Campbell & Campbell’s honors include United States Congressional recognition, major institutional and public art commissions, international competitions and numerous awards from the American Institute of Architects, American Society of Landscape Architects, and the American Planning Association. Their work has also been recognized by the Public Art Index, the National Waterfront Center, the California Preservation Foundation, the Los Angeles Conservancy, the State of California Department of Rehabilitation for Excellence in Barrier-Free Design, and Platinum Honors from the United States Green Building Council.
Our firm’s completed work is represented by landmark urban design, public open space, architecture and landscape projects, including the architecture and landscapes of the Audubon Center in Los Angeles; the landscapes of the Los Angeles Central Library, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the First Street Corridor in Los Angeles; the Pasadena, Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara Civic Centers; and major campus projects at Stanford and Western Washington Universities, UCI, UCLA, the San Antonio Art Institute and Pomona College. Current efforts include planning and design for urban districts in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, and Master Planning projects in China.
Douglas A Campbell ASLA
Douglas Campbell has received international recognition for his work in landscape architecture as public art; urban design; and environmental, urban and regional planning. His work, with partner Regula Campbell, is noted for advancing the collaborative public art of landscape architecture as creative stewardship of the environment, forging renewed connections with community and the natural world.
Douglas Campbell is a graduate of Pomona College and the University of California at Berkeley. He initiated his professional practice and research with a commission from Experiments in Art and Technology “ Projects Outside Art” and as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Beirut, Lebanon.
His academic engagements include guest and visiting lectureships at UCLA and USC, and visiting and adjunct faculty appointments including Adjunct Professor in the USC School of Architecture and faculty affiliate with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Southern California (to Spring 2013).
Regula F. Campbell AIA
Regula Campbell’s design work is internationally known for its engagement with the natural and cultural landscape. She has also written and lectured widely on art and the landscape, specifically on the relationships between the arts of poetry and landscape design, and the philosophical and spiritual bases of environmental ethics.
Ms. Campbell is a graduate of Scripps College and the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the recipient of the Inaugural Lois Langland Artist in Residence Program at Scripps College. Her academic engagements include guest and visiting lectureships at UCLA and USC, and visiting and adjunct faculty appointments including Adjunct Professor in the USC School of Architecture and faculty affiliate with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Southern California (to Spring 2013).
The Work of Campbell & Campbell
Douglas and Regula Campbell have since the 1970’s been engaged in works of landscape and environmental architecture and public art, widely recognized for commitment to a collaborative process of discovery and collective expression of community, culture and encounter and re-conciliation with nature.
Their work has been placed by art critic Christopher Knight at the intersection of “poetry and civic purpose”. This work has ranged from public projects noted for design processes involving large numbers of participants, through collaborations with individual sculptors, painters and poets, and constituencies of cultural, academic and research institutions, faith communities and environmental organizations, recognized as works of environmental healing and landscape art.
In 1968, The Campbells began a creative partnership that has continued to the present. In 1970 they were invited by the Experiments in Art and Technology organization to enter into a collaboration with sculptors Alan Kaprow and Newton Harrison, furthering a continuing interest in the landscape as perpetually the artifact and generator of process and performance. Douglas Campbell’s graduate studies in environmental design and landscape architecture at UC Berkeley were significantly influenced by sustainability pioneer, futurist and systems theorist Richard L. Meier.
Meier’s prescient approaches to planning and design in the developing world led the Campbells to Beirut in 1970, working throughout the Near East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and North Africa as consultants to UN sponsored economic and social development projects and related efforts involving resource conserving urban agriculture. The Campbells returned to California in 1974, where Regula entered graduate studies in architecture at UCLA, studying and working with mentor Architect Charles W. Moore.
Doug and Regula established Campbell & Campbell in 1981. The Campbells early work included landscape architecture commissions following competitions for projects such as St. Matthew’s Parish Church and the Beverly Hills Civic Center with architect Charles W. Moore. These projects set precedents for an approach grounded in participatory design, and the incorporation and expression of cultural and environmental context that are continuing attributes of his firm’s work. The public participation foundation for these projects, among many others in which the Campbells were involved during this period, was directly facilitated or guided by the work of Jim Burns, founder of the “Take-Part” approach to participatory planning and design, and Peter Brand of the Coastal Conservancy. At this time Campbell & Campbell began their involvement in a series of efforts sponsored by the California State Coastal Conservancy, initiated with the Santa Monica Pier and other beach and waterfront projects, notably including the master planning and design for the beachfront Imperial Beach Pier Plaza (1986-88).
Campbell & Campbell worked with the Coastal Conservancy team led by Burns and Brand to develop a consensus plan in which over six hundred citizens took part. The Campbells were subsequently commissioned to design the Plaza, evolving the design from a desire to evoke the city’s most significant natural features: the beach and Pacific Ocean; the Tijuana River Estuary, which provides hundreds of acres of vital habitat; and the Coronado Islands, which dot the horizon offshore. Campbell & Campbell also designed the Plaza as a setting for intensive everyday use and special events including the community’s annual Imperial Beach Sandcastle Competition. The project, recognized with numerous honors, including national awards from the ASLA, the Waterfront Center, and Architectural Record has been appreciated both for its process and impact on its community and for its formal qualities. ASLA award jury members conferring on it the status of “a piece of art” and commenting on its subtlety – “It brings you to the edge, to the vastness of the ocean without drawing attention to itself.”
