"[1] He is co-founder of the interdisciplinary firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano in Mexico City known for designs in which the building is subordinate to the landscape.
At Berkeley, he was taught systems theory, ecological planning, and social inquiry techniques by Garrett Eckbo, Robert Royston, Donald Appleyard, and Ian McHarg.
In 1985 Schjetnan was appointed a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard Design School and received an honorary PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in 1995.
In terms of landscape design, Schjetnan was drawn towards the works of Luis Barragán, Roberto Burle Marx and Lawrence Halprin.
"[2] He is now inspired by architects such as Renzo Piano, Tadao Ando and Norman Foster in addition to environmental artists such as Doug Hollis, Richard Long, and James Turrel.
He works with low budgets, basic materials and modest details while gaining financial and political support by linking public spaces with infrastructure improvement.
He acknowledges the importance of landscape to both individual memory and public history by utilizing "critical regionalism": "self-reflective adaptation or transformation of both modernist and traditional design languages."