Deborah Nevins & Associates

The landscape design firm of Deborah Nevins and Associates was founded over twenty years ago in New York City. Over the years, the office has worked on projects as large as a 50,000 acre ranch and as small as an urban garden for The President's House of Columbia University. Current work includes a 40 acre park for The National Library and Opera House of Greece, in Athens, sponsored by The Stavros Niarchos Foundation as well as large estates. While the work of our office is noted for exciting visual experiences and an extremely sophisticated use of plants, what we strive for above all is to create a topos in the broadest sense. In other words, we strive to create places with distinct identities that appear to evolve seamlessly from the cultural and physical environment. This allows us to create special landscapes that enliven the intellect and the senses due to their intrinsic relationship to the land. This is a contemporary landscape approach that is unconstrained by stylistic boundaries. As part of our ethos, we are deeply committed to creating landscapes that are active participants in the creation of a sustainable world. Ease of maintenance, function and performance, safety, and universal accessibility are inherent to our concept of sustainable design. Our work addresses this commitment to sustainability through organic development and maintenance procedures, the selection of site appropriate plants, a working knowledge of green roof technology, the careful placement of trees for passive solar cooling, and the recycling of gray water for irrigation. Most notably, we have extensive expertise in working with fragile natural environments using indigenous plant communities that are in harmony with local ecology. We have a depth of knowledge on the diversity of plants in almost all horticultural zones from sub-alpine to the tropics. DNA has collaborated with distinguished architectural firms who practice in diverse stylistic languages. These firms include Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Cooper Robertson and Partners, Allan Greenberg Architect, Platt Bayard Dovell White Architects, Annabelle Selldorf Architects and Rose Tarlow, among others.