Sara Zewde with project models, renderings, and photographs at her studio in Harlem, New York.
Photo: Glademir Gelin
Creative Mind: Sara Zewde
By having close conversations with clients and communities, the Manhattan landscape designer behind major projects in Seattle, Philadelphia, and soon Dia Beacon envisions resplendent parklands with a greater purpose
Throughout Sara Zewde’s growing portfolio of ambitious landscapes, no two projects look the same. Instead, the Harlem, New York, designer behind burgeoning firm Studio Zewde prefers creative collaboration with communities and clients to envision lush landscapes that are culturally affirming and support complex ecologies. “Design should be so expansive,” says Zewde, who moonlights as an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
“Echoes of the Hill” for Exhibit Columbus 2023. Photo: Courtesy of Studio Zewde
That outlook has established Zewde, one of the industry’s small number of Black women practitioners, as a trailblazing force, fueled by her conviction that landscape architecture can achieve much more than mere beautification. She repainted 20,000 square feet of parking lots with vivid graphics to uplift locals in Seattle’s Africatown, a historically Black neighborhood undergoing gentrification. In Philadelphia, she revitalized a disused coal bridge by turning it into one of the city’s most vibrant parklands.
Graffiti Pier in Philadelphia. Photo: Courtesy of Studio Zewde
Africatown Activation Project in Seattle. Photo: Courtesy of Studio Zewde
Her latest project, and her most high profile, involves repurposing eight underused riverfront acres at Dia Beacon in New York as lush terrain befitting the museum’s beloved trove of land art and minimalist sculpture. Slated for completion in mid-2025, her intervention promises to enrich the visitor experience with new meadow gardens, pathways, and earthworks while reinforcing the floodplain site and addressing its history as a crossing point for the Lenape people. Their descendants offered Zewde a decisive piece of wisdom: “Just look at the ground.”
Rendering of Studio Zewde’s landscape design at Dia Beacon. Photo: Courtesy of Studio Zewde
Research mode: Zewde is currently writing a book about Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. During her research, she retraced his travels through the American South, which produced a series of historic writings reckoning with the profession’s fraught relationship with slavery. “He came back to the North committed to the idea of public good.”
Cover: Sara Zewde with project models, renderings, and photographs at her studio in Harlem, New York.
Photo: Glademir Gelin
