Canning Greenworks Studio

Chris Canning has spent over twenty years designing landscapes where ecology does real work — managing stormwater, restoring shorelines, building climate resilience into the places where people live and gather. He founded Canning Greenworks Studio to bring that depth of practice to clients across Eastern Ontario: municipalities, civil engineering firms, institutions, and waterfront property owners who need more than a pretty plan.

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Background 

Chris trained and practiced with two of North America's most respected landscape architecture firms — Andropogon Associates and Olin Partnership in Philadelphia, both recognized internationally for ecological design and built work at the scale of campuses, cities, and cultural institutions. At Olin, he worked alongside Laurie Olin, recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the ASLA Medal. That lineage shapes how Canning Greenworks Studio approaches every project: rigorous ecological thinking, communicated clearly, built to last.

His project experience spans scales and geographies — from the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT and the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, to stormwater best management practices protecting the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Cecil County, Maryland, to green roof and urban heat island mitigation work in Wilmington, Delaware. He has studied civil engineering, hydrology, and hydrologic modelling with Professor Ken Potter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — a foundation that makes him a genuinely useful collaborator for civil engineering teams, not just a visual layer on top of their work.​

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In Ontario, Chris has designed green infrastructure for the City of Ottawa, led shoreline stabilization and greenroof projects in the Rideau Lakes, and is currently co-leading active transportation and placemaking work across four villages in the Township of Rideau Lakes. He teaches at Queen's University and has lectured and juried at the University of Guelph, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Philadelphia University.

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How He Works

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Chris works directly with clients — no hand-offs to junior staff, no canned renderings. His practice runs on hand sketches developed on-site and in conversation, so clients see the thinking as it happens and can shape it in real time. That approach compresses the gap between vision and decision, and it produces landscape projects with a level of craft that computer-generated imagery rarely captures.

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