PEOPLE

ALISON MALOUF

DESIGN ASSOCIATE

Alison Malouf is a design associate at MFLA. She received a SB in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. During her academic career, Alison led or assisted on a number of research projects related to technology and the built environment. She has received several fellowships, grants, and scholarships to support these projects, including the Boston Community Service Fellowship, which enabled her to contribute to the development of MapSwipe for Doctors Without Borders and The Red Cross, and the Penny White Fellowship, which resulted in a guide to the anti-surveillance properties of landscape architectural features.

Alison maintains an art practice that uses constraints and conventions of the design disciplines to work through questions about the manufacture of space and our relationship with digital tools. These investigations have resulted in a design philosophy that considers social and economic forces to be components of the ecosystem in the same way as wind or water. Though she has visited many odd and interesting corners of the world, she finds California an especially fascinating place to study the production of landscape. The breathtaking scenery of the Bay Area is shaped by such turbulent social and environmental issues that nuanced, multivalent resilience is a base requirement rather than an extra service.

Outside of the studio, Alison is outside. She is an avid backpacker who struggles to walk through a forest without botanizing. Her own garden consists of strange specimen plants, Frankensteinian horticultural experiments, and all the fruits and vegetables she could never grow in her hometown of Cleveland, which has winter.