Where the Ego went after the Sun went down.
When I first encountered landscape architecture by way of Chip Sullivan in ED4A, an intro to environmental design class in the infamous Wurster 112. I had thought, “What a wonderful thing. Plants. People. Design. Nothing hard, cold and, soulless like the brutalist building we were studying in”.
It was pitched to me like it was softer ground to step into. It was less aggressive, more forgiving. Less statement, more poetry.
As I've worked through my undergraduate degree, studied landscape history, drew inspiration from precedents, sat in lectures, reviews, and presentations. I struggled through sleepless nights as a result of poor planning, the anxiety of what I did not know, working on what little energy my body had left, and I think somewhere along the way I got lost. Wrapped up in it all. (UC Berkeley sometimes does this to folks)
I drew and re-drew sites, had no real understanding of how topography worked, and barely understood what a scale was. When we first begin, we are so overwhelmed by the ever-looming, treacherous volume of technical skills we’ve yet to even touch, let alone hone in on. Our design and landscape literacy is elementary, yet intuitive but as we begin and participate in our formal education I ask what pieces of ourselves do we forget to bring with us?
Because when we study the “greats”, when we study the landscapes that have defined millennia and have changed and influenced entire communities of people I think I forgot to ask how they got there. I think I forgot to pay attention to the condition to which the designer was trying to improve.
Design is to take on the challenge of translating intention into form.
The designs that the profession praises and the designs that won, kept telling me to make something beautiful, something enjoyable, something nice to look at but now I ask for who? A panel of self-interested designers who can talk incestuous circles ad noseeum? Or for a compassionate community of people who want better for themselves and their people?
Yes. talk shop, be designers but I am no longer interested in the monolithic, the statement piece, the alien ship that landed.
Never forget the role we play as translators. Landscapes unlike art on walls are to be interacted with by all kinds of people, objects, beings seen and unseen. It confounds and mutilates the humanistic concept of consent. It is the theater of the lives we live. It is what we step into when we leave our front doors, it is the interstitial, the unnamed, the yet to be. It is the earth, the neighborhood, the courtyard. If it has a place, it is.
Eight weeks into the semester and, I keep finding myself unlearning what I had interpreted as landscape architecture in my past.
