Melanie Klein

Background

About Melanie Klein

Melanie is a professional landscape architect (PLA), licensed in multiple states. She has helped design and build sustainable, affordable homes, buildings and communities for people in need. She worked on Make It Right projects in Kansas City (re-purposing a historic, abandoned building, we provided 50 high-quality, affordable housing units as part of a mixed-use development for working families) in New Orleans (award-winning homes in the Lower 9th Ward, the neighborhood hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina) and the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana (working with the Sioux & Assiniboine Tribes to build homes for Tribal members). At DRAW, she has been honored to work with several NPOs on sustainable, affordable housing and parkland projects throughout the Kansas City metro. Melanie graduated with honors from the University of Colorado (MLA), practiced with architectural firms in Denver (Civitas) & New York (Studio Libeskind) & was a professor in the College of Architecture at Kansas State University. During her 25+ years of professional design experience, she has served as PLA & project manager on a wide range of multi-disciplinary projects, including her role as Design Guidelines & Master Planning Team Member for the World Trade Center in New York. The scale of her designs range from master planning hundreds of acres to designing site-specific construction details. She is passionate about sustainable design work that facilitates the fusion of a community’s culture & values into unique, locale-specific solutions that get implemented.