The Land is Full | Thomas Woltz
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book. Around here we're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Thomas Woltz: My name is Thomas Woltz and I am the owner and principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. We have offices in Charlottesville, Virginia and New York City, and I'm here today to discuss our most recent book called The Land is Full, published by Monacelli Press.
Suzy Chase: First off, I'm curious about the title, the Land is Full. My initial thought was that the land is densely packed and saturated with buildings, architecture and people, but it seems my interpretation was way off. I'd love for you to chat about the title.
Thomas Woltz: Yeah, the title is something that I feel very strongly about, and it's a way to catch people's attention exactly as it caught yours, and then to deliver them a different sort of definition than perhaps what they were expecting. So when I say the land is full, I mean that the land is already full of ecological history and cultural history. There is no such thing as tabular Raza when you think through that lens, because every piece of land was formed through a remarkable set of circumstances as ancient as the glaciers. And in that time, hence, we have all enjoyed this remarkable dialogue between human beings and the land they occupy. So some feature of an ecosystem or ecology, maybe it's a mineral deposit or falling water, or particularly rich soils or rich forests, would attract human settlement. Those humans would transform that ecology. That ecology in turn transforms them, and so begins this endless dance between culture and ecology. So this theory of the land is full flies in the face of, to me, odious terms like empty space, green space, tabula Raza, vacant land. When you see land this way, you start to have the sense of the deep, deep history of a site. Now as a designer, that is really exciting because that is the source of the most authentic design ideas. So as you'll see from our book, we're a very contemporary practice. There's nothing historicist or reproducing historic landscapes, but they are all deeply informed by history.
Suzy Chase: I'm so fascinated not only by what you do, but by this incredible book, your firm's foundational idea is that all land, whether urban or rural, comes with a deep history and cultural ties. So give me a little background on Nelson Byrd Woltz, aka N-B-W.
Thomas Woltz: The firm has evolved over the last 25 years to really build a practice based on a mission-driven process. So I would say the process that we have evolved over two and a half decades is applicable to any project that we take on, whether it's Tasmania, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, wherever we are asked to work, the process remains the same, the results extraordinarily different thanks to that process. So the basis of this mission-driven firm is to look deeply as you said at the land. And in order to do that, we have evolved a practice that I think is unique in that we have on staff cultural landscape historians. They're also trained as landscape architects and planners, but they have a specialization in cultural landscape history. So that is the history of human engagement with Land one has a specialization in landscapes of enslavement. One has a specialization in indigenous landscapes, and if you're working in North America, you're going to touch one or both of those histories pretty much everywhere you go.
Parallel to that group, we have a conservation group that has been over the last 12 years populated by PhDs and restoration ecology, conservation biologists, scientists who take a rigorous look at the ecological health of a site and what is its potential for improvement, what do we preserve management of invasive plants. And so these two bodies of research inform the very initial design response to whatever the commission might be, whether it's a public park, a botanic garden on arboretum. And so we come before beginning design with all of this research, and one of the most exciting moments of every project is the synthesis of that research into what the guiding principles of any design will be. So I tried to unpack this in the first essay of our book, the Land is Full by demystifying how all this work came to be. And my hope is that if we've done that process right, each project actually looks very different from the others. So we are the antithesis of a firm aspiring to have a style or a look or something recognizable, rather. We hope we have excavated that which is absolutely unique to each place.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, I think the through line is your philosophy. Not nothing looks alike.
Thomas Woltz: I hope not. Well, and that's why the one that trips people up is when I describe how interested we are in prehistoric geology, they're like, sorry, what? And when you think about, for example, in Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee has a remarkable, it's a cliffhanger of ecological history. It's so fascinating. And just in the briefest summary for millions of years, it was a shallow sea that would dry up, get wet, dry up, get wet, and over years the pressure of that sediment made an enormous center of sedimentary stone that stone buckled and heaved up to make a mountain that was called the Nashville Dome, and it's basically the entire center of Tennessee. It was so soft and fragile that it eroded very quickly and it eroded and eroded and eroded until the Cumberland River is now at the lower point, and it's now called the Nashville Basin.
What then happened was because it was revealing layers of salt, bison would come to what they called the great salt lick, and Native Americans would follow the bison and hunt them. If you look at the first colonial map of Native American trails to where the bison came to the salt extrusion, if you overlay that map with the current map of downtown Nashville, they're essentially identical. So in a way, the city of Nashville was designed by bison, but that's the kind of thing where then when it comes time to say, well, what will our retaining walls, what will our paths be made of? Well, obviously the limestone that was formed through this process that we find in the Nashville region. So the materials of a contemporary modern park are finding their own legacy and history, not at a stone showroom of what we think is the most dazzling mineral, but rather what belongs to this place? What is at the essence of the formation of a place?
