David Seiter

David Seiter is a landscape architect and designer in Brooklyn, NY. Through his studio Future Green, he reads existing site ecology before intervention, an approach documented in his 2016 field guide reframing NYC sidewalk weeds as infrastructure.

Seiter's starting point is always what's already there: the weed pushing through cracked asphalt, the post-industrial soil that nobody catalogued. His Brooklyn studio, Future Green, has spent nearly two decades building the case that landscape architecture begins with reading a site's existing ecology before touching it. That instinct produced Spontaneous Urban Plants: Weeds in NYC, a 2016 field guide-as-manifesto that reframed sidewalk weeds as infrastructure. It also shaped commissions at the scale of the Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop, the Amant Art Campus in Brooklyn, and the La Central affordable housing complex in the South Bronx, where bio-retention swales double as spatial experience. The animating question hasn't changed: what does this place already know, and how do you design with that rather than over it?