Associate professor Derek Hoeferlin has been named chair of the landscape architecture and urban design programs in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Hoeferlin, who joined the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design in 2005, is principal of the [dhd] derek hoeferlin design. His work spans architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and urban design, with a particular focus on water-based design strategies.

“From climate change and sustainability to urban density and the creation of public space, landscape architecture and urban design provide critical means for addressing many of today’s most pressing issues,” said Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School.

“Derek’s unique background as an architect with expertise in water management systems and adaptive land strategies, along with his ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and his dedication to teaching and service, makes him ideally suited for his new role as chair,” Colangelo continued.

“In both practice and academia, Derek has demonstrated a tremendous ability to work across disciplines while incorporating urban and ecological strategies,” added Heather Woofter, director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design. “I look forward to working with him to build on the distinguished reputation of our programs under the previous leadership of John Hoal and Rod Barnett.”

About Derek Hoeferlin

Born and raised in St. Louis, Hoeferlin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Tulane University in 1997, where he won the AIA medal, among other honors. He then studied at the Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies in Venice, Italy, and spent six years with Waggonner & Ball Architects in New Orleans, before earning a post-professional master’s degree in architecture from Yale University in 2005.

Beginning in 2006, Hoeferlin served as project manager for H3 Studio’s Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), the only formally adopted Hurricane Katrina recovery plan. In 2008, he co-founded “Gutter to Gulf: Legible Water Infrastructure for New Orleans” with Elise Shelley and Jane Wolff. The following year he took first place, with Ian Caine, in the national “Rising Tides” competition, which explored sea-level rise in the San Francisco Bay area.

In 2010, Hoeferlin won the Sam Fox School’s Outstanding Teaching Award, as well as a Creative Activity Research Grant to study water-related issues in the Mekong delta. In 2012, he was a core member for Waggonner & Ball’s Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. Hoeferlin co-organized — with the Sam Fox School’s John Hoal and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington D.C.’s Dale Morris — the 2013 workshop “MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers,” which brought together Dutch and American experts to explore the impacts of climate change in the Midwest. The next year, he became a core member of STUDIO MISI-ZIIBI's winning proposal for the international design competition “Changing Course: Navigating the Future of the Lower Mississippi Delta.” In 2017, he took first prize in the “Designing Resilience in Asia International Open Competition.”

[dhd] was team lead, with OBJECT TERRITORIES and TLS Landscape Architecture, of “+STL: Growing an Urban Mosaic,” a finalist in St. Louis’ national “Chouteau Greenway Competition” in 2018. The proposal has garnered multiple awards, including an ASLA National Award, multiple AIA Awards, an Architizer A+ Jury Award, and a Global Forum on Human Settlements Award.

Other honors include a Washington University I-CARES Grant to conduct collaborative climate adaptation research in the St. Louis region (2014); a Sam Fox School Creative Activity Research Grant to conduct field research on river issues in the St. Louis region (2015); an InCEES Grant for his field research in the Mekong, Mississippi, and Rhine river basins (2017); and a Divided City grant to support the “Laboratory for Suburbia” research project (2019). Hoeferlin’s research is widely disseminated in multiple venues, including book chapters in “Chasing the City” (2018) and “New Orleans Under Reconstruction” (2014).

Hoeferlin’s book, “Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture” (2020) is forthcoming from Applied Research + Design Publishers.