12 minute read
Advocating for Design
Recently appointed a Mayor’s Design Advocate, KLA's Lynn Kinnear (LK) reflects on her career and the challenges of juggling a demanding practice and motherhood in conversation with university friend Jo Gibbons (JG) of J&L Gibbons and Hattie Hartman (HH), Architects’ Journal sustainability editor.
Hattie Hartman (HH)
Why did you decide to study landscape architecture and how did you select the Edinburgh course?
Lynn Kinnear (LK)
I’m from Edinburgh so it was on my doorstep. My grandfather was a builder and he was quite keen for me to study architecture.
HH
Did you come to London straight after you finished the course?
LK
Initially I worked for Gillespies on the Liverpool Garden Festival and the reclamation of the Lanarkshire Steel Mills. They brought me down to London to work on master plans. When their master planning work dried up, I moved to SOM to work on Canary Wharf. SOM was a very disciplined environment and I learned a lot. I was paid very well and racked up lots of overtime. So I went traveling for a year to Australia, India and other places. When I came back, I worked for Jo when she had her first baby.
Jo Gibbons (JG)
While I was having Miles, Lynn kept the jobs going.
LK
Then I took a teaching job at University of Greenwich and set up the practice. My first projects, were from the London Docklands Development Corporation, whom I’d previously worked for at Gillespies.
HH
How would you describe your USP when you first set up?
LK
I wanted to work with local communities to effect change to their public space.
HH
Even after all the large-scale master planning that you’d been doing?
LK
I’d learned that that didn’t work. SOM’s accomplished Beaux Arts approach to master planning didn’t adequately address local communities. For me, the ultimate project was Norman Park in Fulham. Engagement funding had kicked in, and we set up community groups across the social divide and taught them how to be clients. In many of those early projects, we funded the engagement ourselves.
1. Brentford High Street - The reclad timber sheds create a light destination on the canal and advertise the history of Brentford as a crop growing place for London.
© Grant Smith
JG
Engagement is never adequately funded. But you do it anyway because the deeper and the better you do it, the better the outcome.
HH
How many people have worked with you over the years?
LK
I’ve always kept it small, say three or four, because it’s a teaching practice. We bring in specialists, as needed. I like to employ people straight out of university and take them all the way through. I see teaching people as part of my role as an employer. It’s one of the things I really enjoy.
HH
How has your USP evolved?
LK
Initially we developed a reputation for working in the crossover between art and landscape architecture. For example, with Richard Wentworth at the Walsall Art Gallery, we explored taking over vehicular space for pedestrians. And we also piloted work with schools and non-territorialised play across generations: non-gender and non-generational specific play. Gradually, our USP shifted as we developed more strategic knowledge. Both Jo and I worked on the GLA’s ALL London Green Grid
JG
In terms of USP, your character set the tone of the practice, which was: ‘I’m going to max out the brief and probably add a lot of stuff that you haven’t even thought about.’
LK
Brentford High Street was like that. The strategic work for the GLA gave me confidence to challenge briefs.
HH
Your website describes KLA as a small landscape practice with a European perspective. What do you mean?
LK
Although we’re dealing with British landscape, the practices we admire are far and wide. That includes Andrew Grant working on large land reclamation and ecology-based projects – he was a year ahead of us. And Gross Max, which is Bridget Baines and Eelco Hooftman and the German and Dutch practices, like West 8 and their spinoffs. In the UK, there’s a tendency to think of us as an offshoot of architecture.
JG
Either that or gardeners.
LK
My last big project was 200 hectares. We deal with the landscape and it can be very large-scale. That’s what we’re trained for.
HH
And also to look beyond the boundaries of the site.
JG
To us it’s fundamental to align with the geology that underlies everything. What’s interesting is the ability for practices such as ours to work on a huge variety of scales.
HH
You’re often a small practice in a consultant team trying to get across big ideas. How do you get your voice heard?
LK
A project manager once told me that I behave like a client. I am quite tenacious and determined. You have to be judicious about when to ask a client for decisions and when things just happen because you’re doing a good job.
JG
We rarely get a brief that fulfills the full potential of a project. So in a way you are ‘clienting’. Most likely, you add on all the services that that you’re going to do anyway. Our code of conduct is to service the client, but also the environment. The paymaster is the paymaster, but the actual client is the community.
LK
I take a curatorial role, which means delivering something appropriate and aspirational. Otherwise, we’d just be marking time, earning a bit of money.
JG
It’s complex and dynamic because we’re talking about ephemeral qualities. It’s not bricks and mortar, it isn’t static, it will grow and develop. And it requires people to look after it to nurture the vision.
LK
Maintenance-free landscape does not exist.
JG
You probably have architectural practices that you’ve built a relationship with because when a big job comes along, you want that immediate sense of ‘I know you, you know me.’ So you can put the bid together swiftly.
LK
We have a very good relationship with Witherford Watson Mann. On Walthamstow Wetlands, they were sub-consultants to us. It was landscape architecture-led because it was about increasing public access to a sensitive landscape.
2. Walthamstow Wetlands – Increased public access to an ecologically sensitive landscape.
© Penny Dixie
HH
Are there other architects that you consistently work with?
LK
We’ve worked with Henley Hale Brown and with AHMM over the years. In the old days, I did a lot of masterplanning with the Richard Rogers Partnership. That’s such a schlep across London just to go to a meeting. Sean would have to come with me in the car and hold the baby.
HH
That’s a perfect segue to my next question. How did you juggle the messy relationship between running your practice and motherhood?
