All land, urban or rural, wild or toxic, comes with a deep history. As landscape architects, when we first approach any site, it is with a simple act of grace: We ask its story and then begin to find the imprints left by the forces that have shaped it over time. We call this slow listening. It is the way we gain the knowledge that inspires and shapes the vision for that land. It allows us to open our hearts and minds and develop a sense of kinship with the land. This approach has kept us from regarding any land as empty or vacant or lacking in value or history. The land precedes us and will survive us. It holds eons in layered and complex mysteries. The land is full. It has no end of stories to tell us if we are patient enough to listen.
Approaching land with this sense of its fullness shifts the ways we engage with it in our daily lives as landscape architects and as human beings. It is the counter position to phrases referring to land as “tabula rasa,” “blank slate,” or even the seemingly benign “green space.” As designers and researchers, we look to the complex of geological forces, ecology, and animal and human agency that has shaped the land. It presents tantalizing threads that lead us to design inspiration that arises from the site. We have established two essential categories of interrogation: the physical ecology of the land, and the layers of culture that evolve with that ecology over time. Building an understanding of the intimate connections among humans and the ecologies they inhabit allows us to compose a portrait of a place.
The biography of a site originates in that land’s formation. It includes volcanic activity, glaciation, plate tectonics and seismic activity, erosion, and sedimentation. The mineral content and dynamics of what earth scientists call the “parent” geology establish the base of the chemical and physical qualities of the soil, which in turn hosts specific plant and animal communities adapted to the site’s pH, microbiome, tilth, and soil fertility—what is generally called ecology. The dynamics of water’s movement across land, the forestation, climate patterns, and fire further form the unique ecological nuance of a site. In a historic continuum, these conditions have provided specific factors that influence patterns of animal and human migration. Over time these movements determine settlement patterns around corridors favorable to the broad exploitation and reallocation of natural resources. It is remarkable how often the prehistoric geology of a place, the richness of its soil, a specific forest type, the energy of falling water, or the rhythms of flooding are at the crux of the “how” and “why” of populations, settlements, and modes of land use. These revelations of the ecology-to-culture continuum are what we seek through research.
A Research-Driven Design Process
At Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects we have developed a research-based design process over decades of work that invests substantial resources in learning the deep history of a site. The firm’s structure mirrors our research-based design process: Imagine a celestial model of a Sun with three revolving planets. The Design Group, our Sun, is at the core of what we do. Orbiting this team are the Conservation, Culture, and Communication groups, our planets. These groups push and shape the design approach that occupies their common center by revealing and interpreting the unique aspects of a site early in every design process. They carry within them the specialized perspectives and methods of their fields.
The tools of the Conservation Group are broad and include recorded data from national and regional resources such as the U.S. Geological Survey’s geologic models and soil maps. Often we engage geotechnical engineers to augment this information for greater specificity about a site’s soils and structural integrity through borings that reveal the underlying geology. Biological assessments performed on a given site over days, weeks, and even years provide the crucial next layers of information. The assessment teams are often led by the NBW Conservation Group's specialists in restoration ecology and conservation biology and will include, at times, research scientists who specialize in such areas as amphibians and reptiles, birds, bats, insects, native and nonnative plants, terrestrial mammals, and even lichens. These ecological assessments give us glimpses into the biological balance and health of a site and often inspire the direction of the design team in restoring what might have thrived on a given site and might thrive once again. They also tell us of any specific micro-ecologies to be protected or conserved on a site. Not least, they inform the long-term management and maintenance that follows the implementation of a design. Newly restored landscapes require intensive management, lest they fail to establish as healthy ecosystems against shifts in climate and the introduction of multitudes of aggressive nonnative vegetation and animals.
Parallel to the ecological survey, the Culture Group explores archives, databases, insurance maps, deeds, and other document trails for any clues to the site’s recorded past. The richest sources are primary and personal, such as oral histories, wills, diaries, and letters that reveal unique knowledge and memories of persons with intimate attachments to a place. The stories of many sites come alive through legacies told in families and communities over generations that find their repository among individuals alive today. There are always multiple families and multiple histories to consider between a site's earliest human presence and its current occupation. Historians, anthropologists, and other scholars buttress our knowledge of the site through publications and direct contributions. Archaeologists employ powerful tools available for their surveying practices, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology, which enables high-resolution imaging of ground elevation with exquisite accuracy and without disturbance and can reveal features or phenomena in layers of land cover that can be isolated for visual analysis. The resulting images capture anomalies within the soil profile that may reveal previous excavations made for foundations, cultivation, earthworks, or graves. Together these tools provide the design team with a rich body of information, the fingerprints of the site, for an intimate understanding of the land-language over time—stories known and unknown, revealed, and hidden. With this documentation the Culture Group builds the unique timeline of a site that captures the specific dynamics of human occupation and exchange with the land over thousands of years. Patterns emerge from this information as we collate it with ecological findings. We develop the narrative into a formal report, which follows the rigorous standards of a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR), a format established by the National Park Service, which oversees official designations of historically significant lands and structures within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Park Service’s format is applicable in the U.S. and other countries for documenting site history, contextual analysis, and the disposition or alterations to elements of the landscape. These extensive reports identify what are known among historians as “periods of significance,” which are eras or moments in times past that were most important in its human occupation—and perhaps the end of its occupation. These periods are unique to the site under study; they may be transient, sudden, or prolonged over decades or even centuries, and they relate to the evolution of the site in ways that are crucial in grounding appropriate design adaptations we make in the present and are projecting into the future.
