Walker Macy

Walker Macy is a landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm based in Portland, Oregon with an office in Seattle, working across campuses, parks, civic plazas, waterfronts, transit corridors and school grounds in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The firm led design and landscape architecture on the new Beaverton High School, a $253 million replacement building wrapped around a 15,500-square-foot enclosed student courtyard, where the site work extended to parking, athletic field structures, new football turf and tennis courts. Walker Macy’s practice runs heavily toward publicly funded institutional work, and it frequently pairs with architects of record on district- and campus-scale projects rather than taking prime design roles.

Founded in 1976 and still practising from two offices, Portland at 419 SW 11th Avenue and Seattle at 1201 Western Avenue. The firm counts 432 awards and publications to date.

It is a registered Women Business Enterprise in both states it works from: Oregon WBE #10956 and Washington WBE #W2F0026394.

Walker Macy describes leading in both planning and design as rare for a landscape architecture firm, and the portfolio bears that out in two distinct halves. On the built side in Portland: Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the South Waterfront Greenway, Waterfront Park at Ankeny Plaza and the Portland Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing expansion. In Seattle: Amazon headquarters Blocks 34 and 35, the Seattle Asian Art Museum expansion, Victor Steinbrueck Park, Freeway Park improvements, Fritz Hedges Waterway Park and the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

On the planning side, campus work is a practice area in its own right, with long-range and vision plans for Oregon State in Corvallis and OSU Cascades, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, UW Bothell and Cascadia College, Western Washington University, and Portland State’s Place Matters initiative.

Resilience and remediation work is a third strand: the Duwamish Valley Sea Level Rise Adaptation Strategy and the Westport brownfield revitalisation area-wide planning study. Named sustainable design capabilities include integrated stormwater design, climate-adaptive landscapes, green roofs, habitat restoration and post-industrial landscapes.

The range extends past cities to wineries and resorts, including Stoller Vineyards and Lakeside at Black Butte Ranch, and to remote public land such as Cottonwood Canyon State Park in Oregon and the Mendenhall Glacier National Recreation Area in Alaska.