LK
I found it really difficult. Whatever you do, you feel like you’re not being a mum properly, you’re not doing your job properly. Plus, Sean had his own practice as a director of FAT. They were doing groundbreaking architectural work so they got lots of press. It was difficult for me to fight my corner.
HH
You’ve alluded to Sean’s work, and you still live here in Blue House which Sean designed in 2002 as a live-work home while he was at FAT. A provocative attitude shines through, particularly in its playful cartoon-like exterior. Did this approach find its way into your work? And how does it express itself in landscape?
3. Lynn Kinnear outside her home The Blue House.
© Edmund Sumner
LK
Back then, I was interested in making landscapes which were objects like architecture. It was a reaction to the fact that we are so invisible, always background. Helling Street Park was about making an object with a confident identity as a place. I had lots of conversations with Sean and crossover stuff was happening.
When I get a brief, it’s always a challenge to be a little outrageous, for example Brentford High Street. The brief was for lighting bollards along the canal to link the Golden Mile of GlaxoSmithKline and Sky with the high street so employees could walk down the canal safely. We ended up with a reclad shed and a marketplace renewal.
HH
What do you consider your defining projects?
LK
First Norman Park, and I won the President’s Medal for Brentford High Street. That same year we won the Stirling Prize for Burntwood School with AHMM. Also Drapers Field, a waved landscape that links to the Olympic Park in Leighton, Walthamstow Wetlands, Crystal Palace and most recently Green Victoria
4. Burntwood School – Careful site planning and celebrating the variety of tree forms as a key visual orientation.
© Timothy Soar
HH
Tell me more about Burntwood.
LK
The reason that we collaborated a lot with AHMM is they let us do site planning. I resist strongly if I’m given a project and the architecture has already been plonked on the site. Our major impact on Burntwood was site planning: weeks and weeks of moving the buildings up and down, adjusting the levels. It was a real juggle to get those buildings sitting properly in the landscape with all the correct gradients so that you don’t have horrible great big zigzag ramps, because there’s quite a fall across that site.
HH
Why has landscape architecture maintained such a low profile? With the climate emergency, has its time come?
5. Drapers Field – A carpet of non-territorialised play in the Olympic Village.
© Adrian Taylor
6. Drapers Field – An active walk to school in the Olympic Village.
© Adrian Taylor
7. Drapers Field –Sign made from traffic mirrors.
© Ben Smith @KLA
JG
I wish there was a vision for our landscapes. It’s been over six years since the Brexit vote and there is confusion over ELMS, the English Landscape Management Scheme. Very little aligns across environmental policies and there is a real danger in the ‘growth’ agenda that the environment will be left unprotected. Climate change is the biggest challenge we face, where the landscape architecture profession can effect positive change. Developers realise they need to define their ESG and targets for biodiversity net gain over the minimum requirement.
LK
The UK’s new agricultural policy opens the door to more tree planting and permanent rewilding.
JG
Yes, it is about flood climate change adaptation, flood attenuation and nurturing the soil because some say that perhaps we’ve only got 40 harvests left, the soil resource is so degraded.
HH
Too often architects are oblivious. It’s only about the building.
LK
That’s because most sustainability and carbon zero stuff is about the building. But now, the urban greening factor has been introduced. Will it open the door for substantial improvements? Or are we going to piddle along doing a slight variation of what we did before? We have to think strategically, but we also have to deliver stuff. I’m a proponent of working both ways. We have to do pilot projects on the ground.
HH
So Lynn, You’ve wound down your practice now and are no longer taking on new clients. What’s next for you in this new chapter?
LK
First of all, I’ve given myself permission to stop completely. I’m not taking on new projects but I’ll still do design review. I was recently appointed as a Mayor’s Design Advocate and I do design review for Harlow and Gilston new town and for Newham and Tower Hamlets.
I want to take stock and have a bit of space.
HH
When you look back, what are you most proud of?
LK
My daughter, Lily. And setting up the practice and sticking to my own agenda.
JG
My boys are my best design projects. I don’t know whether it is because we are both mothers and women in practice, or whether it’s just that landscape for us is not just a job, it’s who we are.
LK
Yes, I’m totally immersed in it. I view my staff as an extension of my family though I’m often quite tough with them. That toughness is about wanting people to achieve their potential. To unlock that potential in people is a really great role.
HH
Are you happy with where you are or is there work left undone?
Crystal Palace Park – Celebrating the elevated concrete bridge of the NSC as a unique lookout point over London’s Southern Downlands.
© KLA
LK
I’d like to think that there is a legacy that continues and that the new generation will work strategically in pivotal environmental roles. Landscape architects should use their skills to promote citywide strategies such as blue roofs that address flooding hot spots and proliferate wildlife, school playgrounds that double as nature reserves and streets as the linear parks of the future. It would be nice to be able to pass on ways to do that. Having spent my working life in a city context, I’m now interested in the design solutions that respond to the challenges in rural areas, for example the future of agriculture and the need to replenish our soils and the huge need for rewilding. I also think some of the emerging ideas in rural areas could transfer to urban settings for example how the natural signatures of London: its downlands, river valleys and geography and geology should be the underpinning ideas in repairing the ecology of the city…… perhaps focussing on the rural/urban fringe is an interesting way to explore this and I am hoping that my work with Harlow New Town will support more thinking about this.
HH
It is a privilege to love what you do. Not everyone can say that.
Green Victoria –Combining SUDS and play in the public realm to improve people’s everyday experience of ecology.
© KLA
