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0:13
Good evening.
0:17
Good evening, everybody. I feel like this is an excited crowd. I wonder why?
0:27
Good evening and welcome, and thank you for being here tonight. I'm Gary Hilderbrand, the Peter Louis Hornbeck professor and practice of landscape architecture and chair of the Department here at GSD. And it's my honor to introduce our speakers tonight, GSD design critics and surface design principles, Roderick Wyllie and James Lord. Allow me to begin by acknowledging that the Harvard Graduate School of Design is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett,
0:59
the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past, present and future, and honor of the land itself, which remains sacred to them. The school also recognizes the work of the Harvard University Native American Program in cultivating the relationships that led to the creation of this acknowledgment. Next, a quick reminder that we have a live captioning available tonight for a virtual audience.
1:34
I'm sure that there are people tapping in to listen to this on a webinar. To enable captions, you can click the Closed Captioning button at the bottom of the livestream window. And you can see it here on your screen as well. Big thanks to Paige, and Kat, and Matt, our events superstars. They always get it right. I also want to invite you to join us for an upcoming program on Monday, November 7. Next week at 6:30 you could join us for a public lecture
2:14
by Paul Walker who is the curator of the exhibition outside here, John Andrews-- Architect of Uncommon Sense, which is going to be on display here until December 22. It's really great to see the exhibition of the building. Whether you love it or you hate it, it's pretty great to understand what's behind it. And we invite you to attend all our fall programs here, and you can find a full list of those on the GSD website. Let me turn now to our two speakers.
2:49
It's my great pleasure to welcome James and Roderick here. I have a disclaimer. I'm too close to these two to have any kind of objective view of their work or their firm. Can't be done. Indeed, I'll begin with the fact that they have been great enduring friends to me and friends to the school and the department for all of the years since they completed their MLAs here a couple of decades ago. Loyal, generous, and devoted friends always. We share some things. James, we like Manhattans.
3:27
James and Roderick are devoted urban wanderers. They travel to cities in their spare time, and I do that too. Their vacations are surreal explorations of cities and food. We had dinner last night. I think we spent 90 minutes talking about cookbooks.
3:47
With their partner, Jeff, they've built just an amazing practice based in San Francisco that we all look to constantly for their always willingly shared design knowledge, their passion for the discipline, and for the work itself, which is always rigorous, disciplined, and honestly unobjectively very beautiful.
4:13
In the introduction essay to an interview in their monograph, Anita Veres Bhatia draws them out on their commitment to the performative aspects of landscape, which has been an overriding concern for a long time for so many practices and for our teaching as well. But as important as that is, it's only part of what goes into conceiving, elaborating, and building their work. It's never the primary focus. I think beauty comes above it. What would it mean to design a surface?
4:58
I think it's a good question. In the text-based disciplines, scholars like to talk about how we read, what we bring to reading, what kind of frame we have. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have put forward the idea that various modes of quote "surface reading strive to accurately depict the truth to which a text bears witness." Surface reading, as they say, broadens the scope of critique to include the interpretive activities that lead to understanding the complexity
5:37
of literary surfaces, surfaces that may have typically been rendered invisible by symptomatic readings. This might be a way to talk about how they design a surface design. I think they're like forensic specialists. They're sort of like crime scene investigators looking for evidence so they can build a narrative construct of what happened in the formation of a site. The surface is thick. It's laden. It's drenched with information. It tells them something that's worth
6:10
hearing or seeing and worthy of extrapolating into design ideas, into action, into experience. One other thing to say, you're just going to see great beauty in the work tonight. And finally, the Iceland Studio.
6:31
Got a bunch of other Icelanders here. I think many of us-- so they're teaching a studio in Iceland. What's it called? Aurora Dreamscapes. Let your mind wander with that. Many of us, I think, are osmotically gaining from the presence of this studio in the department and in the school. The imagery of ice caves, which is just phenomenal, the sensuousness of the discussion in a review last week, the all out focus on experience, and up there in the semi-detached world
7:07
of the fifth tray, a noted messiness. [LAUGHTER] In my firm's work, in a certain neighborhood in Cambridge, we talk about messiness without sloppiness, right, Lisa?
7:23
Design work can be messy and conceptually ordered at the same time. And I think that's what's happening up there. The students in this studio have bonded heavily, and that's a very welcomed thing. In our faculty, we talk, these days, yesterday even, about how we rebuild a shared studio culture in a post-pandemic world. And we talk about how we do this in the office, in our studios, right, because it's become easy, and even rewarding, to work at home or to watch this lecture from the comfort
7:55
of your kitchen. So I think this studio, the Aurora Dreamscapes Studio, might be the current gold standard for working in the trays. So I thank the students and thank these two great instructors for that. Roderick and James are in the house, and we can feel it. Please, give a warm welcome. [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
8:24
Thank you. Thank you. Wow. We're really happy to be here. Thank you all for coming and for people that are here virtually. Yes. We're really honored to be here and having so much fun teaching. So maybe that's the first thing we should do is thank our students who give so much to us. Exactly. This talk is a collection of our projects. We had a recognition that so much of the work that we've been doing over the last few years is connected to water and different ways.
9:03
And it's connected to water in different ways because of, often, the location of those projects. And so this is a collection of those projects in which water functions performatively with stormwater management, for example. But it also functions as reflection, reflecting cultural ideas about water. And certainly, it's on our mind in almost every single project considering that we're from Northern California and that we're in drought and that the world is confronting climate change.