Suzy Chase: So interesting. I've often felt that the process of developing a piece of land tends to focus solely on what can be constructed overlooking the soul and history embedded in the land itself. Was there a pivotal moment in your life when you felt the history of the site should guide your design decisions?
Thomas Woltz: I would say that my whole childhood somehow built this into me as a kid. My mom was particularly interested in genealogy. She knew a lot of information, but she didn't know exactly where everyone was buried. So we would be running around on weekends in rural North Carolina with paper and crayons to do rubbings on tombstones of burial grounds. She had heard of that she thought might have been part of properties, and she was reassembling and retracing all these steps. So this idea of intergenerational stewardship of land, of the fact that the remains of hundreds of years ago are still present and can still in a way speak to us over time by informing of us of settlement patterns, of cultivation practices. I grew up in rural western North Carolina, and it hasn't until more recently been so overdeveloped that you couldn't still find these traces. So this idea that the land holds our story, I think as I grew up and studied architecture and architectural history and finally landscape architecture, I became not so interested in my own story.
But in the story of indigenous people, their lifeways, the tragic history of the enslavement of Africans in North America, those stories in histories became really fascinating. And what traces can we find of those to tell more holistic and pluralistic stories of the life of the land? I often joke, I want to make a bumper sticker that says, have you hugged your archeologist today? Because we really are at the point where we don't want to disturb land without making sure we haven't asked the land. All of its questions, and archeologists have many gifts at answering those questions or helping us see the answers to those questions. So any chance we can communicate to the public through our public parks and through design the depth of the layered history of a site, I think it makes us better citizens. So in a way, the pivot was slow or the indoctrination was slow and across an entire childhood, but it opened my mind to everyone's story and all of the stories that land could possibly communicate to us, which is now at the foundation of this practice.
Suzy Chase: That leads me to this beautiful line. I've heard you say you can design the poetics of the human experience in space. Talk a little bit about that.
Thomas Woltz: I would love to talk about that because I feel like it's the thing I've given my life too. I am part of a profession called landscape architecture that is invisible to 98% of the global population in the sense that we forget how much of the land around us is the result of intentional design, whether it's from farmers laying out fields, planting hedge rows, laying out fence lines. These are all intentional landscapes, but even more bizarre is the lack of understanding of how public places, public streets and public parks come to be. And so when you describe one that your landscape experience is intentional, two, that it was perhaps designed with the human experience in mind and three that it is and can be or maybe should be laden with poetic intent, that starts to capture people's understanding of, oh, now I see what you do.
Because so often they think or they'll see one of our projects and people actually ask me, so you guys picked the plants, those are great. Like, wait a minute, what about the massive earthworks or structural engineering, civil engineering, the building of lakes and bridges and all this stuff? And they often respond, oh, we were going to ask you what architect designed that? It's like, well, we actually did. And so when you say we're responsible for the poetics of the human experience outdoors, it kind of encompasses everything you might experience as a visitor to a public landscape. That's what I mean by that phrase, and I take it very seriously because this is hard work, and by the time you get through public approval, permitting, engineering, all the logistics of building a substantial public space, I think the most beautiful thing we can deliver is the poetics of that space and the stories that come to you as you experience that space. So that's really our collective goal.
Suzy Chase: I'm going to read a passage out of the book as the editor. For 30 years until 1919 of Ladies' Home Journal, Edward W. Bok strived to improve the lives of Americans by urging comfort and balance in their daily routines. He is said to have first popularized the words living room from his perch. His own primary living room was outside Philadelphia, but in winters, he headed for his house in Lake Wales at the center of the Florida Peninsula. He was captivated by the region's landscapes, and especially by the rise of land nearby called Iron Mountain. He bought 250 acres of this high land in 1922. Could you chat a little bit about your part of the research and design of this sanctuary?
Thomas Woltz: Happily, yes. Bok is really a kind of hero of mine in the sense that he acquired this 200 foot high mountain in Florida, the highest point in Florida, by the way, which when you come from Waynesville, North Carolina, that's just adorable.
Suzy Chase: Wait, can you call it even a mountain? Is it a hill?
Thomas Woltz: Let's be nice. Let's be nice. It is a mountain in Florida, but it is an extraordinary 200 foot rise in the middle of the flat plains. It's basically the terminus of a central rib that runs down the state of Florida and terminates around Lake Wales. So it's a geologic remnant again of its ancient formation. But Box's mother, and he always mentioned this quote is making the world a better place because you lived in it, and that drove so many of his actions because he didn't build a house for himself on this acreage, he created a wildlife sanctuary, and he was born in Holland, and he immigrated, I think when he was 10 years old, and he remembered from childhood the carons that played in the churches around the region. And so he had this idea to build what he called the singing tower, a massive caron on top of the 200 foot high hill that would ring out all around the region.
