2024 Class of Fellows, Cody Klein, FASLA, Boston Chapter

OJB Landscape Architecture, Boston, MA
by OJB Landscape Architecture

x

Cody Klein's design work at OJB is changing how we look at corporate workplace health and wellness, offering naturalistic, beautiful ways to solve environmental challenges with green infrastructure. Partnering with well-known companies, Klein creates visible models of how landscape architecture advances climate resilience, blurring boundaries between the public and private realms. With his passion, relentless optimism, limitless creativity, and commitment to a highly collaborative process, Klein is addressing the challenge that many companies face: corporate landscape as an adjunct to wellness and employee health and retention. For the Ford Motor Company World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, Klein turned a challenging site into a regenerative meadow ecosystem and solved a flood issue with a green infrastructure solution of two detention ponds. He also developed a reforestation plan with botanical stands of native trees and a layered naturalistic planting palette that balances pollinators, wildlife, and public use. At American Airlines, Klein replanned the 258-acre Texas landscape as a restorative, seasonally appropriate, regionally accurate series of outdoor spaces, including 81 acres of amenity space with work-enabled courtyards, active recreation areas, woodland trail systems, and regional multi-use connection paths. In Oklahoma City, Klein's work restitched the urban fabric together with a streetscape redesign and the redesign of public spaces around Devon Energy Headquarters and downtown Myriad Botanical Gardens. The generously shaded and safe streets are shared by pedestrians, cyclists, and cars and a connected network of parks and open spaces.

As seen in LASN magazine, September 2024.