About peg

An approach to every scale

PEG office of landscape + architecture is an award-winning design and research office based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They engage a variety of projects in terms of content, scale, and medium, ranging from immersive interior environments to large public spaces.

PEG’s work explores the relationship among digital media, fabrication technology and construction. Through new media and fabrication technologies, PEG’s work explores methods of systemic patterning to expand landscape’s expressive agency in the shaping of the public realm. Their projects experiment with formal and temporal patterns; in all cases, these methods are used to craft variation in surface appearances, as well as participate in site functions, such as water collection, plant growth, and maintenance zones. These incremental infrastructures have implications for more integrative thinking about natural systems in relatively dense urban environments and offer new expressive potential for landscape via new combinations of organic and inorganic materials. The use of these tools and techniques has created a signature aesthetic, establishing PEG as part of the next generation in the field of landscape design.

Established in 2004, PEG has been published extensively and won numerous design awards, which include: an Honorable Mention for their entry into the Buzzard’s Bay Bridge: Park international design competition; the 2010 Emerging New York Architects prize; the 2010 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designerssponsored by the Architectural League of New York; a Boston Society of Architects Research Grant; Metropolis Magazine’s “The Select Ten;” a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and were short-listed for the Movement on Main two-stage competition. Most recently, PEG, as the PennDesign team lead (on the Bionic team) was selected as 1 of 10 teams in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bay Area: Resilient by Design.

Notable publications featuring PEG include A+T: In Commons II (2006), Architectural Record, “Emerging Practices” (2007), “Remarkable Landscape Architects,” in ELA Environment & Landscape Architecture of Korea (August 2008), Young Architects 12: Resource (Princeton Architectural Press: 2011), Representing Landscape Architecture (Routledge: 2012), Digital Landscape Now (Thames & Hudson: 2012), 30:30 Landscape Architects (Phaidon Press, 2015), Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2016), Kerb 23: Digital Landscape (Actar, 2016), Innovations in Landscape Architecture (Routledge 2016), Landscape Theory in Design (Routledge 2017). PEG has also been a “featured practice” in Landscape World: 33 (June, 2010) and Harvard Design Magazine 36: Landscape Architecture’s Core (May, 2013).

 

Bios

Karen M’Closkey

Karen M’Closkey, a founding partner of PEG office of landscape + architecture, is a licensed landscape architect in the States of Pennsylvania, California and Michigan. She has over ten years of experience working on a variety of award-winning landscapes.

Karen is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches core design studios, advanced option studios, and contemporary theories of landscape architecture. Her advanced options studios explore techniques for working with repetition, ornamentation and surface modulation as a means to produce new forms of topography. Her book titled Unearthed: the Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) utilizes a selection of work by this highly regarded landscape architecture practice as a vehicle by which to gauge recent disciplinary trends. She received a research grant and publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The David R. Coffin Publication Grant from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Other writings include “Synthetic Patterns: Fabricating Landscapes in the Age of Green”(Journal of Landscape Architecture, Spring 2013), “Not Garden” in VIA: Dirt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), “Criticality in Landscape Architecture: Origins in 19th-century American practices, in Modernism and Landscape Architecture, 1890-1940” (Washington D.C.: National Gallery Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, forthcoming 2013), among others. Her focus considers the use of design techniques and the environmental values they manifest in both Modern-era and contemporary landscape designs. Her forthcoming book (co-authored with Keith VanDerSys), entitled Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (Routledge Press), situates the emerging expressions of pattern in landscape architecture.

Karen received a Masters in Landscape Architecture with distinction from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture with distinction from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Keith VanDerSys

Keith VanDerSys is a founding partner of PEG office of landscape + architecture. Prior to founding PEG, Keith worked for other award-winning architecture offices as a project designer and project architect.

Keith is a Senior Lecturer and Digital Media Director in Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching explore the applicability of new media and fabrication technologies to site applications. Recent research includes combining the computational capacities of geospatial analysis (GIS), computational fluid dynamics (Aquaveo SRH-2d, SLOSH, Butterfly/ Openfoam), and parametric software (Grasshopper) to investigate new modes of defining and testing resilient strategies.

He received his Master of Arts in Critical Studies in Architectural Culture from UCLA and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Detroit Mercy. He was also the recipient of an URF Research Grant, EDCO Research Grant, Graham Foundation Grant, BSA Research Grant and an AIGC Fellowship.

Jeff Sharpe

Jeff is one of the founding partners of PEG office of landscape + architecture. As an architect and designer, he believes each project has a unique purpose and story, and that design is about crafting interactions and a systemic approach to problem-solving. Jeff has led both large and small-scale landscape, master planning, and architecture projects around the world. With over 25 years of experience in leading design teams, he brings a strong conceptual vision, and technical expertise, to create dynamic and imaginative solutions for a diverse client base and project type.

Jeff’s work in design has provided strategic leadership to individuals, businesses, and institutions globally. He speaks nationally and internationally on design, creativity, and collaboration. His work has received numerous national and international awards and distinctions for architecture and design, including several AIA awards.

Site design martinrudolf.com