“Construction is a dance,” says landscape architect Puck Erickson. “We all have our moves.”
For Erickson, who grew up on the East Coast, those moves found their footing in elementary school, when she and her bestie drew their first floorplan on the playground. Fast-forward to college. Erickson studied ceramics and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Kansas City Art Institute.
In the early 1970s, she moved west, landing in the Santa Ynez Valley, where she helped build several houses from the ground up. In 1977, she cofounded Arcadia Studio (arcadiastudio.com), a landscape architecture firm, in Santa Barbara. She and her partners have long shared a strong belief in teamwork — among themselves and with all the other players on any given project.