Fionn Byrne has been an Associate Professor in the UBC SALA MLA program since 2017. Alongside his syllabi, his Landscape Ethics Studio and academic research question the notion of landscape architecture as an “inherently good” profession, asserting through various lenses that all landscapes and design choices are political choices. His approach to teaching is critical and interdisciplinary, weaving together threads of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. We sat down with Fionn to discuss his design interests, inspirations, and motivations to teach.
There is a recurring notion that appears in your work, which is that landscape design isn’t always a benign good, and can often have sinister motivations. What is it that interests you about these notions of friction, and moral/ethical ambiguity?
I think that stems from my introduction to the field of landscape architecture at U of T. There was a formula across the discipline that you would do a design project by defining a problem, and landscape architecture would contribute a solution to it. It always felt so unsatisfying to me. How is it possible that a student working for a couple of months could come up with a solution to a societal problem we’ve had for years? I became curious; what if I didn’t solve the problem? Could I do good design but make the situation worse? I was looking to drive a wedge between one’s personal ethics and one’s design outcomes.
I was also looking at landscape architectural history. I think now, most people would accept that we can’t tell ourselves a story that we’ve always been the problem solver. Some still struggle to say that actually, the things we’ve done have not contributed to benefiting society. Those are the two threads I was thinking through: can I separate design intentions from design outcomes, and what are the ways in the past that we’ve failed to contribute positively to society?
Have you ever gotten pushback on challenging ethics and notions of good?
Definitely. Always. In our first year of design school we were designing a park, and a classmate of mine had decided to pave the entire thing in her proposal. There was a stair in an elevated tower, where you could ascend and look over the paved park. One of the jurors critiquing the project was totally enraged by it. He just absolutely could not accept it. “How could you possibly pave it? We have to do better than that!” That really impacted me, that the jury could be so emotionally charged by this. Many see the mission of the landscape architect as doing good and improving the conditions of nature. It’s about lovely plants and the animals that enjoy these pleasant spaces. Deviating from that brings up a lot of emotion in people. I was struck by that, and thought it was definitely something to probe.
Many see the mission of the landscape architect as doing good and improving the conditions of nature. It’s about lovely plants and the animals that enjoy these pleasant spaces. Deviating from that brings up a lot of emotion in people.
With my own work there’s been pushback. I was trying to set up a challenge: let’s accept that our mission is to do good. What lengths can we take in order to do good? Can we use what are otherwise seen as destructive tools, very much objectionable means to do a project if that project is contributing “good”? I wanted to frame it such that a jury would say, “I like the outcome, but I really don’t like how you achieved that outcome.” It worked, and there was pushback against it. I was trying to put it in their faces that actually it’s not so simple and clear. I’m trying to use design to mobilize a set of ideas to ask these questions: What’s our ultimate goal? What are the methods we use to achieve it? Who wins? Who loses?
The Landscape Ethics Studio manifesto says that for landscape architecture to remain culturally relevant, it must enliven debate around the field’s social function and ethical orientation. How do you feel this moral or social significance has been lost over time, and what led the field to being at risk of no longer being culturally relevant?
The problems we’ve defined are too big. They’re not ones that we can solve. There’s also a step that many are unwilling to take, which is to consider why we have certain problems to begin with. The notion of treating the symptom, not the cause. Climate change is a problem. We can do landscape architecture to contribute to reducing the most severe impacts of climate change. But right before that, don’t you also ask why we have climate change to begin with? It’s hard for me not to do that. As an academic I’m trying to put focus on the structures that are producing the problems.
The working methods of landscape architects, the materials they’re using in their projects, their participation in the global economy, the ways they’re paying their employees, all of it becomes open to critique. You can’t work in the same way that is participant in producing the problem to solve the problem. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think that’s where the discipline has to be relevant. And that’s what it contributes to society, it better articulates the simple problems that we’ve defined for ourselves.
Why do you feel theory and speculation is important, and do you think it’s applicable practically? What do you feel students have to offer in speculative and theoretical spheres?
Everything! I think students make some of the greatest contributions to theory. Practice is limited by the physical realities of the world; budgets, timelines, client demands. The generation and promotion of ideas has some freedom when it isn’t becoming a physical thing.
