BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A new firm in L.A. thinks it?s time to turn up the volume on landscape architecture.
From the August 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Earlier this spring, Kelly Majewski, Affiliate ASLA, was one of more than 100 designers in Los Angeles who attended Design for Dignity, a one-day ?congress? convened by the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to identify ways to alleviate the city?s homeless crisis. But for Majewski, a landscape designer, the takeaway may not have been what the organizers hoped. ?I got asked by multiple architects, once they found out I did landscape architecture, what I was doing at this conference,? she says. ?I heard it three times. Which just blows my mind.? Majewski founded Superjacent, a new landscape architecture and urban design studio, with Tony Paradowski and Chris Torres in January 2016. And it?s interactions like those at the AIA conference that inspired the three partners to make visibility one of their central tenets. ?We came up with a list of things we wanted to try and accomplish, rules that we?ve set for ourselves,? Majewski says. ?One of them is ?Get Loud,? and part of that is [this] idea that people are still pigeonholing what we do.?
All three designers?who have a blend of backgrounds but overlap with landscape architecture?grew up in Southern California and met while at local firms: Majewski at Melendrez and Paradowski and Torres at Rios Clementi Hale Studios. They?re currentl...