Photo by Carol Betsch

Books

Nature, Design, and Health
Explorations of a Landscape Architect

David Kamp

Nature, Design, and Health  Cover Image

About the Author


David Kamp

David Kamp, FASLA, is the founding principal of Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, PC. His forty-year career involving practice, teaching, writing, and advocacy has been dedicated to promoting health through design with nature. A Harvard Loeb Fellow, MacDowell Colony Fellow, and member of the National Academy of Design, Kamp has been internationally recognized through awards, publications, and documentaries. 

Nature, Design, and Health
Explorations of a Landscape Architect

David Kamp

Library of American Landscape History

ISBN: 978-1-952620-39-3 256 pages | 8.5 x 10 inches
$40.00 | Cloth Forthcoming: 06/14/2023
158 color and b&w photos and drawings

The renowned landscape architect David Kamp, FASLA, traces the first stirrings of his interest in landscape to his childhood in rural North Carolina. Kamp maintained his passion for nature through his architectural studies at the University of Virginia, and these in turn helped prepare him for his first design project, a landscape for Australia’s new Parliament House in Canberra.

In the mid-1990s, Kamp volunteered to design one of the first gardens created specifically for individuals with HIV/AIDS, the Joel Schnaper Memorial Garden at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem. The experience proved life-altering, and Kamp resolved to dedicate his practice to exploring the web of relationships connecting design, nature, and health.

In this work, Kamp has sought to put people in touch with nature, regardless of their capabilities—from children with autism spectrum disorder to elders with cognitive and physical challenges.  He has also explored these ideas in the larger realm, where his plans have revitalized schools, brownfields, parks, and urban waterfronts. By putting personal health on a continuum with environmental health, Kamp has demonstrated that design can help make communities more vibrant, resilient, and equitable.

In Nature, Design, and Health, Kamp chronicles his remarkable artistic journey through the stories of his projects for hospitals, cancer centers, elder communities, educational campuses, and other landscapes dedicated to health and well-being. Kamp’s belief in the power of nature to sustain and connect is summed up in his firm’s name—Dirtworks.

About the Author


David Kamp

David Kamp, FASLA, is the founding principal of Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, PC. His forty-year career involving practice, teaching, writing, and advocacy has been dedicated to promoting health through design with nature. A Harvard Loeb Fellow, MacDowell Colony Fellow, and member of the National Academy of Design, Kamp has been internationally recognized through awards, publications, and documentaries.