Surfing a Tsunami: Landscapes That Glide With Uncertain Futures

We live in tumultuous times! Social unrest, ominous technological developments, global political upheaval, ecological collapse, it’s all too much! How might the culture of landscape-making adapt, improvise and evolve in order to lock horns with the bigness of this moment? TERREMOTO believes that through a gentle but critical investigation of both our profession and practice, we can remake landscape architecture to be in service of the whole, and through redefining our relationships to land, labor, materials and plants we can create landscapes that glide with the uncertainty of the present moment.

David Godshall is a landscape architect and co-founder of TERREMOTO, a landscape architecture firm with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He specializes in localized landscapes that are both formally and conceptually adventurous. TERREMOTO is a 27 person landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.  We create well built, site-specific landscapes that respond to client needs while simultaneously challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials, and formal conventions. Our design approach is post-internet, critically-regionalist, and politely controversial.

TERREMOTO mines the omnipotence of intentional inexactitude, and flirts openly with illegibility.  We strive, in many cases, to do as little as possible. We revere the history of landscape architecture, but also kinda want to destroy it, too. It is our goal to build gardens not for this civilization, but rather, the next; and to destroy the system with love and kindness. 

The lecture will be in English.

After the lecture, at 9:00 PM, there will be a special screening of the film 27 Storeys: Alterlaa Forever, a reprise of the screening originally shown at the Film and Architecture Festival.