Kenneth Kay

Biography: Ken Kay, FASLA, is a landscape architect and urban designer with more than 30 years of experience running his own office in San Francisco. Throughout his career, Ken has focused on creating significant visionary concepts and detail drawings for a large range and scale of complex planning and design projects, both locally and abroad. Before founding Ken Kay Associates in San Francisco in 1983, He worked as a partner with two eminent landscape architects and planners: Charles Currier, from 1969 to 1975 in the firm of CR3 Inc. in Avon, Connecticut; and with Garrett Eckbo at EckboKay Associates in San Francisco, from 1975 to 1983. Whether working on urban centers, city neighborhoods, waterfronts, workplaces, or recreating suburbs, Ken lays the groundwork for compact, vital sustainable communities that respect the natural environment and link it into the urbanism of the place on a regional and local scale. Ken has also been an early advocate for reclaiming urban waterfronts, recycling leftover land including brown and gray field sites and conserving water within our cities and towns. Though ambitious, his planning and designs enjoy an excellent reputation for getting built within the context of a range of sustainable solutions, project budgets and schedules. His concepts are substantially approved in public hearings and approvals are gained through successful outcomes from community participation and governing bodies of both the public and private sectors that understand and promote Smart Growth principles. Ken has served for three decades as an urban design advisor to many Cities, Foundations, Local Government Commissions, Developers and Corporate Clients on major projects in the USA and Internationally. Ken is one of the original members of the Congress for the New Urbanism formed in 1993; he also co-chaired CNU’s first Environmental Task Force from 1994 to 1998. In 2006, the American Society of Landscape Architects honored Ken with a Fellowship. Ken’s