Landscape Architecture by Caroline Lindquist ’12

Caroline Lindquist ’12 is a landscape designer who works on projects that involve urban planning, urban design and landscape architecture for public spaces.

Here, she shares her designs from a few recent projects: the Downtown Master Plan for Little Rock, Arkansas, which reinvisions the city’s urban form to embrace the riverfront; Lincoln Beach on Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, which will restore a historic Black beach and the surrounding ecology; and a coastal climate-adaptation plan in western Florida, which addresses future sea-level rise and storm-surge conditions.

This rendering shows downtown Little Rock’s reimagined La Harpe Boulevard, part of broader work on a master plan that embraces the city’s riverfront.

This rendering presents a view of Little Rock’s reimagined waterfront edge.

This image depicts Lincoln Beach’s future ecological zones and representations of the waterfront conditions along Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana.

This image is part of Lindquist’s work on a 2100 shoreline vision and massing study for an island in western Florida to address future sea-level rise and storm-surge conditions.

At top: With the downtown Raleigh skyline soaring behind her, Caroline Lindquist ’12 works on the Dorothea Dix Park site model built by Michael Van Valkenburg Associates in 2017.

About Caroline Lindquist ’12

After showing up late to Ravenscroft’s Career Day in her junior year, Caroline Lindquist found herself at the table for landscape architecture and urban design. As she flipped through the presenter’s portfolio, she was captivated by their work. She loved how it blended art, science, history and psychology. She was hooked.

As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Lindquist majored in environmental studies with a focus on sustainable community design and urban planning. In these studies, she furthered her love of subjects that her Ravenscroft teachers fostered: her love of art, nurtured by Joyce Fillip; her love of history, discovered through Mary Beth Immediata and Mark Laskowski; her love of science, discovered way back in sixth grade from Mimi Lieberman’s passion.

Her research led her to a dream job in her hometown, working as a park planner on the city’s newly purchased 308-acre site at Dorothea Dix Park in downtown Raleigh. In her first month of work, she sat in on interviews as the country’s top landscape architects — designers of some of the nation’s visionary public spaces, including the Chicago River Walk, the High Line in New York and Brooklyn Bridge Park — pitched their ideas for the site.

In her role as a park planner for the City of Raleigh, Lindquist had the chance to help shape the future of the park while also addressing the site’s challenging history as a former mental health hospital, plantation and indigenous land. The work took her to public engagement events throughout Raleigh, where she learned about the needs of the city’s diverse community. This work taught her what is best summarized in the book “Design For Good”: “Design is the highest form of empathy. It is listening put into action.” She went on to pursue a master's degree in landscape architecture at the University of California - Berkeley, where her research centered on climate adaptation and environmental justice.

Today, Lindquist works in Denver for an interdisciplinary design firm, Sasaki, one of the firms she saw interview for Dorothea Dix Park back in 2017.