Sitting Still: The Laurie Olin documentary

Contributed by Ralph Johns

In the late ‘90s I was busily studying at the University of Sheffield and became very familiar with the small collection of design books and magazines held in a corner of the geography library.

These were exotic publications filled with projects from across Europe and North America; photos, a brief description of the design and, if you were lucky, a plan, some long sections and maybe even a detail or two. Their creators included West8, EDAW, Gustaffson  and the eponymous American firms of Walker, Schwartz, Halprin, Kiley, Hargreaves and Olin Partnership.

There was nothing much written in terms of the design philosophy and personalities of these firms, just the outputs.

It was a pleasant surprise then to get to know one of these names a little better thanks to the Wellington Branch of NZILA organising a viewing at the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival of Standing Still, a new documentary that reveals the gregarious and generous spirit of landscape architect and urban designer Laurie Olin.

Diving straight into his backstory, we hear how young Laurie grew up in a small frozen town in Alaska where his father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. It was a township of “damaged people who learnt to live by their wits” but where “at the end of every street was wilderness, the natural world”.

It was here that he started observing the interplay of people, architecture, music and abundant nature through drawing. “If you want to understand it, draw it”, he says. Too true. 

As a young person visiting Chicago he saw the city in the same way, having formed a view of the world where art, science and the natural world were “all together”’.

Later as a young man he spent time in the vicinity of Seattle’s poverty stricken Skid Road, still sketching and becoming an ever more acute observer of life.

He noticed how the markets in Seattle worked as a democratic place where town and country met, and everyone was on the same plane. He became interested in community, in particular how to create equitable environments. Two formative years in Europe, travelling, listening to jazz, reading poetry and always sketching people and places added formative energy to “the process of becoming the person that people now know”.  

Next to New York in the mid 1970s where he studied Olmsted and Vaux’s Central Park through sketching. “I drew the whole damn thing”, Olin recalls in the movie.

As the documentary presents it, he seamlessly became a landscape architect, started a firm and quickly began winning some pretty big briefs. His confident design approach installed abstracted forms of wilderness into urban spaces, immersing city dwellers in designed natural landscapes of topography, water and vegetation. Revisiting some of these landscapes Olin remarks how disconcertingly cool it is to be able to walk through spaces that “came out of your head”.

Now he’s been doing that for 50 years, as well as teaching the next couple of generations of designers. But over that timespan the endemic social and environmental issues that he set out to grapple with have only worsened.

We are shown images of urban streets lined with sidewalk tents, people living out of shopping trolleys, landfills spewing methane and multi-lane freeways choked with cars.

But although Olin thinks that “there is a sense of sadness in landscape architecture that is suppressed”, he is no defeatist. Now in his 80s, he doesn’t question his oeuvre, but rather keeps looking forward, thinking about how to better house people, how to better connect people with place. “You have to be an optimist to be a designer”.

In terms of contemporary American design he muses that social housing is built cheap and fast and feels monotonous. His designs offer “differentiation within replication”, good quality low-rise density that works for poor people (the rich have the means to be able to live high-rise). He is always looking to connect the community to the “local spirits”, doing what is right for the place and the people.

There is a lot to like about Laurie Olin - he’s articulate, creative, empathetic and is probably quite good fun to hang out with.

Olin concludes by encouraging us as designers to “think about the projects that should happen”, which I take to mean leading by designing what needs to be done for people and the planet and trying to bring it into being, rather than patiently waiting for a client to set a budget and write a brief.

There aren’t many documentaries made about landscape architects. There should be more. And yes, I found this one quite inspiring. 

Laurie Olin- some further references

To get a further taste of Sitting Still you can view the trailer here as well as having a look-see at a PDF of the movie pitch or reading early reviews and discussions about the documentary on WLA or on Monocle.

A quick online search quickly surfaces how well the life’s work of Laurie Olin has been captured elsewhere. For instance, in no particular order, see:

Films, #LandscapeExpandedStephen Olsen