Daniel Woodroffe

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In the 12 years since Austin-based landscape architect Daniel Woodroffe founded his firm, dwg, it has become a leader in sustainable design and low-impact development.

The firm has worked on projects all over the world but has made a particularly deep impression on the landscape of its home city. One of dwg’s most remarkable years-long project finally came to fruition in August of 2021 when Waterloo Park, at 11 acres downtown Austin’s biggest greenspace, opened to the public. Daniel’s company served as the local landscape architect team for world-renowned landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh.

Waterloo Park is remarkable not only for its beauty but also for the fact that it is universally accessible with barrier-free design and features a hike-and-bike trail, large lawns and a 5,000-seat amphitheater. What a casual visitor would not necessarily know or notice, however, is that the park was created to reclaim an urban overflow creek that over the years had not only flooded but become a dumping ground. Now, thanks to dwg’s work, the creek’s water has been harnessed with engineering finesse to allow a wide array of plants native to Austin’s ecology to flourish and benefit local birds and pollinators as well.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Daniel explains how making urban spaces more sustainable and equitable is a recipe not only for economic dynamism but perhaps more importantly for good old-fashioned joy, an emotion he likes to cultivate in his offices as well.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

Pier Carlo: I want to make sure I understand a term that is crucial to your practice, tactical urbanism. Could you explain what it is?

Daniel: Yes. We're a multidisciplinary design firm predominantly made up of landscape architects and urban designers. We've been practicing for dwg since 2010. Since the inception of the firm, we've had a very keen and focused agenda of discussing and having a design dialogue with the urban architectural landscape, with the sense of green infrastructure, urban design. Many of our projects are adaptive reuse or looking at the fabric of the American city today and instigating, installing, designing attributes that augment that existing reality. That's the notion of tactical urbanism.

A smaller example would be taking a parking space and turning it into a park and scaling that up to the scale of city blocks or the entire attitude of the city, that sense of being very tactical with changes and changes that have a clear agenda about more of a humanistic approach and a logical approach to how cities are designed and lived in.

Pier Carlo: At what point in your education or your career did you develop this kind of ethical and civic-minded mindset that marks your work? Was it something that was taught to you or did you come to it on your own?

Daniel: I think the answer to that question has probably multiple layers. Obviously I have to make a shout-out and thank my parents, the fossil-hunting and nature-gathering and foraging as a child.

Pier Carlo: So you were out in the greenscape yourself growing up?

Daniel: Certainly. My mother is an artist and diehard naturalist, and very much that was taught to me. Art was always something that was clearly a passion, and through the English schooling system — high school would be referred to as six-form college, which is a prerequisite to a university degree — I had a teacher called David Pope, who taught us graphical communication. And then my degrees in landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and that notion of layering upon layering, building to my strengths, but always having this fascination with the interaction of the natural world and humans and constantly that dialogue of what is nature, especially what is nature and ecosystem within the urban landscape.

I think that what I learned through the course of a degree in Scotland that was very much focused on the agenda of urban design, on sustainable infrastructure and the sociological side of design was then put into practice by living and working in the United States for the last 25 years and understanding the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle differences between the European city and an American city and having the ability to lean on peers and mentors, both professionally but also personally, to understand how we grow that.

I don't think the teaching ever stops, but there's certainly been a series of really pivotal influencers, even today in terms of firms that we aspire to be like or admire or follow keenly in terms of what they stand for as well, given the role and importance that landscape architecture and urban design are having presently in the retooling of how we consider the urban fabric.

Pier Carlo: Has landscape architecture in the last 20 years taken a different place in urban development than it might have before?

Daniel: I believe so, yes.

Pier Carlo: What drove that?

Daniel: That's an interesting question. I think there is certainly a renaissance that's occurring right now. There have been individuals like Jane Jacobs, who was a very astute writer and really campaigner of the urban fabric; of making places more walkable, more authentic, more human-scaled; a kneejerk reaction to the car-centric engineering philosophy that a highway fixes everything; that a six-lane main street is the solution; that pedestrians are relegated to a fraction of a right of way as opposed to building a walkable, dynamic, engaging place. I think there's that action and reaction.

More often than not they are now leading those conversations about sustainable infrastructure, low-impact design, sustainable sites and how to build smarter, more resilient places for us to all live in that use less resources, less energy, so on and so forth.

