In each project, our goal is not only to make a landscape that is recognized for its design excellence. We also believe it is important to make places—spaces that are full of potentials for everyday life and for making people's lives better. Sometimes this means in small, mundane ways—to help them understand a natural process or to make a functional need easier. Sometimes this means changing people's lives in fundamental ways—to change the way they see art and science or to help people understand their places within a community and the world.

Central to the firm’s commitment to changing people’s lives in fundamental ways is a fundamental belief: Works of landscape architecture are more than 'nice' or 'beautiful.' They are vital, comprise basic structural elements, and provide critical functions and roles in design. They are infrastructures—basic and necessary components.

To focus on landscape as an infrastructure presents exciting opportunities:

• how infrastructure can structure growth, organize institutions, and catalyze city-making and reinvigoration.

• how ecologically positive infrastructure strategies and techniques can support healthier sites for all their residents, human and otherwise.

• how infrastructural landscapes can contribute to projects rich in civic expression, particularly in ways that strengthen and clarify citizens’ relationships to the city and reinvigorate civic life.

• how infrastructural landscapes can be strategic mechanisms that enable economically, efficiently, and bureaucratically streamlined projects.