Landscape architecture · Sea-to-Sky, BC
A designer who draws to see. Parks, plazas, trails, and the drawings that get them built — from first sketch to the tender package.
Neuer Garten, Potsdam — field section, 2014
Professional projects were designed at McElhanney and ANKA Landscape Architecture with clients and collaborators named; drawings appear with credit. The rest is mine alone. Click any image to browse the full set.
Landscape and urban realm design vignettes — streetscape planning, programming, and concept design for the heart of Whistler. The design began as trace-and-watercolour studies and carried through to furnishing plans, and brought Climate Positive Design carbon accounting into the practice for the first time.
Fire-Smart planting design across multiple priority areas of a phased renovation for the Whistler Village North resort property.
Planting design, remediation areas, rain gardens, and accessible path systems along the Mamquam River — where the forest floor does the wayfinding.
Planting plan for a recently constructed pedestrian bridge overpass over Highway 1. Design of shrubs, perennials, replacement trees, and site furnishings, to harmonize the landscape with architectural details and civil infrastructure aims.
Early concept design at the Surrey Public Wharf park on the South Fraser: renovation of a run-down industrialized zone — screening the parking without losing the river, a gathering plaza at the base of the pier for the park to grow into, complemented with native planting from kinnikinnick to common camas.
Extensive multi-phased streetscape revitalization from Pear Street to Garnet Road: boulevard canopy trees in Silva cells, root-barrier and soil-volume details, tree retention and replacement accounted for stem by stem along the length of the project. Complex coordination with large civil infrastructure updates, and advancing municipal standards.
In coordination with FRANK Architecture, a planting and site retrofit for the YWCA in Banff: fire pit and seating area, accessible parking, among planting chosen to survive the Bow Valley — wolf willow, bunchberry, blanketflower, alpine forget-me-not.
Landscape and planting plan for highway intersection improvements in Port Alberni — bioretention areas, native coastal plant communities, and tree retention beside a working marina.
Co-designed with Patrick Warshawski, a concept exploring the politics of resource extraction, colonial ideals, and real-world costs. Developed and submitted for the Jardins de Métis international garden festival, with a site plan investigating contested territories and threshold landscapes.
Upgrades and expansion drawn around what's already there: existing burial sites held at a careful offset, trees retained, dark-sky lighting, and planting that lets the forest keep the edges.
Concept visualizations for a music park at Camp Kindle, Kids Cancer Care's camp in the Alberta foothills — built to test the things a plan can't: where the shade falls at four o'clock, whether the chimes read as an invitation from the trail, and the effect of extensive infill grading and bespoke rubber surfacing.
Also on the drawing board, 2021–2026
Studio work from UBC's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2013–2015 — where the habits started: draw first, argue with the drawing, then design.
Nomadic micro-restaurants sited in the interstitial spaces of Vancouver's urban fabric — marine typologies borrowed from the historical itinerant communities of the Fraser River.
A plaza asked to be a place: seating sculpture, section studies, and a case for lingering where Indigenous histories are explored through site rehabilitation.
An urban park rooted in mycological networks, fungal ecology, and soil as public infrastructure — the city's quietest utility, given ground to work.
Density, informal occupation, and layered public space — a study in how much life a small footprint holds when you stack it honestly.
Material transparency and the threshold between interior and landscape — at the scale of a flame.
A compression-only vault form-found digitally, then argued through sections, program, and context plans — geometry doing the structural work.
A physical topographic model communicating landform and drainage proposals — water routes you can check with your fingertip.
Drawing as note-taking — where the design decisions actually happen; the software comes after. Click any drawing for the full set.
The field journal, continued — British Columbia by lens. The same habit of looking that starts every design.
I'm Nikita — an Intern Landscape Architect registered with the BCSLA, based in Whistler and trained at UBC's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. My practice rests on a simple conviction: careful observation precedes good design — in the sketchbook as much as the studio.
The work ranges wider than the job title suggests: park entries and rain gardens, bus stops on mountain highways, conference-centre plazas, cemetery expansions, planting schedules sixty species deep. Through McElhanney and ANKA Landscape Architecture I've led concept development and 3D visualization, drawn construction packages, built physical terrain models, presented to advisory design panels, facilitated public consultation, and helped bring carbon accounting into practice for the first time.
Before landscape architecture there was theatre, teaching, and BC's outdoor industry — which is why the first question I ask of any landscape is what it asks of the people standing in it.
I'm completing my BCSLA registration requirements now, and looking for the next place to contribute.
Open to landscape architecture positions, collaborative projects, and drawing commissions — in Whistler and beyond.
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