Meditations of a Landscape Architect

Looking. Making. Questioning. A Life in Design. A new collection of essays brings the thinking behind four decades of design practice into view.

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Meditations of a Landscape Architect brings together observations, stories and digressions made by David Irwin through four decades of landscape architecture and urban design practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, much of that time at the forefront of one of the country’s leading landscape architecture and urban design practices.

The hardback book gathers essays developed at different moments through Irwin’s practice. Together, they document a continuing process of looking, writing, drawing, making, designing, building and questioning as he works through the things he is still trying to understand.

The book moves between professional practice and everyday experience. Horizons, cities, coastlines, oceanscapes, clay between the toes, coffee, drawing, family, home and conversations with friends and colleagues all become ways of thinking about what design is and what it might be for.

The meditations do not stand as words alone. They sit within a landscape of Irwin’s photography, drawn from years of practice and travel. The images establish an atmosphere for the book and create a visual world in which the essays live, offering another way of looking at landscape, detail, people, place and the things that catch his eye.

Irwin’s essays are meditations on landscape and design, made at different times and places through his ongoing practice. They record how he has come to understand some of the issues that shape design, and reveal something of the thinking behind the work. The making of the essays, and of the book itself, is part of that design process: an ongoing enquiry documented and shared with others. Brought together, they form both a record of that enquiry and a statement of design intent.

Rather than being a manual for design or a history of projects, Meditations documents Irwin’s own process of exploring ideas. His voice is personal and sauntering, moving between observation, experience and speculation as he asks what we might notice when we slow down, what we choose to change and what might be better left alone.