Capturing the ephemeral
I am a maker of spaces. As a designer, I work in a variety of scales from public works to private gardens, to create environments that inspire, solace, and heal. As a podcaster, I amplify the voices of women who lead, transform, and shift the narrative about what women can and should do. With these two skills, I examine what is largely untapped: the intersection of spatial and aural design.
In a world that is forgetting how to listen and privileges the visual, I am on a mission to elevate sound as a medium for peace, comfort, and safety in our built environments.
Our sense of hearing is often overlooked, but sound is critical. It’s our first sense in our mothers’ wombs — the sound of our mother’s voice. Humans can hear farther than they can see. Nature, in fact, privileges sound.
My background is in Landscape Architecture and Design Studies from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Visual Arts from Brown University. In addition to my 25 years in the creative fields, I also fly small planes, parent growing children, run in the mountains, play the fiddle, and swim in open water.
My most recent work focuses on how sound design can create spaces for transformation and healing.
2023 Lausanne, Switzerland
Biography
Sylvia’s love of art and design and mobility flourished in her impressionable 20s. She holds a Visual Arts from Brown University, and a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Design Studies from the Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. During these years, she studied one year at Rhode Island School of Design, the Pacific Northwest College of Art and an impressionable two terms in southern France at L’Ecole des Arts in Lacoste. The peripatetic nature of these years fed a deep curiosity of places and people and the spaces that define them. It led to work and design research in mountain cities: Bariloche, Kyoto, Bilbao, Lausanne and Palmer, Alaska, and others, where the landscape plays a role in the character of the place and spirit of the people.
At every scale, Sylvia’s approach to design draws from an understanding of the cultural formation of landscapes and the reciprocal influence of landscape on culture. Sylvia’s approach to design that values public places and serenity designed in everyday spaces attracted her to work with nonprofits like the Arnold Arboretum and the Nature Conservancy. At the core of all her art and design is a curiosity and reverence toward the environment and people that create the character of a place.