9:45
So this is something that seems somewhat unavoidable. Yet, at the same time, I think we see the opportunity to celebrate the landscapes that we are designing and where they live in the world. So with that, we'll start with a project that we completed a couple of years ago in Seattle, which is a pretty-- In the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of the pandemic, which is a fairly large scale project. It's 40 acres. And it includes public space as well as a campus for Expedia, Inc.
10:25
And I think, when we start the process, I think Gary spoke eloquently to it. We really do scrape the surface, and we've got so many slides, so we're going to click fast. So I apologize for it. But when you start understanding-- is it working? Yeah. Oh, there we go. You really do have to pull off-- and this project, in particular, when we talk about water and use of water, it was water to start with. So you're looking at the site there, the 44 acres.
10:53
There was originally two piers, and then slowly over time, the land was filled in until you got the site that we have right now. The industrial uses of it, the land, and-- then it was then taken by the Amgen campus for pharmaceuticals. So this was an interesting project. This is our vision for it. We really worked in a way that could, in essence, capture all the layers and elements that were on the site previously but actually learn from the site itself.
11:30
And to think about a series of-- because our client was Mr. Barry Diller, who obviously came from a entertainment background, really thinking about it in almost a theater kind of sense, a way of a procession as you move across the site, and you experience a series of distinct landscapes that relate to the place but also to the notion of a workplace at the same time. Treating this not as one of those tech campuses you see all over with ping pong balls and everything else,
12:09
to actually think about all these elements and "amenities" are actually integrated in. But it's really about experiencing the first site. So this, for us, was interesting because the Pacific Northwest, you can see how the trees are structured. In essence, because there was no land here, we wanted to talk about, in essence, the artificiality of nature but making nature at the same time. So these green veils almost continue your movement across the site, and you experience what's going on.
12:43
The first, actually, a piece of the project was the public space that was adjacent to the campus. What you're seeing on the top are various easement maps that were part of the project as it was inherited by the client. So actually, the client was very willing to restructure these easement maps in such a way to consolidate all the public open space. So what we ended up with was this public beach condition that also redirected all the pedestrian and bike uses.
13:20
It was inspired really directly by the beach typology that you find in the Pacific Northwest, this rocky, wild beach, which at times reminded us a little bit of Japanese gardens also, but clearly, has this really direct relationship to the Sound, and gave people a new, almost tactile experience of that landscape. And so this used to be an asphalt road. And so literally, working with Native plant communities and sourcing to, again, integrate people and movement along the edge.
13:57
What was here previously was a 90-degree corner, which several accidents would happen. But it was also a location for king tides. So literally working on multiple levels of pulling out of the sea level rise issues and then incorporating it within a landscape that then becomes performative. And so what you're looking at here, these are a series of rain gardens using native plantings. And the inspiration really came from the character of the places, the beaches that are out there right now.
14:30
And we then soon discovered the lower bottom portions, which are these series of, again, logs that were used as booms in the Sound itself, guiding ships into port. And so the idea that we could reuse them and think about them as an object pieces that could engage people and orient people to the larger city and surrounds and also, as you can see, to the industrial quality of the place. Again, that contrast or this introduction of nature, it's amazing when you do these kinds of projects
15:12
to see how people actually occupy them afterwards. People and other-- And other creatures-- Like owls and bees. Yeah. So a lot of the site was developed to capture rainwater. It can't be strictly described as a restoration project since the site we inherited was artificial, essentially, and filled with debris. But it's some version of a restoration project, I think, acknowledging what was there as well and in some ways celebrating the history of the industry that surrounded it.
16:00
We're not going to read through all of these square footages about the ambitions and, finally, what occurred on the project. But in some ways, we're very lucky the client was really engaged in how the landscape could perform. And so that's something that shaped the character of the site as well.
16:32
Much of what we inherited was absolutely the worst soil that you could imagine, but we worked with soil scientists, including James Sottilo, who some of you in this room know and miss greatly, who ran around the site picking up whatever clues they could about what was actually surviving there. Those clues turned into-- Looks like it stuck a little bit there. Let me go one back. Those clues turned into a whole composting and soil-building regime that was incorporated into the site.
17:16
So what you're seeing are this magic compost tea, people studying in the site for what was there, and then applying the compost tea. Let me try to go back one. Yeah, because I think this shot is really important, at least for the students to understand, is that what you're looking at here-- this is the site as it looked here, is death by asphalt and this remnant areas. And really, we had to search to find soil. And why did we do that on a site like this?
17:49
It was really important to find the right kind of mycorrhizals that are surviving out there. So they've been acclimated to a site, right? Even though it was basically the size of the lectern here that we actually were able to find. And so what we did was we then took those microbes and then interjected them-- and you can see the two mounds-- into the-- and grew them. So it's almost like kombucha, right? So you just keep growing, and then you're-- shoot, what do I do with this mother?
18:20
But anyway, the important part of the story is that, because they were already acclimatized, we inoculated them back from the soil. And when we brought the new soil in that had been inoculated, we literally were able to have a soil that is already ready for that place. So it's from it and made it and come back to it. And part of that benefit that we exploded, I think for us, was through the planting because as a landscape artist you put little plugs in and then you
18:57
hope that the weeds don't take over and everything else. But when you actually care about the soil and you incorporate these kinds of technologies, literally, they grew overnight. And all the issues that you normally have to do for maintenance reasons disappeared. So it really is thinking about what's underneath and then to create this overnight. This is part of the stormwater management. And this is also-- so this part of it is about composition for us. And I was happy to hear Gary use the word
19:32
beauty a couple of times in his introduction because that is something that we're involuntarily attached to in our work, which I realize is hard to completely quantify. But to us, it speaks to how we organize the spaces and how we think people are going to be engaged in them.
