CALIFORNIA DREAMING

Untypical, collective in spirit and a champion of simplicity, sustainability and equality, California-based Terremoto landscape architect practice, founded by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi, is changing attitudes – one radical garden at a time

WORDS: Darryl Moore

Set in the hills of Hollywood, Terremoto has created this ‘avant-garde intervention, a botanical dream garden’ with the likes of Cercis canadensis, Kalanchoe beharensis and Brahea armata

The website of California-based landscape architect Terremoto is untypical of the slick commercial affairs of many of its industry peers. Instead, it proffers an assemblage of text and images, where formal descriptions of projects are replaced by freestyle narratives evoking the rationale and essence of the gardens while photographs reveal the construction process as well as delivered states, often replete with occupants putting them to good use.

The overall impression conveys much of the ethos and aesthetic of the practice, established by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi, who bonded while both were working at Surface Design Inc. in San Francisco. ‘At a certain point, it crystalised in my mind that I wanted to create gardens in a way that I felt was missing in the United States,’ says David.

Setting out on their journey together ten years ago, the duo has grown the practice to 23 staff split between offices in Los Angeles (LA) and San Francisco, curated by David and Alain respectively. Between them all, they have created around 400 gardens.

Ethos And Structure

Terremoto aims to create environments that are aesthetically, ecologically, and metaphysically provocative and productive, rebalancing the ways in which power is manifested in the landscape. Their work is deeply connected to the places where they practice in California, confronting issues of land ownership imbued with the legacies and inequities of colonialism and capitalism, as well as exploring the ecological bonds between regional flora and fauna.

‘If I can’t walk into a place and tell if the ecosystem is in or out of balance,’ says David, ‘then I am probably not the person who should be working on this project because it is easier to do harm, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in an environment with which you are not familiar.’

In keeping with their principled mission-oriented approach, the office structure rejects a top-down power hierarchy in favour of one that David describes as ‘very collective in spirit’.

Both the offices operate independently, but in ‘spiritual alignment’, and independence within the office is also evident. ‘People want to be able to reflect their own design acumen,’ David explains, ‘and so, through giving them a great deal of autonomy, it’s like having twenty-three small practices within our office that Alain and I art direct.’

Collective decisions determine which projects are undertaken and how they are allocated to team members – each of whom has a personal workload of five to 12 projects. As the larger of the two offices the LA team usually has about 60 or 70 projects on the go, ranging from small modest homes to large estates. While studying landscape architecture in 2001–7, David noticed that residential design was not embraced in the prevailing pedagogy. Later, as a fledgling practice without a track record, however, smaller residential projects were the most readily available. He recalls that it provided an opportunity to ‘build tons of residential small gardens, making a million mistakes, learning and experimenting, trying to push it forward’.

The duo soon found a comfortable niche, which has since become the mainstay of Terremoto’s work. Occasional smaller commercial projects are also part of the mix, but public projects are conspicuous by their absence, which David credits to the near impossibility of dealing with unresponsive municipal bureaucracy. His description of a garden as ‘a human-curated manifestation of materials and botany, built and maintained by labour on a medium of land’ allows for an ideas-based approach to design, exploring the conditions and contexts of gardens and acknowledging their histories. While the Terremoto people are aware of garden traditions, they cautiously avoid styles and instead, their work exhibits an aesthetic born of the marriage of materials, plants and place.

MATERIALS-LED DESIGNS

Terremoto

Terremoto is a landscape architecture design studio co-founded by David Godshall, who studied history of art and architecture at University of California Santa Barbara and landscape architecture at University of California Berkeley, and Alain Peauroi, who studied landscape architecture at California Poly SLO and industrial design at Design Academy, Eindhoven NL. The studio has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. terremoto.la

They believe that materials should determine the detail and not vice versa and hold no truck with ornament and complexity, favouring instead materials that are simple and local, and construction methods that are straightforward and durable and not reliant on external infrastructure.