We explore the land’s past for the communities we serve as landscape architects—our clients, the project stakeholders, the knowledge keepers. This is a first step in a conversation with the community. We listen to their passions, memories, and hopes about the site, knowing that design can only move at the speed of trust with a community. We get to know the people whom a landscape serves, so that any remaking of the site is useful to them over a long span of time. This is how we build stewardship, by creating authentic places that honor the past and that belong to the people who live in that place.
As the design of a landscape evolves, the Communications Group, our third planet, engages the complexity of sites to help people understand the continuum of the land’s history. The group’s tools—words, films, graphics, and digital models—communicate and clarify the design concepts. This graphic collateral provides the images for signage and creative concepts of wayfinding and interpretation on the site telling the story of the design that grew from the story of the land.
Unexpected Truths
The land is a witness that allows us to remember. When land is lost, we lose that witness, and without a witness, people can start to question whether historic events actually happened or not. Our research process often reveals painful site histories that have been covered or erased. We work to tell the truth about what lies within the land, because sustaining the land is sustaining the truth. It’s essential to reckoning with legacies of indigeneity, subjugation, hate, injustice, violence. The more precise the story and the location, the more power the designed landscape holds to reach our imaginations and our spirits and to inspire dialogue and eventual healing. The opportunity to protect these stories through the design of sites of memory and contemplation has offered potent ways to move a diverse public—people both injured by these realities or unaware of them—toward confrontation of the difficult aspects of our shared history.
Among our recent projects are the rejuvenation of the Burial Ground for Enslaved People and the creation of the Contemplative Site that places into the landscape the names of the 607 people Thomas Jefferson held in bondage during his lifetime at Monticello. This Burial Ground was brought to light by oral histories of descendants who knew this hallowed place in the forest, neither marked nor documented, as the burial place of their ancestors. Over twenty-five years of direct engagement of dozens of descendants of enslaved persons at Monticello, conducted by the Getting Word African American Oral History Project at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, informed the design and material decisions during the revival of the Burial Ground. The descendants were critical in creating a place of dignity, solace, and reflection.
Other truths have revealed themselves unexpectedly, as happened during research for the EcoCommons at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. The project was steering toward returning the biodiversity of the Piedmont region to a large new campus open space. A review of past property documents showed that The Pickrick, a restaurant, once occupied a part of the site. Before its demolition, the Pickrick became a place of crucial importance to the Civil Rights story of the nation.
On July 3, 1964, one day after the Civil Rights Act became law to prohibit racial segregation, three students from the Interdenominational Theological Center, George Willis Jr., Woodrow Lewis, and Albert L. Dunn, placed their bodies in danger to test that the new law would be upheld. After violently being forced out, the students were represented by the attorney Constance Baker Motley, who took their case to the a three-judge circuit court in Atlanta. The federal court upheld the Civil Rights Act’s prohibitions on racial exclusions in public accommodations. The restaurant’s owner, Lester Garfield Maddox Sr., a future Georgia governor, closed the restaurant rather than abide by the law prohibiting him from continuing to racially discriminate against patrons. Upon learning this history, NBW , with the encouragement of the Planning, Design, and Construction department of Georgia Tech, developed a section of the site to articulate a narrative of the incident at the Pickrick, which wasn’t originally a part of the project. The design finds its power in reviving the exact outline of the Pickrick in a space now called Unity Plaza, un-erasing it around a figurative retelling of the students’ courageousness.
In Centennial Park, in Nashville, the firm’s research showed that the site’s attractions to humans through time owes to a confluence of geological, hydrological, and ecological forces. Nearer to our own time, that confluence, through so many inevitabilities, made Centennial Park the site of the landmark rally that prompted ratification of the 19th Amendment to guarantee women the right to vote. The design marks the route of the historic march in 1920 by suffragettes who demanded that Tennessee state legislators approve the amendment. Their protest, which took them to the steps of the Parthenon within the park, succeeded as the tipping point for Tennessee to become the 36th state to ratify women's voting rights.