20:00
So you're seeing this stormwater management, but it's a very wild meadow. I think also we were excited to, given the idea that this is a campus, we were excited that maybe this could be a different kind of campus, one that felt a little bit more closely connected to a wild nature, that would be a little bit more provocative to people to think about why some of these selections were made. And the fact that it's sat right on the Sound of Seattle
20:36
was really important because, so many times, buildings block views. You don't see. You don't get connected to a site. So part of that theatrical approach to the entrance really came to us as how do you extend the visual connection to the Sound without even getting to the Sound. So part of the strategy was to think about the stormwater and how you could abstract that experience on the other side of the building. And so what we did was we literally mapped the Sound,
21:15
and then, through a CNC, routed these series of stone because we know that water features always get turned off, right? So never design a water feature that is not going to get not turned off. So part of our strategy was, well, let's still the water and then allow that to always be part of the experience but then to introduce real water over the water, which is all reclaimed water from all the roof systems. So it's then, as it layered together this Earth form that we created, again, spatially
21:52
it does some interesting things and also experientially. As you cross over this, you hear the sound of the water, which creates this wonderful calming effect, especially for the people that use this place but also in combination with these grid of trees. This is Roderick's favorite tree, the katsura tree. Cercidiphyllum. What's really magical about cercidiphyllum, for people who don't know, is that certain times of year that has this cotton candy fragrance, which
22:22
is pretty magical if you're standing in the middle of the grove. So if you're coming into the site, yeah, exactly. But the Earth form itself does another thing that's really interesting besides creating a plane, then it's a simple water just cascades over it. But it also creates a datum. And what's interesting is, because Expedia is a travel agency, there's a combination of cues that we integrated within the landscape. So this is the front entrance. You can see we reused, recycled train
22:53
lines to delineate the edges. And then the ombre that you're looking at starts the experience of the sound. So the shimmering of the water then in paving materials happens from the very front. You get the sense of excitement of where you're going. But this Earth form you see here is, sometimes, you'll see the cruise ships parked. You have no clue that there's a water-- there's basically the docks are on the other side. So you, all of a sudden, get a whole new city parked there.
23:25
And you start to understand the importance of what you're doing. And there are more intimate spaces throughout the site, which was really important to have this variability of scales that people could spend time in. This is a diagram of the planting for two courtyards that we designed here. These are courtyards that-- actually, it's funny when we've worked with tech clients before, a lot of times, people want to do meetings everywhere, outside, all the time.
24:00
Every place is a potential meeting location. But in fact, the client, in this case, said actually, I don't really want people to have meetings here. I want them to just walk around and have a moment away from meetings. So that's what we designed here. The way we view a planting design as a way of organizing the space, but also thinking about it and its potential impact on habitat. So you're seeing diagrams of the plants and also the associated habitat that they are promoting.
24:38
And here are the two different courtyards. They're marked by different approaches in terms of color and texture. And they're, I think, intended to be, and I think they are very immersive. They take you away from the larger campus, even though they're right next door to the building, which leads us to a kind of larger view and composition of the main lawn and connection to the sound itself. You can see all these pieces of industry that are still here,
25:18
and you see Seattle directly behind it, Downtown Seattle. This is still pretty much in Seattle and pretty close to Downtown Seattle, but we worked with architects based in San Francisco, who we work with quite a bit and love collaborating with, Aidlin Darling, to develop this pavilion that has been called the Prow that comes out of the landscape. So in this case, sometimes they come up with projects and have an expectation that the landscape will surround their building.
25:54
And in this case, they came to us and said, well, the building is going to come out of the landscape. So you actually see it pretty explicitly in this view from above, the roof being an extension of the terraces that are part of the bigger composition of the landscape. But it's also part of the performative landscape because what you're looking at are these series of terraces that drop down. Now, there's a lot of lawn. For Californians, a lot of lawns, we go bananas seeing that.
26:25
We're thinking water use, crazy, crazy, crazy. But in Seattle, it rains all the time. And so we had to get over that hump. But what was interesting I think about the use of these terraced landscapes is that we were able to incorporate the stormwater issues and treatment systems through these native meadows. But also, in the case that there are king tides and sea level rise, that those same things become protective barriers to the site as well, and engage people. You can start to see.
27:00
These are the fishing boats, but the big boats move into this lock next door. This next project is, again, this is closer to our home in Woodside, California. And the notion here is to think about the preciousness of water and how you use it and what it does because the beauty of water is that it gives you a sense or a connection to things that are around you at the same time. So working with the architect, Olson Kundig, we literally used the landscape to extend their building out
27:40
and have a grounded experience. And thinking about when you enter into this, this is 70 150-year-old olive trees that we saved from being wood chipped. And so we felt, yes, they didn't produce olives anymore, but they actually should have a new life here. So as you're immersed, what's interesting about this site is that we could do little or no grading. And so subtly, how we layered in these water features to extend the architecture out or create these thresholds
28:18
that you'd go into the next space were very important in the sense of playfulness that we can have in cactus gardens and intimacy as you arrive to the front door with these series of, again, creating where the water should go and making it very precious at the same time, and how that grading shift that happened at the pool. So what's interesting about the project is one side it's very structured with the orchard of trees, but on the other side is the meadow,
28:47
which is what you're seeing here, early sketches, of thinking about how that could work in the processes from cover crops to final plantings. So we've included these-- we can probably go a little faster through. These are the sketches and how you get more intimate and highlights within that bigger design, and how the grading, as you can see, was incorporated into the planting design at the same time using wet plants and meadows working together and thinking about the individual module that
29:19
fits within that meadow matrix. And when you start getting into it, you start going into the field and you start making changes and things about that. But this is what it looks like when we first started. There was a cover crop on this before. But then you started to structure how the planting would work. So what we used here was a mixture of California native plants and then plants that were, basically, if you ran the transect around the world, if they were on it, we'd try and use it.
