Shauna Gillies-Smith talks to Cool Spaces! host Stephen Chung about the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s landscape. Photo: Shauna Gillies-Smith
The landscape architect Shauna Gillies-Smith has worked on only a handful of episodes of Cool Spaces! The Best New Architecture, a new PBS series focused on new architecture, but she’s not worried that landscape architecture is getting the short shift. The show’s host, Stephen Chung, was a classmate of Gillies-Smith at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and she says she is confident that he is sufficiently “interested in the allied disciplines.” The show, now premiering in local television markets, is organized around different typologies—the first few episodes have themes such as “Performance Spaces,” “Libraries,” or “Healing Spaces”—and focuses on three major new projects per episode. Although landscape architecture is not yet a featured theme, Gillies-Smith has been on screen or behind the scenes for some of the projects, and she’s a big believer in exposing the nondesign audience to design. “It’s as much an advocacy project as a beautiful interesting project about design” she says.
Gillies-Smith, who is the founding principal of ground in Boston, is one of a team of experts whom Chung may interview on screen; the team may also include an engineer, a lighting designer, or an acoustician, depending on the project. Each expert talks about a different aspect of the project and tries to make it comprehensible to the general audience. “So, for example, I spoke on two different projects,” Gillies-Smith says. “One was the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and in that project it comes down to something very, very simple: the idea that the land was constructed.” Gillies-Smith walks the viewer through the way the landscape was shaped to accommodate a Dan Kiley garden next to the museum’s Stephen Holl addition: “The addition has a very strongly sculpted landscape that is primarily creating space so the building can poke out of the ground like a series of lanterns. A very simple idea, that the landscape was built around the buildings,” she told us.
Gillies-Smith also worked on the episode on the Yale Health Center, which gave her the opportunity to talk about how green roofs work. “The health center has a healing garden on the roof, and the interesting aspect of that project is: What is a green roof?—explaining to the audience at large that it’s not just dirt and plants. It’s technical.” Gillies-Smith used the metaphor of a club sandwich to explain how a green roof is designed and built.
The importance of a show like Cool Spaces, Gillies-Smith says, and of having a landscape architect involved, goes far beyond the oohs and aahs of a big-time design project. She’s frank about the big picture, and how landscape architecture could have a greater share in that picture. “You need to pay attention to the big media descriptions to teach to the nondesign audience—not only the paying and nonpaying clients, but everyone—the importance in developing literacy about design. Almost every aspect of our urban experience is designed—roadways, buildings, landscapes,” she says. “In demanding, expecting, and advocating a respect for our work, there has to be an understanding that there is incredible design energy everywhere.”
The show is primarily driven by architecture projects, but Gillies-Smith hopes that it will help viewers broaden their concepts of what a designed landscape is—“not just a park or a garden or a roof with technology. Once you get beyond that level, you can start to project and advocate for a more engaging and beautiful and effective and performative landscape as well.”
Cool Spaces! The Best New Architecture is now airing on local PBS affiliates. Check your local listings for airtimes.
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