Susannah Drake
New York City
Susannah Churchill Drake FAIA FASLA is an acclaimed urban designer specializing in climate change adaptation. Her award-winning work is consistently at the forefront of innovative urban climate adaptation. Susannah was awarded the AIA Young Architect Award and was an Architectural League Emerging Voice. She lectures globally, is a frequent design juror and has taught at Harvard, Syracuse, Wash U, CCNY, FIU, IIT, and Cooper Union. Drake served as ASLA Chapter President, and Trustee in New York. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Geography, Planning and Design at the University of Colorado, Denver. In 2020 Susannah received the inaugural Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Climate Action. Her book “Sponge Park,” was published in 2025 by Park Books. Drake’s work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, the Smithsonian/Cooper Hewitt, and was exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale. She graduated from Dartmouth College and earned March/ MLA degrees from the Harvard GSD.
More by this author at The Nature of Cities
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Cities are typically a game of limited space and limited budgets. What could we do less of to make room for nature?
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What can Nature-based Solutions and sustainability professionals learn from cultural institutions such as museums and botanical gardens? How can the synergies benefit both NbS and cultural institutions?
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You say po-TAY-to. What ecologists and landscape architects don’t get about each other, but ought to.
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Daylighting and restoring urban streams, ponds and wetlands can provide huge ecological and social benefits. Are such restorations “worth it”? What are the pitfalls? How can we demonstrate these benefits and elevate them in the public discourse so that urban wetlands become urban planning priorities?
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Do urban green corridors “work”? It depends on what we want them to do. What ecological and/or social functions can we realistically expect green corridors to perform in cities? What attributes define them, from a design and performance perspective?