
Boston City Hall Plaza Renovation
Boston, MA
Kate is a landscape architect at Sasaki. Her project leadership, strategic thinking, design eye, and technical skills have been instrumental in the success of diverse projects ranging from master planning to site-scale work. As a naturally interdisciplinary thinker, she excels at collaborating across disciplines to craft elegant, contextual solutions to complex design challenges.
Prior to discovering landscape architecture, Kate was a high school math and physics teacher in the Boston Public School system. Her passion for inspiring and empowering urban youth infuses her work as a landscape architect. She values engaging stakeholders in the design of their own urban public spaces through lively workshops, and is particularly interested civic open spaces that support the play and learning of city children. Kate pursues independent research on children’s outdoor environments, including schoolyards, playscapes, and outdoor classrooms.
Kate holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts, a master’s degree in education from Lesley University, and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Dartmouth College. She earned the 2011 National Olmsted Scholar award, the highest honor of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), for her work on urban schoolyards, and has since served on LAF’s board of directors. Kate remains active in the academic world through teaching appointments at the Rhode Island School of Design and University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as through volunteer work with local public schools.
Boston, MA
Cincinnati, OH
Denver, CO
Des Moines, IA
Baton Rouge, LA
Coastal Alabama
Denver Region, CO
Ocean and Monmouth, NJ
Los Angeles, CA
Worcester, MA
Chicago, IL
View more of Kate's Projects Collapse Projects
Sasaki's Kate Tooke published a deep dive into a post-occupancy study she conducted at Smale Riverfront Park. The article originally appeared in the National Recreation and Parks Association's (NRPA) magazine, Parks and Recreation
How will the pandemic encourage us to think differently about the design of urban spaces?
A researched-based approach to adventure playscape design at Cincinnati's wildly successful Smale Riverfront Park