James "Jim" Richards
BLA 1978
Landscape Architecture
James “Jim” Richards is a national award-winning designer, author, and educator whose work has creatively spanned landscape architecture, town planning, and urban design for 35 years on projects in 17 states. Richards is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is also a cofounder and principal of TOWNSCAPE, Inc., an urban design consultancy with offices in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, and Vancouver, Canada, where he creates plans for downtown revitalizations, new town centers, urban villages, transportation corridors, and transit-oriented developments. Richards serves on the Board of Directors and as a blog correspondent for Urban Sketchers, an international nonprofit organization that teaches and promotes on-location sketching across disciplines and around the globe. His book, Freehand Drawing and Discovery: Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers (Wiley, 2013), won an ASLA Honor Award in 2014. Richards is also a recipient of the ASLA Bradford Williams Medal. Richards received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from LSU in 1978.