CARIN WILSON
INTERVIEW
Where or what is your first memory of place?
I have two quite distinct memories, both as a child. One from a farm I visited in central Canterbury where I still occasionally experience the unique sense of space and the impression it made on my senses, sounds and smells still come back decades later. The other is of the place my grandmother and her partner lived in alongside the marae down in Whakatane. Its a quite humble little flat-roofed cottage but again that relationship with the surrounding whenua spoke of a sense of place, the track down to the pigpen, the creek beyond, all conveniently arranged for access without cramping the connection to the environment.
What do you think of the term ‘placemaking’?
It’s a critical concept. Everyone wants it without quite knowing how to go about getting it.
When thinking of place, how do you approach the process of design?
I still relate strongly to Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’ as a reliable guide to getting the process right. Too much of the urban fabric of Aotearoa is the result of inappropriate use of models developed for a different time, place and social framework, and we are still needing to address the legacy of those unsuitable outcomes.
What do landscape architects need to understand about New Zealand to practice here?
To thoroughly understand heritage values and how to apply them.
Place is not always urban or within a cityscape. At what scale does placemaking begin?
I think of it as how successfully we manage to inculcate a mix of impressions that provide feedback to our spiritual, intellectual and sensory selves. One way or another each of these states of being have to find expression along the path to forming a relationship in time and space. It’s possible that a lot of what we observe as the exaggerated desire for mobility in our society is occasioned by a failure to make that deep connection rather than the simple exercise of choice. Superficial values prevail.
Does community consultation fit into your design process and where does the weight sit... client, user, design process or intuition.
All are relevant, but as a designer you have to develop your own process model and learn how to use and trust in intuition.
Do you need consensus to make design decisions?
At some stage as a designer you have to accept that you may have developed a certain expertise that others haven’t grown through their experience, and take the lead. It may not always be easy to step into this role, but its a kind of responsibility of your learning to help steer the process to a workable solution.
It’s simple to focus on supporting or easy to sway stakeholders to generate input to satisfy a client’s desired outcome. How do you target consultation?
I believe in scanning widely to gather data, even trying to coax it out of hidden corners before moving on to focus on the solution context. Somebody holding an opposing view may often have a clearer perspective on the way forward, but may need help to articulate it.
Do you analyse or critique past projects as to how well they function for people and create a sense of place or identity? Is this objective or subjective?
I always try to keep watch on the way projects age, it’s one of the best ways I know of self-assessing how well you have performed.
How do we make a contemporary sense of place?
Or, conversely, is there a common sense of place for the human condition? Does ‘contemporary’ necessarily mean we disregard solutions from another time and place, from outside the territory of the familiar, that disregard norms we assume to be non- negotiable? We live in an era where we have access to almost unlimited and diverse examples of what the human population has developed in the process of defining its sense of place. Aggregated together, we can find systemic elements that provide a common thread and they are not about traffic flow, building heights or density but about how well the solutions facilitate connection and belonging.
