It really becomes an outdoor room connected to the architecture. Urban landscapes are about architectural spaces. GD: How do setting and size shape a project?ĪC: We work on everything from urban courtyards to vineyard/hotel complexes that are hundreds of acres, and each takes a very different approach. Left: Cochran’s ability to blur the line between natural and man-made environments is evident at Stone Edge Farm, a Sonoma residence, olive grove, winery, and garden. Combine that with a climate where everything grows and where people spend a lot of their time outside: They’re invested emotionally in their landscape. I don’t think it’s an accident that Silicon Valley or Berkeley in the ’60s happened in California. Coming to the Bay Area was very freeing I realized I’m able to do more here. This was the culture of Thomas Church and Sunset magazine, where people could name a landscape architect. What happened?Īndrea Cochran: When I first came here, someone asked what I did and it was the first time I had ever told anybody I was a landscape architect when they didn’t say, “My holly bush has dots on the leaves.” I didn’t have to explain that I design gardens I’m not a horticulturist. Garden Design: You moved to the West Coast 30 years ago with the plan to stay just a few years. A collection of her work, Andrea Cochran Landscapes, by Mary Myers is available from Princeton Architectural Press. Sourcebook: Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture is based in San Francisco (415/503-0060) ). Our slide show of Cochran's landscapes is accompanied with a Q&A with Cochran. Garden Design caught up with Cochran recently to dig below the surface of her clean, crisp designs in order to better understand the aesthetics and process of this walking force of nature. Last July, she collaborated with the architect/artist Susan Narduli in a competition-winning design for the San Francisco Veterans Memorial, which is slated to open in the fall of 2013. Like her work, Cochran is both elegant and warm, and that delightful paradox shows up in projects that include museum sculpture gardens, housing project courtyards, and children’s play spaces. Her highly sculptural and modernist designs consistently garner media attention and awards since 2004, in fact, the only year she didn’t win an honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects was the one in which they asked her to be a juror. Featuring stunning photography, drawings, plans, and an essay by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Henry Urbach, Andrea Cochran: Landscapes celebrates the first twenty-five years of a highly intuitive and reflective creative process.Landscape architect Andrea Cochran may have grown up in suburban New Jersey, but she strongly identifies with the West Coast, where she’s lived and practiced for the last 30 years. A combination of harmony, wonder, and surprise awaits wherever her sharp geometry and vibrant plant life meet. In her hands, polished black concrete becomes both a quiet reflection of the sky and an instrument to amplify the sound of falling rain locally quarried stone walls reflect the border walls between valley farms twisted forms of olive respond to the spreading California oaks dotting distant hills. Cochran’s landscapes are clean, but not cold. Materials such as COR-TEN steel allow her to draw boundaries on the land with ultrathin edges while also reflecting the earthy tones of the soil beneath. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of plant species, Cochran uses vegetation to blur edges, and porous and permeable materials to create grade changes that enlighten and disappear. A stacked plane of planters, each housing a different variety of succulent, mimics the compression found in hills banked against each other in the distance. Her work is distinguished by its careful consideration of site, climate, and existing architecture. Andrea Cochran: Landscapes presents eleven residential, commercial, and institutional landscape projects in detail, including Walden Studios in Alexander Valley, California the sculpture garden for the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon and the award-winning Children’s Garden in San Francisco.Īndrea Cochran seeks to put her clients’ individual narratives in conversation with the land. They are sensuous, captivating oases that absorb the eye in a totality of spatial composition. Poetic language suits these functional and often lyrical works of art. Studies in repetition and order, orchestrations of movement in the landscape, and elements placed in geometric conversation, is how author Mary Myers describes the twenty-five-year career of San Francisco based landscape architect Andrea Cochran.
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