Confluence

Confluence is a Des Moines landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm founded in 1998. It’s grown into a regional network of nine offices, from Kansas City and Minneapolis to Fargo, Chicago and Denver, with a portfolio heavy on campuses, parks, trails, streetscapes and downtown districts. Recent work includes Highland Bridge in St. Paul, which won a national ASLA award, and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library site in Medora, N.D. On the new Iowa 9/WIS 82 Mississippi River bridge at Lansing, Iowa, Confluence led aesthetic treatments for the piers, abutments and retaining walls. That’s the kind of infrastructure detail most bridge teams treat as an afterthought, and it’s where this firm earns its keep.

Eighty-plus design and planning professionals, nine offices, and the number that says most about the practice: more than 200 awards to date.

The office list runs Des Moines, Kansas City, Sioux Falls, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Omaha, Fargo, Chicago and Denver. The firm describes it as a growing network across the Midwest, though Denver sits outside that description; the stated intent is a team able to assist clients wherever a project lands.

The service list is longer than landscape architecture, planning and urban design. Twenty-four project-experience categories are published, and two are worth noting when matching a firm to a job: rooftop amenity space, which is its own discipline on dense mixed-use work, and a digital studio. Master planning, parks and open space, corridor and streetscape, waterfronts, mixed-use development, residential, sustainability, and resorts and hospitality fill out the rest.

Credentials concentrate in the professional bench. Four fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects — Chris Della Vedova, Dolores Silkworth, Daniel Tal and Wm. Christopher Cline — sit alongside a published cohort of landscape architects-in-training, which suggests a firm that trains rather than only hires.

The recognised work spans scales. Highland Bridge in St. Paul took a national ASLA Honor Award for Urban Design in 2026 and, separately, a Grand Award for sustainable stacked infrastructure from the American Council of Engineering Companies of Minnesota. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library collected an ICONIC Award for landscape and public space from the German Design Council and Architectural Design of the Year from the Architecture MasterPrize, both in 2026. The Falls Park conceptual master plan won a national design competition for the City of Sioux Falls in 2021. The Minnesota Vikings headquarters, practice facility and Viking Lakes development took ASLA chapter awards in 2020 and 2021.

Two of the nine offices publish direct lines: Des Moines at 525 17th Street, (515) 288-4875, and Chicago at 325 W Huron Street, Suite 602, (312) 663-5494.