This project provided a community struggling to revitalize itself with a memorable and powerful central place, using a minimum of elements, celebrating without dominating its spectacular setting, expressive of the collective imagination of its citizens and encouraging of their aspirations for the future.
During this time the Campbells began a professional association with early mentor Lawrence Halprin, serving as associate landscape architect for projects in Los Angeles including Grand-Hope Park and the Los Angeles Central Library Maguire Gardens (1990-93). The outcome of a decades-long struggle to save Bertram Goodhue’s Los Angeles Central Library and return its long vanished West Lawn (“Maguire Gardens”), this project, recognized as a place significant to the civic and cultural life of Los Angeles, is the product of an intense artistic collaboration between landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and associate landscape architects Campbell & Campbell, who also served as landscape architects of record for the other components of the project. Since its completion in 1993, as in Goodhue’s original 1926 design, today’s Maguire Gardens exemplifies the conception of the Central Library as building AND garden – a vibrant gathering place and symbol to the people of Los Angeles of the value of commitment to the public realm.
Campbell & Campbell ‘s projects throughout the 1990’s further explored artistic collaborations in the context of landscape architecture as “Public Art”. These notably included the commission following a competition winning collaboration for the City of Pasadena’s “Sentinel Plaza” (1989- 1991) with painter Robert Irwin.
This project evolved from the winning entry in a national invitational competition organized in 1989 by the City of Pasadena Arts Commission for a public arts project involving the design of a courtyard for the new police headquarters in the city’s historic civic center. Its outcome eloquently embodies the Campbells central concern with the creation of public expressions of place and values through the medium of landscape architecture.
The work, with collaborator painter Robert Irwin, is a minimalist “Zen like” composition of the components explicitly required by the City’s program- a tree, a fountain and a gated wall – which animated by the play of light and space, color and of the passage of time, speak of community and nature in this particular place.
This project has led to Campbell & Campbell’s continuing and current explorations in service to expressions of community and place, including the recently completed West Hollywood Veteran’s Memorial project with United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (beginning in 1999).
Beginning in the late ‘90s, these continuing, long-term explorations have also included the landscapes of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (1997- ), and both landscape and architectural design for the Audubon Center in Los Angeles (2000- ) and Plaza De La Guerra (2007- ) and Library Plaza (2011-) for the City of Santa Barbara.
Campbell & Campbell was selected by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1997 to be a part of the realization of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (1997- ). The Campbells served to help manifest the vision of the Cathedral becoming a place “to be nourished and challenged” as a place of worship for the Roman Catholic community and also a place of gathering, celebration and contemplation for the entire city.
Pastor Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik has noted that, “on receiving this commission, understanding that the landscape can communicate deep connections to the created world, Campbell & Campbell embraced the garden heritage the Franciscans brought to the early Church in California and extending this heritage into the future – using landscape forms -– plaza and cloister, water, trees and plants that speak of Church traditions, scripture, the changing of the seasons, and the diverse traditions of the Roman Catholic communities from around the world represented in the Archdiocese. His sense of history, beauty and landscape design and collaborative teamwork made Douglas Campbell a treasure in the design and construction of the Cathedral landscape.”
Serving the children and families of its culturally diverse inner city neighborhood, the Audubon Center at Debs Park (2000-) in Los Angeles is a prototype for the Audubon Society’s national urban nature center initiative. Campbell & Campbell is responsible for the site and interpretative planning and design, all phases of the landscape architecture, and the architectural concept design, beginning involvement with an intensive community participation program in 2000, continuing into the present. The design aims to create common ground for encounters with wild nature within a park in an urban setting.
All of the Audubon Center’s features incorporate elements that tangibly communicate the interconnectedness of ecosystems and humanity’s new determining role in their fate. The several interwoven components of the design work together to connect people with the natural and cultural history, present and future of the surrounding Arroyo.
Ed Reyes, the Los Angeles City Councilmember in whose district the Center is located, has hailed the project’s creative approach to sustainable design as bringing about “ a shift in culture” in the City bureaucracy, and as “the seed that led” to Los Angeles far reaching Green Building Ordinance. Reyes considers however, that “the most successful aspect of the Audubon Center is the availability and accessibility of nature that residents can see, touch and feel.” and that the Center “makes the relationships between people and nature very tangible, and that, to me is an amazing success story.”
This work seeks to position “sustainable design” in the broadest possible context, and defined not only by technology and consumption metrics, but as authentically coming out of a place and a community – part traditional wisdom – part scientific insight and technology – and part poetry, rooted in ethical and spiritual traditions and inspiring stewardship into the future.
This work is based on the Campbells belief that “design in the landscape must be a many voiced conversation between the generations and with Nature, fully engaging memory and the imagination, and in service to re-visioning of connections to community and the natural world – inspiring in new generations a deeply understood sense of new and unprecedented responsibility for the fate of the earth.”
Through this work, and through their teaching, research and writing, Campbell & Campbell aspire to explicitly place landscape architecture at the foundation of environmental design, and in the company of the healing arts.
The projects described here represent a body of work by spanning over four decades, by a landscape architect and architect recognized for advancing a broad vision of their profession through their works, accessible on many levels and engaging many, in service to society.