29:54
And so this idea that you could use some-- this here's the cover crop to start with. And then you can start to see us layering them out for the paths. And then initial plantings. And then we're just going through time here, and this is what looked like mid time.
30:15
And this is what it looks like now. So this series of grasses and experiences. And what was quite wonderful about this garden is, for the family that was in it, the client-- you're a landscape architect. They get architects, but what really do you do? And what was funny was Cindy is like, yeah, meadow, shmeadow, whatever, do its thing, and whatever, it's cool. But then it went in, and she looked at us, and she says, I've never gone outside. And now I go outside every day.
30:55
Every day, I grab my wine in the evening. I grab my coffee. I grab my kids. In pandemic times, literally, it saved her life in some ways because she was able to immerse in this rich landscape. This is his, actually, outdoor desk. We got him outside too. Yeah yeah. But you can see the beauty now. And this is a low water use meadow, right? So this is really the direction that we need to be thinking about, at least in California, where we're using--
31:31
Well, but it's hard to describe where it begins and ends. The low water informs the composition of the project. And so it all, I think, is integrated. This is the native Romney poppy. This next project, this is a funny one. [LAUGHTER] We're jumping to Hawaii. We're jumping Hawaii, of all places. This was one where they have a lot of water too, but then they also have a lot of history that is untold. This is the project. It was built by Vladimir Ossipoff, one of their modernists.
32:15
This is what the building looked like in the beginning. Of course, there was no landscape, per se, around it. And there wasn't until we got involved. What was funny about this was this is a rather-- we had actually-- not that we're his source, but we had a mind to help protect this building because this building was under threat of being demolished. And the client that was in this building was building a whole bunch of towers around it. So in essence, what we try to do is
32:44
to illustrate the importance of this man's work and the structure itself and how it frames the ocean. As you can see, it sits right across the ocean, but separating it from the ocean is a four lane highway, Ala Moana. And so we started to think about how can we make these connections. But it started, actually, with the descendants. And Gary, I greatly appreciate the acknowledgment started because our firm, we work a lot with Indigenous people and First Nation.
33:14
And so talking about that, when we worked with the descendants, the native Hawaiians on this project, they were getting up-- they were beating their chests because, if they found a bone or whatever, they'd stop these towers and stuff. So really, it was a dialogue. I said, well, we work with the Maori in New Zealand. They're like cousins. Let's talk. And so what's interesting about this project is that, through design, we were able to acknowledge and tell their story in a really interesting way
33:45
because they believe Sky Father and Earth Mother came together, and they had a child. And that was Taro, which is the plant you see at the bottom there. And then as Tar0 was stillborn, they created man to take care of Taro. And so for this whole water feature thing, you're going to see how the stories or elements were connected. And really, this is the parking lot. We started, and we wanted to reconnect back to the water. So we created this datum line, which is all Hawaii. You register things.
34:17
And then the water feature itself then visually connects-- your eye level connects to the ocean and takes out all the cars. The sounds of the water and the inscribing of the water with the patterning of the architecture really created this environment that they never had an urban space in Honolulu before. And I think that's part of what we were talking earlier about. You can create spaces, and if they're dead and not interesting, no one will come or even want to be a part of it.
34:46
But if they're interesting, I think people do things that you don't expect. And that feels always really exciting to me is for people to use the spaces and be surprised. I'm very surprised by all of this, probably mostly the ice skating. But all the rest, it's surprising how much it's been taken over by the people that live there, which that's what it should be done. It should. And just a poignant moment, just to make it a little more human. So the biggest guy, the descendant.
35:19
I'm big already, but this guy was really big. He came up to me after because he saw this modernist fountain piece right? There's no way you would understand the relationships of what we had created unless you were part of the storytelling and understood the story. And so you don't have to put a sign on it to make it work, but that giant guy came up to me when they're christening it and were giving blessings to the place. And he give me the biggest hug, and he says,
35:53
you're the first person to ever listen to us. And that was monumental because we created 120-foot long water feature that is quite remarkable. But it literally told their story, and it did it in not a small way. And I think those kinds of connections, those types that we try and listen for is what makes the work so great. This was-- do you want-- The Museum of Steel in Monterrey, Mexico, which is a project we did when we first started our own studio.
36:29
It's a site that is an old industrial site and something that I think the city of Monterrey, in some ways, was proud or indebted to the history of industry there. So there's a celebration of the old steel, and yet, a need to transform it. So this is a great source of-- we were talking a little bit earlier today about people in this room and who you meet, right? So one of the people that I worked with was this amazing woman named Claudia Harari. So she was the only landscape architect in Mexico,
37:18
other than maybe Mario. And what was so funny is, literally, when this was one of our first projects, she called, let's do this. And because we went down there, and there's not a profession called landscape architecture, there was no budget. So we literally-- I call this-- as they dug out-- this is Nicholas Grimshaw did the architecture, and they carved the ground out to put their museum in, which we did this green roof over. But what was interesting is, as they dug,
37:47
we found our elements because there was no budget. So we literally reused the steel containers that literally fused brick. And you can see how-- and we wanted the juxtaposition of the raw material infused on what it came in to the finished product. And so literally, we would find these giant pours and elements that were buried. When they had a bad pour, they just biffed it out the back, which is hilarious. So you can imagine if you're from the '70s when giant wax mold--
38:21
But we also broke down the material and reconstituted the concrete. We reused the cladding on the old hall to create this water feature that's 200 meters long, and it's where the train tracks used to come. So Claudia and I and Jeff, we'd all be sending stuff like this back and forth to each other, like this, like this, wider. Make it this. Through fax machines, mostly, at that point. And everything else to see how the-- and it does an optical perspective because the water
38:52
looks like it should be going the other way, which is why the trains used to come in, unload, and pull back. These are also remnants of the ore that we then did. This is low-tech design here. It's literally irrigation to create the mist, but they look like giant hot rocks as you arrive, which is what you would expect. But it's actually cold and cool, so it becomes a outdoor air conditioning people that can learn about the process and the materiality of the place while
39:25
at the same time enjoying a nice breeze. The roof here, we've included this in because this was the museum below. And the architects actually wanted to mound this up and put trees on it. And we thought, this is amazing, this sculpted roof. So let's just do and rethink about what that could-- and this is the build up literally of the roof going from the soils to creating Latin America's largest green roof. And this roof, as you can see here, is completely nonirrigated.
