Being bold

Deborah Mulhearn takes a broad look at the landscape profession, asking where the opportunities are for professionals now and in the future.

Whether a multidisciplinary practice or a small firm with a specialism, the landscape architect’s role and responsibilities in the twenty-first century are increasingly about building social capital and maintaining healthy, sustainable environments as much as keeping up with fast-paced technological changes.

These are challenges that bring rich opportunities for collaborative ways of working and sharing expertise. They could be projects that bring humans closer to nature while protecting fragile ecosystems, as at a new nature reserve such as Walthamstow Wetlands, or delving into the growing overseas markets such as Russia, a country looking to western European expertise to achieve a more human-centred approach in Soviet-era towns and cities.

Profiling the profession

‘We have a great opportunity to create an identity for our profession that people can understand and that elevates our collective profile,’ says Ben Palmer, a director of Optimised Environments (OPEN) in Edinburgh. ‘As landscape architects we are good at thinking about projects across longer timescales. Having a voice within big teams and having the confidence to say what we think as professionals is something we could work on. We collaborate but it’s also about knowing when to push. Certainly we must stand up for what we think is right – often we are standing back to benefit a project as a whole, as we did as part of Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA)’s architectural team at the new V&A Museum of Design in Dundee. But there’s also a time to let our egos shine. Knowing when is the skill.’

OPEN was part of Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA)’s architectural team at the new V&A Museum of Design in Dundee. ‘The landscape is very simple around the V&A, because the building is the iconic object,’ explains director Ben Palmer.

© VisitScotland / Kenny Lam

The new V&A was a project very much about the building in a setting. ‘The landscape is very simple around the V&A, because the building is the iconic object,’ explains Palmer. ‘On other projects we take the lead as landscape architects, working either with our in house teams or external consultants in order to produce the best possible overall projects. It’s not about landscape versus the architecture or engineering. If you take that adversarial approach, the whole project suffers. It’s an easy trap to fall into and we can come out of projects feeling bruised.’

Landscape architects are well placed to bring teams together and in some cases lead, as at Walthamstow Wetlands, Europe’s largest urban wetland nature reserve – created from a chain of open reservoirs owned by Thames Water and covering 200 hectares of land in East London. Until this HLF-funded scheme there was no free public access.

‘Landscape architects should not underestimate how they can affect the success of a project,’ says Lynn Kinnear, director of Lynn Kinnear Associates (LKA), a London-based practice with a track record of innovative projects that challenge social exclusion. LKA was lead partner on this hugely complex site necessitating a multidisciplinary team of landscape, urban realm, architecture, structural, civil and services engineering, exhibition design, wayfinding and graphics, curation, arboriculture, ecology and specialist planting design for the client, Waltham Forest Council.

© VisitScotland / Kenny Lam

The main challenge was to find a shared vision with stakeholders who often had polarised views, and negotiating those tensions and conflicts, for example between protecting habitats and increasing access, and the operational requirements of the site.

To do this, landscape architects have to understand about reducing health risks in urban areas, and flood characteristics in rural or low-lying areas, as well as wider global issues such as alleviating the impact of climate change.

‘Ours is an expansive profession and we have a range of skills, including at the strategic level, that show our true potential,’ says Kinnear. ‘But we have to be more aspirational. The education system could be more ambitious and push students to do a lot more design critiquing so they learn to strive for great spaces and places, and not just settle for the norm.’

Digital or digits?

Many large projects are structured to employ BIM and large multidisciplinary practices now ensure they have people with the requisite digital skills on their teams. The construction industry as a whole is embracing this method of collaborative working and landscape architects are increasingly tasked with combining BIM modelling with traditional skills.

Smaller practices can position themselves by offering a more flexible and creative service. ‘We ensure that we stay up to date with our use of IT programs, but also do a lot of hand drawing,’ says Sophie Parker-Loftus, an associate landscape architect at Exterior Architecture (ExA) in Manchester.

‘BIM packages are invaluable for collaborative technical design but early in a project pens and tracing paper allow for greater freedom and creativity. CAD drawings can feel abstract and providing more fluid sketches can give the client more opportunity to influence the process,’ she says.

‘It’s also good to get away from the computer screen sometimes. We go on regular study trips to analyse our own work and that of others – the good, the bad and the ugly. The whole practice from assistant to director goes, and we study landscapes abroad and around the regions, to sketch and photograph and discuss as a practice what we can learn from other projects.'

Walthamstow Wetlands

© iStockphoto

‘It’s best practice to revisit but R&D also takes time and it’s about promoting and raising our internal standards as well. If you are focused on computer skills there is always the danger of not only forgetting about traditional skills, but the experiential part of going through a landscape can only happen out there, being out in the rain, getting your hands dirty, hearing the sound of rustling reed beds.’

‘Drawing skills remain absolutely relevant,’ agrees Ben Palmer of OPEN. ‘But digital tools are front loading the design process, and these are issues we discuss a lot within the practice. Of course there are benefits to digital ways of working, and clients like them because they can be great collaborative and coordinating tools, but systems such as BIM can be clunky and can accelerate the design process to the point where the initial creative stage can be lost or stilted.

