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RRR: How important is working on site for you?
DY: I think the connection between designer and site
is crucial – it’s far too easy to overlook some of the
human-scale interactions or moments that really
don’t translate well in a set of drawings if you’re not
frequently on site. Rosalie House was a test in many
ways to see how you could go about getting the
outcome you wanted in terms of texture and spatial
quality, and then work backwards to figure out how
you might document that effectively to get a compara-
ble outcome from a general contractor.
PO: I wanted [to create a] landscape that was part
suburban garden and part public park space. And
then Dan, I remember one day you used the term
“meadow” for one of the courtyards. I had been
working in our garden city context for a long time and
was interested to know how Dan would contribute to
thoughts about occupying the suburban landscape.
We started talking about ways to make appropriate
landscapes ... gardens with no edges, plants taking
over structures.RRR: Have you worked on projects where you’ve
handed over documentation and then got a result
that wasn’t up to your expectations?
DY: Not as yet, but I’ve had a good working relationship- Dan Young (top);
Paul Owen (bottom). - The garden at the Owen
Architecture-designed Rosalie
House in Brisbane, designed by
Dan Young Landscape Architect,
eschews typical responses such
as screening and bordering.
Image: Cathy Schusler
with contractors. And it involves spending a bit of time
at implementation being out on site and talking about
it. It might be that you’re there doing set-out and you
build it together. Its difficult to get a fee for putting
together a comprehensive planting plan for a project
that might only have a $20,000 budget, so you might
just go down and do a full set-out yourself, or instead
let the contractor lay the plants out and come in and
fine-tune it on the day of planting.RRR: A concept that we’re exploring in this issue of
Landscape Architecture Australia is “new direc-
tions in planting design.” What are your guiding
design principles in this area?
DY: Variation in form, texture and scale, for starters.
So it might be that I set up guiding principles around
leaf shape, or plant form, which is then scaled up and
down and replicated at different scales across the
palette, which then results in a sort of superimposition
of density. Also shades within a colour spectrum – so
always working between different shades and scales. I
find this lends legibility to a project, without being
prescriptive in a plant selection sense; it allows me to
introduce plants that I mightn’t otherwise consider,
because the selection criteria leads to something with
specific qualities as opposed to something I “like.” →LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA MAY 2017 61