And he engaged the Olmsted brothers firm to design a master plan for a wildlife sanctuary. It was initially focused on native plants animals, and over time, he in dialogue with the Olmsted brothers, started to add more and more exotic plants. But the seed of its idea was around a native plant and animal sanctuary. I think the native plants of Florida turned out to be not as exciting as perhaps they all expected. And so it ended up with lots of tropical plants, big tropical flowering plants, and a lot of chameleons. So we were engaged to expand Bok Tower Gardens by another a hundred percent. So we doubled it in size. And one of the things we thought was, well, let's restore the original concept and the original path network that the Olmsted brothers had conceived of with Mr. Bach, it became very popular. So they built massive parking lots and a new visitor center, and unfortunately from the parking lots, you could just walk up to the tower.
So we thought we need to seduce through design all of the visitors to actually engage in the landscape to deliver them to the point that was the original origin point of the experience that the Olmsted brothers had carefully calibrated. So that you slowly ramp up the long flank of this 200 foot mountain and you have views of the tower, the views are taken away, you turn and you're surprised by another view of it. You might hear the bells ringing and there's a long canal that's a reflecting pool. So we honored and restored all of those elements while adding a 21st century value, which is universal accessibility for wheelchairs and strollers. So on this steeply sloping site, we had to be very creative, and we looked to their traditional geometries, spiral curve geometries to meander a hard pavement path that gets you all the way to the tower quite easily in a wheelchair for our new parts of the garden.
It is a much more contemporary language, I think seamlessly partnering with the historic portion, but we added landscapes to this botanic garden that explain Florida. So you have a bog garden, a wetland garden, a lake garden, and we restored wire grass ecosystems that support the gopher tortoise. And the gopher tortoise is a remarkable charismatic animal from central Florida that burrows in the ground. It thrives in the wiregrass ecosystem, which has, I don't know, is deemed by 20th century America as ugly. I find it exquisitely beautiful and rich with wildlife and diversity, and this is the habitat that's rapidly disappearing of this tortoise. So we restored that in collaboration with conservationists in Florida so that the gopher tortoises on site could thrive. So we invite the visitor through these rich ecosystems culminating in an oak hammock forest, and that delivers you to the beginning point of the Olmstead experience.
So it was a way to extend your experience to teach you a lot about the native plants of Florida and their associated wildlife, and then bring you into the historic piece. I'll end this description with a couple of summary points. One, we did a demonstration garden because Florida is wildly agricultural adjacent to the Wiregrass prairie, so you can see food being grown in that adjacency. We also designed a children's garden that shows the geology of central Florida, the plants of central Florida. We made a tunnel that's the shape of the gopher tortoise shell so that kids can burrow like a gopher tortoise. You can be in a nest like one of the native birds. So all of the play items in the children's garden give a child an empathetic relationship to the native animals of the region. And I think that's kind of at the heart of what we want to do as well. If we can bring people into a rich contact with nature so that they understand nature and they have empathy for nature, they will become the next generation of stewards.
Suzy Chase: I thought it was really interesting that your team walked the site at various hours of the day.
Thomas Woltz: Always. I mean, the land is so alive through the night, through the early morning, and at dusk, it's least interesting from about 10 to five from a biological standpoint,
Suzy Chase: I thought it was so forward thinking it might not have been that Bach trucked in all that rich black soil back in the day,
Thomas Woltz: Of course, we're dealing with very sandy, sandy soils that drained very, very fast in order to achieve the diversity of horticulture that he wanted. That was absolutely required.
Suzy Chase: I can't imagine the expense.
Thomas Woltz: Yes, and the fact that it wasn't for himself at all. Again, his house that he built for himself was miles from this site. This was always meant to loosely in his words, to inspire Americans to gratitude for the many freedoms that we enjoy in this country, that he as an immigrant had arrived. A very poor man was able to get an education and rise to his position as a publisher and editor to him was just a remarkable gift. And he wanted to inspire others to be grateful for all that we enjoy in the democracy, that we share a beautiful message that is, I think, very enduring.
Suzy Chase: And I think his mom instilled that in him.
Thomas Woltz: Yes, he always, again, he quotes her often, but I love that make the world a better place because you lived in it. I think that's a really beautiful sentiment.
