Alisa Blatter

Alisa Blatter is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches planting design. She is also a landscape designer at Arbolope Studio, where she provides ecological site and contextual analysis, planting design, and construction administration in botanic garden, campus, commercial, and park settings.

Her work in practice and in the studio explores the interface of native plants and cultural typologies of built form — from the spontaneous vegetation of urban infrastructural landscapes to highly-legible, culturally-patterned plantings in public-facing project areas — as a layered zone of cultural interpretation and experience.

Enlisting other platforms, she engages landscape-based practices to investigate relationships among individuals, communities, and ecologies, including: the narrative geography of the American Bottom floodplain (“The American Bottom Gazette” with Jennifer Colten, Matthew Fluharty, and Jesse Vogler); interpretation of prairie ecological function (Danforth Plant Science Center prairie signage, for Christner Architects, in Creve Coeur, Mo.; Pilot Plot rain garden signage, for Studio Land Arts in G-CADD, Granite City, Ill.); a maintenance process-based interpretive landscape (Tyson Environmental Learning Patch, with Micah Stanek, in progress, for Tyson Research Center in Eureka, Mo.); and plant research typified as art installation (Glade Test Plot Garden, with Micah Stanek, unbuilt).

She was a collaborator in the One Tree Project studio, which won the 2018 National ASLA Award of Excellence for Student Collaboration. She is co-author of the ensuing article, “Attending to Unbuilding,” with instructors Jesse Vogler and Ken Botnick, published in fall 2022 in the Journal of Architectural Education, which received the 2024 JAE Design Essay Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.