We worked closely with the renowned Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire and the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument organization to commemorate this crucial moment for the state and the nation. The monument is sited at a level that allows visitors to conceptually march with the powerful women immortalized in the space. The five women honored in the new monument were present during the final ratification battle in 1920: Anne Dallas Dudley of Nashville; Abby Crawford Milton of Chattanooga; J. Frankie Pierce of Nashville; Sue Shelton White of Jackson; and Carrie Chapman Catt of New York. The existence of these landscapes and the design vision for each of them emerged from deep site interrogation to construct a spatial context to hold their stories, to inform visitors with their full narratives, while aspiring to bring comfort to those confronting regularly, or for the first time, difficult, complex, or painful histories.
Research to prepare us for design has also revealed unexpected ecological histories that have been lost over time owing to evolving land management practices. Our findings have come in the course of examining the seed bank (dormant seeds held in soil), investigating soil horizons (the visible layers of contrasting material layered deep in soil), or in reviewing written records of historic conditions. In Memorial Park in Houston, six-foot-deep soil borings revealed parallel layers of ash, showing that, as long as 400 years ago, the Karankawa and Akokisa societies managed the landscape with fire, likely to attract grazing animals, including bison, to the banks of the Buffalo Bayou. In the contemporary design of Memorial Park, NBW designed both wet and dry prairie ecosystems to restore both fire-dependent and fire-tolerant grassland ecologies to the contemporary landscape.
A seed bank in New Zealand, at a coastal site on the North Island, showed pre-settlement conditions of temperate rain forest on what later became severely overgrazed nonnative pasture in the 21st century. The design team worked closely with elders and young leadership from the local Maori community (Ngā Tamānuhiri) to establish a nursery for germinating and cultivating the seeds of native trees that were later installed among the 600,000 trees planted to date, restoring seven miles of coastline to the rainforest conditions that would have existed before the first Maori landing, circa 1300. At Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, the presence of gopher tortoises was the clue that their habitat, Sandhill Ecosystem, severely compromised by development and agricultural practices in the region, could be restored to a pre-settlement, fire-managed ecology dominated by wiregrass and saw palmetto. This would better support the health of the gopher tortoise and the historic ecological community. Each of these examples of restoration ecology arose from biological assessments and curiosity about the complex, deep ecology of each site. Today, these flourishing ecosystems are managed to support their survival in a future of rapidly changing climate.
From Findings to Form
Form, in the design of landscapes, creates movement, memory, and experience. It also offers a scaffold for connecting people with the fullness of the land and its stories. The synthesis of the foundational research into ecology and culture inspires the early design forms, which often emerge as a gesture or composition against which the natural setting and ecology becomes more legible—a cultural datum for the unfolding of the dynamics of time and ecology. A purposeful tension between the context and the designed intervention sparks an awareness in people and engages them in nature. The forms may be as simple as a line, an angle, a circle, or an ellipse. These simple forms provide an intuitive orientation that frees the mind and the eye to absorb the setting and offers lines against which a person can read the subtlety and complexity of the land.
There is a moral imperative to landscape architecture in deepening our connection to nature.
This imperative raises the question: What is natural? The past two centuries of landscape architecture have yielded a spectrum of answers. At one extreme are highly constructed evocations of “nature untouched”; at another are complete abstractions and subjugations of natural processes by the architecturalizing of plantings, landforms, and pavements. These extremes of expressing nature are equal in their artifice. There are meandering paths, exuberant vegetation, and weeping conifers typical of Picturesque Period landscapes, which are as contrived as the abstract landscape patterning of Postmodern designs, where concrete paths and mown lawns create a highly controlled public experience in nature. Despite the heavily composed condition of both extremes, one is commonly construed as natural and the other as artificial. Even landscapes that seem natural—wild, romantic, sinuous—are ordered and maintained. Bringing aesthetics and ethics together, we believe form provides the structure that facilitates awareness of the designed landscape acting as the foil for measuring and monitoring the natural dynamics of a site; for truly seeing the land. Awareness breeds stewardship and it benefits the landscape and the communities vested in it to understand that all landscapes are constructs of some order, creations that require care. The image of nature untouched by humans has been shattered by numerous recent studies and publications, notably Charles C. Mann’s book 1491, which examines the North American landscape and its maintenance by Indigenous people over thousands of years. Nature is part of us, and we are a part of nature.
