SWA Group

About SWA Group

SWA Group is a landscape architecture, planning and urban design practice structured as a unified collective of eight independent studios. More than fifty years ago it became one of the first fully employee-owned design firms in the United States - an unusual model then and still uncommon today. That structure shapes everything about how the firm works: individual studios retain their own character and leadership while sharing a collective vision.

Design Philosophy

Three beliefs run through the practice. Landscape is essential infrastructure - the bridge between the built and natural worlds, central to healthy communities and ecosystems rather than decoration applied at the end of a project. Ideas and innovation drive reinvention, with new technologies and materials tested against a long legacy of built work. And the business itself is plural rather than singular: in an industry often organised around one name and one philosophy, SWA is deliberately many.

Services

Landscape Architecture

Studios work across scales, geographies and contexts, from large multifunctional public spaces to small intimate sites. Research into materials, lifestyles and landscape technologies informs the work, combined with close study of how people actually use outdoor space.

Planning

Planning is treated as a framework for long-term transformation, balancing short-term benefit against the long view. The firm helps clients grow urban districts, campuses, workplaces, transit-oriented developments and waterfronts into places that flourish and adapt over decades.

Urban Design

Urban design work connects buildings, streets, open space and movement into coherent districts, often as the connective tissue between separate development parcels.

Notable Projects

• Hunters Point South Park, New York - a resilient waterfront park designed to flood and recover
• Buffalo Bayou Park, Houston - large-scale urban bayou restoration and public realm
• Expo 2020, Dubai - landscape for a global exposition site
• Bao'an Bay Park, Shenzhen, China
• Pacific Plaza and Southern Gateway Park, Dallas
• Culver Steps, Culver City, California
• Shunde New City and Dongguan Delta City, China - large district plans
• Port of Los Angeles, The Cannery and Esencia, California

Resilience and Ecology

Much of the portfolio addresses water directly - bayous, bays, waterfronts and floodplains - where landscape must absorb storm events rather than resist them. This is where the claim that landscape is infrastructure becomes concrete: these projects perform hydrological work that would otherwise require hard engineering, while also serving as public parks.

Global Practice

SWA works across the United States, China and the Middle East, giving its studios experience of very different climates, densities and planning systems. Chinese district-scale commissions in particular operate at a scale rarely available in North American practice.

Market Position

SWA is among the most established landscape architecture firms in the United States, competing on ecological rigour, large-scale planning capability and a distinctive employee-owned studio model that retains senior designers over long careers.

Why AEC Teams Should Know SWA

For teams working on waterfronts, parks, campuses or transit-oriented development, SWA offers a leading reference for resilient landscape design and long-horizon district planning across the built environment.