PRAIRIEFORM

{BIO}

John Benjamin Kamp is a landscape designer, urban planner, and urban designer. He holds a master's degree in urban planning and design from UCLA, a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, and has an extensive background in ecology and has worked as a city planner and designer for the City of Los Angeles. He grew up in Minnesota and has spent extensive time in both Los Angeles and Mexico. His varied educational background and his extensive traveling have helped him to formulate a unique approach to landscape design that emphasizes movement, form, and change.

Having grown up in and around the northern prairie, he is particularly interested in tall and short grasses and how they can provide a sense of both movement and stability within the landscape. Additionally, he is interested in the American front yard and how it can be modified into both an aesthetic and functional space, and how it can be transformed from a space of limited ecological diversity into a space that teems with life. In considering the entire site and not simply the backyard, he is able to create landscapes that contain a cohesive design narrative on an impressive scale.

Aside from the array of landscapes he has designed for a diverse clientele, Mr. Kamp has lectured extensively on issues surrounding front yards, circumstantial urbanism, and the role culture and immigration have played in the evolving urban form of the United States. These studies have further shaped and helped hone his design approach into one that is at once rustic, formal, and truly modern.