A Transformative Year for Designers Kotch and Derek

What happens when a world-renowned landscape architect from Thailand comes to the United States as Designer-in-Residence to work with an award-winning architect whose passion is what he defines as watershed architecture? It has been a year since Season 4, Episode 10 when we first asked that question of our guests, and now it’s time for an update.

Hosts Sarah Thorne and Jeff King, Lead of the Engineering With Nature® Program at the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), welcome back Kotchakorn Voraakhom (“Kotch”), an international member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and founder of Bangkok-based company LANDPROCESS, and Derek Hoeferlin, Chair of the Landscape Architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis. Derek and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have been hosting Kotch on her year-long appointment as Designer-in-Residence, sponsored by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Reflecting on her expectations for her year in St. Louis, Kotch said, “It is like a journey. When you travel into some new place or experience, you're expecting one thing; but when you actually go through it, you run into different things that you were not expecting.” Kotch spent her time learning from the St. Louis community and, as she says, listening to the ecology of the Mississippi River. Kotch taught Derek’s students at Washington University, held several workshops with community members, engaged with a range of people from USACE, and talked with people in small towns along the Mississippi who are dealing with perpetual flooding. Her residency has “been a pause to relearn what I have learned. As a practitioner, you want to conquer the world. You want to change the world. But in the end, you just have to let the world change you as well.” As she notes, “Nature has the final word.”

Derek relates a similar kind of experience in wanting to change the world, while also being influenced by it. His journey has been a 15-plus-year project to investigate what he calls “watershed architecture” and his interest in how watersheds can reflect a tipping point in time. Derek has been influenced by large-scale climate-related disasters and thinking about what it means to design buildings in that context. “As designers, we look at these larger-scale events and watersheds and what they mean for design decisions. Specifically, how can we engage water better within our design decisions. That's where we are right now with our conversation with the Engineering With Nature Program. We’re trying to think of a much more holistic way to bring communities into the next phase of this transformation.” These are some of the themes that Derek addresses in his recently published book, Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture.

Jeff notes the inspiration that Derek and Kotch’s work together brings, “To be able to address these issues concerning climate change really is going to take us getting to know one another, to understand and appreciate our uniqueness as individuals, but also how do we harmonize as humans. Please keep pursuing and delivering good strategies and good solutions that will help us get past these existential threats. What you both are doing is incredibly inspiring for future landscape architects and others.”

For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/
• Jeff King at LinkedIn
• Kotchakorn Voraakhom at LinkedIn
• Derek Hoeferlin at LinkedIn