They make beautiful landscapes, places where office workers devouring their lunchtime sandwiches can be surrounded by buzzing bees and chirping birds. But there’s a lot more than that behind the making of any project by Los Angeles and San Francisco-based Terremoto. This company is underpinned by a considered, radical manifesto that’s out to challenge how landscape architecture works – and even what its remit should be.
Just take this from what reads like a declaration of independence from the rest of their trade (as posted on their website): “We gnaw on the bones of modern and postmodern landscapes alike and consider new, inverted futures for the baroque and the picturesque. We pillage the tattered fuselage of worlds East and West. We have no particular identifiable style, because beauty is diverse, and because ‘having a particular style’ sounds very boring.” I don’t think they are planning to visit the Chelsea Flower Show.
One of the team’s recent projects is Denver 17th Street Corner Plaza, a privately owned but publicly accessible space. Here, surrounded by skyscrapers, they have made a curvy garden with large trees, giant boulders, chunky wood benches and grasses that move with the breeze. A slice of rewilding in the downtown.
David Godshall, a principal at Terremoto, is one of its creators and while content with the outcome he also underlines why there won’t be too many more schemes such as this in the portfolio. Because that’s the first thing that’s wrong with landscape architecture: its practitioners unwisely stray too far. “We believe that landscape architects and landscape designers should mostly be local. I say that because landscape making is inescapably regional. And if you were to take me and put me somewhere else in Europe, for example, I probably wouldn’t be very good at my job. We believe that landscapes should be by, of and for, the creatures and communities that they serve.”
The Denver project came in through a side door – the client was someone that they had worked with before, from closer to home. To safeguard both the site and their beliefs, they trod with care, questioning every move. They started by focusing on the sourcing of local materials because, as Godshall says, “It seems like good logic to us that, in order to keep the carbon footprint of our projects light, the materials should come from nearby. We mostly move stuff around in the US on the backs of big trucks, and the fewer trucks driving around, the lighter the carbon footprint of the project. Interestingly, taking this approach also inescapably imbues a project with a sense of regionalism.” And there’s another added consequence – this helps support local businesses, including plant growers, quarries and timber mills.
Godshall is at pains to ensure that everyone involved in the making of the Denver project is given credit. And, I mean, everyone. One of Terremoto’s other manifesto-like pledges is to shine the light on the people who actually build their landscapes – the labourers who haul the giant rocks into position, lug bags of soil around. He explains: “The making invisible of the contribution of the labourer – that’s mostly done in the mainstream perspective – is either passive, systemic racism or classism. Hiding the contributions of the mostly Latino or Latinx men who build the landscapes that we make in California seems to be quietly problematic to us.”
Godshall is eloquent, measured (and, yes, I am sure that all his colleagues are too) and Terremoto – “earthquake” in Spanish – clearly has both the ambition and potential to shake up the world of landscape design. But luckily, its work is more than just polemic, it’s also about beautiful, wild, nature-embracing landscapes that people respond to. These are not crappy community gardens made from abandoned pallets.
I ask Godshall if he’s happy with the outcome, how people are using the benches and locating spots to linger (before answering, he stresses Terremoto’s opposition to trying to control what people do in a landscape – an American problem, he believes). “We have learned that the needs of an office worker are not that wildly different from the needs of say, a honeybee or a butterfly or a bird, in that what we mostly want is to be able to be outside, to enjoy the environment, have a sip of water and commune with nature,” he says. In short, if you want to savour your burger in the sun without a side order of manifesto – he’ll leave you alone.
To hear Monocle’s full interview with Terremoto’s David Godshall, listen to ‘The Urbanist’ , below:
