Andrea Cochran


Andrea Cochran is an American landscape architect based in San Francisco. She is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and one of seven designer women featured in the 2012 documentary Women in the Dirt.

Early life and education

Cochran was born in New York City and grew up in northwestern New Jersey. For college, she had an early interest in attending art school but was dissuaded by family. She enrolled at Rutgers originally intending to study animal science before eventually transferring to landscape architecture after attending a lecture by the head of the program, Roy DeBoer. She received her undergraduate degree in 1976, then graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1979 with a Masters of Landscape Architecture. In 1981, Cochran moved to the California Bay Area.

Career

Early in her career, Cochran worked on the east coast and in Europe before relocating to California. She worked for The Planning Collaborative in San Francisco prior to forming the partnership Delaney, Cochran & Castillo, Inc. with fellow landscape architect Topher Delaney in 1989. In 1998, Cochran founded . She became a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2007. In 2014, she was awarded the ASLA Design Medal in recognition of her "body of exceptional design work at a sustained level for a period of at least ten years."
Cochran has frequently been lauded as a master of minimalism in landscape design. Her firm's award-winning projects often feature clean lines, minimalist structure, and edges defined by plantings en masse. Her influences include fellow landscape architects Dan Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, and in addition to artists Robert Irwin and Fred Sandback.

Major awards and honors

Major works

  • Corn maze installation made from willow twigs, Sonoma Cornerstone, Sonoma, California
  • Courtyard with reclaimed cypress, Curran House, San Francisco
  • Outdoor furniture collection in collaboration with Landscape Forms, Inc.