design teams

Rusty regularly joins Architects and Landscape Architects on larger scaled childcare, camp, school, and park projects.

Rusty works with Architectural teams as part of project interviews, client meetings, conceptual designs, and detailed design consulting.

Rusty is a great resource for professional  teams looking to design special environments for their clients. Rusty brings his nearly 30 years of playscape design experience with him as well his humor, creativity, and knowledge of child development and children’s and caregivers’ needs.

Rusty has precedent images from around the world to help kick off design charrettes and get the team’s creative juices flowing. He speaks the language of educators and designers and brings a fun creativity to meetings and his design work.

Design firms Rusty has worked with include:

Rusty has a gift for imbuing joy and wonder into his designs, and breaking the mold with his sense of the fantastic.  This sort of creativity makes our collaborations something we look forward to very much.  We are very proud of the projects we have been able to work on together thus far.  I am personally looking forward to the next opportunity. 

–Zac Rood, Senior Designer, Trowbridge Wolf Michaels Landscape Architects LLP

Rusty Keeler … what’s not to like!  Rusty is living proof that creativity can entice children to expand their mind by learning from playing in the landscape around them. Rusty has applied this excitement by creating child space environments from a walk in a kale forest, to making mud pies, to piling up sticks and stones to build something, to having a conversation with a chicken. His designs can invigorate every child’s mind and enthusiasm with an opportunity for discovery of nature as the basis for an appreciative life of creativity in the years to come.

Larry Lord, Founding Principal of Lord Aeck Sargent Architects

Rusty Keeler has been an invaluable consultant to The Autism Nature Trail (The ANT) at Letchworth State Park since 2015. As we worked with parks personnel, landscape architects and autism experts, it was Rusty who was our “true North” in keeping the focus on connecting trail visitors to nature. He sees natural beauty and excitement in every aspect of the outdoors and elicits a sense of adventure and wonder with each creative design. When Rusty starts a sentence with, “What if…,” all of us who work on The ANT know that we will end up with a completely original proposition!

Loren Penman, Co-Chair for The ANT
Genesee Region Parks Commission