‘Thinking about materials through the lens of climate change,’ explains David, ‘our profession suffers from a horrifying weight of cognitive dissonance in calling things environmentally sustainable when they are not. That does us and our society a disservice.’

The Terremoto designers are adamant that expensive does not mean better and eschew the material consumption culture of luxury lifestyles that many designers espouse. Instead, they prefer to do as little as possible to honour the land and meet a client’s brief, retaining what is already on site, reusing, reinventing and employing hyperlocal materials.

Their Museum project is an apt example. Avoiding any major earthworks, a terraced sandstone hillside faced with crumbling cinderblock and cracked zoo rock was renovated with cheap but characterful materials. Paths and seating areas were made with old pavers and a new staircase added to connect the upper and lower terraces. Native plants were retained and enhanced to avoid the need for irrigation systems, and the owners have been actively involved in nurturing the garden themselves. Past and present are clearly visible and harmoniously co-exist in a way that David and Alain describe as ‘carbon-light, poetically rich and beautiful in a next civilisation sort of a way’.

Celebrating the labour that has gone into a garden project is central to the office’s ethos. This runs counter to the bias that gives landscape architects prestige over the underpaid workers who often go uncredited for their input in bringing garden schematics to life. Terremoto is critical of other practices with portfolios that represent gardens as immaculate conceptions, rather than the results of collaborations with contractors. ‘The long game is that we’re interested in gardens that reflect the desire for a more egalitarian world,’ says David. ‘Showcasing the labour is one part of that greater goal.’

Acknowledging this is especially important in LA, where the labour force consists largely of Latino immigrants who are already subject to economic discrimination and passive systemic racism. Terremoto has formalised a land and labour working group within the studio. It meets regularly to analyse the business’s working practices and members write articles to raise public awareness of the issue. They also discuss these issues directly with clients, being transparent about the real costs of gardens and helping them understand that their gardens are devalued by undervaluing and poorly compensating the people who build and maintain them.

An Evolutionary Approach

Terremoto’s dense planting style – abundant in form and texture – has evolved, from an early sculptural approach to an intermingled curated wildness. With a growing ecological awareness, it has skewed largely towards native plants that are adapted to the extreme conditions faced in the region, such as heat, drought and fire.

Water management is a crucial problem in LA, so native plants that have no need of irrigation are an easy low-tech solution to creating resilient gardens that also provide obvious benefits for local animals, birds and insects. ‘If you think about a garden, it may only be used by humans for a small percentage of the time during its existence,’ reflects David. ‘We lead busy lives, and our gardens have these lives without us so by using mostly native planting, it makes them more useful to the creatures who also interact with them.’

On larger long-term projects, he outlines an ambition ‘to start actually propagating on site when appropriate and when we are able to. From a closed-

TERREMOTO’S

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In Form

loop perspective, that seems to be the best way of doing it.’

TOP: the KX Lab garden is arranged around ‘big, good trees’ – 25 California sycamores – with reused gravels to create the sense of a creek bed and concrete, stone and wood for seating.

BOTTOM:

Native plants are at the heart of an experimental project called Test Plot, organised by Terremoto and in operation in Elysian Park in east LA where, over decades, the pre-existing native vegetation had been erased. An ongoing community landcare process has been established and, stewarded by local resident volunteers, it straddles the line between native gardening and ecological restoration. Four 30-foot-diameter plots with different aspects have been established, and any unwanted existing vegetation systematically removed before they are planted with a wide range of regionally appropriate species. Monitoring the plots provides information for possible future plantings that can challenge the invasive species that otherwise dominate the park. Working with educational and municipal partners, a wider programme has since been developed in other sites across the city.

Terremoto’s dedication to discarding industry assumptions, and to continually asking themselves the question ‘how can we make gardens that are truly good?’, involves addressing the contradictions the designers encounter in their work as honestly as possible. It is an unending process, but one that, to their credit, increasingly results in projects that are beautiful, different and succinct realisations of their ambition to make ‘radical gardens of love and interconnectedness’.