Beka Sturges

In her design of landscapes for institutions and the public, Beka pursues the interplay between communities and their environments as a source of history, identity, and resilience. After completing work as project manager for the final phase of The Clark Art Institute, she opened Reed Hilderbrand’s New Haven office in 2015. Beka has steadily grown a staff and design culture with the capacity to sustain projects in the private and public sector, from the latest phase of Connecticut’s Resilient Bridgeport Plan to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe to a major expansion at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley. In collaboration with communities in New Haven, she initiated the vision plan and implementation of the first phase of Mill River Trail, a 4-acre linear park running through the center of the city. Current work under her leadership includes the adaptation of Seaside Park to meet the flood protection goals of the Resilient Bridgeport project, the new Farrand House at Washington D.c.‘s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, and the renewal of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with SOM/Annabelle Selldorf.

A committed educator, Beka is a Critic at Yale School of Architecture. She has recently lectured on the career of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the role of history in design, the spirit of residential landscape architecture, and the transformative experiences of art and place at The New York Botanic Garden and Cleveland Garden Club as well as at the University of Rhode Island, Smith College, and the American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Meeting.

Beka earned her BA in English from Sarah Lawrence College and began work toward a PhD in English Literature at Princeton University. After teaching in New York City for several years, Beka found landscape architecture, drawn to the phenomena of movement and change within landscapes. After graduating from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she joined Reed Hilderbrand in 2005. Beka is a compulsive reader and likes to hike, garden, and draw in her spare time.