Beka Sturges

In her design of landscapes for institutions and the public, Beka pursues the interplay between communities and their environments as a source of history, identity, and resilience. Since opening the Reed Hilderbrand office in New Haven in 2015, Beka has steadily grown a staff and design culture with the capacity to sustain projects in the private and public sector, from the latest phase of Connecticut’s Resilient Bridgeport Plan to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe to a major expansion to Storm King Art Center. Actively collaborating with New Haven’s Latinx community, she initiated the vision plan and implementation of the Mill River Trail, Phase 1, a 4-acre linear park running through the center of New Haven. Beka also served as project manager for the final phase of The Clark Art Institute. Current work under her leadership includes the new Farrand House at Washington D.C.’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the renewal of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with SOM/Annabelle Selldorf, the San Antonio Botanical Garden Master Plan, and the Great Island Vision Plan. A committed educator and thought leader, Beka is a Senior Critic at Yale School of Architecture. She has recently lectured on the career of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the role of history in design, the spirit of residential landscape architecture, and the transformative experiences of art and place at The New York Botanic Garden and Cleveland Garden Club as well as at the University of Rhode Island, Smith College, and the American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Meeting. Growing up in New Jersey, Beka loved to walk through the woods with her family and climb trees. Her grade-school building, designed by Princeton’s Head of Architecture Jean LaButat, seemed to be in service to its wooded surroundings and supplied Beka with a daily sense of exhilaration. She earned her BA in English from Sarah Lawrence College and began work toward a PhD in English Literature at Princeton University. After teaching in New York City for several years, Beka found landscape architecture, drawn to the phenomena of movement and change within landscapes. After graduating from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she joined Reed Hilderbrand in 2005. Beka is a compulsive reader and likes to hike, garden, and draw in her spare time.