40:01
So this is in our show because, really, the scale and the ability to do non irrigated green roofs is really important and becomes the showpiece. So now, when you're on this, rather than doing the trees and just doing sedums, you can now read the mountainous landscape that this thing sits within, which is really-- that's the icon of the city. So really, using the architecture to help set up the connections to the larger city. And of course, they went Vegas on the inside.
40:34
This was the old blast furnace, and then you can see the water feature here. And people can go up the lifts. But really trying to distill this material, this reused material and the concrete. Everything is basically from the site. There's nothing imported. The hardest thing for us on that project was to get plant material because there are no nurseries in Mexico. So that was interesting. And now this is a detour briefly to a project that's
41:02
not complete but just to expose the process of a water feature that happens to be in our project. This is a small garden in San Francisco. This is actually the courtyard part of it, but it includes this tall water feature. We started working with the water features consultant fluidity out of Los Angeles, and we were talking a lot about how to animate that water, how to get that water to have a sort of light effect or a change during the day. So we started thinking that maybe we could actually
41:41
treat the surface that that water comes over as a weaving, something that interrupts the flow of the water. So we started looking at people like Annie Albers and other weaving textile artists. We have a friend in Los Angeles named Liz Robb who does textile art. And so we asked her if she would be willing to do a couple of samples that we would maybe cast in bronze for the surface of the water and actually then make larger samples, which is where we are in the project
42:16
right now, which is what you're seeing. These are about, I don't know, 4 by 2 or something like that. And they're basically bronze casts over these weavings that Liz has done. So the next step is to test it out with fluidity in terms of the actual water movement over these samples. But a lot of that was how you-- the whole design is how much not as much water can you use, right, because it's not about a big pool. It's about visually seeing the contrast
42:53
and minimizing the use in a very small, intimate way. This is the Uber headquarters that we did a shop in downtown San Francisco and Mission Bay district. And this really is, again, this layering and understanding where the site was. It was actually a part of the Bay. You can see it in the pink here. And the notion is, as it slowly got filled in, now we're extracting that out again. And so discovering where it was and the sea walls then had an influence. So this is Mission Bay a couple--
43:28
you can't even recognize this anymore. It's literally filled in. So the main component of the project is a public space. It's a park, essentially. And we're trying to figure out all kinds of ways to attack that, create space. What are some precedents that might be a little less expected than what we've been seeing in the development of this neighborhood? I think we've seen a lot of landscape architecture in this neighborhood that feels very formally connected to the architecture.
44:02
And I think some of it's pretty well done, but we were excited about doing something a little wilder, a little bit more, I'll say, sensual. We started looking at painting, so this is Robert Motherwell. And actually, this is one of the first sketches that we did for the space. It's a space in between buildings, so there's circulation, but we wanted to carve spaces out. And ultimately, this is one of the first versions of the design. We started thinking about people like Pina Bausch, which
44:39
is what you're seeing right here, this Carnations performance in which there's this delicate path through the space that creates the dance. And this is the outcome of all of that thinking over time. It also incorporates stormwater management. Of course, in San Francisco, and in many municipalities, we're really being required to keep all of the water on site. But I think that sometimes that can read as being really prescriptive to designers, when, in fact, we've found that we can almost
45:27
do anything we want once we know what the parameters are. So we created a more organic and wilder garden. We really did challenge the engineers because you've seen them all, right, these horrible engineered concrete curbs with little cutouts and someone planting a few junkus in there thinking they're going to survive. Well, this is a totally different approach, thinking about-- just like you saw the dancer. We tiptoed through creating these elements that
45:59
could organize the runoff to these certain beds, but treating them, not as these engineered things, but as these plantings. And we also wanted to-- there's a component of bringing the geology and the seismic history that's such a part of San Francisco into the project. So we actually ended up sourcing these pretty gigantic pieces of stone. This is us selecting them. But we wanted also to expose the artifice of this. So the stone themselves are, at times, polished, at times, rough.
46:43
And this is us working with one of the people we collaborate with in San Francisco, Jim Spahr, to create these sculptural pieces, but also, as I said, in these public projects, we don't know what people are going to do. We just hope they are mostly safe. And I think that ended up being the case. So here you can see part of the construction and then the finished element. And you can see how we really tried to play with the rustication of the ground plane
47:12
and the transference of water across the site while handling fire trucks and everything else that you have to do in a city. So this is literally a functioning lane.
47:31
This is a project across the Bay, the Bay Area Discovery Museum. This is a funny historic site, and it was an old military base. The Bay Area Discovery Museum, which has a very particular, I would say, progressive pedagogy about experience and learning, occupies one portion of the site. This is the Bay Area Discovery Museum. And we worked on a master plan for the Bay Area Discovery Museum. We worked with Olson Kundig out of Seattle on the master plan.
