Biography of Alan Ward
Alan Ward is a planner, designer and photographer, and a principal at Sasaki, a Boston-based multi-disciplinary design firm. He has photographed the built environment for nearly 50 years, initially as an architectural photographer, then focusing on the photography of designed landscapes for over four decades. He is the author and photographer of the award-winning 1998 book American Designed Landscapes: A Photographic Interpretation. His photographs have appeared in over 200 other books, magazines, and journals. Early in his career he was the photographer for several influential exhibitions featuring significant works of landscape architecture including Dan Kiley: “Classicist in the Modern Landscape” and “Built Landscapes: Gardens of the Northeast.” The exhibition "Luminous Landscapes: Photographs by Alan Ward" was at the National Building Museum in 2016.
He has led teams at Sasaki on internationally significant planning and design projects including the rehabilitation of the landscape at the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C., landscapes at new U.S. Embassies in Montenegro, The Hague, Helsinki and Beirut, and the landscape for the renovation and expansion of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. His planning and landscape design work for real estate developers incudes over thirty years at Reston Town Center from the initial phase to the recently opened expansion at a new Metro Station. He is currently working on Firefly, an eleven-million-square-foot mixed-use development in Frisco, TX with a 30-acre park and Gas Worx, a 5.5-million-square-foot mixed-use district in historic Ybor City, Tampa, FL.
Trained as both an architect at the University of Cincinnati, and a landscape architect at Harvard University, Alan has taught design in both fields - at Ball State University and Harvard University, where he also taught a seminar on the relationship between photography and design. He has written articles on mixed-use development, landscape design, and photography in professional journals including Landscape Architecture, Land Forum, Urban Land Magazine and View Camera. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and was a Visiting Artist in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2002 and 2006.
