Her work promotes community-oriented spaces that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, and artful.
She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1969, where she studied Art History.
[4] After graduating from University of Pennsylvania, Spirn worked as an ecological designer and planner at the office of Wallace McHarg Roberts and Todd in Philadelphia from 1973 to 1977.
She left Harvard in 1986 to become the chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and also served as the co-director of the Urban Studies Program there from 1996 to 2000.
This project links landscape design, community development, and urban stormwater management.