Waggonner & Ball is an internationally recognized firm specializing in resilience planning, landscape architecture, and architecture. The firm's roots are in historic preservation, which inspires them to seek creative and adaptive solutions so that built environments might thrive far into the future. From Dutch Dialogues® - design workshops held in cooperation with the Dutch National Ministries responsible for infrastructure, water management, and spatial planning in the Netherlands - to completed resilience projects, their work centers around sustainable stewardship and a profound respect for water's role in shaping the future of the built environment. Their work necessarily spans a range of scales, from historic building renovations to strategic master plans. Waggonner & Ball creates projects that result in durable, sound investments for their clients, their communities, and our shared ecosystem - an approach they define as Living with Water®. New Orleans - a challenging environment on the front line of climate change, where a holistic approach to design is essential - is both their home and their point of departure.

Gretna City Park; Gretna, LA

Gretna City Park is the first completed pilot project of the Louisiana's Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) program, the urban complement to the state's ambitious Coastal Master Plan. On the surface, passive recreation and native habitats define the park with acres of wildflowers, hundreds of new trees, shade pavilions, piers, and miles of walking paths that ring a series of ponds and lagoons. When it rains, these landscape features provide 6.5 million gallons of stormwater storage. The project, done in collaboration with CARBO Landscape Architecture (CLA, See page 116), also reused all material excavated on-site. The project received AIA New Orleans Honor, ASLA Louisiana Honor, APA Louisiana: Great Places in Louisiana, ASLA Louisiana President's Award of Excellence, and ASLA Louisiana Green Design awards. PHOTO CREDIT: WAGGONNER & BALL

 


Mirabeau Water Garden; New Orleans, LA

On the site of a former convent destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, the Mirabeau Water Garden will become a campus for water research and demonstrate best practices for urban water management in the city's most vulnerable neighborhoods. The site is a low-lying, 25-acre parcel that will realize initial design concepts from the Dutch Dialogues® New Orleans and Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. Waggonner & Ball worked with CLA on a combination of conventional engineering and landscape features that will divert stormwater, store and clean the water as it flows through the landscape, and take advantage of a unique subsurface sand formation for groundwater infiltration. The range of site design features will serve as educational and recreational amenities. PHOTO CREDIT: WAGGONNER & BALL





Mandeville Parks Master Plan; Mandeville, LA

In response to recent growth and development pressure, this park seeks to strengthen Mandeville's identity as a place of natural beauty by prioritizing a nature-based approach to park design and maintenance, increasing multimodal connectivity between parks to improve safety and equitable access, and reconnecting the city's natural bayous to the lakefront. This plan builds on the city of Mandeville's investments in Resilience and Pedestrian & Bicycle Plans and has catalyzed the development of three new city parks currently under design, also receiving an AIA New Orleans Merit Award and an AIA Louisiana Merit Award. PHOTO CREDIT: WAGGONNER & BALL





Resilient Bridgeport; Bridgeport, CT

Following Superstorm Sandy, Waggonner & Ball led a multidisciplinary team to create a model for living and working along the coastline by addressing flooding caused by rainfall and storm surge. Prioritized designs restore the environment, strengthen connectivity, enhance the urban and regional economy, reduce long-term risk, restore the primacy of the city's coast and waterways, and stimulate downtown as a central part of the city's identity. The team is currently working in Bridgeport's South End to balance redevelopment while protecting the area's assets. To date, the project includes a stormwater park, a coastal defense system, interior stormwater infrastructure improvements, street raising, and re-envisioning the entry to the historic, Olmsted-designed Seaside Park. PHOTO CREDIT: WAGGONNER & BALL

As seen in LASN magazine, October 2025.