Martha Schwartz Partners is a leading international practice whose work focuses on activating and regenerating urban sites and city centres. Situated at the intersection of landscape, art, and urbanism, Martha Schwartz Partners has 20 years of experience designing and implementing installations, gardens, civic plazas, parks, institutional landscapes, corporate headquarters, master plans, and urban regeneration projects. MSP is also working with cities at a strategic level as they take a view to sustainability at a city or regional scale. MSP’s work demonstrates a deep commitment to the urban landscape and public realm as the platform for sustainable cities that are healthy across all aspects, sectors, and domains of urban life.
With offices in Europe and North America, Martha Schwartz Partners is engaged in projects and consultation around the globe and has to date worked on projects in over 20 countries and four continents.
The core team of design professionals consists of landscape architects, architects, urban designers, horticulturalists, field implementation specialists, and senior project managers, with backgrounds from Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. This diversity in disciplines and backgrounds affords Martha Schwartz Partners the agility to work across all scales and cultures, and allows its team to be nimble in even the most challenging urban and social contexts. In addition to its core team of professionals, MSP collaborates intensively with external consultants, expanding the breadth of the practice and enabling effective response to any scale of design problem.
Martha Schwartz Partners’ expertise and commitment to landscape as a means for activating urban sites have led to the design of highly effective and well used public and private spaces. The team’s landscapes, installations, and large urban projects continue to shape the environments they are part of and the lives of the people who use them. Their design for Manchester’s Exchange Square is held as an example of how an effective public realm design can galvanize the full recovery of a devastated urban area. And their work for the Mesa Arts Centre in Mesa, Arizona won the 2006 ULI Award for Excellence and provides a vibrant urban centre for a city that had previously lived without a central core.
The firm has also recently completed: the Concept Design for the Abu Dhabi Corniche, a 4.1 kilometer stretch of the city’s most valuable waterfront; the design and implementation of the Abu Dhabi Financial Center; The Dublin Docklands Grand Canal Square; Masterplan for the expansion of Canary Wharf, Wood Wharf, a large mixed-use, waterfront development in London; Masterplan for Yongsan International Business District in Seoul, Korea; a winning submission for the landscape of the Tirana Mosque in Albania, and one of the Master’s Gardens for the International Horticultural Exhibition in Xi’An, China.
In addition to the work above, Martha Schwartz Partners is currently working on many projects that use landscape to activate change and to enhance their environments. These projects include a state-of-the-art hospital in Vienna, Austria where landscape plays a significant role in the treatment and well-being of the patients, and working in consultation with cities such as Gothenburg, Sweden, Edessa, Greece and Geelong, Australia to help these cities achieve an economic renaissance and a strategy for sustainable growth for this next century.
Martha Schwartz Partners has continually been recognized for its contribution to the urban landscapes of the world and to the field of landscape architecture. The firm has received award recognition from the British Association of Landscape Industries Award in the Regeneration Category in 2008; The Chicago Athenaeum Award for Best New Global Design 2007 for Leamouth Peninsula; The ASLA Honour Award 2007 for Mesa Arts Centre; The Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence in 2006; and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2006.