Rich Haag Hon. AIA

Richard Haag (10/23/1923 - 5/9/2018)  
Universally recognized as one of the leading landscape architects of his time, Rich Haag exhibited a genuine kinship with the aims of The American Institute of Architects and the thousands of design professionals who draw inspiration from his work and strength from his widely, wisely expressed convictions.
 
AIA Seattle welcomed this distinguished "humanitarian of design" as an AIA Seattle Honorary Member in 1981, recognizing the number and breadth of his contributions to the local professional culture.   In 1999, the AIA recognized the national significance of his professional contributions by welcoming him as an AIA Honorary Member, on his nomination by AIA Seattle.  His sustained and extended influence had a genuinely global effect.

For more than five decades, he toiled side by side with architects in the rich but rocky field of design leadership, advancing the design professions' highest ideals as colleague, collaborator and friend, teacher and critic, civic activist, and design advocate.  Architecture and all the design professions have realized enormous benefit from his individual and cumulative achievements -- in the brilliant projects he's created and collaborated on in and around his Seattle home and throughout the world; in the diaspora of literally thousands of students and disciples who have passed through the University of Washington College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where in 1963 he founded the influential UW Department of Landscape Architecture, or who have heard or read his scholarly discourse; and in his legacy of commitment to the potential for design to serve society beautifully, intelligently, and democratically.

In 1998, Harvard Design Books published Richard Haag:  Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park, and in 2015 University of Washington Press published The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag:  From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design by Thaisa Way.   As a UW Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture honored by his colleagues there with the 2003 establishment of the Richard Haag Scholarship in Landscape Architecture, Haag continued to teach, to lecture internationally, and to practice as Principal of Richard Haag & Associates in Seattle until its 2016 closure.

He twice received the ASLA Presidents Award for Design Excellence, for Gas Works Park (Seattle) and The Sequence of Gardens at Bloedel Reserve (Bainbridge Island) -- the only person so honored by his profession.  In 2003, his colleagues presented him with the ASLA Medal –- the highest award given by the national American Society of Landscape Architects, recognizing an individual "whose lifetime achievements and contributions to the profession have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of the public and the environment;" and in 2007 with the ASLA Design Medal.

References:
*The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Richard Haag; Richard Haag, Oral History
*The Seattle Times June 19, 2015, "Meet Richard Haag"
*Friends of the Market 50th Anniversary, 2014
*Pacific Coast Architecture Database, Richard Haag
*DoCoMoMoWeWA, Richard Haag
*"The Cultural Landscape Foundation August 3, 2018, "TCLF Mourns the Loss of Rich Haag"
*Knute Berger Crosscut August 7, 2018, "Saying goodbye to the godfather of Gas Works Park"
*UW CBE August 7, 2018, Celebrating the Life of Richard Haag
*Lynn Porter, Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce August 7, 2018, Richard Haag remembered for his designs, inspiration and passion
*Grant Jones, WASLA News August 2018, "Remembering Rich Haag:  a few reasons I think of him as my father"
*The Seattle Times Now & Then July 2023,  "How Gas Works' belching hellscape turned into a post-industrial paradise"
*The Seattle Times October 1, 2023: "50 Years since Gas Works Park opened, what it means to Seattleites"
*The Seattle Times  November 24, 2025: "A ‘both/and’ solution for safety at Gas Works Park"