Landscape architects and 2025 National Design Award winners TERREMOTO discuss their newly released principles of radical gardening, a practice-wide commitment to creating “omni-positive” gardens that are deeply empathetic, ecologically restorative, and thoughtfully designed to support all living things at every scale.

TERREMOTO is a landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and Berkeley, California founded in 2012 with the intention of building gardens and landscapes that were explorations and investigations into ideas and culture. They create site-specific landscapes that respond to client needs while challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials, and formal conventions. Spanning projects of diverse scales and typologies, TERREMOTO’s portfolio reflects a belief that gardens can respond to the needs of all, and that this expansiveness gives rise to novel forms of beauty.

Kasey Toomey and Story Wiggins from TERREMOTO is joined by Billy Fleming, interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and design, for a conversation about how they translate their values into practice through landscapes that embrace process-based stewardship, closed-loop systems, and care for both human and non-human communities. Together, they will explore how gardens can serve as powerful tools for imagining a radical future built and tended with love.

More about National Design Awards: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/national-design-awards/

Biographies:

Kasey Toomey is a landscape architect and principal at TERREMOTO, where he co-leads the studio’s Bay Area practice. His work is shaped by an interest in where materials come from, local ecologies, and how much—or how little—is needed to make a place meaningful. Trained in landscape architecture and sculpture, he works across gardens, public spaces, and objects with a focus on hyperlocal plants and materials. He values resourcefulness over refinement and collaboration with the people who build and care for gardens. Kasey believes in non-human centric design solutions and iteration. He received a BSLA with Distinction in Research from Cornell University and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Story Wiggins is landscape architect with a background in historic preservation and land stewardship. As a principal at TERREMOTO, she leads projects of various scales and types, including residential, commercial, institutional, and agricultural. Through her intuitive approach to design, she aims to honor the land, exercise restraint, and allow for evolution through stewardship. Her recent work has explored design illegibility within the cultural landscape of the Sea Ranch, and bioregional and cultural specificity with Ohlone leaders at the mak-warép Land Conservancy. She has also led TERREMOTO’s ‘Land and Labor’ internal working group, which advocates for the building and gardening trades and the tradespeople that make design tangible. Story received an MLA from UC Berkeley and a BA in Historic Preservation and French from the College of Charleston.

Billy Fleming (moderator) is an interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and design. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Fleming was the inaugural Wilks Family Director and founder of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an urban policy advisor to the Obama administration. He is the author of Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (2026) and coeditor of Design with Nature Now (2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (2021).