‘It’s a question of how to blend some of the new technologies with traditional skills, using the immediacy of techniques such as hand drawing to maintain creativity at the beginning of the design process. Being able to communicate ideas is essential, and hand drawings can encourage clients and stakeholders to feed into the design process as they don’t feel so precious or final.’

At Walthamstow Wetlands, LKA was able to show how data underpins and influences design decisions. For example, how a set of seasonal routes are determined by habitat movement, rather than the other way round – and how this is applied to determine where the entrances could be sited to encourage people to move around and through the reserve in certain ways.

‘At Walthamstow Wetlands a fully integrated design process has resulted in a scheme rooted in the natural and industrial heritage context of the site and that seamlessly flows between the external and internal spaces,’ says Rose Jaijee, project director for client Waltham Forest Council. ‘The process of agreeing detailed design was by no means straightforward,’ explains Jaijee. ‘Critically, the design team was able to manage a structured process of securing consensus at each design stage. Important for the scheme that finally emerged, the team had the confidence and strength of conviction to put forward design options that pushed the envelope and challenged the client group.’

Community engagement – all together now

Communities are becoming much more aware of their environment, of how cities function and the relationship with health and place, for example. LKA has worked proactively to empower local communities for decades, and in this way practices like theirs are way ahead of the architecture profession. Twenty years ago LKA was working with the Bengali community in Whitechapel High Street, setting up translators in sari shops to reach marginalised communities and people, often women.

Brentford High Street, 2016 winner of the LI President’s Award and a Civic Trust award, was also a project about bringing together communities and stakeholders, including both local authority and private landowners, in a densely populated part of London that suffered major traffic issues.

‘It was a complex project with many facets but we looked at it from the social perspective rather than as a design project,’ she says. ‘We considered how a local population could benefit from the big businesses on its doorstep, in this case GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Sky TV. It’s not just about adjacency, we were aiming for genuine connectivity and mutual benefits.’ A series of engagements and consultation to activate moribund spaces included a pop-up shop where startup businesses could come and test out their ideas and products, and cargo bikes could be hired to reduce emissions.

Brentford’s revived High Street

© Grant Smith

Working genuinely from the grassroots up allows landscape architects to talk to people at concept stage to discuss how they would like to see their spaces animated and cared for in the long term. ‘Almost all of ours are community projects because it’s really important for us to connect with as many people as possible,’ says Heather Ring, landscape architect and founder of Wayward, a London-based collective of landscape architects, designers, artists and urban growers. ‘We often offer programming and curating for the life of the project,’she adds.

‘We’ve established a reputation for a specific kind of work and our clients see us as placemakers who can balance the more corporate or commercial aspects with local and community driven interests.’ Clients range from local authorities, developers who are interested in building a sense of authenticity, cultural partners, museums and grassroots educational organisations such as Mandela8 that has commissioned a memorial for Nelson Mandela in Princes Park in Liverpool.

‘The Mandela8 memorial project in Liverpool is very much the vision of a grassroots community where Wayward had very intimate and intense engagement with local stakeholders,’ says Ring. ‘It is a space for education and reflection that responds to the garden that Mandela created in prison, and telling the story of how his garden was a key symbol in his resistance and endurance. Part of that is looking at how a community can care for a permanent memorial.

Practices such as LKA and Wayward pioneer models of working and new thinking. ‘We work quickly, often in small, interim spaces that can act as small testing grounds where we can innovate and then adopt ideas on a larger scale,’ says Ring. ‘For example we are now developing larger versions of our Urban Physic Garden in London, and created a satellite of small DIY projects alongside the permanent Mandela memorial, in the form of a series of oil barrel gardens that children can make.’

The wood and the trees

Landscape architects are increasingly forging opportunities to educate and influence clients, for example commercially-driven developers. ‘We are trained to look at context and how systems work, and these are skills are becoming ever more relevant as people become more aware of how the way they live impacts their environment, and vice versa,’ says Ben Palmer of OPEN. ‘If we explain properly how we can add value they can take often take this on board.’

At Countesswells, a large new settlement of over 3,000 homes, schools, employment and community facilities in Aberdeen, OPEN is working with Stewart Milne Homes to create a new 11ha park that revitalises existing watercourses and creates an ecological park running through the heart of the new place. ‘This is a private scheme but one that is built around a quality streetscape, landscape and public realm,’ says Palmer. ‘You may have to work to convince the client that their upfront investment is worthwhile but it’s our job to demonstrate what the benefits could be and thereby gain their trust. It’s often down to finding the right client at the right time.’

Urban Physic Garden, London

© Mike Massaro

ExA is a horticulturally-driven practice working in the context of climate change, where research and experience is changing the form and shape of city planting.

‘We try as a practice to qualify the value of what we are doing, because the idea of increasing natural capital is at the heart of our practice ethos,’ says Parker-Loftus. ‘Not all species are suited to urban planting, but also, conversely, we are looking at which tree species survive and thrive in our changing urban environment and integrating those species into planting schemes. For example you would not have considered planting the Styphnolobium japonicum, or Japanese pagoda tree, in central Manchester ten years ago.

‘There is a constantly evolving palette of what we use and where in urban settings. As a profession we have to stay abreast of these changes.’ From masterplanning to planting, landscape architecture covers so many skills and touches on such a huge range of disciplines, that the future can only offer exciting opportunities.

Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist writing about the arts, architecture, heritage, social issues and the built environment.