EDAW

EDAW was an international landscape architecture, urban and environmental design firm that operated from 1939 until 2009. Starting in San Francisco, the firm grew to become the most commercially successful and well-known landscape architecture and urbanism firm in the world, which at its peak had 32 offices worldwide. EDAW lead many landscape architecture, land planning and master planning projects, developing a reputation as an early innovator in sustainable urban development and multidisciplinary design.

EDAW is an acronym derived from Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams, the names of four of the firm’s original partners: Garrett Eckbo, Edward Williams, Francis Dean and Don Austin. A limited partnership, the firm was bought by the American engineering conglomerate AECOM in 2005, ceasing to exist as a standalone practice in 2009 when it was fully integrated into the company.

EDAW traces its origins to the studio founded by Eckbo and Williams in San Francisco in 1939 to practice landscape architecture and urban design. The practice brought together the design of Eckbo’s avant-garde, Modernist landscape architecture and Williams’ concern for conservation and land management. By 1964, joined by Dean and Austin and Robert Royston, the partners took on a number of important commissions across California and beyond. Projects such as the California Urban Metropolitan Space Plan, commissioned in 1962, were radical in their environmental foresight. Under the tutelage of Eckbo, the practice was responsible for some important modernist works of urban landscape architecture including Tucson Community Center and Fulton Mall (Fresno).

It was in the 1960s where the firm expanded its repertoire into resort and leisure design with its first resort project, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawai’i; the firm's international portfolio began with projects in Asia such as Lodi Gardens in New Delhi, India. By the early 1970s, EDAW entered into the environmental planning field with a major commission with the Californian utility Pacific Gas & Electric and undertook a land use review for the State of Hawaii in 1970. In 1973, the firm – then called Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams – adopted the name EDAW.

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