About

 

Driftless Landscape Architecture, PLLC, is a full-service landscape architecture, arboriculture, and construction management firm operated by designer and educator Jennifer Bolstad. Driftless Landcape Architecture seeks to craft memorable, durable outdoor spaces that pair the dynamic natural environment with the seasonal, episodic, and evolving needs of the people that inhabit these landscapes. Our clients enjoy turnkey services from the intial design vision to seamless representation through the construction of their project.

Jennifer Bolstad spent her childhood on a century farm in the Driftless region of the midwestern United States. The area is named for its pre-glacial condition: the glaciers of the last ice age diverged around some 24,000 square miles, leaving the rugged topography untouched by their drift and retreat. As we approach a post-glacial world condition, accelerated by climate change, unique patterns of resilence are emerging in the driftless region’s hydrological, agricultural, and social systems. Such patterns can guide our approach to landscape architecture: it is a multi-scalar medium well-suited to facing the challenges of social and environmental justice that are inherent in adapting to the early impacts of global climate change.

Driftless is also an ethos: an unwavering commitment to connecting people and nature in ways that improve both.

  • Jennifer Bolstad

    FOUNDER and PRINCIPAL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

    As the founder of Driftless Landscape Architecture, and its predecessor firm, Local Office Landscape Architecture, Jennifer Bolstad has led the design, implementation and construction management of projects ranging in scale from highly-detailed green roofs and residential gardens to framework plans for entire campuses and miles of urban waterfront. Her praxis is complemented by her research and teaching at New York University and Parsons School of Design, as well as her humanitarian efforts in workforce development for the green economy.

    Jennifer Bolstad is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University's Visual and Environmental Studies program and received her Master in Landscape Architecture, with Distinction, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has over twenty years of experience practicing Landscape Architecture and is registered in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

    Ms. Bolstad’s innovation and leadership in equitable design for climate-change-vulnerable communities is underpinned by a thorough understanding of the tectonics of the medium. She has fifteen years of experience in Construction Management of public landscapes, infrastructure, and buildings, and has overseen constructability analysis and costing, implementation, permitting and interagency coordination for hundreds of millions of dollars of construction work for projects and programs throughout the five boroughs of New York City, including the Economic Development Corporation’s East River Waterfront Esplanade, the Department of Parks and Recreation’s “Million Trees” program, and a federally-funded resilient energy initiative on the Rockaway peninsula in coastal Queens. Ms. Bolstad is also a Certified Arborist with a keen interest in the role of urban forestry in mitigating the impacts of climate change.