Celebrating nature itself

"If my park is about the intrinsic value of nature, and I have to choose between kind of formal, linear, organized, grid-like landscape elements or curvilinear, natural, irregular landscape elements, which am I gonna choose? Irregular. Because formal, straight, linear: not nature. So you choose. And what that leads us to, what it led us to, was a kind of a statement that we could say, ‘Look, when we begin designing, our design is going to be like this. The intrinsic value of nature means that, you know, nature is gonna dominate the whole design, it’s gonna be about natural forms, we’re gonna let natural things take place, we’re going to deliberately make the architecture subordinate to the natural forms, the architecture has to appear to either be celebrating nature itself or it has to appear to be succumbing to nature itself. That way it will be obvious in the very design of the park, when we begin to design, that this is a park about the intrinsic value of nature.’"

Joe Rohde
22 April 2008