Patricia Algara, BASE Landscape Architecture

Patricia Algara came to landscape architecture through feminism, not through drafting tables, even though four generations of architects preceded her. She founded BASE Landscape Architecture in the wreckage of a recession, with one project, one collaborator, and an office in an abandoned building. Nearly two decades later the firm is ten people, most of them women, most of them immigrants. She grew up in Mexico in the 1980s surrounded by architects and never once pictured herself among them. Her undergraduate degree was in Latin American Studies, and her first job was reading grant proposals from women around the world at a feminist grantmaking organization in San Francisco. The same pattern surfaced in proposal after proposal: polluted rivers, unsafe streets, unequal access to resources. At a feminist gathering in Costa Rica, a prominent organizer said what was needed was to put every architect on a boat, sail port to port, and show them how cities are not built. Patricia recognized the problem immediately and also recognized that solving it was not an architect's job. It took a friend's offhand suggestion, and a dinner with a landscape architect she had never heard of, before she found the profession that fit. Alyssa Olson and Patricia have collaborated on a mixed use project in the Mission, so this conversation moves quickly past the surface. They get into designing play spaces that children can reinvent daily, and why a structure that is not explicitly a castle becomes a castle, then a spaceship, then something else. They cover the shift away from metal and plastic toward sand, mulch, boulders and gardens in daycare environments, and the work of convincing caretakers that children getting dirty is the point. Patricia explains why the firm brought irrigation design in house, both as a hedge against the next downturn and as a way to treat water as something to slow, sink, spread and reuse rather than merely pipe. She describes ten years of returning every other month to a median that had been under grass for fifty years, hard clay that nothing could burrow into, until four bumblebee nests appeared. She is candid about AI and BIM, the water cost of the technology, and the expense of staying current as a small firm. For designers, builders and firm owners, the useful thread here is how a small landscape architecture practice builds durability without abandoning conviction. Patricia treats portfolio diversification as survival, having started a firm in a recession, and she has structured the practice so passion projects live under a nonprofit umbrella and staff can pursue their own interests inside it. She has borrowed governance ideas from a firm that gave nature a seat among its trustees. She lets her team work from Italy or Bulgaria or wherever family is. And she is assembling a book of licensure stories from Latinas in landscape architecture, aiming to publish on International Women's Day 2027. Her advice for anyone earlier in the path is four words long: there is no space to play small. Chapters: 00:00 Coming to Landscape Architecture Through Feminism 08:05 Founding a Landscape Architecture Firm in a Recession 11:04 Designing Play Spaces Children Can Reinvent 16:38 Diversifying the Portfolio to Stay Recession Proof 18:12 Bringing Water and Irrigation Design In House 22:37 Giving Nature a Seat on the Board 23:57 Bees, Healing, and Designing for Habitat 27:32 Ten Years of Watching a Median Come Back 39:29 AI, BIM, and the Cost of Staying Current 47:25 Latinas in Landscape Architecture The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry. Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale buildergrowth.io shares the tools, strategies, and insights you need to take your business to the next level. Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/designersandbuilders/ Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@designersandbuilders You can connect with Patricia at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-algara-pla-fasla-95325626/ https://www.baselandscape.com/ https://www.instagram.com/base_landscape/