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Gwen and Isaac Cohen don’t do everything together, but they sure do an awful lot.

“We’ve been collaborating on projects together since graduate school; it’s a part of who we are,” Gwen said. “We also travel together whenever we can to see beautiful and unexpected landscapes.”

The Cohens joined Auburn University as faculty members in fall 2022. They are assistant professors in landscape architecture in the College of Architecture, Design and Construction and have offices side-by-side in Dudley Hall, where they both teach design studios and electives.

The Cohens met when they were graduate students at the University of Virginia, where Gwen remembers hearing Isaac’s laugh before she ever laid eyes on him. Before moving to Auburn, they worked together at Studio Outside Landscape Architecture in Dallas and co-taught college courses for years at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Oregon.

Along with their 2-year-old son, they share lunches, coffee dates, evening walks at Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art and the challenges of designing their own garden and renovating the interior of their house.

“I was putting the final coat of sealant on the kitchen floor the morning we went into the hospital and had our son,” Isaac said. “We see our yard as a shared design research project where we can each experiment and explore new ways to design with simple materials and plants.”

No longer co-teachers, they currently teach separate classes and have their own areas of expertise. Gwen’s research focuses on ways that humans are connected to the ground and what stories are held in soil, while Isaac is an expert on the design and development of public parks and urban spaces.

Since they are both committed to getting students out of the classroom and into nature, they worked together last year on a Tiger Giving Day project that raised more than $11,000 to support student travel around the state for field work.

“Designing in the studio is important, but there’s nothing compared to being out in the world, seeing how things are built and making connections with communities,” Isaac said.

Gwen says that sharing so much of their life makes things more convenient — especially when Isaac has a book she wants to borrow.

“Our offices are next door to each other, so I just have to walk around the corner to see Isaac,” she said. “If we weren’t next to each other, we’d have to have twice as many books.”