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In Memory of Ted Baker, FASLA
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Edward "Ted" Baker was obsessed with nature.
"You know leaves have feelings too, right?" he used to tell his son, Edward G. Baker, whenever he yanked them from the tree.
Baker took his love of plants and turned it into a landscape architecture career that spanned nearly five decades and continued through his final days. He died on Friday, Arbor Day. He was 76.
Since he moved to Miami in 1968, Baker ran his own Coral Gables-based firm, taught at Florida International University and served as a landscape architect for the city of Miami.
Friends and family remember the highly accomplished landscape architect as a funny, warm man with a true passion for his profession and a dedication to education.
Gene Tinnie, an artist and community leader, first worked with Baker on Overtown’s Henry Reeves Park in 1977. They met again in 2010 for Sherdavia Jenkins Peace Park, where Tinnie said Baker sought to add special touches that would make the park a memorial in more than name only. The 9-year-old was killed by a bullet as she and her brother and sister were playing outside their home in July 2006.
"There are too few people who get to enjoy their work and derive satisfaction from it. That becomes contagious," Tinnie said. "He was one of the blessed ones who could do that."
Baker was born in Staten Island and came to Miami with a degree from California State Polytechnic University and experience with a handful of landscape architecture firms. He went on to receive his MLA from Florida International University and his MDes from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
Over the nearly 40 years he spent in South Florida, Baker went on to join or found many organizations, all while starting his own business and family.
Baker was a founding member and chair of the Miami-Dade County Historic Preservation Board; on the Urban Development Review Board of the City of Miami for 14 years; on the Design Review Board for the City of Miami Beach for three years; an ExCom member of the Florida Urban Forestry Council; chairman of the Florida Board of Landscape Architects; and inducted to the American Society of Landscape Architect’s Council of Fellows in 1997.
"Creating a landscape is about creating an experience," Baker told the Herald in 2002. "The more daring and challenging those are, the more exciting and rewarding the place will be."
Source: Alex Harris / www.miamiherald.com