S5, E9: He’s Been Designing California’s Outdoors for Decades. Here’s What He’s Learned.

This is a very special episode of Unpacked by Afar. This week, we hosted Unpacked Live — a live version of the podcast — in partnership with Visit California in Dallas, Texas. The event celebrated California’s extraordinary creative landscape, and today’s guest has literally shaped the ground beneath many Californian’s feet.

Roderick Wyllie is an award-winning landscape architect and founding partner of Surfacedesign Inc. A rare San Francisco native, he’s helped design some of the Bay Area’s most beloved public spaces, including the Lands End Visitor Center above Sutro Baths, a plaza at the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mission Bayfront Park.

In this episode, Roderick talks about growing up in 1970s San Francisco, what it means to design with rather than against a place, and why he thinks California’s greatest creative export might be optimism.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is a very special episode of Unpacked by Afar. This week we hosted Unpacked: Live, a live version of the podcast, in partnership with Visit California. We were in Dallas to talk about and share California’s creative landscape.

And that voice you just heard belongs to Roderick Wyllie, one of our panelists. Roderick is an award-winning landscape architect and founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc. He’s helped design some of the most iconic outdoor spaces in California, including the Bayfront Park and Land’s End Visitor’s Center in San Francisco, places that I often spend time in. Roderick joined me on stage in Dallas to talk about his approach to design and how California informs so much of what he does creatively. In this episode, we go a little deeper into his work, growing up as a native San Franciscan, and where he goes to take in the magic of California. There may be elk involved.

Well, Roderick, welcome to Unpacked. It’s so lovely to have you here today.

Roderick Wyllie: So happy to be here.

Aislyn: One of the things I was really appreciating about you when I was doing some research is that you are a San Francisco native, which is so hard to find. Can you tell me about your relationship with California and specifically this city?

Roderick: It’s true, I don’t run into natives that often. I have a kind of family history of being in Northern California. My grandfather was born in San Francisco, my grandmother was born in Oakland, both in the 19th century. My grandmother was born in 1893 and lived to be 107 years old, she lived through the entire 20th century. My father on that side of my family was born in Napa.

One of the things about San Francisco, at least in my experience, is that it is always changing. I think we evolve with cities as people, and San Francisco gives you different opportunities to access it in different ways as you grow through it. I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in San Francisco, and it was a sort of wilder time. There was a kind of freedom that one confronted here then, and I think it had a very formative influence on my creative process, a kind of openness that I appreciate in retrospect.

Aislyn: What do you think that was about? Do you have an example of something from then that might parallel the way you create now?

Roderick: My parents, who were not necessarily artists, were always taking the kids to explore the city. That might have involved going to galleries or museums, but it also might have involved going to the opening of Green’s Restaurant, which at that time was a vegetarian restaurant open and staffed by Zen monks. There was a kind of curiosity that was encouraged not only by my parents, but by the city itself, a sort of wild frontier that we could take part in.

Aislyn: It’s a very different landscape today in many ways. How would you characterize San Francisco now in terms of creativity and artistic expression?

Roderick: I think it’s still there. People come to the West Coast often to shed the inhibitions and some of the history. The big influence in culture in San Francisco and the Bay Area is obviously technology. I’m not intimately involved in the development of technology, but it’s a fundamentally creative pursuit. I don’t know many other cities that could really accept the idea of driverless cars, and in fact, San Francisco has. Now as I drive around the city, they’re kind of in my way sometimes, but I take them all the time. That opportunity to imagine something like that as possible feels connected to the Bay Area and to San Francisco.

Aislyn: That’s such a nice transition into your work, because I see so much curiosity in what you do with Surfacedesign and how you approach each project. I was watching a 2022 Harvard talk in which your friend Gary Hildebrand likened you and James to crime scene investigators, looking for evidence to build a narrative construct of what happened in the formation of a site. That’s curiosity, and quite an introduction. How would you interpret your business name and what you do, and how you apply that thinking to the natural world?

