Building a Following

In 1979, a young Martha Schwartz burst onto the scene with one of her first—and most contentious—projects, the Bagel Garden: her own Back Bay parterre lined with shellacked bagels and purple gravel. MIT’s Necco Garden (crafted from candy wafers and tires) and the Splice Garden (an AstroTurf and gravel rooftop) at Cambridge’s Whitehead Institute followed, solidifying her reputation for blurring the line between landscape architecture and art.

Now Schwartz has won a prestigious National Design Award—the industry’s equivalent of a Pulitzer—from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt museum. Despite the accolade, local clients have been few and far between—her public and private works appear more often in cities with a decidedly less Brahmin aesthetic (Miami, New York, Munich). Nonetheless, she based her company, Martha Schwartz Partners, near Porter Square, and teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. And while Boston hasn’t yet wholly embraced her forward-thinking style, Schwartz is about to get some well-deserved local recognition—she’s helping transform the Natick Mall into an upscale shopping, dining, and condo development, to be completed in spring ’08.