"Designing a landscape is about connecting the body, soul, and mind to the land and to itself."

Kathryn Gustafson believes in the power of nature-and in the power of the human ability to shape it and to be shaped by it. Gustafson defines her field as anything under the sky or any interior space that may be perceived as a landscape. At times, this includes the landscape of the mind. By harnessing intuition and emotion, she manages to create spaces of extraordinary serenity. She herself reflects that, "All our senses receive a formidable amount of information. There is a need for places where one can stop and clear out the excess and the non-essential, so as to put some semblance of clarity in the rest."

Over the last twenty years, Gustafson's meditative spaces have taken root in the soils and psyches of France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. From her beginnings in fashion to her deeply evocative landscapes of today, the notion of the human body remains her starting point. "I'm very connected to the land," Gustafson says. "I can feel it physically inside me."

Gustafson's grounds and hardscapes are surprising in their textures and contrasts. The sweeping curve of her bougainvillea-festooned pedestrian bridge in Costa Mesa which traverses a mall parking lot is punctuated by projections that resemble heron wings, a bird native to the Southern California area. Delicate masts impart swirls of industrial light to organic shapes at the Shell Petroleum headquarters in Rueil-Malmaison, France.

Most recently cited by the British Arts Council for France's graceful high-tension pylons, Gustafson has been named an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Institute of British Architecture and awarded London's Jane Drew Prize. She earned her degree in landscape design from L'Ecole Nationale du Pays in Versailles, France. It was there that she got her start as a landscape architect working on the late French President Francois Mitterand's Grand Projets, specifically Parc de la Villette. Current projects breaking ground include her Shoulder Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park, Seattle's eight-city-block theater district swaddled in colored light, and a Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut, Lebanon.