The Sweeping Landscapes of Shauna Gillies-Smith’s Youth Suffuse Her Landscape Designs
Having grown up in the Canadian Rockies, the Massachusetts-based landscape designer today brings the same expansiveness to urban landscapes with her firm, Ground.
When she was growing up, landscape architect Shauna Gillies-Smith often found herself deep in the mountains. “I grew up in the Canadian Rockies,” she reflects. “I spent half the year at an off-grid café my family runs in the mountains—it’s a four-mile hike just to get there.” These formative experiences of being immersed in the landscape, and watching it change over the seasons, stuck with her. Today, it’s part and parcel of how Gillies-Smith approaches her work as a designer with Ground, the Boston-area landscape architecture firm she founded in 2008.
“Landscape architecture sets the stage for the drama of daily life,” she asserts. “It’s a dynamic, evolving canvas—shaped by weather, time, and how people engage it in their everyday routines.” This understanding of the landscape as ever-changing and intertwined with human life underpins her work, which today spans Massachusetts and the East Coast.
Whether she’s designing public parks, multifamily residential settings, or higher education campuses, Gillies-Smith brings her artful yet pragmatic approach, balancing function with beauty.
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“The nature of landscape architecture is constant creation,” she explains. “What keeps me in the field is the process of invention, where imagination meets real-world impact.”
With a strong design background—she studied architecture at UBC and then urban design at Harvard—Gillies-Smith thrives when creating landscapes for public spaces. A key example is Winthrop Center Park in downtown Boston, where she helped transform an underused, forgotten space in a historic square into an oasis, creating a place of respite amidst the urban chaos. “It exemplifies our belief that landscapes should be interactive, not just background scenery,” she says, referring to how the square functions as a programmable space for movable furniture or special events. “Seeing people gather there for lunch or simply to relax has been incredibly rewarding.”
For another of her favourite projects, Gillies-Smith worked with the architect of the Winchendon Community Park in northern Massachusetts to create an outdoor amphitheatre that frames a nearby lake as a backdrop for activities on stage. Stone seatwalls and oversized terraces allow the amphitheatre to be used for concerts, movies, and other community events. “It’s fulfilling to see how well it’s been embraced by the town,” she reflects.
Throughout her practice, Gillies-Smith has designed public art projects that blur the boundary between art and landscape. For example, with the LandWave sculptural landscape project in downtown Boston, her firm envisioned a pair of wave-like landforms that twist through the landscape, covered with blue mosaic tiles on one side and green groundcover on the other. Here, simple forms and materials combine to make an eye-catching moment in the urban landscape, inspiring passers-by to stop and consider the elements of the natural world encircling them all the time.
No matter the scale or function of her projects, Gillies-Smith strives to create a sense of dynamism. “We try to design places that constantly shift in how they’re experienced,” she says. “Our goal is to create places that are joyful, beautiful, and enduring.”
