EDSA is a Fort Lauderdale landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm that Edward D. Stone Jr., a Korean War fighter pilot turned landscape architect, founded in 1960. He started it in his garage. The firm now runs offices in Orlando, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, New York, Raleigh and Shanghai, and its resume runs from resorts and urban waterfronts to hospital campuses, including the Fort Lauderdale Beach revitalization. It’s still best known for hospitality work around the Caribbean and beyond. In West Palm Beach, EDSA is the landscape architect on West Palm Point, Cohen Brothers Realty’s planned 23-story, 438,000-square-foot office tower by Pelli Clarke & Partners, where a pedestrian paseo will cut across the block.
Three disciplines that run in sequence
EDSA organises its work as visioning and planning, urban design, and landscape architecture, and the firm is clear that these are stages of one process rather than three products. Visioning and planning starts at the scale of the land itself, uncovering what a site can hold and translating a client’s intent into an implementable development strategy. Urban design handles the problems that arrive with density and mixed use. Landscape architecture delivers the built result, and the firm’s own framing there is worth quoting in spirit: it plans for visual beauty but keeps track of how the individual elements of a site, neighbourhood or community work together as habitat for people.
The portfolio is heavily resort and destination work, and international. Featured projects include Etereo, part of the Auberge Resorts Collection, in Quintana Roo, Mexico; Bluewaters Island and an opera house in Dubai; Guacalito de la Isla in Nicaragua; the Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center in Jacksonville; and the Fort Lauderdale beach revitalisation, which is civic work in the firm’s own city.
That last pairing, a cancer centre alongside luxury resorts, says something about how the practice applies the same planning method across very different briefs.
The firm publishes research rather than only project galleries. Current pieces include a 2026 Outlook on signals and emerging patterns for reassessing risk, value and experience, a guide to community repositioning, and a study on designing for density that looks at layering space and experience within the urban fabric. For developers deciding whether to reposition an existing asset or build new, that is the firm selling its thinking before its drawings.
Two offices are listed, Fort Lauderdale and Dallas, and the site is published in simplified Chinese and Spanish as well as English, with a WeChat channel alongside the usual social links, which reflects where the client base sits.
The main line is +1 954 524 3330 and general enquiries go to info@edsaplan.com. Sources: edsaplan.com homepage and Contact page.
