Hideo Sasaki

Hideo Sasaki, FASLA, was a prominent landscape architect and educator. His work ranges from corporate projects for Upjohn, John Deere, Bell Labs, and others to major public spaces such as Copley Square in Boston, Constitution Plaza in Hartford, and Greenacre Park in New York City. He designed landscapes for numerous university projects and city parks as well as Walt Disney World in Florida. In 1957 Sasaki and Peter Walker moved their firm from San Francisco to Watertown, Massachusetts; it would later become SWA Group. Sasaki was a professor and chairman of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1950 to 1968. He was on the Redevelopment Land Authority’s Design Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C., and served as a member of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library Advisory Committee on Arts and Architecture, the U.S. National Arboretum Advisory Council, and others. Sasaki attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley, before being sent to an internment camp during World War II. He continued his education after the war, earning a bachelor of arts in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois in 1946 and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1948. He was the first recipient of the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal in 1971 and was awarded the Allied Professions Medal by the American Institute of Architects in 1973.