Roderick: Our name is absolutely connected to the idea that we are shaping the ground, touching and composing the experience of it. That curiosity is essential to what James and I do. We believe there is always a solution available to us, even if we haven’t found it yet. The best description I can give is that it’s almost the way filmmakers enter a site and try to attach their work to its essence. That happens in all of our projects, whether it’s a site very specific to San Francisco or a project in Detroit, which is a city far away from San Francisco, but one where we’ve just completed the Hudson’s project. There’s a lot of research that goes into all of these, but ultimately there’s a sense of attaching intuition and curiosity to the solutions.

Aislyn: I’d love to talk about some of the more iconic ones. Living in the Bay Area, I’m familiar with the Lands End Lookout and Mission Bayfront Park. What are the projects that really stick in your mind as representing that approach?

Roderick: As a San Francisco native, we’ve had projects all around the perimeter of the Peninsula. The Land’s End project was above Sutro Baths near the Cliff House, all about access, visual and otherwise, to the Pacific Ocean. Our design strategy was to embrace and elevate the idea of the dunes that are part of that bigger landscape and allow people to access it with all their senses.

We also worked with the Parks Conservancy on a plaza at the Golden Gate Bridge, and then there’s the Bayfront Park project, which is all about access to the bay. I’m so thrilled to have these little dots on the map that are all public projects celebrating a truly extraordinary place in the world. The Pacific Ocean is this formidable, rugged moment. The Golden Gate Bridge celebrates people being in San Francisco and across the bay. And Bayfront Park is really a celebration of the maritime history here.

Aislyn: I’ve spent a lot of time in all three of those places, I only recently realized you were the connecting thread. My partner works at the UCSF Mission Bay hospital and has lunch at Bayfront Park all the time. Is there a part of San Francisco that you haven’t explored or touched in that way that you’d like to?

Roderick: I really love the coast just north of San Francisco, Point Reyes and Inverness and all along that coast. I feel a little hesitant to say I want to touch it, because I kind of want it to not be touched. But I love the idea that people have access to it. It seems like quite a responsibility to touch it in a way that allows access without necessarily transforming the power of that place.

Aislyn: There is a rawness in certain places that you wouldn’t want to lose.

Roderick: Absolutely.

Aislyn: You’ve worked quite extensively outside the state and country as well. How do you bring this California mindset to projects like the Museum of Steel in Monterrey, Mexico, the Smithsonian South campus in Washington, D.C., and Detroit?

Roderick: In addition to being generally curious people, I think there’s a kind of optimism that is part of the life of California that we bring to those projects. The Museum of Steel, a museum of the steel industry in Monterrey, was a project where we didn’t have a lot of resources in terms of budget, but we had a client willing to use elements already on site and transform them to tell the story of that place. To me, that speaks to a kind of optimism that is our baseline: we can solve this.

Maybe we need to redirect the approach, maybe we need to rethink what refinement means, but that seems really fundamental in our work elsewhere. Another example: we did a 40-acre project in Seattle along the Sound for Expedia Inc., a campus project, but also a public part of the waterfront. The first thing we did was meet with soils engineers trying to find any microorganism they could to figure out how the site could thrive. It had essentially been a garbage dump. They found tiny microorganisms that ended up being the basis for the soil makeup, injected into compost to make compost tea and create a whole regimen for a thriving, healthy ecosystem. To me, that’s our technology. It takes a leap of faith, a willingness to just keep going and discover something that works.

Aislyn: Water seems to be such a big element in your work, both as something beautiful for the eyes and as a resource issue in a state dealing with drought. How do you think about those two sides of water?

Roderick: Where there is scarcity, the insertion of water in a landscape is so powerful, and that is our baseline for how we want to compose with water. There are so many opportunities for water to affect light and reflection in a space, and those are tools for elevating the immersive quality of a landscape. We also know that the Mediterranean climate of Northern California is incredibly impacted by water, so when you see it, there’s an immediate recognition of how powerful it is here.

