by Edward Flaherty, ASLA

Regarding international work, have you heard of seagull landscape architects—they fly in from the US, make a mess here and there, then before the damage dries, they fly back home? The following post is not about that. This is about expatriate American landscape architects who really work and live abroad while doing international projects.

The Challenge

As every project is different, so is every landscape, every country, and every culture.

What do you imagine life would be like if you were sent to a strange country for the duration of the project planning, the design, the construction, or the settling in/starting up of operations?

In the 21st century there are often large urban or large hospitality destination projects. Sometimes an American landscape architect may be part of a huge multidisciplinary, multicultural team, as shown in image above.

Other times the American landscape architect may be on the front-end in a strange country gathering site and regional information regarding project feasibility. Such was American landscape architect Cory Jordison’s situation, as explained to me when he was recently in Tangier for six months of information gathering. Read his story and ask yourself: how would you have responded? How would you have handled it? What would you have done?

Before Cory tells his story, please note: language regularly becomes the primary purveyor of cross-cultural disasters. And though English has become the international language of business, there are plenty of linguistic toe stubs and crevasses—misunderstandings on the surface and underneath. On site in a foreign country, the American landscape architect will find in all cases English is rarely the first, but more often second or third language spoken…plus dozens of varieties of Pidgin English. Miscommunications can be impossible to avoid.

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by Edward Flaherty, ASLA

I can’t deny the romantic attraction of the places where I have worked and lived:

Tangier, where on the Strait of Gibraltar, Europe meets Africa. Tangier lesson learned: waterfront tourist district. I learned the hard way how important free access to multidisciplinary project information is.

Istanbul, where on the Bosphorus Strait, Europe meets Asia. Turkey lesson learned: 200km motorway connecting Europe and Asia. I learned how to scale ‘making a difference’ when working with senior engineers whose career had been on horseback.

Saudi Arabia, on the Red Sea in a port called Yanbu, where for centuries people have made their way to Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia lesson learned: new town in the desert on the Red Sea coast. I learned the hard way how small the landscape infrastructure is compared to the energy, port, primary industries, transportation, jobs, and telecom are to a city being built from zero.

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Large-Scale International Projects, in Theory and in Practice: Challenges & Opportunities for Landscape Architects

Yogi Berra had it right. He said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”

How does a very large and very complex project—1.5 kilometers long and more than thirty international consultants—get built?

Here’s the simple summary: there are three players. Number one: the owner—the owner has the money and property to develop the project. Number two: the consultant—the consultant does the design and engineering for the project. And number three: the contractor—he builds the project. Then the owner moves in and operates the project. Straightforward, right?

Almost…

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You may wonder what it’s like to work in the cradle of Western Civilization—the trading posts between the East and West, the Middle East and North Africa, and, for millennia, primarily a landscape of traders.

But first, we’ll start with something you may be more familiar with. Large nurseries like Monrovia, Keeline Wilcox and ValleyCrest often have rows upon rows of trees, shrubs and ground covers, each properly pruned, grown to near perfection and available in seemingly unlimited quantities in any size you want. Selecting plants there is the same as going down the breakfast cereal aisle in a large American grocery store—huge selections, multiple sizes of each, in massive quantities. Just like cereal boxes, the plants in these nurseries are labelled, well displayed, properly set out and all uniformly healthy. That sophistication and mastery of horticultural and logistics processes—integral to plant growth—is a spectacular achievement that some landscape architects never fully appreciate—until they worked with the pirate landscape contractors of the Middle East.

In the Western Region of Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, a large new town was under construction and street trees were part of the infrastructure work. That was the first time some landscape architects had seen—on a competitively bid, huge project scale—plants being grown in used, empty tin cans. Always rusting, the cans rarely even had drainage holes and were always stacked cheek-by-jowl to save on land rental costs. Plants were hand watered seemingly by chance. Pruning equipment? Just never around.

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