But there's obviously the attitude of landscape architecture and climate action and sustainability who are a pivotal driving force in terms of the prominence and conversation that landscape architects and urban designers are having. More often than not they are now leading those conversations about sustainable infrastructure, low-impact design, sustainable sites and how to build smarter, more resilient places for us to all live in that use less resources, less energy, so on and so forth.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned subtle and not subtle differences between American and European cities. You've worked all over the world. Are there things in common that all people in all cities require, and in what ways do you need to adapt to different cultures?

Daniel: That's a fun question too. I think yes, there are absolutely fundamental common elements that you see in any great city, whether it's St. Mark's Square in Venice or Camden Locks in London or even parts of New York and Boston, Chicago, and where Austin is going in terms of a city. The attributes of bringing people together, that sense of the public realm, a great investment in public open space that drives, that is a catalyst for economic resilience as well as a construct and a reflection of the social attitude of a city and other people. I think that is true whether you are developing a city in Bahrain or in Abu Dhabi or doing a project here in our own backyard in Austin.

Those are common elements, the fundamental philosophy and necessity to understand local distinctiveness and a sense of place, a sense of environ or response. You can't build a shiny glass box with no air conditioning in a climate that exceeds 40 degrees Celsius. You have to be responsive and consider airflow and shade. And then from a landscape architectural perspective, the role of water, water-resource management, water-harvesting, native plants and the attitude that not only represents from a sustainable standpoint but also from a cultural acknowledgement of it being right in that place.

I think those are some common positive elements that are definitely unique. There are obviously big differences as well.

Pier Carlo: You are our first landscape-architect guest, in fact our first architect guest, so I have perhaps a dumb question. Unlike most of the other guests I've interviewed, you have to be collaborative and have a wide array of stakeholders — from cities, grantors, funders, your clients, engineers, etc. — in a way that many other artists don't. Through all of those negotiations, how do you maintain your own artistic vision and protect your artistic spirit?

Daniel: Passion. [He chuckles.] I think there is an inherent sense, whether you are a fine master painter or a sculptor or a landscape architect, there is an attitude of we all have a common thread of telling stories, of interpreting a story about the place or the element that we are referencing or being inspired by. Many of our projects lean heavily into the attitude about art and landscape and the sense of the built environment.

You are right. I often consider landscape architecture as being this giant pair of knitting needles that are braiding and binding all the disciplines together, interpreting the necessity of a civil engineer’s pipe layout from stormwater management to, “Do you have to do it that way? Can we expose it, make it beautiful, make it into a rain garden?” To the attitude of placing buildings on sites and looking at shade and sun and human comfort. Sometimes that human comfort can become an artistic interpretation of telling the story of water and clouds and a shade structure and developing this perforation and shadow pattern.

I think you obviously have to listen to the stakeholders and your clients. We are at its most fundamental level, I like to think, good listeners but also good storytellers too. And storytelling is really creating a place that has a certain je ne sais quoi, something you can't quite put your finger on when you're in that space but it feels great. It either is entirely about the place being historic or ecological or taking advantage of a view. Or you can just sit in an urban plaza and go, "This is amazing. I don't quite know why, maybe it's the sound of the water, maybe it's the shade, maybe it's the bustle of people, the clinking of coffee cups and so on."

That's, I think, the art that we as designers of the urban realm often take for granted, but it's an instilled sense of: Art can be just kids playing in a park; it can be people simply enjoying that space and coming back repeatedly and making that restaurant or food court successful, enjoying a concert; and then art can also be the detailing of how that bolt and nut came together to a custom solution of a shade structure.

That's, I think, the art that we as designers of the urban realm often take for granted, but it's an instilled sense of: Art can be just kids playing in a park; it can be people simply enjoying that space and coming back repeatedly and making that restaurant or food court successful, enjoying a concert; and then art can also be the detailing of how that bolt and nut came together to a custom solution of a shade structure.

I think it's a complex question and I think complex answer, but I think every artist has to effectively resonate with either the spirit of the time or the thing they're inspired by or the client that hired them to do X or Y.

Pier Carlo: Well, now that you've brought up art as storytelling, can you tell us the story of a project of yours that you're proudest of for both its aesthetic merits and its commitment to equity and sustainability?

Daniel: Just one? [He laughs.]

Pier Carlo: Or you can cherry-pick. Up to you.

Daniel: Perhaps I can lead a little bread-crumb story.

About 10 years ago, we started a campaign of looking at Congress Avenue, which is defined as The Main Street of Texas. It goes from the Capitol to the lake and into South Austin.

Pier Carlo: So this was when your company was only two years old, is that right?

