About OWSW
O'Shea Wilson Siteworks is an award-winning landscape architecture studio based in Charlottesville, Virginia. We are small, dynamic and dedicated to making meaningful human places that intelligently engage local ecologies, are culturally relevant and that operate simultaneously as habitat and as experiential terrain. We are involved in projects ranging from gallery installations, site sculpture and private gardens, to corporate and institutional landscapes, post-industrial sites, urban design and public parks. We are expert collaborators and are sought after to add value and creativity to integrated design teams on projects throughout the U.S. and abroad.
We see our job as creating places that catalyze happiness, connect community and sustain dynamic human habitat. In our practice we believe that all design must adhere to principles that protect and enhance watersheds, improve the ecology of sites, increase biodiversity and carefully manage the impacts that human processes have on a larger context. Through the development of high performance projects we aim to go beyond sustainability and towards regenerative and restorative solutions. We have proven ability in the artful integration of human systems and native ecologies.
We believe that it is vital for the design of human places to be beautiful, functionally effective and intellectually stimulating. In all of our projects we work toward a fusion of ecology and culture that recognizes the role of human society in a larger environmental context. We do not operate from a formal ideology, but rather from one that is based in a careful analysis of the sites and people with whom we work. Our process employs dialogue and creative expression to fuse the needs and desires of our clients with the inherent qualities and conditions of the places they live.
Peter Joseph O’Shea ASLA FAAR LLA
Principal Designer and Co-Founder
Pete is the co-founder of Siteworks and the leader of all design projects in the studio. Pete brings over twenty years of professional practice to the envisioning and development of holistic, innovative and creative approaches to design that effectively considers the ecological and cultural context of the practices work. His work merges art, architecture, engineering and landscape into a successful, effective and complete design approach that prioritizes concerns for ecological intelligence, human experience and thoughtful material assembly.
He is broadly experienced in the facilitation of community design efforts and workshops where collaborating with stakeholders is crucial to achieving a design project’s success. An excellent communicator and presenter, Pete has frequently spoken on the work of the studio to local, regional and national audiences. He has served on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Architecture in both Architecture and Landscape Architecture and has guest taught and lectured at Penn State University, The University of Oregon, Catholic University, University of Maryland, Virginia Tech University, The University of Delaware, and The Ohio State University, where he was the Richard Trott Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture in 2000.
Pete is the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Rome Prize in 1995. In 2007, he was named the Top Green Designer by the Virginia Sustainable Building Network. His projects have received awards for design excellence and sustainability from the ASLA, AIA, INFORM Magazine, The Bruner Foundation, The Building Stone Institute and the Virginia Chapters of the AIA and the ASLA. He is currently involved in public art and design projects in collaboration with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, the Piedmont Council of the Arts and The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. He serves on the development team for the restoration planning efforts for Richard Neutra’s Rice House in Richmond, VA, owned by the Science Museum of Virginia Foundation. He has served as a taskforce member and small team leader on the public urban design committees, arts planning efforts and on steering committees for major public projects in the Charlottesville area.
Pete is a member of the ASLA and USGBC and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is a licensed landscape architect in the state of Virginia.
Sara Catherine Wilson
Principal and Co-Founder
Sara Wilson is co-founder of Siteworks, and brings to the practice over twenty years of professional experience in the design of a wide range of projects from national park service work to private gardens. She has extensive experience in academic settings extending from her tenure as the assistant to the Landscape Architect for the University of Virginia, to more recent experience helping lead the development of design projects for UVa and Virginia Tech. Sara brings significant experience and focus to the integration of complex, achievable planting scenarios and to the effective coordination between design, implementation and continued care and maintenance.
Sara is the director of all studio management, project staffing and coordinates office and project communications. She leads studio efforts in negotiating and establishing contracts and project management and helps lead the internal quality control process to ensure the successful fulfillment of design intent through all phases of project development.
While at the University of Virginia’s Office of the Architect, she designed numerous projects for the University Grounds, and contributed to the planning and implementation of the University’s pioneering stormwater master plan, an innovative watershed approach to stormwater management. Earlier professional experience with DHM and Wenk Associates, both private landscape architecture firms in Denver, Colorado, included project design on a stormwater demonstration project for the Environmental Center of the Rockies, the preparation of design guidelines for The Historic Colfax Corridor through Denver and a master plan for employee housing at Rocky Mountain National Park.
Sara applies her professional experience as a volunteer coordinator for numerous garden projects at local schools.
Jake Fox ASLA
Landscape Designer
Jake is a Project Manager and Designer at Siteworks, a small, award-winning landscape architecture practice based in Charlottesville, VA. Jake’s fascination with dynamic systems and the relationship between humans, infrastructure, and the environment brought him to the field of Landscape Architecture. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia’s Landscape Architecture graduate program, Jake’s research interests were broad, ranging from the Markets and streets of Charlottesville to the ancient Roman core and urban ecology of Barcelona, and from the alluvial delta of Southern Louisiana and the lagoon of Venice.
Jake is very active in the Charlottesville bicycle community, serving as Co-Chair of the Charlottesville Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, a member of the Charlottesville Bike-Ped Master Plan Steering Committee, and Co-organizer of Charlottesville Bike Month. Jake is also a League of American Bicyclists Certified Instructor (LCI #4706). While a student at UVA, he co-founded VELOTELIER, an organization that empowers the bicycle community at UVA. He continues to host bi-monthly pop-up workshops around Grounds that cover topics like bike maintenance and safe riding, while also hosting group rides and bike-centric film screenings. VELOTELIER received a GIFT Grant from the University in the Spring of 2013 to expand their work with students, transforming VELOTELIER into BIKE UVA, the official bicycle education arm of UVA’s Parking and Transportation Department. This change has enabled Jake to apply his design skills to creating a series of simple bike repair manuals in support of the material covered in the workshops, and to experiment with constructing temporary mobile workstations and BIKE UVA graphic design initiatives.
Jake also gives back to the community as a volunteer mentor for the A.C.E. Mentorship program at Charlottesville and Albemarle High Schools, and is an aspiring photographer whose work is featured across the Siteworks website and in a variety of University of Virginia School of Architecture publications.
Jake brings an intensity and focus to the practice and has a specific interest in urban issues within the public realm, which lead him to his current position at Siteworks. While at Siteworks he has been exposed to a variety of projects, including the Greer Environmental Sciences Center at Virginia Wesleyan College. the Mundo Verde environmental charter school in Washington D.C., the Educational Resource Center at the UVA Health Center, the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, Longwood University Master Plan, and a handful of private residential projects. Prior to joining Siteworks, he worked with TempAgency on their entry to the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, a scheme that was selected as a finalist for their “My Hair is at MoMA PS1”.