Studio Zewde

Studio Zewde is a landscape design, urban design and public art practice based in Harlem, New York, founded and led by Sara Zewde. The studio’s staff come from landscape design, city planning, urban design, sociology, statistics, community organizing and public art backgrounds, which is unusual for a landscape office and shows in the way its projects treat site history. The firm has been named to the AD100, selected as an Architectural League of New York Emerging Voice, and included in ArchDaily’s Best New Practices. Studio Zewde is one of three design partners on the Toledo Museum of Art reinstallation, where its scope covers the Welles sculpture garden and the wider museum campus.

The licensure list is the practical detail most owners will want first. Sara Zewde is a registered landscape architect in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas, and in Ontario, Canada. For a studio this size that is a wide seal-stamping reach, and it explains how a Harlem office ends up on projects well outside the Northeast.

Zewde’s own training sits behind the studio’s stated method. She holds a master’s of landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, a master’s of city planning from MIT and an undergraduate degree in sociology and statistics from Boston University. She teaches as an Associate Professor of Practice at Harvard alongside the practice. The sociology and statistics background is not incidental: the studio describes its design methodology as syncing site interpretation and narrative with the craft of construction, which is a research posture as much as a design one.

The named staff list is short, running to roughly ten people, with a separate group of collaborators brought in per project. Recognition includes a place on the Architectural Digest AD100, an Emerging Voice award from the Architectural League of New York, and inclusion in ArchDaily’s Best New Practices. Zewde has also been named to TIME magazine’s TIME100 Next, Wallpaper’s 300 People Shaping Creative America, and holds a United States Artists Fellowship.

The office is at 218 Lenox Avenue in Harlem, and the studio periodically opens it to the public. Its Open Studio events share in-progress work with the surrounding community, with an invitation list anyone can sign up for. That is an unusual practice for a design office and consistent with the community organising background the studio lists among its staff disciplines.