Finding Stories in Parks

All right, all right. This is my father. I give you a minute to soak that in. He is a wild person, but despite some of his more feral attributes, he is an amazing storyteller. I’m sure everybody knows somebody just like him, not the porcupine thing, but somebody who can just tell a great story, spin a yarn, kind of the ham at the table. That’s my dad for sure. He used to yank me and my brother out of school for weeks and weeks at a time, bear hunting in Canada, elk out west, navigating the rivers of Appalachia in our canoe. But you see, through all this, I learned a tremendous amount about the outdoors. I learned how to read land form, topography, got an understanding for habitat, the movement of animals.

I became a landscape architect, and I spent my career designing parks, trails, and public open space. And you see, the design approach that I really hang my hat on is I work really hard to find the story of a place, and then I tell that story through landscape architecture. I’m going to give you a couple examples. When I first moved to Austin, I started working for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. I was designing state parks, planning state parks, and one of my first projects was a 4,000 acre property deep in the hill country. I spent hours on this site laying out trails, finding the best places for the campsites and the cabins, dodging rattlesnakes. They let me drive this wild thing called the war wagon around. It was great fun.

The problem was is we kept finding all these archeological resources right where I designed the cabins and the campsites, and that’s cool because we were finding these 10,000 year old Clovis points, piles of them, but it was going to lead to some project delays. So I walk into my boss’s office, and I’m frustrated and I’m telling him about it, and he says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It just means you’re doing good design work.” What? Good design work? We got all these project delays. And he’s like, “No, no, listen. People 10,000 years ago, they liked the same stuff we like today. We like being near water or being up on an overlook or being just inside of a tree line so we feel protected, but can still see out in the field.” He said, “You’re just finding the places that feel good to us as human beings.” Somebody found them 10,000 years before me, but it made me realize something. There’s places in the outdoors that we cannot help but feel a connection to. I just had to keep finding them.

So look, let’s go up to San Gabriel Park in the city of Georgetown. This is Georgetown’s crown jewel park, historic from everything from Seafree’s new Two Step Inn festival to the historic nature of the park to endangered salamanders. It’s kind of like the Zilker of Georgetown, and like Zilker, it’s a beloved park, but it had become well-worn over the years. And so when I was hired to do a full reimagining of this park, a full redesign, it was really important to my design team that we not lose sight of the historic nature of this park, its pioneer day’s roots. So we started to tell that story in the bathroom. We used this architectural form of a dog trot style house. It’s got this central breezeway that allows moving of air, keeps everything cool in the summer. My amazing architect, Clayton Korte, came up with this fantastic design, but something was still bothering us.

There was a long history of this site before the pioneer days. Indigenous people, the San Gabriel River is right there, the trees, the land itself. How are we telling that story? So we made a design decision. We rotated the building 45 degrees so that now the thing that anchors this building to the ground, to the natural history of the site, is a 200-year old live oak tree directly on the main axis. Sometimes a very subtle design decision can have powerful impacts on completing the story of what’s really important at a place.

So I’m going to bring us back down to Austin here to the Miller development, Mueller, Miller, Mueller, Miller, whatever. Y’all may know it. It’s a urban mixed-use village on the east side, on the side of the old municipal airport. My firm, RVI, has been the master landscape architect for this entire development, and under my predecessor, Barbara Austin, under her leadership, we imagined this string of greenways that would just surround the entire development and act as the front yard for the community. It’s a real dense development so nobody really has a big yard in this development, so these greenway parks would serve that role. A place to meet your neighbors, throw a ball with your kid, go for your morning walk.

And then we thought, well what about in the lower greenways we would do a Blackland Prairie restoration. It’d be teeming with tall native grasses and wildflowers. And then maybe instead of stormwater ponds, we’ll design urban wetlands, and we’ll articulate the edge condition so it now can help support over 200 species of native flora and fauna and become an Audubon hotspot for urban birders. Man, y’all, I’m really liking this design right now. This is coming together pretty good, I think, yeah.

But people might get skeptical, like a tall grass prairie for your front yard instead of like a mowed manicured Bermuda grass lawn? We had to get people comfortable in this site. Well nothing says I can feel comfortable here than a 25-foot tall Texas field spider. Yo, we used a giant arachnid to get people welcome on the site, but that’s just what it did. This thing begs to be explored, checked out, walked around. This piece of public art is here to tell the story that dense urban development and thriving native habitat can coexist and thrive together. Our urban greenways, they can contain multitudes.

So look, at the end of the day, what I do is I find stories, and I find stories in history or ecology or in public art, and I use them as a conduit to connect people with the land and to each other in hopes that through those connections, they’ll be able to find their own stories to tell. Thank y’all.