Establishing roots before growing the tree. A gentler path to the end result.
We spend a lot of time considering the link between landscape and architecture. As landscape architects and custodians of this earth, we push for landscape driven schemes and buildings that work with the land, to enhance the land and minimise their impact on the future of this earth. Sometimes we think what we are doing is new, trail blazing. But then we take a walk at Beachy Head and remember architecture that is led by the land, isn’t new, it’s old. Very old. It’s in the straw and heather roofs of Celtic round houses, the neolithic grass long barrows, and the wattle walls of Viking homes. Over time we have moved gradually away from the land, we began to harness its powers through such architecture as wind and water mills and then to disregard it in the search for the next perfect housing plot, the next instagrammable interior. Land that can be cleared and a blank canvas created.
But there is a shift, a shift in the minds and hearts of architects, landscape architects, professionals. A sensing of the urgency to choose a new path and an acceptance of our role within the solution. There are rumblings. Rumblings of a bigger kind in our clients, the people of this land, those who want to shift their priorities from fast and beautiful to slower and thoughtful. Those who want to push for passivhaus, natural materials, for landscape led. And those who can, with support from us, tolerate the slower final home, gentler final finish.
We are moving within a difficult time, a time of crisis; climate, housing, health but the solutions are within our reach. Solutions which don’t have to be either/or but instead to shift, to reprioritise. To choose health first, climate first and final finish second, later, slower. There are those who believe that sustainable and beautiful are juxtaposed but our projects are evidence of the contrary. Of course, there can be moments in that journey to be both sustainable and beautiful where clients may need to choose; to phase or to compromise, to have now or later but the answers to those questions are changing too. People understand the value in building right over building fast.
Our projects aren’t perfect, we aren’t perfect but our projects are better for having us within them. They are greater than they were, slower than they were, gentler than they would otherwise have been. And each time we breathe life into a new client relationship or work again with that passionate architect, we are choosing to reprioritise, choosing to be brave and in turn facilitating others to be brave too.