Lifted by Design: Advancing Landscape Architecture Through Community-Centered Solutions

Landscape architecture shapes environments to solve real-world challenges, strengthen connections between people, and build resilience in the fabric of our communities. At its best, the discipline brings together ecology, engineering, and imagination to transform outdoor spaces into living systems. Places where learning, play, and gathering feel as natural as the landscape itself.

What Makes Exceptional Landscape Architecture?

ISG’s practice centers on designing spaces that are both purposeful and inspiring. Weaving together art, science, and story, our teams create landscapes that serve everyday needs while sparking a sense of possibility. Some of our project types include:

• Nature-Based Play Environments–Outdoor spaces that invite exploration, curiosity, and joy, rooted in natural forms and materials.
• Wetlands + Stormwater Infrastructure–Functional landscapes that manage water, restore ecosystems, and reveal the quiet beauty of natural systems at work.
• Campus Plazas + Learning Landscapes–Outdoor classrooms and plazas that blur the line between built environment and living laboratory.
• Urban Placemaking + Civic Corridors–Public spaces designed at a human scale, where everyday routines become opportunities for connection.
• Parks + Recreation Facilities–Landscapes that encourage movement, wellness, and belonging across generations.
• Integrated Green Infrastructure–Design solutions, like green roofs and bioswales, that quietly stitch sustainability into the rhythms of daily life.

ISG’s Strength: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation

ISG’s landscape architecture practice thrives because it is supported by a broader network of planners, engineers, architects, and environmental scientists. With a recent acquisition of Lift Environmental Design, our collaboration allows us to design as part of an all-inclusive vision for community.

With our growing presence in Durham, ISG is bringing our multidisciplinary expertise closer to schools, municipalities, universities, and neighborhoods across North Carolina. The office is a hub for collaboration, a space to bring people together to shape environments that are resilient, connected, and deeply rooted in community identity.

Why Landscape Architecture Matters

Landscape architecture has always been about more than lines on paper. It is about the lives lived between those lines—the memories made on a playground, the relief of shade along a city street, the quiet renewal found in a restored wetland. By integrating environmental systems with human experience, the discipline offers both utility and inspiration.

With ISG’s expanded team and new Durham footprint, we are poised to design and elevate landscapes that hold a chance to uplift: people, place, and planet.