The following is a transcript of Jay Wu’s interview with Denise Hoffman Brandt, Professor at CCNY’s Anne Spitzer School of Architecture and Director of Graduate Landscape Architecture from 2010 to 2020. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q. Many of my classmates don’t come from either environmental or urban studies backgrounds, yet we’re all here studying Urban Sustainability. Given that context, I thought it was really interesting that you first earned degrees in art history and painting before studying landscape architecture. Why did you become a landscape architect after studying art, and how does that background inform your work today?
A. When I first transferred out of art school, I was interested in anthropology and philosophy. However, my art history thesis advisor knew that I wanted to be an artist and had no intention of growing up to be an art historian. He suggested that I could stay affiliated with the field and fulfill my desire to travel by becoming the technical illustrator for archaeologists and art historians. So for many years, that’s how I supported myself. I was a technical illustrator for archaeological projects in Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Cyprus.
In Egypt, while sitting on a wall with a friend of mine, I decided I was going to stop drawing the past and start drawing the future. After many digs together, we had started thinking, “We’ve been doing this for nearly ten years now. What do we really want to do?” And on a whim, I decided I’d try landscape architecture. I didn’t even really know what that meant because it is an often misunderstood discipline.
One day back at the university where I was a research specialist, I went to the landscape architecture building to look for a map and decided to check out the admissions office while I was there. They told me that the admissions cycle was closed, but gave me the contact information for faculty involved in admissions in case I wanted to ask about application extensions. It so happened that on my way back to the museum, I ran into a friend of mine, a paleobotanist, who was going to be having dinner with one of the faculty that evening. We chatted for a few minutes, and two weeks later, I was admitted. Everything fell into place quickly, but it felt right. Landscape architecture brought together anthropology, philosophy, and the environment, all of which I have always been fascinated with.
Q. I noticed in your publications list that you’ve traveled quite a bit! It seems like a big part of your work.
A. Yes! The project I’m working on right now is devised around a road trip, based on years of driving back and forth across the country. I’m writing about how US citizens think about landscape issues. A lot of people think of landscape as a scene or a kind of natural phenomenon, but it is actually at the confluence of society, culture, and environment. Landscape is not just terrain, it is how we understand it–how we situate ourselves within earth systems.
A lot of people think of landscape as a scene or a kind of natural phenomenon, but it is actually at the confluence of society, culture, and environment.
Q. When you were in landscape architecture school, did your classmates have similar backgrounds or it was pretty all over the place?
A. The best landscape architecture class cohorts are the ones where you do have a ton of diversity and students from different backgrounds. A good landscape architect is a polymath, because you have to understand ecology and biology and physics to design landscapes, you have to understand anthropology to work with communities, and you better have a philosophy to understand motivations. One of the best things about Landscape Architecture graduate programs is that everybody’s coming from a different background and working together, and so those beneficial skills are all rubbing off at the same time. You learn more from your classmates than from your instructors. I always joke that one year our best incoming student was a dentist. He had an amazing sensitivity to shaping things, and he worked really hard on learning the rest with and from his classmates.
Q. Is a background in illustration needed for students considering landscape architecture?
A. When I went to school, my background in technical illustration was a huge bonus. Now with CAD and doing everything on the computer, students who come in from arts and humanities backgrounds often look at the digital technologies as a huge hurdle. But once they get in there, it’s a lot easier. With Instagram and all of these apps that are so graphically enabled, people come in with advantages they don’t even realize they have. We used to see a lot of frustration and tears, but that’s just been completely abated.
Q. A book I’m reading for class implied that traditional landscape architecture is focused on design principles that are not necessarily environmentally sustainable because it requires more energy or otherwise goes against the grain of nature. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that framing.
A. I think the argument is a red herring. Yes, designs that seek to maintain high levels of uniformity and monoculture do require lots of energy input, but we wouldn’t say that the gardens of Versailles were a failure because of that! The idea that humans should not have any effect on our environment is actually problematic and unsustainable, and I think it comes from a false binary of humans vs. environment. However, if you think of ecology as inclusive of humans then it’s kind of absurd…would we tell a beaver not to make a dam? So I think that we need to be sensible rather than dogmatic. Sometimes high energy inputs for a short time may be worth it because it has meaning culturally and socially. But the timeframe is key, we have to realize that we’re not designing for all time.
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