Each of the public landscapes shown in this book has relied upon the research-driven design process to discover a language of forms that elevates the experience of the site. The process of design renders that language as earthworks and paths entangled with introduced horticulture and restored ecosystems. These design compositions reside in dialogue with dynamic ecological processes that shape and steer the composition over time. Each unique composition is neither pure patternmaking nor pure restoration ecology but uses constructed form to reveal stories, shape the public experience, and heighten awareness of people to the ecological dynamics of the landscape. The design allows people to stand upon the very spot of a historic event, or in the shade of a tree that has been growing for four centuries, or to touch the unearthed spring water used by Indigenous people and settlers. These are the authentic moments when we can all hold hands with history and feel the connection to land’s past in our bodies. The rectangle (slightly obscured by an exuberant meadow) of Unity Plaza on Georgia Tech University’s campus recalls the exact location of the Pickrick, an important civil-rights site that was made invisible by its demolition. A line through Machicomoco State Park creates a proportional time scale that holds thousands of years of Algonquian history and points to theresilience and future of Virginia Indians. The massive ellipse of the Eastern Glades of Memorial Park is an intuitive orientation device that leads people to a wide range of regional ecologies: forested wetland, native oak motts, prairie, and a lake, all held in balance by one geometry, which was inspired by an early design concept for the park from a century ago. For all else form does, it also quite simply helps us find our way.
Composition and Time in the Design Process
The extensive set of finely calibrated instruments we carry within our bodies are constantly, automatically gathering data, remembering details, and logging impressions while simply walking a site. When immersed in a landscape, the body unconsciously measures distances, slopes, textures, and space. Over days and seasons, observing light, temperature, humidity, vistas, sounds, and, perhaps most powerfully, the smells of a site, we can metabolize a site into our own bodies, and it becomes part of our personal memory bank. Extensive immersion uniquely positions the designer to have an empathic relationship to a given site and prepares the creative mind to hold and then to reveal what is true in the land.
Once the fundamental ecological and cultural research is known by the design team, when the voices of the user and the stewards have been heard, when the body has spent time walking the site in various conditions, finally it is time to draw. This is the most critical moment in the birth of a creative design concept. And drawing is one of the most powerful tools designers have as another kind of physical engagement that triangulates among the eye, the hand, and the land. Design concepts improve dramatically through iteration, repetition, and testing. Whether we work in graphite, ink, watercolor, or clay, we are using our bodies to represent the existing conditions we discover and to propose new interventions in a site, converting these metabolic inputs into a creative output fueled by knowing a site. Creative inspiration in our design process is not, therefore, the result of a lightning strike, but rather the product of a mind and body well prepared over time in the making of a specific landscape. During this period of fecund creativity, the gestural forms, scales, and spaces of the design emerge simultaneously with the materials and realities of experience, the building materials, horticulture, water, and light.
Paramount to our work is imagining the visitor’s experience both upon completion of construction as well as a century into the future, weighting the future experience over the immediate. It is a uniquely frustrating quality of landscape architecture that a design is least impactful the day it is completed; only with time will it evolve into a living system and achieve the complexity of the long-term vision. Infant landscapes are fragile, require dedicated care, and are vulnerable to the forces of climate extremes, vandalism, and neglect. There is a unique sense of time and patience given the decades that landscapes take to mature and achieve ecological stability. We work on a generational time scale. We work to inspire the stewardship of land and to assure access to nature for people we will never know, to build places we are not likely to see mature in our lifetimes. This deep awareness is not a source of sadness or anxiety; landscape as a construct beyond ourselves and our human timeline is a source of great personal calm and perspective: landscape patience.
Preservation and the Middle of History
Land is in peril the world over. Once devastated, whether by war, neglect, or development we lose the ecologies and stories of that land and we become broken from our past; we lose the witness of our human history. Over the past two and a half decades, NBW has had the honor and opportunity to work with mindful and spiritual people who have challenged and expanded our sense of time, ability to see land, and the very definition of stewardship. These valuable lessons have become manifest in our process and worldview. We see ourselves and our work somewhere in the middle of a site’s history – responding to its past and thinking of its far future. Time is not linear, and it moves in slippery ways, in loops and spirals; the past is not over, and our intervention is not necessarily a new chapter, nor is it an end of anything. This concept of time has shaped our sense of a covenant with the land and with those who tend it by seeing ourselves at a midpoint in the continuum of history - an ever-shifting midpoint.
Covenant with Land
The land allows us to remember who we are and have been. The landscapes presented in this book are the manifestation of a moral bond with land: a commitment to the preservation of its health, its history, and its future. Our mission is to conceive of, design, and build landscapes that forge a meaningful connection between people and nature. We do this creative work not by magic or stroke of genius, but through a steady process of deep listening to learn the land, the people who use it and those who tend it. It is hard work, often invisible work, requiring patience and vision. However, nothing is more gratifying to me than seeing a severely damaged ecology rebounding, a suppressed history revealed, retold, and preserved, a family or friends exploring a public landscape where restored wildlife and plant life thrive once again
There is much work to do because the land is full.
Our species thrives only because the land is full.
We will persevere in this work because the land is full.
