OLIN Elevates Two New Partners: Spotlight on Marni Burns

Marni Burns at Water Works Park and Island, Philadelphia, PA | Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

OLIN is proud to announce the elevation of Marni Burns and Michael Miller to the role of Partner. We have had the good fortune of both Marni and Michael’s significant contributions to OLIN throughout their careers. Starting at OLIN as landscape designers, they each rose through the ranks to Associate where they have helped lead notable projects including Sojourner Truth State Park, ResilienCity Park, South Wetlands Park, and Origin Park. While each attends to their projects in a distinctive fashion, Marni and Michael share a passion for revitalizing ecologies and cultivating communities through the transformation of urban, post-industrial, and vulnerable landscapes. Their experience and growth at OLIN is due, in no small part, to the relationships they have built with you, our professional community, over their many years of practice at OLIN. They are in a new position to nurture and expand those relationships, so we would like to take this opportunity to let you get to know them even better. We are pleased to share their unique stories with you.

MARNI BURNS
Marni is driven to transform complex and neglected landscapes into ecologically thriving social spaces for everyday life. With a persistent interest in the human experience of ecological systems, and an education in environmental science, she approaches each site determined to maximize cultural engagement, ecological health, and hydrological functioning of the landscape. She began her career in environmental consulting, seeking out site histories and learning to read imprints on the land. Degraded and damaged sites remain her favorite places of action, where the layered histories can be reframed to contribute to environmental and social vibrancy rooted in the particulars of each community. Starting with the importance of place, her focus has evolved to include the interwoven aspects of climate resilience, environmental justice, and community connectivity. For over 14 years, Marni has brought this approach to many of OLIN’s most noteworthy projects, including The U.S. Embassy in London, Hunts Point Lifelines, Rebuild By Design Competition, Bronx, NY, Water Works Park and Island in Philadelphia, PA, and ResilienCity Park in Hoboken, NJ. 

Marni’s work seeks to enhance and reveal environmental systems in immersive experiences that spark curiosity and connection. She spent her early childhood in rural New York, where the backyard deck designed by her father was larger than the house, and the fluctuations of water cycles were evident in the periodic flooding of the front yard from the adjacent lake. She then moved to an apartment in the Bronx where outside was mostly paved and water was hidden in pipes. She believes this ingrained an early drive to seek nature in the city and a deep appreciation for urban wilds. She often escaped to pockets of woods along the Hudson River near home, and to volunteer programs building trails and restoring wetlands further afield during the summers. Her fascination with the natural world was paired with a love of drawing and making art. This pairing eventually bound together, over a circuitous path, to the practice of landscape architecture.   

Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

Marni obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Conservation and Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She worked for several years in environmental consulting, performing site assessments and helping clean up contaminants in New York and California before realizing she didn't just want to make places less bad, she wanted to transform them into places of health and community life. She began a masters program at Yale’s Forestry School with a focus on urban ecology prior to receiving her Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. At UVA, Marni was inspired by her mentor and founder of DIRT Studio, Julie Bargmann, whose artistic work on post-industrial sites has had an indelible impact on Marni’s approach to design.

Over her 14 years at OLIN, Marni has had the opportunity to work on projects that align closely with her deep set desire to reveal the history and environmental processes inherent in the landscape – inspiring those who experience it to witness, understand, and steward their environments. She has worked with Marie Selby Botanical Gardens for over six years helping to plan and implement the transformation of their Sarasota botanical campuses to meet the challenges of growth and climate change while delighting new and regular visitors in the wonders of epiphytes and native Florida plants. She brought this framework to her more recent projects, including planning for the transformation of a former cement production, brick making, and aggregate mining site into the new 520-acre Sojourner Truth State Park along the Hudson River in Kingston, NY for the non-profit land trust, Scenic Hudson. Many of her projects include large consultant teams and she revels in the collaboration and expansive learning that each project brings. 

Collaborating with OLIN Partners, Lucinda Sanders and Richard Roark, on Rebuild by Design’s Hunts Point Lifelines, a federally facilitated design competition following Hurricane Sandy, was a crash course in both resiliency planning and deep community engagement. The project resulted in an innovative plan to safeguard the hub of New York’s Food Supply while improving the quality of life for the South Bronx community, through environmental health, as well as economic, recreational, and hydrologic measures. This began a trajectory of work around resiliency planning and design projects requiring responsiveness to community needs and technical demands at a range of scales. She helped lead the design of ResilienCity Park in Hoboken, NJ that manages almost two-million gallons of stormwater as part of the City’s flood protection strategy while offering a place for culture, play, and respite –co-designed with the community. At a larger scale, the Comprehensive Infrastructure Master Plan for the eight communities of the square-mile, Caño Martín Peña District, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, defined measures to mitigate the risks of chronic exposure to flooding as well as lack of sanitation infrastructure, safe housing, and accessibility –driven by community advocacy. 

In her new role as Partner, Marni continues to believe landscapes have a story to tell and hard work to do. She is looking forward to continuing to evolve her practice to meet future challenges while staying grounded in the cultural history and natural processes of the places we depend on.