Charles Morris Anderson

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Charles Morris Anderson is principal of Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture, founded in 1994 in Seattle. Charles Anderson has been a practicing landscape architect for over 20 years, crafting numerous award-winning projects that are recognized for their ability to integrate art, nature and community needs. His firm grounding in horticulture forms the basis for an evolving body of work that highlights the transformative processes of ecological systems: creating socially-relevant spaces and galvanizing the energy of others to advocate for parks, plazas and open space within communities.

His work has ranged from high-profile commissions at the Arthur Ross Terrace at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park to smaller scale, yet no less important, neighborhood parks and urban ecological restorations. Across this range of scopes, budgets and complexities, his projects consistently engage the tensions between artworks and the ordering processes of nature. Each project, in its own way, reveals the essence of natural processes, creating the potential for ecological fertility and aesthetic sublimation while cultivating a spirited engagement with place. As Gavin Keeney noted in his book On the Nature of Things, “[Charles Anderson’s] work exhibits not a romanticizing of natural orders, but a perhaps post-romantic realism given to rewriting and recoding fallen environments…. As public spaces, they function as places of repose and serenity. But they also have an implicit heuristic value – an educative edge – that belies their functional intention.”