Sarah Cowles is the Director of Ruderal, based in Tbilisi. Ruderal is a landscape architecture and planning studio focused on the emerging development markets in the Caucasus region.
For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of culture and ecology. She leads multidisciplinary teams to realize complex landscape-focused projects in international contexts. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard. As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
Arsenal Oasis is a unique project located in Tbilisi Georgia. It was designed for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale by an urban design and research studio Ruderal. In this video, the designer Sarah Cowles explains the forces and circumstances that shaped the project. The LILA 2021 jury wrote: Arsenal Oasis is an experimental project that deals […]
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