48:11
They did quite a few exhibits inside that are pretty amazing. And through the programming of the project, we needed to identify these experience-based designs that aligned with their pedagogy. The project that we're showing you is what we call the Gum Nut Grove. Well, actually, you can speak to the eucalyptus. Yes, sir, because I'm half Kiwi, right? That's why I-- it's Australia. But what's interesting is, so growing up in California, the eucalyptus is what we call an endemic species.
48:55
It's part of our culture. It was brought in originally to do train tracks and all these things. And Australia we have a very similar climate, so it took off. And so really, where I grew up, I was surrounded by eucalypts. So we took the inspiration, because as kids-- because this is a children's museum-- of picking those things up. And rather than throwing them at your brother, what can we do to actually inspire ourselves to engage with the forms. And so that all of a sudden, you start
49:29
to recognize the importance of these trees and the scale and the size and how you can engage with them. So we designed these giant gum nuts that you would, in essence, climb up to and experience and hang out in, and then have various different experiences and levels of engagement for the children to literally grow their bodies and engage with the trees safely. And it's all been designed so that adults can chase after them. And half the time, some of our friends who said, oh, you guys did that?
50:06
And says, oh, I love going in those things all the time. I go, but you're 50. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] A project like this is so much a product of a collaboration with the client, and this client was really eager to have kids challenged. The idea that this is maybe a little bit scary and a little rickety at moments, though still safe, felt really important to her. So I will say, actually, it is a little bit scary. You feel like you're hovering above the ground, about however high you are off the ground.
50:39
Oh, you are. Yeah, and then sliding down this eucalyptus leaved tunnel. So just like the leaves falling, you're falling through so you can see from the last gum nut down the slide. And these ones that are, again, for smaller scale kids to make house and live in a gum nut. But also, this is part of thinking about access. So not every kid can climb up to the top gum nut, so we needed to make sure that we created an equivalent experience for kids on the ground.
51:20
So the ground became a very important part of the whole project. And now, we're jumping all the way South to Palm Springs to talk about the desert and water in the desert. This is a residential project that, in some ways, I think functions as an oasis. It's a garden that's about the desert and about celebrating the power of the water in the desert.
51:54
And as it first started with this image here, which is Sonny Bono, who was the mayor of the city before becoming the Congressman. And so it was this funny situation where you have this dramatic landscape pieces, and then you've got these celebrity characters that occupy Palm Springs. So it led to this crazy drawing like this. And an organization where we literally, in this case, took out in the front yard. So there's no driveway, except we put it down at the bottom.
52:27
But the driveway used to be up in the middle there. And so in Palm Springs what they do do, these giant hedges that ring these properties. And so turning what-- this used to be driveway-- becomes the new entrance to the place. So we created basically a garden that wraps around the whole house. So there's no back or front to this design. And then we planted-- because some of the imagery that we use with Sonny Bono or the idea that it was a pink landscape.
52:58
And our client, his nickname is The Squirrel. Well, the pink landscape refers pretty specifically to the mountains beyond and that time of day in which they're this glowing pink. But we've tried to work with this grass before, and you need the right climate for it to actually turn pink. Muhlenbergia capillaris for anyone who wants to know. And so you see it there with the mallow, but we also paired it with the pink cacti under the aeris. So it's interesting as you stroll this garden because it's
53:35
a garden that is not-- it's from the place, but it's actually capturing from the real place and not the artificial place that people have done in Palm Springs. So this is just a little before and after, but there used to be a swimming pool in between here. And so the idea here is can we create or use what I call the borrowed landscape? So literally, all the palm trees of the neighbors, feel like that we get. And likewise, the other direction to the mountain.
54:05
So literally, there is literally thousands of homes in between this end of this pool and the mountains. But how do you actually create it? And you can see, Gary was right about we do love to travel. And Roderick and I love going to gardens. And we always laugh that you'll always find James and Roderick at a garden with the bunch of old ladies because that's who goes to gardens. In a respectful, admiring way. Of course. And so this garden had a really interesting-- this is Diego Rivera's.
54:38
On the bottom right is Frida and Diego's house in Mexico City that probably a lot of people are familiar with. Juan O'Gorman is the architect. But on the top is also probably a garden that some people are familiar with, which is the ethnobotanical garden in Oaxaca. So we are, of course, fascinated by this dramatic form-- The soldier cactus. --that in these-- in Mexico. And we knew we could possibly play with that idea in a place like Palm Springs, and then also use water to amplify that.
55:14
So part of this was that this was a single guy, and he didn't want to feel alone. [LAUGHTER] So the cactus themselves all have their own little peculiarities and personalities so that, when he was out there, he never felt alone, especially during the pandemic. And yes, he did hug and name most of the trees. So these connections you can make with people. This is a much larger connection we're quite proud of. We've been doing, as I mentioned, I am half Kiwi.
55:48
And so we were working a lot with the Auckland International Airport. And this design, they asked us, we need to change the character of what the feeling of the airport is. And I say this all the time, but it was actually true. When I was a little kid, we'd fly in and you'd see sheep and meadows and everything there. But over time, the tin sheds invaded, and you couldn't tell-- and the engineers curbs and everything. So you couldn't tell whether it's Oakland or Auckland.
