landscape architecture
As a landscape architect, I'm passionate about creating gardens of every variety. But I like my work to benefit as many people as possible, so I get particularly engaged when these spaces are accessible to the general public. This explains why I love working on botanical gardens and exploring the ways they allow me to focus on plants and education in fundamental ways. Through the past 30 years, I've had the privilege of working on slices of four different botanical gardens, so I also know the
If you're like me and see life as a weird balance of the tragic and the comic, I have a couple stories tailor-made for you. First the comic - and forgive me for its reference to a component of male anatomy: "When the Dutch city of Leeuwarden
‘What’s the use of knowing about history?’ That’s the question Mark Holden asked to start his Currents column in the July 2008 issue. ‘For many of us, the answer to that question seems so obvious that it comes as a shock to find out just how many people in the watershaping and landscape fields don’t grasp the all-encompassing significance of our collective past – but it shouldn’t. ‘Using my own career as an example, . . . I confess that I waltzed through more than a few early years as an aspiring landscape architect and watershaper in blissful ignorance of the history of
I was the third of four McCloskey children to attend UCLA. All three of my sisters went there, two of them before me, one after. My middle sister, Susan, started in the fall of 1968, and I recall that there was quite a buzz about this weird new fountain that had just been commissioned on one of the campus’ many plazas: It was essentially upside-down, with water flowing from the edges toward an off-centered well, and it soon became known as the Inverted Fountain. I was 13 or 14 the first time I saw it. I’d gone with Susan to some on-campus event, and she gave me a brief tour of the place – including the plaza with the weird new fountain. At that point
‘Why isn’t the appropriate use of water a defining, central component in the education of landscape architects?’ That’s how Mark Holden began a series of articles called “Future Class” in the March 2007 edition of WaterShapes. He continued: ‘That question has rattled around in my head for a long, long time, basically because it has no adequate or satisfactory
Stepping Up