The land organism, the many jointed organs of land and cosmos, is one continuing story rather than a jumbled accumulation of times and places that have no connections to each other, as some might suppose. We may look at a location in a specific moment of time, but that moment is linked, if we go deeply enough, to all that has ever been. And so, we learn to read the land’s biography, its folk spirit. When we observe a site, we aim to uncover the essential movement of line and plane, the curvilinear, the perpendicular, the vertical, and horizontal. We observe how ridges and valleys obviate the movement of water in the landscape, and how flowers, trees, and animals elucidate basic shapes and forms, textures and colors, rhythms and tone, that are endemic to human consciousness and our perceptive faculties.Once we uncover what already exists in the terrain, the patterns that open to our senses, then, through study and reflection, we configure patterns that we can overlay on the existing, patterned space and that can organically merge with it. The key is for the designer to seek out what lies beneath the veil of vegetation and the stones that hide the environment from our eyes, then augment it in the pattern that is laid on top. All of this requires careful observation and contemplation. The sub-grids that influence the apple tree and so much more lie beneath the revealed world and are rarely seen, if at all, through the mechanism of the eye. But these sub-grids, matrices, lattices of active geometries are always present, overlaid by the cosmos (from the Greek word designating adornment) in all its fluid manifestation. The patterns we experience are inestimable, and they are buoyed by pervasive and formidable centers, seeds, sparks that restore and regenerate this universe in which we live at every micro-milli-second.
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