56:16
And so they asked us, how can we get back to Auckland? And so we had a whole bunch of unsuitable soils, and you have no money to do it, of course, which is always the case. But we wanted to incorporate stormwater treatment and a storytelling or a narrative in here. And what's really interesting is we created these large Earth forms. This is about 5K of highway. And these forms here were created out of ones first engagement in New Zealand. So the Maori arrived about 1600 in giant wakas,
56:52
these big canoes, from Polynesia. And when they landed in Auckland, they basically had to survive. And so what they did was Auckland is made up of 90 volcanoes. So the stone itself, they would create holes in the ground, line it with rock, and put their kumer in the bottom. And then during the day, the heat of the rock would then radiate at night, and their plants would survive. So when the Europeans came, so my side of the thing, came in, and we did the same thing to create-- because Auckland--
57:27
New Zealand is like Portland. It's not like Hawaii. And so you have to adjust. So we created the hedgerows that then created the big orchards for the great wine and kiwis and all that kind of stuff. So this then became this iconic-- when you go to New Zealand, you see the hedgerows. So the Earth forms what we did was we took all these layering of how one has engaged with New Zealand and created this big entrance feature that is all planted with that endemic species
58:01
of the hedgerows but the native grasses. At one point, we were told that we took up every single native hedge material in the whole country to plant this thing. But was also is the excitement of travel right now. And so we created these mini Earth forms, we call them the blades, which is the abstraction of the jet engine because you know when you're driving to the airport you're going way faster than you should be. And so you get almost a cinematic approach
58:29
is what we were doing with the ground plane. And then using native materials, the rocks and the shell of the beaches and stuff that used to be here. You get this wonderful clicking along, so the excitement of about to leave for your flight or coming home. These are the language. But it's a funny thing because when you do things like this, there's two stories I always love to tell because you put something out there, you never know how it's going to be interpreted.
58:59
And when this thing was going in, it was during the Lord of the Rings period. So I kept on saying, so what are those Earth forms with the grasses were just hair plugs. And they kept on saying, oh, that's Mordor. So they were basically connecting this film to the landscape. But then over time, they actually understood the whole story. And really, there are these connections that, when you create something different and special, it does affects people's lives.
59:29
And some of the people that constructed those Earth forms, basically, didn't have jobs and were so inquisitive about what was going on that they wanted to be part of the process of building them. So these connections that you can make through landscape are quite unique. And that leads on our last project. So this is our last project. We're back home in San Francisco. This is the Land's End Visitor Center and landscape.
59:58
This is the Pacific Ocean on the left, so it's all the way at the far West side of the city. And we inherited, and we've inherited this a few times, a parking lot.
1:00:18
But it's a really spectacular site. It's historically really important. There were baths there, the Sutro Baths, that famously kept burning down. And at this point, they're ruin. And that actually has its own ecology. It's a brackish water body that's there. People climb around there and do what you do in ruins, imagine the past and commune with the Pacific Ocean. But this is a site that is essentially the National Park Service site. What you're seeing is us going into their archives
1:01:05
of artifacts that have been in storage and wondering if we could possibly incorporate those into the design. In terms of the water story, I think this is one of the most complete. All of the plants that were used in this project were sourced from the exact watershed of the site. So that means that the plants were sourced by cuttings typically, and then grown in a National Park Service nursery in the Presidio, which is a little bit North of here.
1:01:44
So these plants are made to survive with no irrigation. They are plants that then we inherited to integrate into the composition of the project. But actually, what you're seeing are the tags that describe the watershed location and the species and the collection date. Actually, this was quite a while ago that we did this. We also needed to make sure that the soil that was used on the project met their criteria, which meant that it was pretty sandy, needed
1:02:22
to be sandy, permeable because there is no irrigation, as I mentioned. We didn't really have much of a budget in this project at all, I would say. I would say, no budget And when I say that, probably, people think that we're exaggerating because probably we're prone to exaggeration. But in this case, it's not true. We really had no budget. We had no budget. But what we did have was a client that was really open to us being creative about it. And so we knew we needed soil, and so we
1:02:54
started tracking down all the various excavation sites. And this is a warning to anyone that wants to work for us. Or our employee number one, we used to nickname him the Sandman because he would run around to all the construction sites around San Francisco and take little samples of what they were pulling out. And then we had to negotiate with the contractor, will they dump the soil at the very end of San Francisco for us to use for this restoration. So that's what you're seeing.
1:03:24
This is 10th and Market. This is now a tower. And we ended up negotiating them dropping off the sand, which created this very native landscape overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We also wanted to think about how the landscape functions in terms of wind. It's extremely windy there, for people who haven't been there. So we started studying these dune fencing that would shape the ground. And so what you're seeing here is us having the contractor installing this dune fencing that creates a micro-climate
1:04:13
for the planting in between. And also starts to tie back into the Monterey Cypress that are just directly North of the site. Again, because there was no budget. All that wood that you see here, including this bench here, actually came from what was harvested from the trees that were on the site. So they are hauled off, and we coerced one of the guys to mill it, as you can see here. And you can see the direction here. And again, it's a funny thing how you can challenge yourself.
1:04:49
But this bench is completely ADA accessible. And so they don't have to look like they look off the catalog. But the pull up back up space, all that kind of stuff, arm rest can be integrated within the design. And the wood coming from the site, just again, ties it more to the site. The interesting thing is this was also where all the oyster shacks used to be. So when they're building this thing, we discovered tons and tons of oyster shells, which we then used as the mulch.
1:05:32
And every once in a while we'll look on Instagram to see what people like or they don't like in a project. Usually Instagram they like things. But it's funny, those artifacts that we, I wouldn't say, had a wrestling match. But we tried to be very convincing of the National Park Service. We said, having them in storage might not be as good as having them be damaged out and having people experience them. And they finally capitulated to that. But it's actually, sometimes it's the thing
1:06:09
that people like the best is that stag.
