PLUS Foundation is a joint initiative of PLUS and The Narayanan Family Foundation focusing on making our shared spaces ecological, equitable, and livable.

PLUS Foundation hopes to create a platform for landscape architects, allied professions, nonprofits, public agencies, and communities to address urgent challenges in India’s built environment due to rapid urbanization, climate change and rising sea levels, and increasing social inequity.

To pursue this ambitious agenda, PLUS Foundation has developed three program areas:

1. Design Incubator: A community-building platform for socially conscious designers to co-create and address challenges in our shared spaces.
2. Research: A research platform dedicated to finding solutions to landscape challenges facing India like climate change, environment, and rapid urbanization.
3. Advocacy: An education program bringing awareness about the field of landscape architecture. Our program will work to increase the number of landscape architects in India to tackle the challenges of our built and natural environment.

The Narayanan Family Foundation has supported initiatives spanning landscape architecture projects to preschool access in India. The foundation has provided seed money for public space projects improving quality of life in San Francisco, established the Award for Excellence in Landscape Design at UC Berkeley to promote research in landscape architecture, sponsored scholarships to increase the representation of Black Americans in landscape architecture, and provided funding to nonprofits like Pratham delivering education to underprivileged children. The foundation is also starting a program at IIT Madras to advance the use of artificial intelligence to benefit society.

PLUS Incubator brings designers together with government officials, nonprofits, developers, industry experts, and community groups to work on public spaces and social built-environment projects.

The PLUS Incubator is a member-run community. Members think about new ways to improve the built environment and how it can better serve and empower users. The incubator space strives to be a creative and intellectually stimulating environment for people from diverse fields to co-create socially conscious design. Member ideas serve as a catalyst to initiate innovation in public realms and built environment projects.

The members organize public seminars, workshops, and social events to build and share new knowledge in the design community and the general public. We are both a think-tank and do-tank.

PLUS Incubator works collectively to address the environmental crises arising from climate change, rising sea levels, and rapid urbanization.

PLUS and The Narayanan Family Foundation jointly manage the incubator.

PLUS Research provides resources and incentives to conduct research and innovative exploration in the field of landscape architecture.

PLUS believes the profession of landscape architecture is critical in addressing environmental crises, including climate change, rising sea levels, social equity, and rapid urbanization. The profession is increasingly taking the lead role in solving these issues.

Our research program housed inside the PLUS studio will help bridge professional practice and academic research to solve the complex problems of resiliency, environmental stewardship and social equity in the design of our built and natural environments. A fellowship program based at our U.S. and India studio locations will invite researchers to do focused research.