Suzy Chase: So up the road from me and you here in New York City is Hudson Yards where NBW served as the lead landscape architect for the mega project. Talk about how this is what you call invented ground
Thomas Woltz: A little context on the Hudson Yards. The Hudson Yards was designed and built by developers, led by developers, but after I think nearly a decade of City of New York planning, so the planning department had said, you must meet certain criteria, setbacks, height restrictions, scale of buildings, and you can do what you need to do if you meet those. And one of those mandates was that 50% of the entire site had to be public landscape. So we were engaged to design the public portions of the Hudson Yards, and there's a lot of retail and shopping and apartments and offices and that sort of thing. Then that was all within the architect scope. Our scope was really what is the public experience, the roads, the pavement, parking entrances, the exterior experience of what was the largest, I guess still is the largest public space in New York in a century when you're a firm that really believes in the public realm and wants to design at the highest level of quality in the public realm.
This was a very enticing commission, and I always felt reassured that we would be working on behalf of the public as much as on behalf of the developers who commissioned us for this work. I use the term invented ground because before the Hudson Yards existed, you were looking at a 24 acre hole in the city. So 25 feet below the level of 10th Avenue and 30th Street were the trains that is the holding yards for the trains that are fed into Penn Station. So it was an open air hole in the city, and so I say invented ground because we had to construct over the trains all of the public space, including the buildings. So the engineering led by Thornton Thomasetti is absolutely extraordinary. It's fascinating that they were able to achieve this for the landscape. It's beyond just a paved surface or a slab that you build on top of the landscape of Hudson Yards.
Completely artificial has to supply in analogous form all of the things that normal earth and soil provide for us. So you have a structural component, but then you have to create the soil that the trees will be able to thrive in long-term. Replacing one of these trees would be a herculean task. So we constructed with advisors pine and swallow these kind of waffle structures that allow the roots to maintain aeration. Water can move, the roots can pass between the trees under the massive pavement. Irrigation is happening underground. The soil is actually a structural soil that has a high mineral content. It looks like the trees are each planted in a four by four square grate, but below imagine an entire colonnade for acres that is filled with structural soil so the roots can go 50, 60 feet away from the trunk of the tree and co-mingle. So we're creating a whole network of life below the pavement and the canopy of the trees and the shrubs and perennials can all thrive above. So it is 100% constructed ground 25 feet in the air above the rail lines. I think the element that is the most bizarre, and the one that makes me the most grateful for all of our other projects being on actual earth is the fact
Suzy Chase: The cooling unit?
Thomas Woltz: Idling trains. Yeah, the idling trains put out like 120 degree air, and so that exhaust is trapped under the roof deck, super heating the bottom of the concrete slab. So our landscape sandwich is about seven feet thick, and inside of that is not only the soil I described in the roots, but sewage, stormwater, telecommunications, high voltage electricity. Everything is blowing through our landscape. So the degree of coordination to have an elegant, these beautiful spiraling ellipses and curvatures that are absolutely perfect are leading to a remarkable network of infrastructure below. So in order to battle this intensive heat that would superheat the roots of the trees killing them, we had to pump chilled glycol through a system. It's like the inverse of radiant heat that you might have in a stone floor, but it's iced iced, a very chilled glycol that keeps the soil cold so that the trees can go through their natural cycles.
Suzy Chase: Can I ask you about the granite? Did you choose the gray, the light gray, the dark gray, the white?
Thomas Woltz: Yes. So we mock that up and the design of Hudson Yards is functioning at the ground plane, but also from above. So on the ground plane, each of the massive ellipses are anchored beneath Thomas Heatherwick's vessel, and they stretched the primary entrance of each of the buildings and each of the public entry points into the plaza. So wherever you walk in, you are immediately greeted by a long, easy curving ellipse, and you walk along that curve into the center of the plaza. So it's like a mandala one could actually walk in meditation around and around in Hudson Yards following these giant ellipses, we picked a range of five different colors of granite from the New York region that are from a very pale gray, almost white to an almost black, and they're the shades of gray in between. Allow the ground plane to almost sparkle. Its shimmers.
There's a lot of diversity. We thought it would be because there's so much pavement because every single tree comes at what I've just described as this massive herculean effort. So it needed to be diverse and almost shimmery in its color and texture composition. But as you move up The Vessel or you move up into any of the four skyscrapers and look down, each time one of these massive ellipses overlaps the next, the color mix in that overlap becomes lighter. So if you have three ellipses overlapping, it's very, very light. And as you get out to the bigger ellipses, it's a darker shade. So it appears that these pedals are transparent. So it is a real visual delight from above.
Suzy Chase: So what's on the horizon for NBW In the new year?
