Sergio Santana, landscape architect, will present a Max Z. Conrad Lecture at the LSU College of Art & Design at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, January 15, 2020, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103).

Mr. Santana’s involvement with landscape architecture began with an informal visit to Dr. Robert Reich’s office at LSU in the spring of 1971. He mentioned an interest in “architecture” and was immediately welcomed by Dr. Reich to the landscape architecture department. Being from the metropolis of São Paulo, Brazil and living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was a major and drastic change to his life. He experienced one of Dr. Reich’s main premises; “That our quality of life is directly related to the quality of the environment that surrounds us.” During his stay at LSU, he was first introduced to Roberto Burle Marx’s work, an apprenticeship in Roberto’s office in Rio in 1974, which led to resulting on a longterm professional relationship and friendship.

After graduation from LSU in 1976, he moved to Dallas, Texas, accepting a position at Myrick Newman Dahlberg (at that time, a prominent landscape architectural office) until 1984 when he established his own practice with Scott Slaney, the Slaney Santana Group, in Dallas and Houston, Texas. During this period he designed some of Dallas most important landmarks: The Dallas Arboretum Master Plan and Paseo de Flores Garden, the Pioneer and Pegasus Plazas in downtown Dallas, and the landscape design of the North Central Expressway. In 1988 he was the recipient of the Loeb fellowship of Harvard University Graduate School of Design. While in Dallas, he was a Design Consultant to Design Workshop’s office in Aspen, Colorado, working on projects of a variety of scales and situations. The relationship with design workshop led to the establishment in 1992 of the DW/Santana Office in São Paulo, Brazil to develop a master plan for the Urban Development and Environmental reclamation of the Águas Claras Mine in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Since moving to Brazil in 1992, Mr. Santana has worked on a wide variety of projects, in all of Brazil’s ecosystems. From the Amazon region to the Mata Atlantica coastal area of south Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and southern states. The main focus of this work is to develop creative solutions that preserve and celebrate Brazil’s rich environmental and cultural attributes, white creating parameters for the improvement of quality life through quality landscape design and planning.

Sergio Santana Landscape Planning and Design is a company specialized in the development of studies and projects in the following segments: urbanism, urban development planning, resort planning, implementation studies, landscape architecture and urban design. The firm carries out projects for homes, residential and commercial buildings, residential and commercial condominiums, subdivisions, shopping malls, hotels, resorts, hospitals, schools, clubs, squares, parks and street furniture designs. They design master plans for urban development, and large areas with high complexity programs such as residential uses, golf course resorts, clubs, marinas, hotels, and horse riding/polo fields, among others.