Diana Bell, the award-winning landscape architect with whom I have worked for many years has just published her book on landscape architecture called Sculpting the Land. The marketing texts that accompany it describe the book as “ a homage to her unique interpretation of the possibilities of landscape design”.
I am delighted and rather flattered to find that Diana has included two of my projects in her book.
The book contains a selection of her wonderful landscape projects. She has won the commissions for many of these in international design competitions. Her work has a close link with abstract art and is strongly influenced by the paintings of Kazimir Malevich.
Diana has a uniquely individual approach to her landscape designs and in this book she reveals how her unique designs were conceived. They have variously been inspired by existing patterns in the landscape and earthworks. These can appear as land art.
As I was delighted to find out when working with Diana on my designs for a headquarters complex for an American healthcare company Diana will spendi time in a landscape, observing, listening and gathering clues about its past and how they inform a new story, are all part of the process. In the case I am recounting she identified the patterns of a Saxon village in an East Anglian field that she was able to commemorate with ‘land art’ that took the form of geometric mounds and bunds. That project of mine can be found on page 32 of her book.
Diana does not use computers. All her designs are hand-drawn in pencil, ink, collage or watercolour, and the book demonstrates an amazing collection of the ‘art’, that she uses to develop and present her designs. She concentrates for the most part on large scale landscapes such as parks and piazzas in the urban realm. Many of her projects are created on ‘brownfield’ sites including Parco Franco Verga in Milan, Lac de Senart in France, Rochester Riverside Park and Electra Park in London. The last of these is another of my projects.
It has been a delight and immensely rewarding to work with Diana. Long may our working relationship continue.