We are completely committed to the visual and aural impact of things like water. Beauty is not something designers are always immediately willing to discuss, but the idea of visual beauty and some kind of poetic contribution to people’s experience of place, that’s what we do, and water is a tool for that.

We’re completing a smaller private project right now where we wanted to create a datum for being in a courtyard space, and we thought water would ground it. We started looking at weaving as a texture that would excite water, create movement, and have a light texture attached to it. That led us to collaborate with a textile artist we’re friends with, Liz Robb in Los Angeles, to create huge woven panels that were then cast in bronze by fabricators Blue Barn Arts.

The pattern was informed a little by music, I have an undergraduate degree in music and was really interested in Steve Reich’s early phase music. We thought: if we can create a very subtle aural patterning attached to the surface of these water panels, it might result in something we haven’t seen before. All those steps are about our process, what can we do here, who can we collaborate with, what’s in our past, what can we bring forward?

Aislyn: It seems like you’re thinking about all aspects of the final result, not just how it’s going to look and what it’s going to spark, but how it will sound. You’ve mentioned having to think about a water feature even when there’s no water in it. It’s really quite 360 in the way you look at it.

Roderick: It’s the 4th of February right now, and as you drive out of the city, not even very far, everything is green and verdant and kind of glowing because we’ve had rain. That talks about the power of water. But we’re also really committed to being intelligent about how we use water in the landscapes we create. James and I both have a modernist training, which to me always spoke to the idea that materials should be used efficiently and should express what they are. I always thought planting should do the same thing, it should express where we are, efficiently. It doesn’t need to be ornamented to have power or beauty. Our planting palettes can be sensual, with fragrance and color, but they don’t need to speak to a vocabulary that isn’t of this place. I love Italian gardens, but it doesn’t need to be an Italian garden.

Aislyn: I imagine that’s part of what you’re absorbing and listening to when you go to places like Monterrey or Detroit, what is the vocabulary here that we can draw from?

Roderick: Absolutely. What’s exciting to us? What haven’t we seen?

Aislyn: You’ve also done work with wineries, which is hospitality-focused in a different way. How do you approach projects that are meant to be places of enjoyment?

Roderick: We’re trying to rethink how people experience these environments. There’s a long history of European influence in winery design, and we’re trying to say: you’re in California, you’re in Sonoma, you’re in Napa, how do we bring a depth to that experience that makes you recognize this was an oak savanna? These are grasses with a different lifecycle than what you’d see in other parts of the world.

There’s an opportunity to be really distinct about it. We’re just about to complete a rethinking of Mondavi Winery, which is an incredibly important landmark of the wine industry in Napa. My father grew up in Napa, so this project is very close to my heart. So much of our design was about creating spaces where people can taste wine and be together that also just feels intuitively about being in the Napa Valley. We drew inspiration from the views of the arch and tower, the iconic buildings of Mondavi, to the Mayacamas, trying to blend the foreground with the background into one continuous landscape while allowing for spaces where people can simply be.

Aislyn: What does that mean, spaces where people can be? Could you describe one or two?

Roderick: What’s different about winery projects versus the public or institutional projects we work on is that at the public ones, people do things you’d never expect, walking all over things that are supposed to be seats. We design for resilience and for the excitement of how people will interpret things. But with a winery or other hospitality environment, you’re really thinking about smaller, intimate spaces where people can have conversations and be immersed in a garden.

Our approach to wineries is very garden-focused, there’s an emphasis on planting and celebrating seasons, a kind of delicacy in the composition of those gardens. The spaces are differently scaled, but none of them should feel out of scale with a domestic gathering. You should feel at home, and your conversation can be celebratory or quiet, a moment to reflect on where you are.

Aislyn: What are one or two other wineries you’d send travelers to who are coming to California and want to experience some of your work?

