James Welsh
Senior Landscape Architect
MKW + Associates
Biography
Jim has been practicing landscape architecture since his graduation from Rutgers University in 1991. He has worked on a wide variety of projects that range from Fortune 500 and higher education campuses to local urban plazas and playgrounds to county and state parks. While a majority of his work has been focused in the New Jersey/New York region, he has worked domestically in Dallas, Cleveland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Indianapolis and abroad in Korea, China, Mexico and Dubai. He is currently the Senior Landscape Architect at MKW + Associates, leading projects for Bergen and Passaic County Parks, City of New York Parks and Housing Authority and multiple school districts throughout NJ.
Jim enjoys the challenge of working with clients to identify their programmatic options and utilitarian design requirements and then unifying those conditions with a strong visual character to achieve design excellence in outdoor spaces.
Rutgers Climate Bridge Panel 8: Visions for Place
Abstract
Areas throughout the US have been experiencing recent extreme weather events that have been identified as signs of climate change. MKW + Associates (MKW), in their practice of site planning and landscape architecture at sites throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US, has responded to these events by developing site designs that help mitigate these weather conditions. MKW will show that exemplary design can coexist with the need to mitigate these extreme conditions. The best formed responses to extreme weather and climate change start at the earliest stages of project planning and are further developed through the design process (schematic design, design development, and construction documentation) and implementation. Depending on the issues at hand, MKW teams with engineers, environmental scientists, ecologists, our clients and the surrounding community to develop site appropriate design solutions.