Daniel: Yeah, and the notion of tactical urbanism was really coming to a forefront of conversations. Janette Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg were engaging Snøhetta to do the redesign of Times Square, and so there was this real sense of energy and buzz about reclaiming the urban realm for people, not necessarily for these one-ton clunky things with four wheels. Within that, a conversation started on Congress Avenue about doing pilot projects to effectively rent parking spaces and turn them into these pocket parks. In Austin they were called pocket patios because — by virtue of the code that was written and established that we helped to write actually — they had to be defined and tethered to a retail outlet or a restaurant or a cafe. There had to be a food-and-beverage transaction associated with these patios.

We wanted to challenge that and say, 'What if you actually started to build back better and address these social issues of making the space more equitable, more sociable, more economically robust to help the businesses?'

What started there with one parking space has really blossomed into now dozens of these things up and down Congress Avenue and throughout the city and is changing the perception of the public realm. I don't think anyone could doubt that American cities largely have been driven by the automobile, by the highway, by the sense of car and convenience. Congress Avenue is a six-lane, albeit 40-mile-an-hour, highway through the center of Austin, and 85, 87% of that right of way is for cars and the humans are stuffed on the edges. We wanted to challenge that and say, “What if you actually started to build back better and address these social issues of making the space more equitable, more sociable, more economically robust to help the businesses?”

Little did we know that those pocket patios would be the mainstay of how the restaurants stayed in business during COVID. It was an absolute unintended consequence of suddenly they were the lifeline of outdoor dining in the right of way.

Pier Carlo: Because had they not been there when COVID hit, the restaurants would not have had as much access to outdoor seating?

Daniel: Yeah, or you would've been relegated to sitting next to the fender of a car as opposed to an orchestrated organized space. In New York it was fascinating to see these makeshift timber shed-like structures with plastic sheeting pop up everywhere. And what I found more fascinating was that they've largely stayed as businesses come back because people enjoy that interaction of sitting on the street. All of that prologue spun up into a dialogue that we were having about reclaiming public open space.

There was a 1980s building at 2nd and Congress called 111 Congress where the owners were looking to reinvent it to give the lobby a little bit of lipstick and makeup and freshen it up for a new round of tenants coming into the building. That dialogue grew about public open space and a 3/4-acre sunken plaza that was largely fenced in, enclosed, privatized and accessible really only to the handful of people that smoked in the building and a couple of dogwalkers relieving their dogs. It became a project called Fairground and was an attitude towards changing and blurring the boundaries between public and private realms, about introducing Austin's first food hall within a three-quarter-acre plaza that then changed the dynamics of public open space and introduced a conversation about, “Why pour 250,000 gallons of AC condensate down the drain every single year, which the building had been doing since it was built? Why not collect and harvest that and use it for the landscape irrigation? Why not create a fountain feature that utilizes that water, treats it, atomizes it into cloud and cools the plaza?”

I have all of these stories. I mentioned about the artistic interpretation of a shade structure. We imagined a shade structure in that plaza and called it Nimbus because nimbus is a low cloud that hangs in a valley in the morning and the shape of the structure and the perforations of that structure are designed to evoke this image of a cloud. It all started to become this subliminal story of the public realm, public open space, bringing people back together, but also a story about native plants and water reduction and sustainability and how a building can become more sustainable as well within an ecosystem of the urban realm.

That subsequently has been the conversation on many other projects, but that was a very pivotal moment for us in terms of not only imagining a project like that but actually being asked to lead the project as a landscape architect and to hire the civil engineer, to hire an architectural team, and to have the great privilege of working with Michael Hsu Office of Architecture on the interior designs. It became a really wonderful project for us to demonstrate the capacity of Austin to change for the better, to look at what actually became a conversation of a semi-public open space on Congress Avenue, the addition of which was the first in over 100 years because everything else had been built to the property line. “Build a plaza, but it's private.” It was a really unique moment in time that, as I said, has spawned many other conversations of how does a landscape architecture infuse art or what is the role of sustainability and innovation and so on and so forth.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned that you were involved in rewriting some building or planning codes. How so?

Daniel: In Austin, when the conversation of the pocket patios was in play, the Downtown Austin Alliance was one of the key sponsors. There were several council members and policy aides that were clearly motivated to see these things happen, but city code prohibited it or at least there wasn't a mechanism to allow these things to occur, to rent a parking space or to take a part of the right of way, even on a temporary basis. It created these double negatives every single time. It's like, "Doesn't translate to code, can't do it, can't do it."

And so it started with a pilot project that was a year long to test and measure the metrics of success, — social, traffic , transportation. Are car users going to freak out because there's a patio in that parking space? Will the adjacent businesses suffer because they don't have a parking space in front of their business anymore? And then what are the metrics of success from environmental, social and economic impacts? It was a wild success in every measure. The business that sponsored the space flourished in terms of having 30 extra places to sit outside, and their revenue from lunch and dinner and coffee sales went through the roof.