A studio that isn’t aspiring to model practice, and instead aspires to create an arena where we can be speculative, follow through on the purity of ideas, those are the most exciting classes I’m ever a part of. In those studios, there are as many ideas as there are students. They’re all vocalized, they move and transform. That’s super exciting. I think theory moves based on the relationship between the ideas students are contributing to the discussion, and the framing of studios by faculty. It’s reciprocal, and I think practice is influenced by that. Often it’s students who are in those firms, bringing new ideas into practice.
I would make an argument that you could trace this through the terms that we use. Climate adaptation would be like the newest one. You just ask, what’s the term that’s currently in vogue and marketable by design firms? Where did that come from? It’s probably from academia. How did they get that term? They sat as jury on reviews. They watched lectures. They had interns in their office saying these words.
How did you come to teach at UBC? Why SALA?
I was applying for jobs at the tail end of a 2-year fellowship. I applied to a few institutions with very decisive brands and design identities. In such places there’s an implicit instruction to make sure you do what they are, because that’s their reputation and it’s why students enroll. Keep it going in the same way. UBC’s expectations aren’t so strictly defined. We’re not the school of X. Experimentation and openness is something I truly value.
There’s a lot of freedom for individual faculty and there’s opportunity for growth. Here, early in my career, I have a lot of energy and it absolutely feels like a place that can really move with intention and speed. I have defined my own way of teaching and I’m teaching what I want to teach. It’s very freeing and really enriching. I’m excited about the opportunities and creative freedom. I’m excited about how much there is happening, and about finding opportunities to outlet that. That’s what brings me here.
What is a particular site, or attribute of Vancouver that makes it an exciting, or unique, or necessary place to design in?
I’d never been to the west coast of Canada before. I flew here directly from a student trip I was on in China to do the SALA job interview. It was a really exciting moment when I showed up here and this all looked absolutely unfamiliar to me. My image of Canada is the Canadian Shields. We’re definitely not in my imagination of the Canadian landscape.
It destabilized me that my entire career thus far in landscape architecture, people were talking about nature. What nature? You come out here, and it’s right there across the water. I can actually see this thing called nature that we talk about. I’ve been up into northern Ontario, but this here is very different. It is absolutely real, it is terrifying, and it is enormous. I still don’t know how to process that. What we call nature is completely different depending on where you go. I’m still wrapping my head around the absolute power of nature that is here. I think a lot of people have that and it’s partly responsible for the unaffordability, but it is truly outstanding and monumental.
The North Shore mountains as seen from Lasserre. Photo courtesy of Jake Kroft
Who/what are your design influences? Do you have a favourite designer, or work?
Who I draw from depends on what I’m currently focused on and looking at. Denis Cosgrove had a huge influence on the designers I was reading about in school. His writing is very easy to understand and makes a succinct argument. I’d also read James Corner’s writing. I spent a lot of time after school asking, where did his ideas come from? Would I end up with the same conclusions had I also read the primary source materials? Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America impacted me by making it clear that I could communicate ideas and design to a wider audience, when previously I didn’t necessarily think anyone in the public was going to care about it.
But I am critical of the people I’m reading. You don’t read people because you’re just going to buy into every single thing the person’s written. The people you cite are the ones who give you something to be critical of. To me, criticism is extremely important.
These authors have given me the greatest capacity to critically reflect. What I look for is a clarity of idea, a willingness to just ask “why” enough times, and to write that in straightforward language. Some people are not good at that. Others resist doing it.
I love books so, so very much. My greatest inspiration comes from books, not from spaces that I’ve been to.
Fionn is the founder of the Landscape Ethics Studio; an academic group focused on exploring the ethical motivations shared and held within the discipline of landscape architecture. The Studio has two main goals, pursuing critical research to reveal and strengthen designers’ ethical convictions and designing to realize these convictions through the landscape. Fionn’s research is focused on sites of confrontation, including political, resource-based, and military, and responds by complicating notions of the good and articulating a diversity of ethical positions relative to our obligations to nature and each other.
Fionn teaches in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Design programs. Before joining SALA in 2017, he taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design, and the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture. Born in Mapoteng, Lesotho, to parents of Irish and Scottish descent and raised in Ontario on the Saugeen Peninsula, Fionn acknowledges and is thankful to now live and work on the land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation.
Fionn’s design, research, and writing can be found on the website: landscape-ethics.com