BRECK GASTINGER
INTERVIEW
IMAGES Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing
IMAGES Meg Back
IMAGES Meg Back
Breck
Gastinger earned his Master of Architecture (2003) and Landscape
Architecture (2004) degrees from the University of Virginia. His
graduate work was recognized with numerous honours including the AIA
School Medal for design excellence and the Stanley Abbott Award for
excellence in Landscape Architecture.
Breck
has worked at Nelson Byrd Woltz since 2000; he has managed a wide range
of large-scale projects from university master plans and built work, to
national design competitions and urban parks. Major landscape master
plan work includes, Eastwoodhill Arboretum; Monticello, home of Thomas
Jefferson in Virginia; and the multi-award winning Orongo Station
Stewardship Plan in Gisborne, an ambitious plan for ecological
restoration and cultural interpretation within a working sheep farm that
is serving as a model for other farms in New Zealand.
Xsection: What is your first memory of place?
BG:
I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. I was remembering back to when my
sister was born, I was three years old. It’s an old suburban
neighbourhood in Kansas City with no fence lines, big trees and shade.
There are very nice street trees in Kansas City and I remember playing
back and forth amongst those houses. I had to go over to the neighbour’s
because my sister was going to be born, so running in and amongst those
spaces. There’s also a great park legacy in Kansas City and one of my
favourite places growing up is Loose Park. It’s a big English-style park
built in the early 1900’s with big sweeps of lawn and chances to run
and places to fly kites. There’s a little duck pond there and my dad had
given us these little pond boats. We would sail them across and run
back and forth. There’s a spot where there are stepping stones to cross,
and one time, running too quickly to go and catch that boat, I just
totally missed one and just pssshhhhhhh! Right in the pond. First
memories of place…
Xsection: It’s actually amazing how far we can remember back in quite good detail…
BG:
It’s something I try to watch for in my own kids, trying to imagine
what they will remember. They will have memories from 3 or 4 but you
never know which one.
Xsection: They can be quite random
BG: Yes, what we think is important or special as adults is totally different for them.
Xsection: Given those sorts of memories what do you think needs to be built into a place?
BG: I
think that the notion of building “place” is a tricky one, I think in
some ways “place” happens whether you like it or not, kind of like
ecology. An ecology is present even if it’s desolate or empty, the term
doesn’t imply a judgement on the quality or function of the ecology.
Likewise, “place” is the set of conditions that describe human
interaction with our environment. It doesn’t say anything about whether
it’s a good place or a bad place. I guess the important question is
whether or not the qualities of place are ones that inspire us, or
engage us, or suggest some kind of better collaboration as human beings
and so “place”… I guess “place” happens. Shit happens and I guess
“place” happens. So I think “place” is one of those tricky ones - the
more you try to set out and make it, the further away you can get
sometimes.
Xsection: Do you think there needs to be a lot of collaboration between people during the making and designing process?
BG:
Not necessarily. I think that certainly there can be many, many
benefits that come out of that kind of collaborative process and I think
sometimes the process is just as important as the end result. The
process can create connections that last well beyond even the park or
the streetscape, or whatever the project may be; it may be more
important that people actually talk to each other and start to
understand themselves as a community. However, when it comes to
designed environments, there are also many examples of either places
that were designed with no collaborative spirit that function as
incredible places (Thank you, Jane Jacobs!) and then those that are the
end result of a highly collaborative effort and they… they…
Xsection (in chorus): just don’t work?
BG: Yes.
One
successful example to consider is the Citygarden project in St Louis,
which was the product of a commission from a private organization that
paid for the design and the construction, and then gave the park to the
city of St Louis. Because they structured the project in that way, there
was minimal public interaction or design input. We talked with the
organization about whether we thought that was a good strategy or not,
but they’d seen so many situations where you open it up and then you end
up with a design that can end up watered down trying to appeal to too
many different people or voices. And yet the project has become a highly
successful urban environment [Xsection: and it’s beautiful!] and it was
a confirmation that our profession has the skill set and capacity to
collaborate to create successful public places. It actually was a big
team. It’s not like the project was the hand of a single ‘ ‘genius
designer’; it was a huge collaborative team of consultants, the owner,
and the city, even though there wasn’t a big public engagement process.
One really great confirmation that this process can work is that
Citygarden was recognised with the Amanda Burden (Urban Open Space)
Award, which is not a just a design award, but actually a a national
award that is given out to a public space for its positive social and
cultural contributions to a city.
We
didn’t make a big deal out of it, but it’s sort of interesting that the
project happened with little public engagement, and yet it has still
been very successful in doing all of those things that you would hope to
have gotten out of that process.
All
that being said, we don’t try to model that everywhere - each project
is different; we try to find ways to adapt and work in many different
fashions.
Xsection: That seemed to be the case with Young Nicks Head as well; you worked with a lot of different experts and local experts.
BG: Absolutely.
Working at a great distance takes either a tonne of ego or a tonne of
humility. I think we’re on the humility side of things because we just
can’t pretend to be experts at everything everywhere.
Working
in different locations you want to actually align yourselves with the
people who really know what’s going on. The great benefit of coming at a
distance is that you can ask the question that might be a little bit
silly or impertinent and that’s an advantage for anyone right? To maybe
turn what might be some sort of traditional thinking on its head a bit,
because we can all get kind of stuck sometimes in our own patterns.
