On one social level, the roof has inter-connectedness. The garden becomes a social place where people can hang out. The roof becomes an extension of people's daily lives. The laundry room is located right off the roof garden. This helps create great social connections with the architecture and landscape. One day, when we went up to the roof garden at the Curran House, I met a resident who was gardening while doing the family laundry. What do you see as the primary health and social values of these environments? How do they need to be designed to work best? Researchers are increasingly pointing to the value of gardening in reducing trauma. One of your ASLA award-winning projects, the Curran House, an affordable housing community in San Francisco, presents "the landscape as sanctuary in a threatening world." You purposefully designed a quiet oasis on the roof, that intensifies the sense of being in nature, while also enabling social interaction through gardening plots. For that particular use, it worked, but I think adaptability works best at a planning level and applies to urban design. For the Portland Art Museum, we had a client that needed to be able to move things, and they have curators, and they have different exhibits, so things needed to move and change, and adapt to a changing collection. So, I think you're a little more restricted. That's a much more innovative approach when you're working on a planning level.Īt a design level, it's kind of hard to allow things to move and change, especially in a landscape. Urban planning needs to be more adaptable and less prescriptive physically, encouraging adaptation over time. Do you think urban design needs to be modular, adaptive and changeable to cater to different users? Your work for the Portland Art Museum features moveable plinths and vertical steel panels, enabling a multitude of internal configurations. The regions here are very small and specific and it takes a long time working in this area to understand these microclimates. I think I do my best work in the Bay Area, because I think we all do the work in the region that we're the most comfortable with, where we understand the nuances. If you are in San Francisco, you have a climate that is very marine influenced, and very cool in the summer and never really warm in the winter, so you have some opportunities/challenges in terms of plant material. In an hour’s drive from San Francisco, the temperature can vary by 30 degrees on a given day. In the Sunset zones, there are probably five planting zones within the region near the Bay Area. The climate zones in this book are more specific than the USDA zones. A reference book for landscape architects in the west is the Sunset Western Garden Book. I grew up on the East Coast, and so it took me a number of years to really understand the climate here, which is very complex. What are the challenges involved in working with the microclimates in the region? Do you consider yourself a regional landscape architect foremost? Much of your work is in San Francisco Bay area. Edges are done with plantings and spaces are defined by a minimum of structure. That's very much they way I see my work as a landscape architect – a more diaphanous or permeable quality. Spaces such as these and the work of another Minimalist artist Fred Sandback are defined by suggestions of structure. Sandback used colored string to compose space in a gallery. They redefined the spatial constructs of modern architecture during a time that considered space over mass a defining quality.Īnother big influence on my work would be Minimalist artists such as Robert Irwin, who reinterpret our perception of space. The edges become diaphanous, the spaces ephemeral. The gardens they designed in the 1930's were really a reinvention of space. One source of inspiration is the work of early modernist landscape architects: Dan Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, and James Rose. In a recent book on your work from Princeton Architectural Press, Mary Myers writes, "Like Luis Barragán, Andrea Cochran is able to convey a forceful sense of volumetric space." Please describe your unique approach to space in your landscapes.
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