Principals/Owners/Key Leadership Team

Susan Turner was born in Plaquemine, and though she is an avid urbanite, the weekends that she spent as a young girl across the river in sugar cane country apparently got under her skin deeply. Turner has lived in Atlanta, and Boston, and spent summers in Italy and England, but she eventually returned to her Louisiana roots to teach at LSU in its School of Landscape Architecture. And although she’d vowed early in adulthood not to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a rabid preservationist, these things have a way of turning on themselves, and she found herself drawn to the rural countryside of south Louisiana and moved to try and protect its fast-disappearing agricultural landscape.

During her twenty-five years in academia, Susan was able to hone her interests in southern landscape history through projects like the Shadows-on-the-Teche and Drayton Hall, both properties of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she collaborated with national firms Diana Balmori (the Shadows) and Michael van Valkenburgh Associates (Drayton Hall) in developing as landscape historian. The academic schedule allowed time for extended periods of research as well as travel that augmented some of the interests developed during her degree work in the history of art. Study tours with Pratt University School of Architecture over the course of two summers gave her the chance to visit the built works of modernist architects Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier, as well as Antonio Gaudi. Another summer was spent studying preservation, first with Professor Peter Hornbeck and a group from Harvard’s GSD, followed by the Attingham Summer School, focusing on the history of British architecture, fine art, and decorative arts. The summer of study in Cortona, Italy, ostensibly focused on Italian gardens and landscape architecture, was actually what catalyzed a life-long fascination with open-air produce markets and local foods. This would culminate in Susan’s co-founding of Baton Rouge’s Red Stick Farmers Market in 1995, now a community institution.

The founding of Suzanne Turner Associates was a natural extension of Susan’s decades of consulting practice for historic and cultural landscapes, and her love of the design studio setting and the collaborative creative process. She sought to gather a few like-minded people to work together, along with teams from other disciplines, on projects that offered the potential for innovation in design and planning, and quality in execution. After a few years in formation, she is pleased to be able to see her idea of a small workshop firm taking shape.

A brief footnote: Susan did not grow up gardening. Her mother was an avid gardener, so again, she avoided plants until she happened to rent an apartment in Athens, Georgia with a rosemary bush and an abandoned vegetable garden in the back yard. The possibility of actually cooking with something she’d grown, and grazing in one’s own place opened up a world of possibilities in the early 1970s, years before the craze for backyard farming became commonplace. From that point on, plants had their way with her and she’s been a closet-plantsman ever since. This love of the principal material of landscapes has a profound influence on her practice.

John is Associate Principal and has worked with Turner for over fifteen years in various capacities. He has been involved with project management, intensive historical research, and the production of Cultural Landscape Reports for the firm since its inception. Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, John worked with several collaborative teams and with FEMA to create recovery plans and to provide comprehensive feasibility studies for affected communities along the Gulf Coast. He travelled throughout the state, witnessing the destruction that the storms caused, and helping residents envision projects – both large and small – that would most benefit their communities as they came back from the catastrophic events that had occurred.

In the past decade, John spent half a year in Las Vegas, working on planned communities, large residential properties, and community parks, collaborating with varied teams of owners, architects, engineers, and other landscape architects. He led the initial design phases of Coyote Springs north of Las Vegas, working with environmental groups to protect sensitive habitat and ecosystems, and promoting the use of sustainable landscape planning and design to ensure that the ecological footprint of the development was as small as possible in an extremely arid climate, and that water use for landscape purposes was minimal. John also worked with the late landscape architect Ed Blake in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, lead designer of the Crosby Arboretum. While with Ed, John learned the unique combination of variables that the designer used to imbue his projects with the environmental and interpretative magic that he was known for.

As a child, John spent his summers in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, learning small scale family farming and adding to the horticultural knowledge that he brings to all projects. He looks at soil, water, sun, structures, and plant materials in an integrative way to provide the most complete result for the clients of STA. Emphasizing strong fundamentals – like soil, water, and programming – John maximizes the assets of a site and responds to a client’s needs and desires to bring about the best possible solution for any project. Projects that John has worked on have received awards from the Louisiana State Chapter of the ASLA and the Congress for the New Urbanism.

John recently established a small micro-farm in the River Parishes north of New Orleans, where he is growing unusual and rare varieties of vegetables and herbs organically for the New Orleans high end restaurant trade. He has been collaborating with members of the slow food movement to plan and produce the kinds of unique ingredients that elevate the stature of the New Orleans food community and that create the special blend of foodways that define New Orleans. His former garden in Mobile, Alabama was also profiled in the Time Life series of books on horticulture.

Herpreet holds a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing, a Master of Landscape Architecture, and an MFA in creative writing. She has organically carved out a life and work that unites her perpetual preoccupation with place and narrative. At STA, she conducts research, writing, and editing for Cultural Landscape Reports and historic research that informs contemporary designs. She brings strong critical thinking, conceptual visioning, and storytelling instincts to planning and design work. She also coordinates internal and external communications for STA.

Herpreet’s earliest memory is walking with her mother around a giant, rectilinear reflecting pool at the center of an otherworldly courtyard at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India in the state of Punjab. She was two years old and remembers the feeling of her small palm against her mother’s palm, the smooth, warm marble tile beneath her bare feet, the sense of being tiny in a seemingly vast space, and the split second when several big fish jumped out of the water and dove back in. The surprise and joy of that instant is visceral, still.

When she was five, her parents opened a small Indian restaurant in a shabby suburban strip mall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—it was the first Indian food in the city. A Vietnamese grocery store, a pet shop, and a hole-in-the-wall bar were also in the strip mall.

The same year, she used to walk across the street to her childhood best friend’s house to eat boiled crawfish. She remembers the little fire-red creatures with dead, beady black eyes splayed across newspaper on a table and her friend peeling the crawfish for her. In another neighbor’s yard, she used to sit under the shade of a Magnolia tree gathering its seed pods, picking out the red seeds, and pressing them between her fingers.

These discordant landscapes—her parents’ native Punjab, 1970s white-flight suburbs, the expansive green, flat, treed, and humid south Louisiana—and the co-mingling stories, memories, and material matter she associated with them absorbed her thoughts. This early awareness of the multiplicity of place and early recognition that one can pick up a life and move it across continents instilled in her a traveler’s hunger and wonderment.

For Herpreet, narratives and place—how each gives shape to the other—are inextricably intertwined. In applying storytelling to landscape architecture—both research and design—she is especially interested in how vernacular and immigrant landscapes form, evolve, and cross-pollinate with their adopted settings; exploring the convergence of history with modern innovations and aesthetics; and considering how, through design, to effortlessly reveal these complexities to the people experiencing place. Her planning work has centered around utilizing individual narratives and collective community narratives to create culturally sensitive, environmentally sound, and socially equitable plans.

She gravitates to formal minimalist, sometimes industrial, and wild or untamed landscapes, tending to see the poetry in what many deem unremarkable or even ugly. She is also drawn to landscapes that convey striking juxtapositions between scales; the past and present; and the formal and informal. These leanings also come across in her fiction and nonfiction, which honor seemingly ordinary or even underwhelming people who are quietly extraordinary in the ways they face challenging events, changing times, and the gray areas that exist in their relationships to people and place. Her writing largely explores the intersection between culture and geography, especially the Indo-American experience in the Deep South.