Approach

Delivering imaginative, cost-effective and appropriate landscape solutions relies on many factors – strong creative teams; robust practice and quality management systems; sound financial planning; understanding others and the ability to communicate effectively.

When we analyse what makes our projects special to us and our clients, we find a number of common threads that inform our approach and reflect our key concerns. Ultimately the pursuit of these threads sustains our working and thinking methods, providing a ‘frame’ through which to transcend the ordinary and purely functional.

Wherever possible the essence of each project needs to grow out of the site location, the people who will use and occupy the place and the culture that surrounds it at that particular moment. This confluence of site, people and culture, at a point in time, and how it is manipulated is at the heart of our practice.

When we set out to build we intervene into a specific historical situation. The quality of the relationship between what already exists and the new intervention is fundamental to the creation of meaningful place-making. How new work is made to settle-in to an existing situation is dependant on a contextual dialogue between the existing and the proposed. Seeing and exploring this historical context enriches the process and piece.

The design of external space can significantly contribute towards the provision of life-long learning; as much about experience and enjoyment as interpretation and instruction. This is not only specific to educational institutions but applies to many instances where embedding learning within design increases the physical and intellectual accessibility to buildings and landscapes. In doing so we contribute towards sustaining social and cultural engagement.

It is widely recognised that collaboration, participation and consultation are integral elements in the process of design, planning, implementation and aftercare of projects. Disciplinary boundaries are blurring. Trans disciplinary design and co-creativity are expanding the field to include sociologists, community activists and business entrepreneurs, working in an iterative process to provide a synthesis that informs future development.

Nature and ecology are important to everyone, and the optimisation of natural and man-made systems is essential to promote a sustainable ecology. In addition to the inspiration that the natural world can provide, the complexity of our relationship with ‘nature’ (and how the designed landscape can reflect and inform such complexity) makes the proposition richer. We understand landscape not only as a scenographic art, greening or naturalising, but as a connective temporal operation through which our perception of the environment is conceived and engaged.