Fall 2019 APLA Lecture Series Welcomes Sarah Cowles, Principal of Isthmus Group Landscape Architecture

Steering into the skid

Sarah Cowles is a founding partner of Isthmus Group LLC. For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of ecology and culture. She begins with the given, the site and its history, layering new elements that amplify the inherent intelligence of the site to construct new landscape identities and stories. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard.

As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. Her courses and studios include the technical and the pragmatic to the inventive and theoretical. In 2012, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Urban Design at the Tbilisi State Academy of the Arts.

She is a frequent contributor to Landscape Architecture Magazine, and the author of “Market Imperatives” in The Archive of Transition, a collection of photographs and essays on post-Soviet culture and urbanism of Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts. She is @ditch_daily on Instagram