What was interesting is the adjacent businesses also saw a marked interest in trip counts or sales because of people lingering, pausing, stopping. "Oh my goodness, there's a jewelers there. I didn't ever notice that!" Those just incidental moments. Because of those metrics, we were able to sit down with the city-code officials and write firstly a resolution to herald the success of this pilot project and then inform a new portion of the city code to enable these and then lastly to help write a design manual to say, “Not only here's the lessons learned but here's a path to success with an expedited permitting process and a manual of do’s and don'ts to enable you to build these things safely but also efficiently."

Pier Carlo: Wow, that's incredible!

One thing that I love to talk to our guests about is reinventing outmoded systems so that they can be more ambitious and successful in their artistic work. I'm wondering if there is an existing system — whether in the training of landscape architects, how they're expected to develop their careers or how American cities are built, for instance — that could be modified or reinvented to make your work much easier and to benefit American cities?

Daniel: Sure! As a landscape architect, I would be remiss not to say that we need more trees. I'm not trying to say that as a cliche thing. We also need not only to look at trees, but there needs to be a keener attitude towards water and soils within the urban fabric.

There are some really fascinating national and international projects that look at soil-volumetrics capacity for storm-water management, reduction of flooding, reduction of city resources, attitudes of water. Living in Austin in Central Texas on a latitude that is the same as the Sahara Desert, it's hot in the summertime, but it's also humid, and every building downtown uses an air-conditioning system and pours millions of gallons of water, air-conditioning sweat, into the sanitary sewer every single year. Why not harvest that?

We as designers and landscape architects who inform policy and standards moving forward need to be more aware of our profound ability to inform positive change, to have huge, meaningful impacts ...

We as designers and landscape architects who inform policy and standards moving forward need to be more aware of our profound ability to inform positive change, to have huge, meaningful impacts on not only the way that cities are built and the way that we all live and about human comfort but about the way we are sustaining our ability to even be on this planet by having meaningful reductions of energy or resources and positive impacts towards climate action and climate change.

I think there is also a wonderful shift presently about this outdated engineering edict that an American city has to be built driven by the turning radius and miles per hour of a car. Time and time again, highways have proved really only one thing, that the bigger you make them, the worse the traffic gets. It’s this model called induced demand. And at the same time, there is a big push globally to readdress the connectivity of our cities, of our urban places.

Austin alone is going through a multi-billion-dollar transportation initiative to build rail and subways through downtown and to build better trails and bike connectivity and bus connectivity. But at the same time, the state is looking to expand I-35 and just build a bigger highway. It just seems that there's this unfortunate tension about, “Do you really need to? Or do we need to just think smarter about how mobility is rapidly changing with the advent of electric and autonomous vehicles? Do you even need all the space you thought you used to have?”

I think for designers there needs to be a greater emphasis on the capacity to influence that change.

Pier Carlo: When we talk about green space and social equity, one of the realities certainly in American cities is that there's a shockingly high correlation between access to green spaces and wealth. So I'm wondering what can socially conscious landscape architects like you do to ensure that equitable landscapes pervade urban areas, not just wealthier neighborhoods and commercial centers?

Daniel: That's a great question. There is policy but also an attitude of focus.

We've worked with an organization called Raasin in the Sun. They're an East Austin community fabric about empowering underserved or underprivileged African American community groups in Austin. Some of their most profound work has been about street cleanups or just planting a tree or building a soccer field in a neighborhood vacant lot or doing a lot of mural work. We've followed and hung onto the coattails that Raasin has had and have enjoyed collaborating with her and her organization on a number of projects.

I think getting out there, having a voice, being part of the TreeFolks, of the Austin Parks Foundation’s tree-planting days, and encouraging trail access. You're right, it's very easy to get sucked into this vortex of new, shiny, fancy parks in any part of a city, but it's also vital to think about that pocket park, that cleanup program, the simple notion of guerilla tree-planting in rights of way and things like that.

Pier Carlo: Does that happen?

Daniel: Absolutely, yeah. Whether it's guerilla community planting beds where there are tomatoes in the right of way, or just ... . There was a big program that started happening years ago — I think someone publicized it in San Francisco — where someone started planting the roundabouts in cities, and no one could figure out what was going on. Yeah, it happens all the time!

