Gloria Lau

Gloria Lau is a landscape architect, urban planner, and visual artist with a focus on place-based design and built environment storytelling. Her design practice is grounded in socially engaged, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary processes. She is particularly interested in how design and planning manifests through participatory methods, materials and care, and the everydays. Her personal research explores design as a cultural practice at the confluence of spatial justice, infrastructure, and science, and examines the spectrum of how we as a society experience, perceive, and construct landscapes. Her current research projects tackle the entangled histories of colonial botany, vernacular in communities of color, traces of (in)voluntary movements, and public memories/narratives.  

Gloria is the founder of Studio Site and Seek, an art-based research design studio that focuses on spatial design, print, identity, and experiential work. Prior to initiating her own practice, she has fourteen years of experience in offices in New York and California, primarily on public space, resilient infrastructure, and community design projects. As a visual artist, she is the co-founder of Laudi CoLab, an art collaborative that documents and illustrates undervalued stories in the built environment. With a firm belief that designers should also be activists and co-conspirators, Gloria continues to partner with socially engaged and equity-focused organizations as designer, advisor, facilitator, and curator. She is currently on the Advisory Council of New City Parks and a participant in ASLA’s Diversity Summit program. 

Selected Publications