Speaker Spotlight: Shannon Nichol, FASLA, PLA, LEED AP
2024 AIA Tennessee Conference Speaker
Landscape architect Shannon Nichol is co-founder of GGN, a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle, Washington. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (Seattle). Many of the firm’s recognitions include the Smithsonian’s 2011 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture and the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award. Shannon’s projects have been recognized with ASLA National Awards of Excellence, ASLA and AIA Honor Awards, Tucker Design Awards, Great Places Awards from the Environmental Design Research Association, and Pacific Horticulture’s inaugural Design Futurist Award.
Shannon’s designs – including San Francisco’s India Basin Shoreline Park, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and the Gates Foundation Campus – are widely recognized as distinct landforms and welcoming places embedded in local history, culture, and native ecologies. Shannon’s recent and current projects include the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center, and the Seattle Residence: Native Gardens.
At this year’s AIATN conference, Shannon will present Seeing the Ground – Considering the rich design that comes from sharing and learning about the ground beneath our feet, where she will share examples of design-driven efforts to visualize the real ground of each place. GGN’s work is often closely collaborative with architects and clients, so that the process of designing the site is also one of collective learning about the ground itself and its hidden truth and stories.
While Shannon considers nearly everything to be relevant to design and landscape, her “other” interests include car-design history, hill running, illustrative art, and non-fiction books.
Learn more about Shannon in our Q&A below.
Tell us more about your roots. How much of that inspires your design process and work and makes you the person you are today?
I think two aspects of my roots impact my landscape design process:
1. I grew up on a logging road near the Canadian Border in western Washington. Seeing the ancient, pre-Colonization landscape – with the plant and animal communities still intact – getting cut and developed for the first time all around me – knowing that “before and after” story from personal, sensory experiences of both – had a tremendous impact on how I see our landscapes, especially in rural North America.
I tend to imagine what and whom was there for millennia, just a blink of an eye before a few people made some (usually rushed) choices with modern equipment magnifying the breadth and permanent impacts of those momentary choices. I feel that it is important to first know what we are looking at when we see landscape, even when it is highly urbanized. What much older landscape was erased or altered here? Why is the new city or street layout this or that shape? How can we change it again in ways that consider and re-integrate the irreplaceable mix of living things that have been connected to this place for millennia?
2. My parents are extremely independent, self-taught DIY-ers. Growing up in that atmosphere of everyday, hands-on work, learning, trial, error, and iteration was likely my greatest training for my approach to design. There was a moral commitment to trying things and figuring it out. There are no instructions for what you have not yet designed, for a site that is like no other and presents a unique puzzle to resolve and then turn into something that is also intuitively beautiful to experience.
What keeps you grounded in your personal or professional life?
Doing boring, repetitive work grounds my brain and helps me get back into the mindset of a hands-on designer rather than passive manager or curator. As one gets older and leads more things, there is a pull into meetings and coaching and away from time-consuming production work with one’s own hands. Additionally, as we all are swept into the “efficiency” of digital tools that do this production work for us, we are also deprived of the creating and craft side of our design work. This pull away from figuring things out and from the making part of the work is something that I try to mindfully push back against.
A simple starting point for me, when I might begin to feel detached and overly abstract in my thinking about a project design, is to get a plot of the current/nascent site plan, warts and all, and just trace it by hand in a drafting mindset. I’m not trying to design when I start doing this, but just sit down and slowly trace what is there in a careful manner, with a pencil, scale, and edges. I measure and trace and consider the spacings and trajectories of the curves as I go, thinking about how someone crosses this street or how this wall terminates at this auto-generated curb radius that I’d never carefully seen. Inevitably, as I’m tracing and getting into the mindset of wanting to create beauty and more meaning in these drafted lines, my mind gets connected in a richer way to the physical design – even if the scope is just a few sidewalks and driveway aprons. I feel this is like a re-grounding of my mind into the real, physical place we are creating.
How much collaboration do you have with architects in your projects?
Around half of our work (on average) is with architects.
Would you share some advice with architects about landscape architecture and the process of integrating landscape in the architecture to make a project successful?
We love collaborating with architects because of the additional creative dialogue and input. I’ve been so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such a great range of talented architects from around the world! Had I been an architect, I would not have had this opportunity, and it is one of the things I cherish the most about my career.
A lot of landscape architects would, given this chance, advise architects and clients to include landscape architects as early as possible in the design of the buildings, and I don’t disagree that having early involvement can create the chance for the building to be most deeply informed and inspired by the hidden stories and characteristics of the landscape.
That said, I find that coming into a project later, when the building is already somewhat defined (or, on the extreme side, already there and being repositioned by a developer), can support just as rich and successful of a collaborative experience and design outcome for everyone.
The most important factor in successfully integrating landscape into the architectural process, in my experience, is shared curiosity and humility. If we are all confident enough in our own creative resiliencies that we can see other people’s insights and inspirations as additive fuel and enriching context – rather than as competitive or threatening to our own ideas or identity – then we will each produce stronger, richer design. Confident, creative collaborators are always hungry for other viewpoints and sources of design influence and gain strength and clarity from the information and potential design drivers we bring from the site and its context. We’re hungry for architecture that brings strong ingredients into our site and the design puzzle and sensory experience, as well.
Images Courtesy of Shannon Nichol/GGN.
Find out more about Shannon and the AIA Tennessee Conference in the links below.