Sierra Bainbridge and Lisa Tziona Switkin, “Growth and Grit: Cultivating a Life’s Work”

Sierra Bainbridge, senior principal and managing director at Mass Design Group, and Lisa Switkin, senior principal at James Corner/Field Operations, know the challenges of living and working through the growth of a design practice from start-up to international renown. Moderated by Anita Berrizbeitia, together they will discuss both the constant struggle and deep satisfaction of cultivating vision and voice, at work and at home. This will be a candid conversation about their experiences being with a firm from its inception, and about remaining as key collaborators in those firms for nearly two decades. Switkin and Bainbridge have had significant roles in projects such as the High Line, Freshkills Park, Tongva Park in Santa Monica, the Butaro Hospital Campus in Burera Rwanda, and the Memorial to Peace and Justice Campus in Montgomery, Alabama, and many others.

Sierra Bainbridge was a co-founding member of MASS in 2008, and oversaw design and construction of the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda. As cross disciplinary Senior Principal and Managing Director, architect, licensed landscape architect, and educator, Sierra oversees MASS’s landscape architecture department; and the design and implementation of MASS’s projects in the United States and Africa. By working deeply across disciplines to radically reshape the material supply chain project by project, Sierra is pushing to help shift MASS’s portfolio to approach carbon neutrality as close to project completion as possible.  This began with Ilima Primary school in the DCR, and continues to be tested at scale on campuses worldwide including Farm Hub in the Hudson Valley, and the Rwanda institute for Conservation Agriculture in Bugesera, Rwanda. Sierra has also worked on various memorials including EJI, the King Memorial, and the Kendall Memorial. Sierra has held an adjunct professorship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Landscape Architecture, Visiting Lectureship at Harvard University’s GSD. She served as Chair of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Rwanda, where she assisted in the inception and built out of the curricula of the first architecture program in Rwanda, for the African Design Center and for RICA.

Lisa Switkin is a Senior Principal at Field Operations, a leading-edge landscape architecture and urban design practice based in New York City. With a background in urban planning and landscape architecture, Lisa is committed to improving cities through the design of a holistic and vibrant public realm, inspired by place, people, and nature. For 20 years, Lisa has helped to shape New York City’s public spaces including the design and delivery of the High Line since 2004; Domino Park in Brooklyn; the transformative master plan for Staten Island’s Freshkills Park; Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park; and most recently the “Neighborhoods Now” initiative, in collaboration with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Urban Design Forum, and the Van Alen Institute, to develop safe and inspirational reopening strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other signature projects include Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, Philadelphia’s Race Street Pier, Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, Newark’s Riverfront Park, The Underline in Miami, Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, and Seattle’s Central Waterfront.

Lisa currently serves as President of the Landscape Architecture Foundation. She was a Rome Prize recipient in 2008 and has taught graduate level design studios and lectured at universities, symposiums, foundations, and institutions around the world.