A landscape architect, researcher, and scholar, he is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. His research advances the design craft of large-scale, multifunctional infrastructures through a synthesis of historical analysis, advanced design tools, and public engagement. Recent design research by his Landscape Morphologies Lab on the Los Angeles River and Owens Lake has been featured in the press and in multiple books and exhibitions. His last book, coauthored with Liat Margolis, and translated into three languages, is Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture (Birkhäuser, 2007), a treatise on landscapes as material performance systems.