Landscape Architect
USA
Find out more here: www.acochran.com
AC is one of my all time favorite designers, who combines bold modernist design with natural forms, plants and landscapes to soften hard edges. She is so uncluttered in her designs, and plays with large open areas to make you feel simultaneously within a garden and also within the landscape beyond its boundaries. She is based and does most of her work in San Fransico, and therefore chooses materials and plants that she knows will be enhanced by the light or by reflections of the sky.
In an interview I read with her (on the American Society of Landscape Architects website) she sights these modernist designers + minimalist artists as an influence on her work: Dan Kiley / Garrett Eckbo / James Rose / Robert Irwin / Fred Sandback
This is a nice quote from her, talking about a rooftop garden she created for an affordable housing community:
"The point I started with was that I saw this man up there, he had the most beautiful broccoli growing in his two by three foot bed, and I don't know what else was in there, but this broccoli was unbelievably beautiful. He said I come up here and this is my therapy. I can get my hands in the dirt. I was almost in tears. I thought it was the most meaningful thing I'd ever done to just give this guy a chance to just be outside, be in the sun and work with his hands in the dirt and grow something in the five foot square plot. I think it's really worked well. When he's up there working, teenagers come up and hang out. Adults are up there working on their gardens so the teenagers are being monitored. It's not a leftover space, isolated, where things can happen. It becomes this environment that's more of a community, and people kind of watch out for one another".
