Southern California
Marshall Birnbaum is a landscape designer in Southern California. He sees plants as sculpture. When first approaching a project he thinks to himself: “What will grow together in this soil?” “How much water might these plants need?” “What will be in flower when people are outside?” and “How will this garden look a few years in?” He gives the same attention to the paths as he does to plants, choosing materials for how they perform, where they come from, and who knows best how to build with them. In every garden, he asks himself, “What could this place teach a visitor about their environment?”
He came to it from exhibition design with a focus specifically on land art. Six years working between the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the artists responding to their research, then several seasons of public art in the Coachella Valley, AlUla, the Swiss Alps, and the mountains of Utah, doing design, curation, and wayfinding. A planting plan turned out to be much the same job, just for different reasons. Now he reads about soil, draws plants, walks in the desert and the mountains, and spends most of his time trying to get other people to appreciate nature as if it were a work of art (which it is).
Landscape
Geoponika and ORCA Living
previously landscape designer
an app that teaches people about plants
public programs and botanical spaces, Los Angeles and New York
Land art
Blended Worlds
NASA JPL at the Brand Library, for Getty PST ART
Desert X
exhibition design, identity and wayfinding, Coachella Valley and AlUla
Noor Riyadh
light exhibition, Riyadh
Elevation 1049
exhibition, Gstaad
Powder Mountain Utah
previously director of artist residencies, 2012 to 2018