Groundbreaking: BAC Trustee Shauna Gillies-Smith Shares the Power Landscape Architecture Has in Community

Shauna Gillies-Smith, FASLA, is a member of The Boston Architectural College Board of Trustees, and was also recently appointed as a Commissioner of the Boston Civic Design Commission (BCDC) by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Shauna spoke to the BAC about her appointment and career from an active construction site in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Gesturing behind her to smooth new foundations and a rocky slope of dirt, she explained that the project will “bring significant benefit to the public realm.” Once completed, acres of privately owned open green space will become publicly accessible on land previously languishing with abandoned buildings and gas stations. As Founding Principal of Boston-based landscape architecture practice Ground, Inc. this is exactly the type of project that Shauna is committed to actualizing.

Although she’s new to the BCDC, a body responsible for evaluating large design projects impacting the city, she said, “I have presented on the other side of that table as a landscape architect at meetings many, many times.”

The tables are about to turn but it’s the same deep belief in promoting open access to the design professionals and education that drew Shauna to invest her time as a member of the BAC Board of Trustees. She began the role by supporting (current) Board Chair Judy Nitsch on the Presidential search that led to the installation of Mahesh Daas as eighth president of the College.

“I didn’t know much about the BAC at first,” Shauna admits. “I needed to learn what makes the school unique so I could figure out how to embrace my role. It comes down to offering open access to all students, an extraordinary philosophy that makes the barriers to entry much lower than at any other place.”

The fact that the College’s physical campus is located in an ever-changing cityscape, prompting students to design to address real problems around them, is in line with how Shauna defines her own role as a landscape architect planted in urban spaces.

In contrast, she spent her formative childhood summers in a remote region of the Canadian Rockies where her family operates the Plain of Six Glaciers Teahouse, reached only by hiking along a rugged, breathtaking four-mile trail. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that as a student, Shauna was attracted to the absolute opposite terrain—the built environment of cities.

She completed three degrees, including a Masters in Urban Design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, but never formally studied landscape architecture. Afterward, while working as Design Director at landscape architecture studio Martha Schwartz Partners, it became clear that the next step was founding her own firm.

Ground, Inc. is known for high-profile landscape architecture and public art installations like LandWave, a sculptural landscape project that tells the story of the South End, or the playful undulating “seatwalls” that invite spontaneous conversation at the foot of the TreeHouse Residence Hall at MassArt in Longwood. Interestingly, Shauna regards these projects as architectural at root.

She said, “To me, the difference between art and architecture is that art is an aesthetic and conceptual practice. Design is about making art within constraints. Those constraints may be the particular site, the program, the client, or the budget.”

Sometimes respectfully designing around clients’ constraints feels like working an advanced spatial puzzle as the Ground, Inc. team models, renders, and iterates many times over. “It might look artistic in the end, but we are hardcore pragmatists,” Shauna said.

The project she’s proudest of was completed in Taunton, Massachusetts in 2016, at a state-operated treatment center for women battling drug and alcohol addiction who have been committed. A series of interconnected courtyards offer pockets for quiet reflection and larger, soft surfaces for group activities.

Here, the constraints were literal. A fourteen-foot-high barbed wire fence encircled an institutional space that needed to offer the healing benefits of pausing outside in a natural environment with non-toxic and non-hallucinogenic plants. “It’s probably the most well-used landscape we’ve ever done because the women are outside every single day in all four seasons,” Shauna said.

“What really interests me, compared to the other disciplines, is that landscape architecture is a very contaminated profession. You can't control it. You can set the bones, but you don't control the weather, you don't control time, and you don't control how people experience it.”

Shauna has increasingly given to the BAC over the years because she sees how the College’s graduates are embarking into the world and making “a huge impact” both in their own backyards all over the world.

“The BAC is widening the net to offer design education to people and communities that might not have known about that path, much less been able to take it otherwise,” she said.