So
it’s been really fun to play that role of both team builder and
navigator but also provocateur and asking lots of questions and putting
people together that might not have worked together in various
situations. Nick’s Head was a huge team, everyone from ecologists and
farmers right down to the craftspeople. Incredible craftspeople. One of
the great joys was getting to work with them pretty directly, in some
cases bypassing many standard ways of drawing or documenting work
because you were working directly with the craftspeople who were doing
it. Nick’s Head doesn’t have a big thick set of working drawings in the
way you might expect on other projects.
Xsection: We
were talking to [someone from the industry] the other day and he was
ragging on the process that you have to go through. It seems like you
completely bypassed that for Nick’s head?
BG:
We don’t always get to work that way but there have been several
projects where we have had that benefit. It’s almost like a really old
way of working; sometimes you get some dazzle or flags, and you’re
literally marking out lines in the field; it’s a really fabulous way of
working. We also had really good collaboration with the surveyors. At
Nick’s Head we might go and stake some points in the field and then have
the surveyors mark those in and we would work further in CAD. Later we
would then send back another set of points and they surveyors would
stake them out, it was really great. There’s an incredible digger driver
down there that we worked with, Kerry Teutenberg, he looked like he was
in ZZ Top, he has a long beard and stubbies. We found out after a few
years of working with him that he didn’t read contour plans like we did,
but yet he’s incredible with what he does. You tell him to put in a
track or a swale and he’ll do it like nobody’s business. So it was
pretty fascinating to figure out ways to do highly constructed shaped
land forms without necessarily a contour plan. We did do those but we
were also working with the surveyor to physically stake, or in some
cases, literally draw the contour plan on the ground and he would work
to that. It was actually the most precise grading that we have probably
ever done.
Xsection:
Do you do your designing back in the States then get over here and find
you have to adjust it for a whole lot of variable of place?
BG:
Sure, sometimes, but I think our training has served us well, I think
that if you have a good sense of grading and topography and scale then
it’s kind of amazing how it works out. There’s always a leap of faith-
you’re drawing something and you think you have a sense of what it is,
but I’ve been more surprised than not that it actually works out, that
it feels like what you had hoped. It hasn’t happened so many times when
you’re like “oh, that’s way wrong…” I don’t know quite how that works,
but I keep going with it. It definitely requires some testing and
staking things, practicing. I think our education did a good job of
giving us good mental records of the sizes and scales of places and
knowing what a hundred feet tall is or knowing what certain distances
are, being able to relate it back, having a good visual library of other
places that you can compare that to.
Xsection: A spatial library I guess
BG: It’s
really good knowing the length of your pace, so that even when you’re
on vacation you can say’ “hmmm how big is that plaza?”. Though it makes
for, sometimes, a funny way of walking (Xsection at this point accuse
Breck of marching his kids across plazas while on holiday but he takes
it in good humour).
Xsection: What do you think you need to know specifically to practice in NZ?
BG:
Well I think that coming from afar definitely requires that humility
and respect. What is fascinating to me about working here is that
whether it’s cultural layers, or ecological layers and systems, or
geologic time it all seems so very close to the surface and active and
alive. So working here is to be quite open to hearing and learning and
thinking about those layers. It’s all very present in this place. It
seems like a country that’s still so very young and becoming and
figuring itself out and that’s pretty exciting.
Xsection: So how do we create a contemporary sense of place?
BG: I
don’t know, I haven’t framed it that way before, ‘Place’ is one of
those things you don’t want to look straight at, you want to catch it
out of the side of your eye. I think if we feel some confidence about
our values and the way that we listen to layers of ecology, cultural
history and landscape, our understanding about what makes for good
scale spaces for human interaction, that that will put us in a good
spot. But I definitely do not think that there’s a formula, it’s not a
formulaic kind of thing. I’ve had a bit of internal wrestling with the
term ‘Placemaking’; I’m still struggling with it. I feel like it’s ...
you remember “The Dead Poets Society”, that movie with Robin Williams?
There’s a teacher at the beginning of the movie who lectures his
students “here’s how you can judge the quality of a poem” and he has
them draw a graph…It’s silly, and it totally kills the magic of poetry.
I feel like “Place” is a little bit like the poem. “Place” is something
where we can do our best to set the stage, maybe prepare the conditions
for good human space to occur, but you can’t make it happen, it has to
actually be lived. It’s a lived thing, it’s not a constructed thing.
You can try to take your best shot at it, but you need a little bit of
luck and a little bit of the right conditions and it does need to become
itself.
I
think we have learned from the examples of the new urbanists: one may
try to employ all that we know of scale and place - and it should work
but there are other conditions that might hold it back.
At
Citygarden there are a lot of different kinds of spatial configurations
and we were really purposeful about creating a variety of spaces, but
it’s not very defined about how they could or should be used. One of the
really fun aspects of going back to visit is seeing something random
like the Police recruits using the curving bench for doing push-ups -
forty people doing pushups all on a park wall, or there might be an
exercise class taking over a part of the park. I was there one time and
this heavy metal band was getting their photo-shoot and just behind them
there were ladies sipping chardonnay at the café and then just next to
the band is a huge group of African American kids who were playing in
the water having the time of their lives. If we had tried to design for
that it probably would have just been a disaster, maybe it’s like the
pond boat, you have to trim the sails and let it go.
