GABRIEL WICK CONSERVATION, INTERPRETATION & DESIGN OF HISTORIC SITES

« The past is never dead. It's not even past. »
– William Faulkner

Working in any historic context is a little more like surgery than design. This is especially true when we are dealing with an artifact as vital and dynamic as a landscape. An historic landscape, be it a garden, a city park, an academic campus, or a dense urban neighborhood, provides us with a deep insight into who we once were, how we have changed over time, and how we once saw ourselves in relation to our environment. They are essential keys to understanding our history, and yet in our efforts to preserve them for the future we often destroy the very vitality that makes them extraordinary.

My work as a designer is to balance these two imperatives – to preserve a place’s vitality, and to protect the vestiges of its embedded memory, while also revealing its history and significance to a broader public, and, where necessary, adapting it to new conditions and uses.

My work does not attempt to resist the inherent transiency of the garden or dynamism of the landscape, nor to reconstitute these sites as caricatured visions of the past, but rather to respectfully reveal something of each site’s natures, its uses, and the ideas it embodies, with all of its poetry and vitality intact. The goal is to respect and to preserve that beautiful sense of unmediated discovery that we experience when we explore a landscape that is a true anachromism – in the noblest sense of that term.

What is a
conservation site?

By a ‘conservation site’, I do not simply mean a certain quantity of soil, plants and structures that exists some place in the world. We must understand a site in an expanded sense, where our understanding of a place is constituted by the body of texts, images, and memories that are attached to it, and the impressions that it conveys of its pasts and the lives and experiences of the people who have lived there.

Different sites have different requirements: an approach based on a site’s historic past may not be appropriate to a site whose current use is at a dramatic variance with its past. In other cases, where elements survive in something of a fragmentary state, a more critical and abstract approach to its interpretation might be more honest and more meaningful. In certain other cases it might be appropriate to reconstitute or evoke certain missing elements of an historic landscape composition based where sufficient documentary evidence exists to give us a fairly certain sense of how it once was. Each site and each project demands a mindful approach.

The most intriguing sites for me are not sites that are imagined to have come down to us in some perfectly static state of preservation from the day that they were first built – in dealing with something as dynamic as a landscapes, such sites always prove to be more mythology than reality. For me, the best sites are places are those that are left to reveal their pasts and their characters slowly, that have evolved over time to suit different uses and owners, and that embody different notions of nature, and our place within it.