Derek Hoeferlin, AIA, affiliate ASLA, is principal of [dhd] derek hoeferlin design, an award-winning architecture, landscape, and urban design practice based in St. Louis. He is an associate professor and chair of landscape architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Hoeferlin is principal investigator of “Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture.” The project shares a title with his book, where he collaboratively researches integrated water-based design strategies across the Mississippi, Mekong, and Rhine river basins.

Hoeferlin lectures on his work internationally, and his designs, photography, teaching, and writing, have been published and exhibited widely, including in Chasing the City, New Orleans Under Reconstruction, Designing Suburban Futures, Journal of Architectural Education, The Anthropocene Review, Dwell, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Wallpaper, Metropolis, ‘scape, Scenario Journal, Archinect, Places Journal, Exhibit Columbus, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Way Beyond Bigness is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilizes a three-part, integrative design-research methodology, structured as: Appreciate + Analyze, Speculate + Synthesize, and Collaborate + Catalyze. To do such, Way Beyond Bigness realigns watersheds and architecture across multiple scales (sites to river basins), disciplines (ecologists to economists), narratives (hyperboles to pragmatics), and venues (academics to professionals), defined as Watershed Architecture.