David Irwin's Meditations: "Seeing long and wide to the horizon ..."

Meditations of a Landscape Architect from the pen of David Irwin - a co-founder of Isthmus and a Fellow of Tuia Pito Ora New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA) - is hot off the press.

Initial launch events for this one-of-a-kind book are set down for Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Thursday 8 October) and Ōtautahi Christchurch (Thursday 15 October); both at Objectspace.

Working with editor Michael Barrett and publisher Arch MacDonnell (Six Point Press, Inhouse Design), David has berthed a book that, to quote his ‘navigator notes’ (he is a sailor too), "speaks as much to a process of design, and to the lifestyle of a professional designer, as it does to the subjects that occupy my thinking".

This book's wordscape of 20 Meditations and six not-to-be-ignored Digressions are interleaved with the absorptive imagescapes of David's photography. It’s an elegant design ratio of 80 pages of text to circa 82 photos that call your eyes to attention - together delivering a 1 + 1 = 3 equation all of its own.

On a first reading what stands out in Meditations of a Landscape Architect is the provocative and purposeful edge it travels along, conveying a reader from a midden-like coastal mood to the setting of critical bearings on current-day city building and the binding together of land, people, culture and community. And from a tidal flood and ebb of thoughts that carry an elucidating and "inherent landscape bias" to a unifying concept of home that culminates with ‘A Place Called Home’, a 21-line poem written in 2016 by David’s mentor and touchstone Rewi Thompson (1954-2016).

Meditation by meditation the gradual layering of the book - absolutely not a memoir nor easily genre-fied - stealthily teases out a collection of baselines, dimensions and tools-of-the-trade insights particular to charting a heading in the world of landscape architecture and beyond - in ways that highlight how certain things "should never be underestimated" (but probably are, or are at risk of being so).

The interesting work

It's in the fog, in that grey zone where things are not fully clear, that the interesting work happens (p.189)

All along the way, David seeds adeptly aphoristic responses to a selection of the hundreds of elementally big and little questions he has asked himself over the years, and continues to ask.

In the meditation titled 'Grinding coffee - finding flavour', for instance, he describes the question of "ideal density" as "one of the most interesting problems designers face".

At two different points in this book David touches on the significance of the time spent with his Lincoln University cohort of 1986/87, writing that it changed the way he saw the world.

From the perspective now of a lifelong practitioner, he offers readers the benefits of an expansive and ever-explorative design vocabulary, and serves up a series of much-needed calls for urgency - including a call for landscape architects to "believe in ourselves".

David raises a caution in Meditation 20 about those who fail to champion ideals, and then takes a succinct stand on what it means to be a landscape architect and professional designer.

Landscape architecture is about understanding, acknowledging and designing in ways that allow the collection of parts to be joined. It is not divisive. (p. 250).

Being a designer is living your life in a studio. Every day - whatever the day, whatever the weather, wherever you are - you are in a studio. In your mind, or in reality, thinking about and solving the problems of this world. (p.251)

As signalled by NZILA president Ralph Johns in his introduction to the book, Meditations of a Landscape Architect is a unique and timely ticket to "the curious mind of one of Aotearoa's most influential landscape architects".

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Books, #Around-the-motu, #LandscapeExpandedStephen Olsen