Profile

We are a landscape architecture practice. By design, we transform and invent, we edit and reveal. We pursue the ideas and values that give shape to landscapes. This perspective informs how we see the world and how we drive change through our work. 

While our roots are in New England, our work is across the United States and abroad. We have completed major landscapes at Longwood Gardens, Storm King Art Center, and the grounds of the Clark Art. We have shaped the public realms and parks of New York City, Boston, Houston, Tampa, and New Orleans. We are authors of transformative planning projects for Boston’s Franklin Park and Cambridge’s urban forest as well as climate adaptation strategy for complex sites like the Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin. We build homes and gardens in diverse climates, from Southern California to Coastal Maine.    

Our own story begins in a garden. Douglas Reed and Gary Hilderbrand founded the practice in 2001, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after winning the competition to create Arnold Arboretum’s Leventritt Shrub & Vine Garden. Their vision of a practice pursuing and building beautiful, rigorous work grounded in ideas attracted a generation of landscape architects whose collaboration and dialogue are responsible for the practice’s achievements. Eight principals leading Reed Hilderbrand today each bring a unique voice to a common sensibility. We believe in collective intelligence. Our capacity draws upon a conviction about landscape architecture’s potential to change the world. Today we are a team of sixty-five landscape architects and designers working from Central Square in Cambridge and downtown New Haven.    

Our work is highly visible and widely recognized. Recently completed projects are featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Art Newspaper, Galerie, and elsewhere. Recipients of more than one hundred design awards, Reed Hilderbrand is recognized consistently by our peers in the American Society of Landscape Architects, American Institute of Architects, and the Society of College and University Planners. A private residence in England, a resilient waterfront park in the Hudson Valley, and the Franklin Park Action Plan for the City of Boston each earned ASLA Awards of Excellence.  

We are teachers and students. Education anchors our practice as we engage deeply in many places and communities; we are always learning. Leaders across the firm teach regularly or serve as critics at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale School of Architecture, Connecticut College, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas, and elsewhere. Within the studio we promote technical excellence and professional rigor at every level, from designers to principals. Our design-led research has established a foundation for work on urban forests and decarbonization through landscapes. In this context, we have signed on to the ASLA Climate Action Plan to achieve Net-Zero Carbon in practice before 2040. We design our way forward.