Aceto Landscape Architects

At the foot of Maine’s tallest building is a humble courtyard.

Veins of quartzite run through granite walls quarried along the Downeast coast, recalling the bedrock that shapes Maine’s mountains and shoreline. Delicate bronze inlays trace across the stone, catching the light among ferns, weathered wood, and granite.

For nearly ten years, AKLA has been creating bespoke public spaces throughout Portland. The work often sits quietly within the city—sometimes overshadowed by the buildings and urban canyons around it.

But look a little closer and you’ll find pieces of Maine woven into these places. Materials, textures, plants, and details that remind you where you are—and perhaps of the places you love beyond the city.

Small moments of landscape that invite you to stop, notice, and stay awhile in the sun.
Christina Watka

As landscape architects we walk through public spaces visualizing “what could be”. Hats off to City of Portland (the original one) to test areas throughout the city to see where people want to be, where people congregate, rest, socialize, and find solitude. We walk by this area every day to our office, and couldn’t help ourselves, so we had to design it! Let’s continue to make outdoor spaces within our cities that are beautiful, functional places that create community!

windows on the studio.

These glimpses of graphics, plans, diagrams are mere glimpses of the work happening in the studio this week. All different scales, differing objectives, purposes, and processes. As a studio, we think it’s important to work across all scales of landscape. From private gardens to new neighborhoods, river parks to shared streets. It’s all landscape. It’s the art and science behind the places we live.

Where does the landscape end and the city begin?

Is it at the building foundation? The planter edge? The curb line?

We think the city and landscape are one. Public, private, quiet, and social. The urban landscape is a complex arrangement of components. A living record of our collective values; places to sell goods, fall in love, or just find respite.

Completed in 2024. The Spring and Winter Street landscape was planned and designed by AKLA architecture: Ryan Senatore and CWS Architecture + Interior Design

Where does landscape fit into the work environment?

As the workplace model evolves with technology and cultural demands for a better work-life balance, how can we leverage the landscape as a third place that offers reprieve from the cubical, while being a functional work space?

We think we hit on something special at The Downs when we designed the first four commercial office sites at the Innovation District. Revisiting this landscape 5 years later reveals the evolution and value of the site and landscape, not just as something to look at, but to reside within.

Today is ribbon-cutting day at Equality Commons.

We’re proud to have designed this urban courtyard for Developers Collaborative —transforming a tight space between buildings and parking into a green, welcoming place for people to gather.

Seeing it filled with people today is the best part.
architecture: Ryan Senatore build: Penobscot General Contractors
Photo by Kevin Bunker

There’s something especially meaningful about getting to do this work in our own backyard.

Our journey has taken us from Colorado to Maine and New Hampshire—and to communities beyond—but some of the most rewarding work is helping shape the places we know, use, and care about ourselves.

We love helping communities chart a course forward: balancing sense of place, equity, and economics while creating ideas that feel grounded in the landscape and responsive to the people who live there.

One recent example is our housing concept for the former John Fuller School in North Conway. What began as an exploration of how a compact, walkable neighborhood might fit into the existing community is beginning to take on a life of its own.

It’s exciting to see the conversation gain momentum, and we look forward to seeing the idea continue to evolve.

For us, that’s the best part of community planning: helping create a vision that can grow well beyond the drawing

One of the quiet surprises of landscape architecture is its ability to transport us.

A glimpse of something wild—even in the middle of the workday—can briefly take us somewhere else. A meadow moving in the wind, seedheads catching the light, insects and birds moving through the grasses. These small encounters with nature can be restorative in ways that are easy to underestimate.

AKLA designed this meadow five years ago within an industrial park. Today, it’s maturing into its own little patch of wildness and biodiversity—a landscape that feels increasingly distant from the workplace surrounding it.

Sometimes the most successful landscapes are the ones that make you forget where you are. Kevin Browne Architecture

Design is a team sport.

We talked a lot last week about context—and the value of working together toward a common goal.

Like any athletic pursuit, there is a motion and fluidity to design. You stand in the batter’s box or at the top of a mountain and visualize what comes next: the base hit, the turn, the line through the trees. There’s a brief moment when you can almost feel the outcome before you move.

Design can feel the same way. Putting pencil to paper and shaping those first few lines on a plan is physical, intuitive and visceral. But those lines don’t emerge from nowhere.

Behind them is a much broader context: the collective knowledge of a studio. Years of projects, conversations, mistakes, successes, materials, books, sketches and experiences—all forming a foundation to push off from. And, just as importantly, the person sitting ten feet away who sees something you don’t.

We’ve maintained a studio in downtown Portland for more than a decade—including through the height of COVID—because we believe being together matters. Ideas get pinned up. Someone rolls their chair over. A question becomes a sketch. A sketch starts a conversation. And the work gets better.

Technology has made it possible to work from almost anywhere. We embrace that flexibility. But we still believe there is something difficult to replicate about a room full of designers working alongside one another toward a common goal.

Great design may begin with an individual idea, but rarely does it stay that way.

Where does landscape architecture begin and end?

We don’t think it does.

The same principles we bring to neighborhoods, campuses, and public spaces—connection, experience, stewardship, and a strong sense of place—translate directly to the intimacy of a home and garden.

Our work spans scales, communities, and landscapes across New England, Colorado, and North Carolina, with new work underway in Massachusetts.

Different places. Different people. Different scales. The same belief that thoughtful design matters everywhere.

So where should landscape architecture begin and end—and are we defining the profession too narrowly? architecture: Vellum Modern Architecture