Roderick: We’ve worked with Aidlin Darling, a San Francisco-based architecture firm we love collaborating with. We worked on Faust with them, it’s a Victorian property with an amazing history. From a planting perspective, we were thinking a lot about color and the mythology of Faust. We wanted all the planting to go from light to dark, connected to Faust’s descent into darkness. It has a beautiful view of the valley and is a really great place to visit. We also worked on Buena Vista Winery, an important historical site in Sonoma, the two historic buildings there are a marvel to see and it’s beautifully sited. Of places we haven’t worked on, I think Scribe is a really great place to visit in Sonoma. Aidlin Darling worked on that project too, and Terremoto, based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, handled the landscape. It’s a really amazing, less formal way to experience a winery.

Aislyn: How do you think about the very specific conditions within California when designing outdoor spaces, from microclimate to microclimate, wind, water, land?

Roderick: It’s an incredibly important aspect of how we design, doing analysis, figuring out where the sun hits and when. I’m actually not that hesitant to expose people to the elements. At the Land’s End project, people are blasted with wind from the ocean, and I think that’s actually pretty great, as long as there’s a warm place to escape to nearby. I don’t always want to remove those bigger experiences from the sites. But we certainly do need to create shelter.

Aislyn: I love the trees at Land’s End and how they’ve been shaped by the wind. If you feel the wind, you understand how it’s shaped the environment. You have to keep that exposure.

Roderick: But maybe the trick is to have somewhere to go to.

Aislyn: Yes, okay, San Francisco, I get it, you’re a windy place.

Aislyn: What do you feel like you can do in California that you can’t do elsewhere? What is it about this state that has such an outsized creative impact?

Roderick: People live outside in California. Even thinking about modernism here, there was always this idea that we would be living inside and outside. We don’t need to convince people of the value of their outdoor environment or how much time they’re going to spend there. That’s really unique to California. It’s funny, people complain about San Francisco being cold, but it’s really not that cold.

Aislyn: It’s just maybe cold in July when the tourists come and then they’re like, what’s happening? How do you teach that California mindset? What is that experience like?

Roderick: James and I teach at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. We just completed a fall studio, a design studio where our site was the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, focused on wildfires in California and how designers can rethink how we deal with the landscape at a larger scale. A lot of our studios have a difficult question at their base. The studio before that was in Iceland, looking at geothermal energy, but also about bathing. That’s not a bad way to characterize how we teach: we want to think about stunning environments and the opportunity to rethink things like energy, but we also want to put you in warm water so you can really experience the place. Our students are along for a fairly immersive ride. We spend a lot of time with them, less on readings, more on conversation, experience, iteration, and trying. What we contribute most is helping students define what their interests really are and building confidence in their creativity. I think that is a California approach to things, at least in the context of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It’s a slightly different perspective, and I know it’s appreciated.

Aislyn: Do you find you have to convince students who haven’t been raised in that way of thinking?

Roderick: We’re really open-minded. We tell students: do what you need to do, this is for you. We’re professors, but we’re working for you, please articulate what you think you can get from us if you’re not getting it.

Aislyn: The idea of creative confidence, wherever that leads you.

Roderick: It’s pretty confronting, actually. James and I have funny little blinders on, sometimes we feel like we don’t understand things, and so we’ve just always kept going.

Aislyn: Back to your soil note. How do you design places that feel like California without feeling like clichés?

Roderick: You do it as a composition. It’s about creating a space that directs someone visually and spatially toward their surroundings in a meaningful way. At Bayfront Park, we calibrated the views from the park of the bay in subtle ways, not using walls, but through shaping the ground to lead people to connect to where they are without being didactic. There are some moments of a slightly heavier hand, though. We used reclaimed pieces of the Bay Bridge, which was being demolished, in partnership with the Oakland Museum. We’re not trying to beat people over the head with those connections, but we’re trying to set the ground for curiosity and let people make them.

Aislyn: Is it the Bay Area Discovery Museum that you also worked on? I haven’t actually been there, not having children, but I know it’s for adults too.

