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EnlargeBen Falk plots out long-term living landscapes, not turf patches | Photograph by Ben Stechschulte

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Under The Sea

Whole Systems Design transforms landscapes into low-cost, productive spaces. Will your corporate campus be next?

As the sky purples over a terraced northern Vermont hillside, a caretaker paints young plum trees at Teal Farm with slaughterhouse blood. This ritual is not cause for alarm, just nontoxic deer control. It's a sign of how Teal Farm, 1,300 acres of nut pines, sugar maples, berry patches, and plum trees, represents the forefront of landscape design. Its creator, Ben Falk, develops properties that integrate buildings, are aeshetically attractive, grow food, respond to the local climate, and save money by being low maintenance, making them the epitome of putting land to productive use and a leap beyond merely preserving trees, the current vogue in sustainable landcaping. If Falk and his firm, Whole Systems Design (WSD), have their way, you'll soon be seeing a fruitful scene like this one out the windows of your corporate headquarters.

Falk, 30, is realizing his vision on educational campuses and nonprofit-owned land such as Teal Farm (run by the LivingFuture foundation) with the goal of one day seeing a majority of state and privately owned land converted to productive use. (The corporate-campus trend evolved from copying universities.) Falk has landed commissions at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont and has taught his approach at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum and the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. At Lawrenceville School, a private prep school near Princeton, New Jersey, WSD created a design for a sloping lawn to be transformed into a garden that contributes fruits and vegetables to the dining hall. Its outdoor classroom and study space will provide shelter in three seasons for literature seminars. "Ben is elegant in the way that he's able to push the envelope beyond sustainability to regenerative design and resilience," says Josh Hahn, a sustainability consultant for private schools, who brought in WSD to do the work at Lawrenceville.

Falk's process begins with a collaboration with clients on a detailed, long-range master plan, which combines mission statements, photos, drawings, and graphs -- even menus. "The master plan helped us articulate key elements of our institutional memory," says client Jack Kenworthy, who engaged WSD to help develop the design for an 18-acre property in the Bahamas that comprises a hands-on marine-ecology high-school semester program, a research center for marine science and sustainable development, and a for-profit renewable energy company. "The plan also helps us communicate to the larger world. It shows, graphically and with text, the deep linkages between our activities, people, educational curriculum, buildings, and spaces." Education is a driving goal of everything WSD does, including Teal Farm, its largest client project to date. Designed and built for a total cost of $6 million, Teal Farm is a prototype for sustainable, fossil-fuel-free energy consumption and food production. Falk gave Fast Company a tour, showing off such features as a constructed waterfall and nitrogen-fixing "green manure" plants, such as vetch, set at the base of nut pines.