John Kleinschmidt Email & Phone Number

As Design Director of Waggonner & Ball, I help teams set the creative direction of projects focused on adaptations to climate change in coastal areas, Living With Water™ strategies for sustainable urbanism, and sensitive responses to place and site at the building and campus scales. Never without a sketchbook and pen, I draw to bring people together – something I learned in my earliest days at Waggonner & Ball, when I joined the first Dutch Dialogues® workshop in 2008. Since then, I have lent my hand to dozens of collaborative workshops that underpin our firm’s “all-scales” approach to design and project definition with clients, design partners, and community members.I believe practical things should be beautiful, that drawing by hand is as essential as breathing, and that the most important spatial challenges of our changing world can be met with creativity and design thinking.I maintain a collaborative arts practice focused on installations centered on the phenomenology of water, environmental change, and uncovering hidden stories in strange sites. I have been an artist in residence at A Studio In The Woods and now serve as a board member. I also serve on the Customer Advisory Committee of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans and am a Design Consultant to Ripple Effect, a non-profit working to build water literacy in K-12 schools currently collaborating with Tulane’s ByWater Institute and the Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development on “Ripples to Waves,” a multi-year initiative funded by the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program.

Listed skills include Architectural Design, Design Research, Urban Design, Water Sensitive Urban Design, and 2 others.