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Homepage Hero

Alex Hart, RLA, ASLA

Alex has 14 years of experience designing outdoor spaces. He served as a landscape architect at New York City’s Parks Department for most of that time, where he was the lead designer for over $20m of parks, playgrounds, and other public spaces. While at Parks, Alex led the design group responsible for all parks in Manhattan, as well as the department’s Storm Response Unit, which was charged with redesigning all city parks damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Alex earned a Bachelors in Cartography and GIS from BYU, a Masters of Regional Planning from Cornell, and a Masters of Landscape Architecture from Cornell. Throughout his career, he has focused on research as a means to improve practice, including a year in Copenhagen as a Fulbright Fellow studying pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure design.

Our People

CLA staff are among the best in the business. They have a wide range of experiences, but all share a commitment to design excellence and skillful production.

We employ a team strategy on nearly all projects, with healthy internal debate on design choices. While a single team member will always be ultimately responsible for running a project, our structure creates numerous opportunities for collaboration while maintaining accountability.

Firm Principles: Design

  1. Unify the space and its users.
    The best design solutions allow the land to be itself, while making it enjoyable to for its users to access. Our ultimate goal is a harmonious unification of natural beauty and human systems.

  2. Take care of the land.
    We feel each project should leave a place substantially better than it was – ecologically, economically, and functionally. Landscapes usually have few opportunities to be designed, so we utilize all the tools we have to make each opportunity live up to its full potential.

  3. Make it look great.
    Great design is more than just checking the boxes on a list, whether the design is for a sports car, a symphony, or a landscape. For our projects, we hold ourselves to a standard of excellence in graceful form as well as effective function.

Firm Principles: Clients

  1. Understand the context.
    Every client brings a unique situation, and the design can only be successful if it corresponds to that situation. We make it a priority to understand each design challenge in detail, through site visits, analysis, and lots of listening. This responsiveness continues throughout the design process, as we prioritize client communication at all times.

  2. Operate with efficiency.
    We are honored by the trust our clients place in us. Therefore, our entire business model is set up to produce excellent results as quickly as possible. We tend to set realistic deadlines and then do everything we can to come in early.

  3. Always provide clarity and transparency.
    Many of the sites we work on are complicated, regardless of size. So we utilize a variety of strategies to ensure the client understands what we are proposing, along with the benefits and disadvantages of alternative options. We specialize in producing clear graphics to communicate design intent, as well as clean contract drawings to minimize problems in construction. Through it all, we make sure the client always understands what we are doing and why we are doing it.


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