Thomas Woltz: We have a full slate of really exciting projects, many public parks, public landscapes. One is the Memorial Park in Houston, Texas. We've been under construction for the last 10 years, and we have 10 more years to go. I think this often baffles people because 20 years of construction was after two years of master planning. These landscapes are so big and so long to construct that these relationships can last decades and they should Memorial Park in downtown Houston. It's midway between downtown and uptown Houston. If you know the city, it is twice the size of Central Park. So imagine building all of that at once 20 years is feeling actually quite fast. So we're on deck for the next large portions of that park, which one of them is a hundred acre memorial to the soldiers who trained on this landscape for World War I. So the parks, again, the history is that it was a training camp for soldiers and it was always intended to be a memorial.
But when it was inaugurated in 1924, no memorial was ever built. So this is the first time, a century later that we're designing an actual memorial to the community that supported World War I, the soldiers who trained there, who built the camp, and it's honoring their memory. Parallel to that, we have some really interesting historic sites that we're working on a master plan for the 300 acres of colonial Williamsburg looking comprehensively at the visitor experience and elevating ideas about the colonial revival as a fascinating and viable period in American landscape history as opposed to just sort of pretending that it's all 18th century actually making the distinction between which landscapes are 18th century landscapes that have survived, and which were designed by Arthur Schiff, a master of his trade in the 1930s. So that's a very exciting project with remarkable stewardship from the board of trustees and visionary leadership at Colonial Williamsburg.
And we have some great campus work doing the business school at Rice University, having just finished a re-imagining of their historic quad that was completed this fall and open to the public in October. Continuing work at Georgia Tech and the University of Virginia. So lots on deck, wonderful educational landscapes, public landscapes and cultural institutions like Olana, the Home of Frederick Church, the Rothko Chapel at the Menil Museum in Houston. And then I think the last category that I'm really excited about that is happening in the coming year. We have over the years, built some wonderful relationships with indigenous nations who are finding ways that the landscape can tell their deeper story and their history. And one is the Caddo people that were in pretty much all of Texas, Arkansas, all the way up to Illinois and their culture really flowered in the 13 hundreds, and they were part of the removal of Native Americans to various reservations in Oklahoma.
And one of the most powerful sites for the Caddo is in Alto Texas. It's called the Cato Mounds. And there are three sacred mounds to the Caddo people. And so we've been engaged with the Texas Historic Commission and the elders of the Caddo Nation to tell their story in the public landscape. And similarly working with the Cherokee Nation and its elders of the Eastern Band and the main spring conservation trust to support the design of the removal of a dam that has interrupted the Red Horse sickle fan fish from migrating up the Oconaluftee River and into the Cherokee Nation. So this will restore the ecology of that river, reconnect the people to their food source and restore the ecology that was damaged a century ago. So these are all really stimulating and exciting projects that span from the very heroic to the very quiet telling of stories.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called The Perfect Bite, where I ask you to describe your perfect bite of a favorite dish, totally left turn.
Thomas Woltz: I love it, and I think I have one, it's from a long time ago and I haven't had this bite in a while. It is a bite that I feel reflects the work we do or the work I care about and love. And that is after college, I moved to Venice, Italy, and I worked in an architecture firm for five years in Italy. And in the summers I taught for the University of Virginia School of Architecture where I'd been a student and they had a summer program in architecture, and we would go on various trips to see villas and landscapes all around the Veneto. And there was a stop we would make every year to a Prosecco winery, a production for Prosecco in a town called Valdo, and that's up near Montebelluna and Treviso. If you showed up at the right time, they were pulling warm loaves of bread out of an outdoor brick oven, and they had their own soppressata, which is a soft sausage, we call it soppressa here, and they would have fresh so with fennel hot bread right out of the oven and an ice cold glass of Prosecco looking out across the embroidered hills of the Alto Adige and upper Veneto landscape.
And it really is a moment. I have no zero self-destructive instinct whatsoever, but I really do think in that moment I could pass away and I would be just fine. I would have achieved everything I needed to achieve with that one bite of hot bread soppressata and a glass of cold Prosecco is really, truly joy because it is the land, the visible land in front of you artfully and beautifully cultivated by human beings to bring forth this incredible bounty that nourishes us and brings us joy.
Suzy Chase: Finito, is that what they, I don't know. Is that what they say? Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Thomas Woltz: Our website is nbwla.com and social media is NelsonByrdWoltz, all one word on Instagram.
Suzy Chase: This was fascinating. Thank you so much, Thomas, for coming on Dinner Party Podcast.
Thomas Woltz: Suzy, you are so kind and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope we actually get to have a real dinner party very soon in the neighborhood.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzychase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
