Coen+Partners

Happy New Year from all of us at Coen + Partners! As we step into 2025, we’re filled with gratitude for our incredible clients, collaborators, and team who continue to inspire and elevate our work. This year, we’re excited to create more meaningful landscapes that connect people, nature, and design. Here’s to a year of growth, creativity, and shared success. Cheers to 2025!

From all of us at Coen + Partners, we hope you had a wonderful holiday season with your family and loved ones. As we close out another year, we want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to the incredible team members and clients who make everything we do possible. As we reflect on the milestones and achievements of the past year, we’re reminded of the strength that comes from teamwork, mutual respect, and shared goals. We wish everyone a joyful, restful holiday season and a prosperous new year. Here’s to even greater success, collaboration, and growth in the year ahead!

Traditional urban planning, which leans heavily on quantitative data often misses the essence of communities, viewing them through a lens of systems such as mobility, programming, population, density, and zoning. Healing Landscapes advocates for layering in a qualitative perspective - prioritizing community stories that can more meaningfully shape project briefs and ensure a richer understanding of how space can truly reflect and celebrate the vibrant beauty of communities by honoring the past while envisioning a well rooted future.

The Healing Landscapes Research Initiative aims to refine the process of envisioning the future of our public landscapes - leaning into ways that we can co-create with the community. We've been testing ways to bring stories and memories to life through design, and use them as a way to bring people together while we regenerate the earth and improve urban systems and ecologies.

The Healing landscapes Research Initiative defines a process for gathering stories, and redesigning spaces where the collective memory of our city is strong. We start by understanding the stories of people, and how they have moved across the land. This understanding leads us to find creative ways to strengthen natural systems, and ground our work in the history of the place, while looking forward to the needs and desires of the community in the future. These stories told in public open spaces along rivers, roadways and neighborhood centers help us regenerate the earth and connect our communities.

Guided by a mid-century modern aesthetic, the Speckmann house and landscape blend through the use of a refined palette of concrete, steel, wood, and water. This project involved a comprehensive site redesign for an existing modernist house, originally designed in 1956 by a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota. Situated on a highland, the property has distant bluff views to the Minnesota River Valley. The landscape celebrates the simplicity, transparency, and flatness that shaped the building’s mid-century architecture. Within the areas delineated by the walls, trees, and the building exterior, one can move freely from one distinctive space to another, mirroring the flow within this mid-century modern home. Photography: Paul Crosby

The Wood House is located in the iconic Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. Nestled within a busy neighborhood, the property has an unusually spacious lot for the densely populated street, where opportunities for privacy and immersion in nature are elusive. The residence is situated around an interior courtyard that was designed in concert with architectural elements, creating a calming refuge. A custom fence with vertical slats wraps around the property, addressing the client’s desire for privacy and enabling the extension of the living space into the outdoors. The slats are strategically positioned and angled to allow a viewing garden to be seen from the street with varying degrees of visibility to passersby. The courtyard landscape offers a seamless transition from inside to outside and maximizes opportunities for rest, recreation, and introspection. Collaborators: ParkFowler Plus Photography: Christopher Barrett

As technology advances and digital exploration in landscape architecture gains momentum at lightning speed, the design process should still integrate a very fundamental and important step: sketching. The simple act of sketching is integral to how we get a feel for projects, how we can test ideas, and how we can unlock the most potential from our collective thoughts. There is power when we put pen to paper. There is a connection we experience when we let our pencils and markers dance across the page. Sketching is part of our artistic process and a way we create world-class designs. Thank you to our own, Brett Payton for this creative insight!

This #FlashbackFriday, we are reflecting on the KAFD Environs Study for the 1,220 acre area surrounding Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District. Steeped in cultural context, this landscape architect-led master plan created an iconic, world-class model that celebrated the local context, environment, and culture while establishing a vibrant, connected urban public realm. Collaborators: Arup, Guy Nordenson and Associates, Donaldson + Partners

Explore the serene spaces of Westminster Church, where history and contemporary design converge. Our unique copper fence, inspired by the church's historic stained glass windows, creates a delicate dance of light and shadow through its perforations and abstracted symbolism. This dual-layered design not only separates but enhances, offering a moiré effect that shifts with your perspective, enriching both the urban edge and the interior courtyards. The 7,200-square-foot area includes the multifunctional Fellowship Courtyard for community gatherings and the Memorial Columbarium, providing a tranquil urban tribute space for reflection and remembrance. Located just south of downtown Minneapolis, these spaces are a testament to the timeless connection between tradition and modernity. Collaborators: MG McGrath - Architectural Surfaces + Architectural Glass & Glazing and MSR Design (Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd.)