Chloe Hawkins

Education

BFA, Oberlin College 2003; MLA, University of Virginia 2010

Biography

Chloe Hawkins is the founder and Director of Cohort, a landscape architecture practice that works in places where people strive to be in community with each other and with the lands where they live. Chloe is also Lecturer at the University of Virginia, and a practicing visual artist. Chloe is a relationship builder, with a strong belief that impactful and healthy designs emerge from the communities that make places unique - people, plants and land and their interplay with their deep histories and imagined futures. She aims to foster collective design processes where people are able to both dialog and get their hands dirty. 

Chloe has worked for multiple internationally renowned design firms including D.I.R.T. studio, Siteworks Studio and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. From her previous practices, she carries into Cohort an honoring of site history as a basis for design, and years of experience with interdisciplinary teams on design planning through construction to freely imagine creative responses to challenging problems. 
Chloe has designed landscapes ranging from immersive gardens in campus and home landscapes, new and adapted public parks in the American South and New Zealand, community spaces within post-industrial wildlands and botanical gardens that aim to inspire environmental stewardship through the experience of the beauty of native plants. 

As a designer and teacher, she draws on her background in visual arts and sculpture to use drawings and full-scale mock-ups as essential tools for sparking connection, imagination and collaborative space-making. Her design studios, foundation courses and electives focus on embodied space as a homebase for design, the craft of landscape detailing and approaches to forming places and relationships with plants. She approaches and teaches drawing - across scales and media - as a tool to practice imagining things that don’t exist, communicate with others, and develop designs to be implemented.

On any given early morning Chloe can be found in her garden, staring at tiny movements of plants and light, digging, moving, and experimenting, remembering loved ones in the family gardens and floodplain forests of her childhood in Kentucky and imagining how things might appear differently tomorrow.