You can feel a sense of power, a primitive, deep connection. Also Delphi (in Greece), which is a ruined landscape but also the most sacred, spiritual place. I’ve seen people standing there with tears in their eyes. Or Walter De Maria, who did The Lightning Field-a grid of poles 20 feet high in the high desert of New Mexico.ĪC:One of the most powerful spaces I’ve been to is the Pantheon in Rome. Like Donald Judd, who was constantly asking what is the boundary between a sculpture and the place where it sits? Robert Irwin, early in his career, suggested space by running a violet chain-link fence through eucalyptus trees so it becomes part of the landscape. Do you have favorite sculptors?ĪC: The people who influenced me are minimalist sculptors, mainly working in the West, who really have thought about their art not as a piece in a museum but as an environment. When we get to a more rural landscape, then I’m thinking of the zone around the house as being very architecturally defined.Ĭochran often uses reflecting pools, here flanked by 100-year-old olive trees at Walden Studios, a vineyard and arts facility in Sonoma County, California. So I’m thinking a lot about how those edges define space and about screening and light. On a suburban project, I’m really thinking about the edges of the property, about how to fool the eye to make the space seem more permeable with a larger environment. The landscapes are generally more hardscapes, almost idealized, where we bring in the sense of nature in a very controlled but not-trying-to-copy-nature kind of way. It really becomes an outdoor room connected to the architecture. Urban landscapes are about architectural spaces. GD: How do setting and size shape a project?ĪC: We work on everything from urban courtyards to vineyard/hotel complexes that are hundreds of acres, and each takes a very different approach. Left: Cochran’s ability to blur the line between natural and man-made environments is evident at Stone Edge Farm, a Sonoma residence, olive grove, winery, and garden. Combine that with a climate where everything grows and where people spend a lot of their time outside: They’re invested emotionally in their landscape. I don’t think it’s an accident that Silicon Valley or Berkeley in the ’60s happened in California. Coming to the Bay Area was very freeing I realized I’m able to do more here. This was the culture of Thomas Church and Sunset magazine, where people could name a landscape architect. What happened?Īndrea Cochran: When I first came here, someone asked what I did and it was the first time I had ever told anybody I was a landscape architect when they didn’t say, “My holly bush has dots on the leaves.” I didn’t have to explain that I design gardens I’m not a horticulturist. Garden Design: You moved to the West Coast 30 years ago with the plan to stay just a few years. A collection of her work, Andrea Cochran Landscapes, by Mary Myers is available from Princeton Architectural Press. Sourcebook: Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture is based in San Francisco (415/503-0060) ). Our slide show of Cochran's landscapes is accompanied with a Q&A with Cochran. Garden Design caught up with Cochran recently to dig below the surface of her clean, crisp designs in order to better understand the aesthetics and process of this walking force of nature. Last July, she collaborated with the architect/artist Susan Narduli in a competition-winning design for the San Francisco Veterans Memorial, which is slated to open in the fall of 2013. Like her work, Cochran is both elegant and warm, and that delightful paradox shows up in projects that include museum sculpture gardens, housing project courtyards, and children’s play spaces. Her highly sculptural and modernist designs consistently garner media attention and awards since 2004, in fact, the only year she didn’t win an honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects was the one in which they asked her to be a juror. Landscape architect Andrea Cochran may have grown up in suburban New Jersey, but she strongly identifies with the West Coast, where she’s lived and practiced for the last 30 years.
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