite pleasing to the eye. One of her projects, the Perry Residence, exemplifies her liking of a smooth transition from the existing architecture into the landscape and it blends the two together quite nicely. All of her designs blend the existing architecture with the landscape design as if it were already there. One key factor in this statement is that she expresses the importance of integrating the landscape design with the existing architecture. Spare geometry applied to vibrant plant life results in sharp compositional order. This exercise in restraint heightens a sense of the elements-texture, light and movement” (1). Our work draws boundaries with a controlled palette of materials, creating permeable edges that blur the line between the natural and built environment. Her mission statement as well as her thinking process for her designs is as follows “The work of Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture sculpts and navigates space through a seamless integration of landscape, art and architecture. Cochran’s firm in California consists of fifteen different people, not including herself, and they design public and commercial sites as well as residential and private sites (1).
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