1:06:13
And this is the view Northwest. And you can see the visitor center all the way at the top. That's it. [APPLAUSE]
1:06:34
Yes. Oh no. OK.
1:06:47
I don't want to talk. I just want to see more work.
1:06:55
It's wonderful work, and I feel like there's just a great amount of humanity in your work. This is because I know you, Will. But the way you speak about your work with others, Jim and Allen at Olson Kundig and Claudia Harari, Grimshaw, Liz Robb, you speak with tenderness in a way about the people work with, which I think is a characteristic that I have deep apprec-- even now, a more deep appreciation of. And I think for the students especially, this talk is like a clinic about how
1:07:43
to work because you show the roughness of your sketches and the trickiness of working with contractors to how to lay out a meadow. Contractors, they'd never done that before, right? Put those guides out? And the matrix, it's a pain in the neck to do that. But I just feel like you're really teaching about how to do the work, and this isn't a question. This is an appreciation. And we don't have a lot of time, but I just want to open the floor for questions or appreciations if that may be the case.
1:08:35
And we have some mics.
1:08:39
George. George, take the mic. Oh thanks. Yeah, I'm wondering about the maintenance issues because all those plants and the edges that you've created and steep slopes and whatnot, I'm imagining-- and I know that you were probably thinking of this too. But if you could just speak to that a little bit. Is this live? It is live. OK well absolutely. I think that's the first thing we start to think about because there is this fine line of being able to get the careful balance between the plant needs
1:09:19
and what budgets cost sometimes. And so when we challenge ourselves to incorporate and attack the soils, whether it's my friend Sandman finding the right soil for those there or us finding the microbes, digging through the site to find the right thing, those little, small efforts actually go a long way towards maintenance because you're creating a healthier system. And the plant material, in essence, takes care of herself. Now, the compositions of the mixes and stuff,
1:09:58
what we try and look at, especially the stuff that was in Seattle, looking at endemic and Native species and/or they actually lived together, right? So it's almost like I had a wonderful, magic time of hanging out with Roberta Burle Marx early on in my career. And so he would go out and understand where these plants were in nature and then come back and compose with them. So I don't think that's lost on us either because I think that notion of what you put next to who is really important.
1:10:37
And one of the projects that-- and that goes culturally too, which is interesting. We have, again, these projects in New Zealand. And at one point, we thought it would be really important that we would plant these banks with eucalyptus, and underneath it we would plant New Zealand species, native species because they take longer to grow, and they need special environments for them to sprout up and take over. And we're working with the Maori. And at one point, he stopped me during the show,
1:11:11
and he says, because what I said was that, well, once the New Zealand species get a tall enough to survive and not worry about competitors and stuff, we'd cut all the eucalyptus out. And we thought, well, eucalyptus, Australians, they hate them. So it's all right. It's all good. But the Maori actually took me aside by the ear basically and said, wait a second. You can't do that because it's like cutting down your big brother that's protected you for all this time.
1:11:43
And then, even though it's a totally different species and you're planting it quote "because no one's going to cry if you take out a eucalyptus" was actually the opposite. And it's those kinds of relationships, of working with culture and planting and caring for the land that you can learn are so important. And that trickles, in a long way, down to the maintenance as well. My response to that question is maintenance is always a really big problem.
1:12:15
And we try to create maintenance manuals to combat that. We try to design in some sense of forgiveness in what we design. Can this actually be able to be changed and still maintain its integrity or its essence? But it's a garden or a landscape, and that's the nature of the beast, where it's wild. It's untamed. And we have friends that are involved with Great Dixter in England, and they're really upset about the plants that Sissinghurst now uses, that have replaced the particular cultivars that
1:12:59
were used originally. That's not to be dismissive of that, but it's just part of what we do. And I can't say we've solved it at all. We keep trying to have more accurate maintenance manuals and develop relationships with the people that maintain things. But it is always a challenge because people have limited resources. And the garden that we showed in Woodside, that is a project that has a lot of resources. It's maintained impeccably, right? But public projects don't have those resources.
1:13:40
But also things change. We can't just be putting lawn everywhere in California, so people have to evolve with us, I suppose. More questions?
1:13:58
Just following that, if you don't mind. George, part two. Yeah, part two. Actually, I was wondering about, you had said earlier, don't design a fountain without considering what it's like when it's dry. Correct. So I would assume, to some extent at least, that in the design of these very-- they're not really geometric. They're biomorphic or something-- that perhaps you're thinking about how entropy takes hold, and not just with the plant communities and all
1:14:33
that, but the edges, and the steepness of a slope. The eucalyptus trees create one kind of environment, but what happens-- I'm thinking of a Dan Kiley project that 18 years ago in Philadelphia, that started out as a grid and a bosque of Locust trees, and then it just fell into disuse. And then grass came up between the bricks everywhere. And it reminded me of the savanna. It was really quite nice, even in ruin. But wondering about that.
1:15:08
Go ahead. Yeah, I'm wondering if we might be-- the Dan Kiley model is probably not where we are right now. And maintenance might have something to do with that. The Pierpoint Lane Project in San Francisco has a wildness that might be a little more forgiving. Time will tell. I actually love Dan Kiley, and I love that sort of approach, that formality. But Yeah, I think we are trying to build in a little bit more cushion, I guess. It's a good question that I don't--
1:15:52
that I'm not sure we know the answer to. You will in 20 years. Yeah yeah yeah.
1:16:00
Well, thank you for just a great evening and for being here this semester. We're going to have you back very soon. Thanks, everybody, for turning out tonight. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.
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