Principles:
- Treating everyone fairly and respectfully.
- Designing with Country wherever possible.
- Careful sequencing of space and volume to maximise the potential of each site.
- A conscious use of materials 'indigenous' to their environments to produce a disciplined palette.
- A strong sense of the technical being revealed, and that the design is honest to its materials.
- Fostering the working interrelationship and interdependency of various disciplines and streams of knowledge.
- Build-ability, usability, client' intent, brief/requirement, maintainability: Creating a morally defendable design.
- Careful project planning and delivery, and close involvement, including project management.
- The use of the landscape as both 'object' and 'container' in that we should think of designing a landscape as a figure, or object, in the same way we think of a building, and not just a flat plan, but also that the landscape is literally the container of everything we are and is enveloping our every experience. It also means that each site will reveal its own solutions in this oscillation between object and container, and that we should listen to each site through the practice of design; a practice rooted in the idea of iteratively proving or disproving design ideas by drawing them out on paper to really see what is working.
Designing with Country
This practice is all about incorporating Indigenous knowledge and cultural perspectives into the garden and landscaping designs, emphasising the use of native plants and ecological practices. This approach recognizes the deep connection between Aboriginal people and the land, promoting sustainable gardening practices that reflect the local environment.
- Respecting the Knowledge and History of First Nations Peoples:
Understanding and incorporating traditional ecological knowledge about the land, its plants, and their uses. Where possible involving First Nations people in a project from the outset. - Using Indigenous/Local Provenance Plants:
Prioritizing the use of locally indigenous plants that are adapted to the specific climate, soil, and environment of the area. - Sustainable Practices:
Implementing gardening methods that minimise environmental impact, such as water conservation/water sensitive urban design (WSUD) composting, and reducing the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and understanding that hard landscape works should be designed to last for in excess of a hundred years to minimise the total carbon footprint of the project over its entire life. - Creating a Sense of Place:
Designing gardens, parks and landscapes that reflect the unique character of the local environment and culture, fostering a connection to the land, and within the community. - Promoting Biodiversity:
Creating habitats that support native flora and fauna, contributing to the overall health and resilience of the ecosystem, and fostering the use of threatened and endangered plant species to encourage nurseries, other landscape architects, landscape contractors and clients to grow cultivate these species.
Process:
Design and construction is never a straightforward, or linear process.
Initially Duncan will work with clients to properly define a brief. Often clients 'know what they want' but creating the nexus between the project requirements, project priorities, the ability to see how a project might be built, or the order of works, trades availability, and material/labour costs is something that can all be set out in a well defined brief. Often initial design sketches will help resolve some of the loose ends. So right from the outset we can see how multiple tasks often must be carried out in parallel.
Drawing is central to Duncan's design process. In a world where AI (at great cost in terms of energy and water consumed) can spit out multiple options that look great on a screen, such 'design solutions' don't have the same intelligence as the collective intelligence of a designer/client/builder combination where the processes that are undertaken within that group of people contain all the nuance that will result in a built project that is fit for purpose. And drawing is the central part of that conversation that takes place. Duncan's design hero Carlo Scarpa said that, ‘I want to see things, I only trust this. I put things here in front of me, on paper, so I can see them. I want to see, and this is why I draw.’ That is the act of drawing is its own process by which certain truths about a site and the application of design solutions to that site can be revealed, something a fancy render, or seductive AI generated image cannot possibly even realise.
Another aspect of the process is also understanding the complex regulatory or statutory environment in which design decisions must be made, where possible regulatory relaxations might be applied for, the culture of the approval agencies that provide consents to build, the time such consents take to be arrived at, and how a design might be progressed during the process of applying for development and construction consent.
Ultimately an understanding of what design actually is is important to have: it is the process of making informed, evidence based decisions that define the project in both the broadest terms, but also as such decisions relate to the smallest of details, and being across all of these factors that drive the built outcome.
This process is initially about getting a landscape design built that provides a stable framework for the spaces of the landscape to live on in, often in terms of a hardscape - stairs, walls, pools, outbuildings, and the like - into and around which the living layer of the design is planted.
Unlike architecture, however, landscapes are living systems, so in many way, a landscape is never completed, as the gardener will continue to make design decisions about the way in which a landscape is maintained, replacing and thinning out plants, adding more and so on, or that factors external to a site come into play later after the project has been 'completed'. In this regard Duncan likes to maintain a relationship with clients long after they've finished with their commission for his services, so that the design intent is maintained, but also is continually expounded in new forms with the changes of the gardener/client.
Initially Duncan will work with clients to properly define a brief. Often clients 'know what they want' but creating the nexus between the project requirements, project priorities, the ability to see how a project might be built, or the order of works, trades availability, and material/labour costs is something that can all be set out in a well defined brief. Often initial design sketches will help resolve some of the loose ends. So right from the outset we can see how multiple tasks often must be carried out in parallel.
Drawing is central to Duncan's design process. In a world where AI (at great cost in terms of energy and water consumed) can spit out multiple options that look great on a screen, such 'design solutions' don't have the same intelligence as the collective intelligence of a designer/client/builder combination where the processes that are undertaken within that group of people contain all the nuance that will result in a built project that is fit for purpose. And drawing is the central part of that conversation that takes place. Duncan's design hero Carlo Scarpa said that, ‘I want to see things, I only trust this. I put things here in front of me, on paper, so I can see them. I want to see, and this is why I draw.’ That is the act of drawing is its own process by which certain truths about a site and the application of design solutions to that site can be revealed, something a fancy render, or seductive AI generated image cannot possibly even realise.
Another aspect of the process is also understanding the complex regulatory or statutory environment in which design decisions must be made, where possible regulatory relaxations might be applied for, the culture of the approval agencies that provide consents to build, the time such consents take to be arrived at, and how a design might be progressed during the process of applying for development and construction consent.
Ultimately an understanding of what design actually is is important to have: it is the process of making informed, evidence based decisions that define the project in both the broadest terms, but also as such decisions relate to the smallest of details, and being across all of these factors that drive the built outcome.
This process is initially about getting a landscape design built that provides a stable framework for the spaces of the landscape to live on in, often in terms of a hardscape - stairs, walls, pools, outbuildings, and the like - into and around which the living layer of the design is planted.
Unlike architecture, however, landscapes are living systems, so in many way, a landscape is never completed, as the gardener will continue to make design decisions about the way in which a landscape is maintained, replacing and thinning out plants, adding more and so on, or that factors external to a site come into play later after the project has been 'completed'. In this regard Duncan likes to maintain a relationship with clients long after they've finished with their commission for his services, so that the design intent is maintained, but also is continually expounded in new forms with the changes of the gardener/client.
