Maura Rockcastle designs landscapes by first standing in them for hours, feeling how the light shifts, how the ground gives underfoot, how a single site changes across a day. As Principal and Co-Founder at TEN x TEN, she has turned that slow, sensory way of working into a practice that treats deep attention to a place as the starting point for design, not the first line item to cut when a budget tightens.

Her path was anything but linear. She started in fine arts, running raspberries and homemade tea bags through a printmaking press, then watering the prints to grow mold and study how they changed over time. A perceptive professor pointed her toward landscape architecture, and she never looked back. She began her career the day after graduation at a renowned New York practice, working on a now-famous elevated park, then spent nearly a decade in the city at an interdisciplinary studio before returning to the Midwest, where she grew up and where her father practiced architecture. She co-founded TEN x TEN with a longtime collaborator after the two bonded over a design competition entry.

In this episode, host Alyssa Olson and Maura get into the real mechanics of running a values-driven studio. They talk about community engagement as genuine relationship building rather than a box to check, and the tension every firm knows between time, fees, and the storytelling that makes a project sing. Maura is candid about treating efficiency as its own design parameter, about the project management systems and shared digital boards that keep the studio's institutional knowledge alive, and about building a more horizontal office with a transparent salary ladder and rotating leadership roles. She also walks through work that carries heavy histories, including the revitalization of a sacred site at the confluence of two rivers, layered with cultural meaning and generations of trauma, and a minor league ballpark nested into a former industrial pipe foundry, where roughly 85 percent of the site's material is being salvaged and reused.

For designers, builders, and entrepreneurs, this is a clear-eyed look at how to protect the parts of your process that matter while still running a profitable, sustainable practice. Maura's approach to material reuse, community-centered design, and building a studio culture people actually want to grow inside gives you a lot to carry back to your own work, whatever the scale.

00:00 From printmaking and mold experiments to landscape architecture 

03:06 Early career and a decade of big-city practice 

05:26 Coming home and co-founding TEN x TEN 

07:11 What they set out to do differently 

15:05 The tension between time, fees, and storytelling 

18:29 Efficiency as a design parameter, tools, and shared knowledge 

25:59 Building a horizontal studio: titles, pay, and rotating leadership 

32:51 Dream projects and landscapes with contested histories 

37:13 Salvage as design: a ballpark built from a foundry 

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You can connect with Maura at:

https://www.tenxtenstudio.com/

https://www.instagram.com/tenxtenstudio/?hl=en

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maura-rockcastle-513a036/