Led by James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie, Surfacedesign, Inc. is a San Francisco–based landscape architecture and urban design studio known for bold, material-driven work that blends architectural clarity with a sculptural, site-attuned sensibility. From public parks and international airports to intimate gardens and experimental studios, their projects push against the conventions of globalised sameness, favouring landscapes with distinct character—eccentric, expressive, and often unexpected.

Trained in modernist rigor but shaped by raw Californian conditions, Lord and Wyllie approach each site as active collaborators. They resist prepackaged solutions, favoring an ongoing dialogue with local ecologies, cultures, and communities. Across continents—from New Zealand to Mexico, from Icelandic geothermal sites to Californian fire zones—their work explores how precision and play, control and uncertainty, can coexist in the landscape.

At the core of the studio’s vision is not a desire to stand out, but a commitment to tuning in: to what is already there, to what might be forgotten, and to what can still be reimagined.

We speak with the Surfacedesign founding partners, James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie.

Your landscapes are bold. There is “no reservation” – if it’s a business centre, it’s a business centre, if it’s a resort, it’s a resort, if it’s a natural park, it’s a natural park – you go lush with strong expression of design principles. You say in your book SURFACEDESIGN: Material Landscapes, that your designs are autonomous. Perhaps your designs would be best described as “landscapes with a character”, eccentric too.

We never think of boldness as something we try to force—it’s more a result of being clear about what we want to express. That clarity—whether through palette, structure, or sequence—isn’t about spectacle, but about shaping landscapes to operate in a way that feels right for the place. We’re not afraid to lean into an aesthetic or be expressive, because we’re not designing to hide things. We’re designing to spark imagination.

There’s a lot of sameness in the built environment today—globalized palettes, engineered conventions—and that’s something we push against. The goal is always to create something with character, something that feels specific, local, and intentional. But we’re not working from a checklist of what to avoid. We’re open to reinterpreting things—even materials or ideas that might not have seemed “beautiful” to us at one time. And that openness has expanded the work. We are still influenced by our modernist training and the rigor of our education as landscape architects, but we’re also trying to evolve from it. Before we started working we would say, “We’d never design a garden,” and now here we are, walking through English gardens three times a day, totally humbled and inspired.

What drives us is this ongoing investment in place. The idea that design can respond to site, ecology, culture, and care—and still leave room for play, joy, and transformation.

In Europe, large-scale landscape strokes are rare and public spaces are held back design-wise; the scale of the landscape is smaller. What would you say about the differences between European, Chinese and North American or Australian landscape designs? How do you approach projects in other landscapes?

Working in different places, you start to notice how landscape design is shaped not just by climate, but by structure — the systems that support the work, and the cultural expectations around how things come together. In Europe, there’s often a longer lineage — a tradition where designers are also growers or caretakers, and the work has this kind of built-in intimacy. But that history can also be heavy. There’s a language around what a landscape is “supposed” to look like, and it can feel like you’re working inside a well-established frame.

In California, that frame doesn’t really exist. California feels different. It’s like we’re slowly shedding the European history of garden-making every year and creating a language of our own. The conditions are raw — fire, drought, shifting seasons — and you’re constantly responding. There’s no fixed formula. The landscape teaches you to stay specific, to pay closer attention. That’s shaped our approach over time: we don’t start with a reference, we start with what’s in front of us. That looseness — or maybe that urgency — gives us room to try things. And that mindset travels with us when we work elsewhere.
When we arrive in a new place, we try to tune in to what’s already there. Sometimes that’s a scent, or a material, or a rhythm in how people move through space — something that’s still holding meaning, even if people have stopped noticing it. We’ve learned that being outsiders can help us see what locals may have grown blind to. Those are often the cues we follow — not to preserve them exactly, but to pull them forward in a way that feels honest.

That’s also why collaboration is essential. We don’t show up with a fixed idea or a single solution. We rely on people who know the place more intimately — ecologists, artists, community members — to push the work in directions we couldn’t get to alone. Sometimes the most generative part of a project isn’t what we draw, but what gets revealed through the process of listening and adjusting.

In the end, it’s not about making a statement. It’s about building something that fits — that’s rooted in the land and the culture around it, and that has enough openness to evolve over time. Something that feels specific and alive, and maybe even a little unexpected.

The execution of your projects is meticulous and sharp. It’s planned to the last detail. On the other hand, the projects seem complete from the start. How do you plan for evolving processes? What do you leave undone?

The work might look complete – but it never is; it’s always evolving. Things are meant to evolve in a natural way, and we account for that. I feel like the sharpness you speak of is about precision – we have a deep understanding of what we want to create. For example, there’s a sharp sensibility when it comes to our vision, and we make sure to make space for the process to evolve in a natural way. There are some things we have control over, and some things we don’t, but we’re constantly strategizing for what could happen over time: how the site gets used, how materials wear, how plants grow. Each detail is a reflection of the concept itself.

However, we’re not trying to control everything. I suppose because we know that we need things to evolve naturally, the beauty becomes about the uncertainty, in what people bring to it, and in what we couldn’t have predicted, which is built into the process. A huge part of this, though, is our team. James and I only do a fraction of the work. I’d say the rigor of our practice comes from the diversity of our studio. Landscape architecture is one of those funny places where you have a lot of different backgrounds, so we lean on people’s past lives from environmental science, art, music, even history, or horticulture to feed into the feedback loop of making and evolving. It’s not about overdesigning. It’s about understanding where you are and responding very clearly, very honestly, and with intention.

Have your interests changed since you opened the office? What made you wish to distinguish yourself from the rest, what was missing then, and what do you think is missing now?

From the start, we didn’t set out with a clear agenda or roadmap—we simply wanted to pursue work that excited us, and that felt more energetic and fresh than what we had experienced in previous offices. We weren’t trying to fill a gap in the profession so much as follow our curiosity. Over time, our interests have naturally evolved, shaped by each project and by our desire to keep learning. We’ve always seen ourselves as slow builders—like turtles, accumulating knowledge with each opportunity. One major turning point was the Museum of Steel in Monterrey, Mexico, where the constraints of a limited budget forced us to be inventive. We reused materials from the site—concrete remnants, steel scraps, even fused raw materials—as both practical elements and narrative tools. It wasn’t a conscious shift toward reuse at the time, but rather a response rooted in necessity, curiosity, and a belief that materials carry meaning. Looking back, we realize how formative that was. We were also shaped by cultural references from our youth—for Roderick, growing up around experimental art scenes in 1980s San Francisco, where it always seemed natural to embrace rawness, reuse, and imperfection—which made us question why landscape architecture had become so precious and unadventurous. For us, reusing materials never felt radical, just intuitive. What’s important is getting things built in a meaningful way, and that often means challenging conventions and embracing what’s already in front of us.

What kind of project would be your wildest dream to do? 

In many ways, our dream projects already exist in the studios we teach – we call them our “fantasy projects,” which function as testing grounds for the kinds of imaginative, site-specific work we’d love to pursue professionally. For instance, we recently led a studio in Iceland centered on geothermal bathing environments that not only celebrate natural energy but could also help advance its adoption. These fantasy projects tend to situate themselves in remote, ecologically significant, and often extreme landscapes—places like Iceland or Joshua Tree—where we explore themes of environmental adaptation, art, and immersion. Our ideal commissions would follow a similar trajectory: designing a geothermal bath, an artist residency in a desert cave, or a sculptural landscape that engages fire ecology in California. We’re interested in projects that blend ecological urgency with artistic and sensory richness—projects that challenge expectations and invite us, and our clients, to reimagine our relationship with place.