Roderick: It’s a really playful solution, as it should be. It’s inspired by the gumnuts of the eucalyptus trees, their little acorns. There are two gigantic eucalyptus trees on that site, and we wanted to inhabit them. So we designed gigantic acorns that kids could go into and wander, and then an elevated pathway and slide where kids could be in the canopy of those gumnuts. It is for little kids, but it’s totally worth going to if you happen to be there, climb up the rope thing, walk the elevated pathway. It’s a little scary, as it should be, but not dangerous. Watching kids interact with something you’ve designed is the most satisfying thing in the world, because they don’t care about you at all, it’s either working or it isn’t. Their criteria is clear. And we also thought a lot about different kids’ abilities, there are gumnuts on the ground that give an equivalent experience of being inside one. It’s really inspiring to think about all the different ways people can experience these landscapes.

Aislyn: I love it. I live in Sausalito, so there’s really no excuse for me not going. I’d love to close with two slightly different questions. Are there projects or plantings in the Bay Area or the state that immediately evoke California for you?

Roderick: Just walking through Golden Gate Park, which I did this weekend, is incredible, it always feels a little bigger than I expect. Right now the magnolias are flowering and it’s complete joy. But there are other, more obscure gardens that really speak to California. The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek is an amazing dry garden, very much about the succulent landscape. Ruth Bancroft was an amazing steward of that landscape and it’s spectacular. Lotusland in Montecito is another really spectacular garden, a kind of travel through a fantasy of a California landscape. So many parts of that garden speak to the original owner’s life and to the broader Santa Barbara and Montecito landscape. She was an opera singer who married nine times, a larger-than-life character. The Huntington in San Marino is really incredible, maintained so beautifully, just a spectacular garden. And going to Inverness and seeing the tule elk wandering through the fog, these gigantic, almost ghostly beasts, to me, that is California. It’s breathtaking, a little scary, and totally magical.

Aislyn: That’s beautiful. You’re making me want to head north this weekend. You and James are such big travelers, if you had to put together a brief itinerary for Northern California, where would you send people?

Roderick: I love to eat, so I like this question a lot. I really love Valley Bar and Bottle, which is in Sonoma on the square. The food is incredible, it’s informal, all the ingredients are sourced locally, and there’s a kind of creativity and pleasure in the experience I can’t recommend enough. In San Francisco, the most oddly iconic restaurant to me is Zuni, part of the whole history of California cuisine in the Bay Area. What’s special about it is that it’s in the city, so as you’re there you’re really experiencing Market Street and the bigger urban context. But somehow with all those windows, you still feel very comfortable and enclosed. I don’t know how they do that, but it’s just so intimate.

Going to the farmer’s market at the Ferry Building is always an amazing experience, seeing purveyors focused on just peppers, or something like that. There are also some great arts and retail destinations you really wouldn’t find anywhere else. The Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch is a collection of galleries that’s totally worth visiting, there’s always something going on there. And there are retailers that are amazing too. We did a tiny interior garden for our friends who have a store called Modern Appealing Clothing in Hayes Valley, it got some notoriety in The New York Times as one of the 50 best clothing stores in the United States. It’s a little obscure to find, doesn’t have a big sign, and it’s so San Francisco, beautiful, and kind of a poetic opinion about even how you dress. We created a little riverbed inside the retail space, probably 15 or 20 years ago.

Aislyn: Anything else you’d add?

Roderick: Near Inverness, there’s a great gallery called Blunk Space in Point Reyes Station, connected to JB Blunk, an amazing California sculptor who did quintessentially California woodwork, sculpture, and furniture. His work is being appreciated more and more every day. His daughter has a beautiful little gallery space in Point Reyes Station that’s continuing his legacy.

Aislyn: Roderick, it’s been so lovely to have you with us today. Thank you for sharing your time and your brilliance.

Roderick: Thank you. This is so fun.

Aislyn: Thank you so much to Roderick Wyllie and our event partner Visit California.

If you want to watch a live recording of the event, you can find our YouTube link in the show notes. We’ve also included more information about Roderick, his work, and all of his travel suggestions. Please check out our other Unpacked: Live episodes featuring architect Barbara Bestor and writer and naturalist Obi Kaufmann.