But I think that the unfortunate reality is in the American city is there are still desperate inequities of the haves and haves-not, and the public-realm landscape architecture can have a profound impact on raising the sense of civic pride or sense of place. Parks and open space, when managed and kept clean and safe, have significant benefits and indicators on the reduction of crime.

As designers of the public realm, our most important clients are our community members and our neighbors, not just the person paying the bills. There's nothing more heartwarming and uplifting and bringing you back to work the next day than just sitting quietly in a plaza or a pocket park or an area where there was a mural done and seeing people genuinely enjoying that space.

Tree-planting, clean streets, these things can cause paradigm shifts in terms of how people perceive their community. I think we do have an embodied role to chase the next shiny object but also think about where we live, how we live. As designers of the public realm, our most important clients are our community members and our neighbors, not just the person paying the bills. There's nothing more heartwarming and uplifting and bringing you back to work the next day than just sitting quietly in a plaza or a pocket park or an area where there was a mural done and seeing people genuinely enjoying that space.

Pier Carlo: Do you do that? Do you go visit and hang out in your completed work to watch people?

Daniel: Oh, yeah! It's probably the highest accolade you can get by just being quiet and watching people enjoying. Yeah, it gives me goosebumps. That's the get-up-and-go, wake-up-in-the-morning moment of, “What are we going to do that's cool that will inspire a generation today?”

Pier Carlo: How do you make sure that everyone at your firm cultivates an artistic spirit?

Daniel: Practice what you preach. In fact, somewhat well-timed in terms of us talking today: In 2020, we celebrated 10 years of the firm. It was a hugely important moment for me and for the partners of the firm, hugely important for everyone to have achieved so much in such a relatively short period of time. Back at the founding in 2010, we made a commitment, we were like, "OK, we're going to take the entire firm on a trip. We're going to immerse the firm in the DNA of the firm." That trip was a trip to the United Kingdom to go to Cambridge and go to London, two cities where I grew up, to see a little bit of a trip down memory lane, a little bit of what makes Daniel tick, but also a deep immersion into two contemporary modern European citie,s to really immerse people in travel, in culture, in food, in places that they-

Pier Carlo: And modern cities that are built on centuries of history, as opposed to America, which built on 100 or 150 years.

Daniel: Yeah. And then of course COVID kicked that plan in the pants, and we couldn't go. But we go this June; the entire firm is heading off for a week. To say that we're excited and terrified about 37 people running around London is an understatement, but it's going to be amazing. I don't know of another firm anywhere that has saved like crazy over 10 years to enable a trip that is all about celebrating the values of the firm and bringing everyone together.

We planned it years in advance, knowing that just the logistics alone of booking hotel rooms and flights and everything and making sure that our clients are aware, that everything fits in place and that we've hit the deadlines and we're ahead of schedule and then we can shut the doors and yet still be accessible to our client because of the powers of technology. It's a huge commitment.

I think the American landscape of employment, particularly in architecture and design right now, is crazy. It's incredibly busy, and we strive very, very hard to make a firm that not only practices and preaches a different dialogue of landscape architecture but is also culturally truly unique in terms of how we embrace remote working or the attitude of just celebrating everybody's birthday, those little things, but then being able to say, "Heck yes, we're actually going to do this trip, and it's actually going to happen. It wasn't just something nice that the principal said at the meeting just to get people excited, and then we forgot about it.” So yeah, it's going to be amazing.

Pier Carlo: That's fantastic. Good for you!

Lastly, is there a current or upcoming project that dwg is particularly excited about that you can discuss?

Daniel: We were very, very proud of seeing Waterloo Park, which is the first phase of Waller Creek, come online. We are the local landscape architect for Michael Van Valkenburgh. Michael is one of the greatest minds of this generation of landscape architecture, of urban design. To have listened and learned and been a giant sponge from him, to participate robustly in the design, and then, thanks to COVID, our team having to do 100% of the construction observation of that project. To have literally poured sweat, blood and tears into the successful realization and to then see Gary Clark, Jr. play to 5,000 people on the opening night. And to see not only how much of a staggering environmental feat that park was, but also what a staggering social activator it is.

The fact that the city can raise publicly and privately hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent the fabric of open space is a real indicator that Austin is just getting started in terms of being a truly great city.

And that's only phase one of multiple phases of Waller Creek going from effectively an urban sewer to one of the nation's largest urban-creek restorations. It’s a profoundly important moment of pivoting the city to address connectivity and environment and stewardship of the public realm, as all these other projects of subways and trains and buses and even highways are ongoing. The fact that the city can raise publicly and privately hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent the fabric of open space is a real indicator that Austin is just getting started in terms of being a truly great city.

April 11, 2022