Ecological Design Group Thinks Outside the Box

Tanner Weeks is a principal and co-founder of the Ecological Design Group. (Madeline Circle)

Tanner Weeks and Martin Smith did something few others were doing in 2008: They quit their jobs to launch a new business.

Today, the landscape architects and the team they’ve grown at Ecological Design Group of Little Rock are still challenging convention. Their vision: to sculpt spaces that manage water, preserve habitats and soften the hard, concrete edges of urban sprawl.

“We were young and wanted to be eager, wanted to develop something, build something, so we jumped out on our own in ’08 and landed our first significant project,” Weeks said.

Jobs as sub-consultants under more established architects and winning a key contract, the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery near Birdeye (Cross County), helped the company survive its days as a startup.

But it wasn’t easy.

“There were tough times where we didn’t know how we were going to fabricate our paycheck,” he said. “When your back’s against the wall, you figure out what you’re made of.”

In the years since, the firm has completed expansive landscape projects such as the Pinnacle Mountain State Park Visitor Center in Pulaski County and Osage Park in Bentonville. It now has 30 employees.

EDG has a new challenge — maintaining the innovative edge that propelled it into the firm it is today while balancing the demands of a mature company.

Everything 5 feet outside a building is within EDG’s purview, Weeks said.

Unlike a neighborhood landscaper, the company has a team of more than a dozen landscape designers and nine engineers who work to create a sense of place while minimizing environmental impact.

They design everything around a site’s ecoregion and its watershed, Smith said.

“Those are two very important aspects of what we do that’s really quite different than corporate American, capitalistic planning,” he said.

Smith and Weeks are both Arkansas natives but were drawn to out-of-state architecture firms after they graduated from college. Deep family ties pulled them back to the Natural State. Smith is now a fifth-generation Birdeye resident and works in EDG’s Wynne office.

“I spent 20 years of my life trying to figure out a way to get away from there and then the next 10 trying to figure out a way to get back,” he said.

‘Stealth Environmentalism’

EDG flips the script of traditional site plan engineering. In Arkansas, civil engineering firms will typically hire landscape architects to support them, whereas EDG puts the focus on the architects, with civil engineers working to support their vision, Smith and Weeks said.

The company’s unconventional design philosophy made partnering with some civil engineering firms difficult. Weeks and Smith, who are licensed landscape architects, agreed that they needed to bring engineering in house as EDG grew.

“The industry was controlled by civil engineers, and basically, we were handed bad site plans and told to put plants on it. And I was like, well, this just isn’t going to work at all,” Smith said.

In 2012, they hired Brahm Driver, a civil engineer coming from a Boston engineering firm that pushed green infrastructure and sustainable stormwater management — EDG’s specialty. Weeks and Smith floated the idea of starting an office in northwest Arkansas, and Driver agreed to help establish it.

“It was exactly what I wanted at the time: scary and exciting,” said Driver, who was only 29 when he started the firm’s Rogers office.

The new office, which is in a former milk factory, came at an auspicious time.

Rapid growth in the area helped the firm secure several projects in a short time. Some of the firm’s largest projects have been in the northwest Arkansas corridor: the Thaden School in Bentonville, Lake Atalanta Park in Rogers and Underwood Park in Fayetteville, to name a few.

One project, Creekside Park in Bentonville, is particularly innovative, featuring the city’s first “green street,” Bright Road. All the stormwater that falls onto the street is discharged locally through permeable paving or landscaped stormwater basins.

In the beginning, most clients were the eco-conscious type and were willing to pay more for a low-impact design. But recently these designs have become more economical, as they are cheaper to maintain than less environmentally friendly alternatives.

With offices in Little Rock, Rogers and Wynne, EDG serves a wide array of clients, and it has had to make the environmental pitch in different ways.

“If you prove that the cost is equally as affordable and that it’s something that looks higher end, it’s like, ‘Well, if I can spend the same amount of money and get a better product, why would I choose anything different?’” Driver said. “We had to work pretty hard to convince a lot of folks that that was the case, and it took some clients to take risks on it.”

The firm now has four biological engineers who are researching how the company can provide clients with data showing the ways their design positively impacted an area’s ecology. But labeling a landscaping solution as ecological can be a detractor for some clients, so the company takes a different approach.

“You have to shift, and it’s almost stealth environmentalism,” Weeks said. “As long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line or the project cost significantly, they’re good with it.”

The Experience Model

Because eco-friendly landscaping and site design have become more economical and more mainstream, EDG is having to find new ways to innovate, Weeks said.

Now that the company has grown out of the startup stage, it has had to balance goals of profitability and establishing a management structure with staying innovative and creating new visions for the future.

“As we grow and have this more corporate culture or structure, we’re trying to keep that small-business mentality, but we realize that in order to grow to the next level, to continue to have our mission, we have to go to the next generation of engineers and managers,” Driver said.

Specifically, the company has turned to what it calls “the experience model” as a way to innovate.

“We infuse the experiential opportunities and the operations behind that into the design from the very beginning, whereas with a lot of other groups in our world the experiences that people have afterwards are really an afterthought,” said Danny Collins, the company’s newly hired director of experience.

Collins grew up in the Ozarks and moved to New York, where he also found himself working in a corporate architecture firm. He also worked in the outdoor guiding space, including work at a lodge in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

He brought his experience in ecotourism back to Arkansas and founded 37 North Expeditions of Bentonville in 2018. The company focuses on creating curated outdoor experiences and guided trips, and it has now partnered with EDG.

He described the partnership as a Venn diagram; both companies’ programming and operational thinking are centered on the same question: How can we invite people to enjoy the outdoors more often?

“We’re just not going to make a true, authentic conservational effort unless they actually get to see the why,” Collins said. “And so every single trip we lead on 37 North, and every space that we’ve designed, EDG is focused on helping individuals, as many people as possible, understand why we need to protect these places.”

Smith believes that the experience clients have in their spaces is what sets the firm apart, not simply its ecological design. The design must have the right intention, even from its earliest stage.

“Build it and they will come. That’s not really true,” he said. “You program it and they will come.”