20th Annual Landscape Design Portfolios Lecture Series: BEKA STURGES | Giving Voice to the Land

In honor of the 20th anniversary of this series, we invite you to hear three influential landscape architects showcase their signature projects, working methods, and design philosophies. This year’s lineup features a passionate and influential trio, each of whom is transforming cities around the world in their own way. Their timeless designs and tireless advocacy for public spaces, regenerated urban sites, and city centers tell stories that resonate on profound emotional, intellectual, and poetic levels—reflecting a deep, personal connection between people and place, history and ecology.

Giving Voice to the Land

“We gave the landscape voice... and turned the museum toward the land.” This is how Reed Hilderbrand Principal Beka Sturges describes her firm’s award-winning expansion of The Clark Art Institute on which she served as landscape architect and manager. The Clark is just one of many high-profile projects Sturges has led—each one a powerful spatial demonstration of the cultural and environmental value of landscapes. This sensitive integration
of architecture, ecology, and history can also be seen at The Mill, a residential project that draws inspiration from Eastern Connecticut’s rolling terrain and agrarian traditions and unifies upland meadows with the stream and raceway of a ruined industrial mill. Similarly, Sturges’s garden surrounding the Minimalist house at the Old Quarry reorders and manipulates the industrial site’s own granite—refuse and bedrock—to create pathways and places within the rough remains. Thus, Old Quarry’s essential character has been unearthed, not carpeted. Her other current work includes landscapes at Yale and Brown Universities, Boscobel House and Gardens, Storm King Art Center and the 4-acre Mill River Trail through the center of New Haven. A committed educator, Sturges teaches landscape studios at Connecticut College.