Professor Emerita Clare Cooper Marcus receives Lifetime Achievement Award
August 28, 2019
Clare Cooper Marcus, Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design, has been chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Center for Health Design. The award celebrates the contributions of an individual over their entire career.
With more than 50 years’ experience, Cooper Marcus is internationally recognized for her pioneering research on the social and psychological implications of design, particularly urban open space, affordable housing, outdoor space in healthcare, and environments for children and the elderly.
Cooper Marcus has been the leading force behind the movement to create therapeutic gardens and landscapes, and her work has been recognized with numerous awards. She has been instrumental in putting gardens “on the map” internationally in the design of medical communities as key components of healthcare environments. As the principal of Healing Landscapes, Cooper Marcus researches and consults with numerous clients on the effectiveness of restorative landscapes in healthcare settings.
She is the author of seven books and numerous publications. Among them, she has published two books on therapeutic landscapes: Healing Gardens (1999, co-authored with Marni Barnes, MLA ’95), and Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces (2014, co-authored with Naomi Sachs, MLA ’99). Both texts are primary resources in the field and continue to be used by professional designers and students nationally and internationally.
As a faculty member at CED, where she taught for many years, Cooper Marcus incorporated her research into her design studios. In one course, taught in 2006, landscape architecture students produced proposed designs for a garden at a hospice at the Men’s Correctional Facility in Vacaville, CA. After a long period of meetings, fundraising, and politics, the garden was eventually opened in the summer of 2018, with final design by Chris Kent (MLA ‘93) of PGA Designs, Oakland.
“Clare’s vision and creativity have linked two important and disparate fields; landscape design and environmental psychology, and it is this interdisciplinary approach that makes her a true pioneer and international leader in the field,” stated Debra Levin, president and CEO of the Center for Health Design.
“An innovator and keen observer of how spaces are actually used, who creates ideas, gathers the research to support the benefits of evidence-based design and then disseminates her findings to the academic and design communities, Clare has had a tremendous influence, world-wide, on the creation of humane and supportive environments.”
Cooper Marcus is an alum of CED (MCP ’66) and arrived in the U.S. as an immigrant in 1961.
The Healthcare Design Expo & Conference will take place at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans from November 2-5, 2019. Cooper Marcus will officially accept the award at the keynote presentation on Monday, November 4, 2019.