The Landscape Architecture Department welcomes Catalonia-based landscape architect Martí Franch to lead Myles H. Thaler workshop
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| During a week-long workshop, the Department of Landscape Architecture faculty and students worked alongside invited guest, renowned landscape architect Martí Franch (at center in image on left), developing collective drawings, site mappings, and landscape representations. Photos courtesy of the LAR Dept. |
For one week in late March and early April, the Department of Landscape Architecture came together to welcome renowned Catalonia-based landscape architect Martí Franch to the A-School to conduct an enriching workshop supported by the Myles H. Thaler endowment.
Franch is the founding principal of the award-winning EMF Landscape Architecture based in Girona, Spain — an interdisciplinary research-led practice that explores hybrid strategies across ecological systems and cultural constructs to inform projects described as “multifunctional productive landscapes.” EMF’s work always begins with local materiality, landforms, and processes to guide new projects. Key projects, such as the sustainable Tudela-Culip renovation in Cap de Creus, Spain — a project that transformed a former resort into a protected natural site and the flood-resilient Parco della Pace, are known for bridging nature with culture through ecological restoration.
Franch brought his design methods and principles to the multi-day workshop, where students and faculty alike had an opportunity to work side-by-side, investigating landscape strategies, representational methods, and concepts. The workshop brought together the entire department, including 42 graduate landscape architecture students, and 10 faculty, for a wide range of activities, from lectures and talks, to tours and walks — and the development of experimental collective drawings and physical models that tested materiality of landforms.
In a kick-off keynote lecture titled “Earthworks & Succession,” Franch articulated the ideas behind his practice’s “Girona Shores” project, an ongoing, “self-initiated” set of designs that began with using vegetation maintenance as the foundation to design public spaces in Girona.
Commenced during a global financial crisis, the goal of the project was to make “big and cheap,” so that the model could be repeated and adapted to many sites — the design was a system of low-cost, modest, poetic and above all, useful, spaces that enriched the quality of life for the people of this town. Radical in its conception, but practical and realizable in its execution, the project manifested as a series of small-scale bold interventions, described as both “pilot projects” and “sketches” — designs that tested ideas through “drawing on the site itself through removing and adjusting vegetation.”
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| Workshop images courtesy of the LAR Dept. |
Working with students as part of the workshop, Franch and landscape architecture faculty modeled a collaborative approach to landscape architecture practice, emphasizing the testing of ideas through drawing, sketching, modeling and making. Student teams co-authored layered drawings, expressions of sites as evolving cultural and ecological systems. Over the course of the week, students stepped out of their typical classrooms and studio spaces — working together at communal tables set up outside, on Campbell Hall’s North Terrace and the Shure Outdoor Classroom. The workshop not only convened students across years, and expanded learning across curricula, it served as an important opportunity build community around shared dialogue and stimulate learning through collective acts of making.
The workshop was made possible by support from the Myles H. Thaler endowment in Landscape Architecture. Myles H. Thaler (BLA ’73) was a distinguished alumnus of the first graduating class of the department of landscape architecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. From 1979 to 1991, he was administrator of the residence and grounds of the Vice President’s home in Washington, D.C. A native of Baltimore, for much of his career, he served as an administrator of the Naval Observatory, as well as maintained a private practice. In 1990, two years prior to his death, Thaler endowed a perpetual lecture fund with the following intent: "The purpose of the fund is to bring to the School of Architecture nationally prominent scholars and practitioners to give presentations on the subject of 'the meaning of the garden,' in order to expand public awareness of the cultural significance throughout history of gardens both public and private."