Mary Vélez

Landscape Designer

Mary has an innate desire to tell stories and build connections between people and the living things around them, a passion which led her to landscape architecture. Growing up on a farm with a lifelong love for reading, writing, and drawing, she has always been captivated by the small moments of beauty and wonder that inspire appreciation of the natural world—and she seeks to recreate these moments through the design of responsive and resilient public spaces. Mary joins Starr Whitehouse from Stimson Studio with two years of experience in private, institutional, and public planning and design. She brings a well-balanced intuitive and analytical approach informed by her background in environmental ethics. In graduate school, her research focused on the tools that landscape architects use to learn about sites and communicate the myriad histories, presents, and potential futures of a place. She develops these layers into graphic and narrative materials that convey the agency of sites and systems to stakeholders, clients, and design teams. Mary holds a Master’s of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies from Colgate University, and has taught as a Lecturer at the University of Virginia MLA program. Her work has been exhibited at the University of Virginia, the Smithsonian, the Anchorage Museum, and has been published in Lunch journal.

Representative Projects:

Bayard Cutting Arboretum, Great River, NY
Halletts Point Esplanade, Queens, New York
Southwest Park, Hoboken, NJ
Hudson Public Square Park, Hudson, NY
East Shore Shoreline Parks Plan, Staten Island, NY
Manhattan Greenway Harlem River, New York, New York
Vine Street Waterfront Development, Philadelphia, PA
Nissequogue River State Park Master Plan, Kings Park, NY
Brookline Residence Garden, Brookline, MA*
Unified Vision for Downtown Providence, Providence, RI*
Sapphire Farm, Sapphire, NC*
Tivoli Preserve, Albany, New York*
Lower Don Lands Master Plan, Toronto, Canada*
A Gathering Place for Tulsa, Tulsa, OK*

*Projects completed before joining Starr Whitehouse