Landscape Architecture Spring 2025 Series, Expanded Practices: Jon Shinkfield

Join us in 175 Warren Hall for a lecture with Jon Shinkfield, Founding Director of REALMstudios. This lecture is titled "Edge & Center: Decolonizing the Garden."

The art of practice arises and emerges from the role of practice itself, with practice being tested and refined over time through personal circumstance, experiences and relationships. At a personal level, Jon's practice has moved significantly over the past 10 years, where his design approach has become increasingly grounded in close observation, manual tending, expanded knowledge and incremental moves; moving further and further from the ‘set piece’ to a place of embracing the agency of landscape and its transformative, regenerative capacity, from a groomed monocultural colonial aesthetic to one of biodiversity and richness. In the absence of such it is dead.

Ironically it is the garden, or at least an approach to a garden, that has become foundational to the broader practice of REALMstudios.

The Logan Ave garden has been primal in this recalibration process, an opportunity to co-author a living landscape, shaped by time, evolving over six years, a direct and visceral hands-on experience of working with time, on a denatured site, to recover its deeper histories (held by the rootzones of remnant trees, their intact soil profiles and corresponding preserved seedbanks). It was in this recognition, that the key to the site lay in the rootzones of the existing trees, in their capacity as the foundation to a regenerative response, that landscape could have its natural agency in recovering a site’s endemic condition. The premise of that project, Decolonizing the Garden, was to “co-author” a living landscape. 

The real learning is that there is a remnant capacity (to some degree) across all sites, resonating around soil structure, geology, water, remnant and recruiting plant material and the relationships of these constituent parts. The regenerative landscape draws from these as a self-perpetuating landscape system. The regenerative landscape system has application at multiple scales, from micro to macro. At each scale it has an ever increasing reference to increased biodiversity, with capacity to migrate to broader geographies through dispersal and recruitment, being no respecter of cadastral boundaries. Increasingly their work is without boundary, as the systems of place find their way.

The learnings for practice have been significant and impactful. Understanding the capacity of a landscape, its processes and responses, through readings and observation, to capture and realize regenerative opportunities.