Ernest Haines

Ernest Haines is a landscape and urban designer whose work examines how computational tools can support more adaptive, responsive, and precise approaches to spatial design. He is the founder of ijk Solutions, a Philadelphia-based practice that integrates technology, analysis, and modeling into the planning and execution of the built environment.

His professional experience ranges from the design of high-impact public spaces to the construction of large-scale landscape infrastructure across North America and abroad. Ernest has worked with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Sherwood Design Engineers, and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol. His approach centers on how projects are built, who builds them, and how a shared language can be embedded early and often in the design process.

Ernest holds a Master in Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard GSD and a BS in Urban Design with Departmental Honors from Parsons School of Design. His thesis,Turnpike Metabolism, advised by Robert Pietrusko and awarded both the department’s thesis prize and the AIANY + ASLANY Transportation + Infrastructure Design Excellence Student Award, explored how the American highway system not only traverses landscape but actively shapes it. Using the New Jersey Meadowlands as a case study, the project proposed a national framework in which landscape metabolism, sensing, and feedback loops become primary drivers in the design, rehabilitation, and governance of infrastructure.

He has given guest lectures at Columbia GSAPP, Parsons, and Harvard GSD, and has contributed to core and option studios focused on infrastructure, ecological systems, and urban metabolism. In 2018, he was awarded the Irving Digital Innovation Fellowship at Harvard, where he developed technical workshops and pursued research on filmic cartography. His research examined how cinematic techniques can map territory, sequence spatial narratives, and reshape collective perceptions of landscape.