6,000 cubic meters of soil conceptualises land colonial collection practices at the Museum of Natural History in Paris

Daniel Coombes, a third-year Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Landscape Architecture, discusses his Declassifying Forecourt project that received an honourable mention in the prestigious international LA+ design competition EXOTIQUE. The project is being featured in the Spring 2024 issue of LA+ Journal.

21 March 2024

Can you share with us the initial inspiration behind your Declassifying Forecourt project? What motivated you to tackle this specific theme in Landscape Architecture?

My inspiration came from the call for entries to the annual design ideas competition hosted by the LA+ Journal, and how it intersects with my research.

The competition theme was EXOTIQUE and asks entrants to design the forecourt of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which had been used as a royal garden of medicinal plants since 1635.

I approach research through creative practice, that is, through reflecting on a series of design projects. My idea was to show the numerical and geographical extent of colonial collection practices housed in the Gallery of Botany of the museum.

Your design involves aligning 6,000 cubic meters of soil with the six million specimens in the Gallery of Botany’s herbarium. How did you come up with the idea of using soil as a design element, and what challenges did you encounter in implementing this concept?

Soil as an exhibited material was missing from the museum complex.

The Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology holds martian meteorites, giant crystals, rocks and admirable minerals. Still, there is an absence of non-exotic soils.

I wanted to question why soil is left out.

One interpretation is that soil is the material of land, and conceptions of land are controversial in a Western museum context. Initially, I considered the plants in the herbarium (a collection of plant samples preserved for long-term study) disconnected from their soil, so I proposed incorporating soil from each geographical location recorded in the herbarium. The idea developed into using the actual numbers of plants in the herbarium from each country/territory.

My first idea was to have 247 piles representing the countries and territories listed in the herbarium. However, the herbarium’s digital database’s location of origin is incomplete, with approximately 20 percent of the plant specimens having a recorded location.

This challenge steered the project towards the idea of soil classification.

Nevertheless, this challenge strengthened the project conceptually and reduced the spatial complexity from 247 piles into 32 piles representing the World Reference Base (WRB) soil taxonomy.

The awareness of the ongoing herbarium digitalisation guided the development of the design proposal further. As the herbarium is being digitised, the soil in the forecourt would continually be added to and as the herbarium received new specimens.

Your design strategy incorporates soil taxonomy, reflecting geographic and colonial influences. Can you delve into the symbolism behind this choice and how it communicates a critique of classificatory norms and the historical relationship between Western regimes of collection and colonisation?

The design intends for visitors to experience a spatialised soil taxonomy. The taxonomy guides the forecourt’s layout based on the 32 soil types prescribed by the World Reference Base soil classification. The critique of classificatory norms and the relationship between Western scientific practices of collection and colonisation comes through grafting the location and number of plants onto the taxonomic structure.

Interpretation panels do not communicate this core aspect of the design to people walking through the forecourt. Walking around the piles of soil and wondering about the different sizes, colours, and textures highlights an experience that visitors encounter bodily.

Senior Lecturer Hannah Hopewell mentioned that your proposal cleverly critiques classificatory norms. How did you go about ensuring that your design effectively communicated this critique, and what kind of reactions or discussions are you hoping to spark within the Landscape Architecture community and beyond?

I am interested in discussing ways of working with colonial artefacts and histories through landscape research. Being Pākehā, for me, means ways of working that participate in, question, and unsettle past and present colonial practices.

The other design investigations in my PhD relate to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, particularly its European settlement by the New Zealand Company and their specific ways of contemplating landscape. Although Landscape Architecture is politically charged as both a medium and a discipline, several critical voices assert a lack of political intervention.

One way the Declassifying Forecourt project attempts to enter such discussions is by attaching soil taxonomy, which tends to show even quantities of each soil type, with the herbarium collection, which is radically uneven regarding geographic location and the number of species collected.

The countries and territories most represented in the herbarium, France and its current and former colonies, form the larger piles.

In focusing on the historical and spatial specificity of the herbarium, the critique of classificatory norms is communicated by displaying the herbarium's scale and its relation to soils worldwide.

Being featured in the Spring 2024 issue of LA+ Journal is a significant achievement. Can you tell us about the significance of this publication in the field of Landscape Architecture, and how do you feel about having your work showcased in such a prestigious platform?

I have followed the LA+ journal for several years, so I am pleased to have my design published in their forthcoming US spring 2024 issue. It’s an honour to have my work reviewed by the competition jury of leading academics and practitioners in Landscape Architecture, including Julia Czerniak and Catherine Mosbach.

The journal comes from one of the most recognised Landscape Architecture programmes, the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, and the + in the name refers to its interdisciplinary approach, so it’s great to potentially reach a diverse readership.

The Salon des Refusés section of the journal will feature notable designs. What sets your project apart, and what aspects of your design do you believe will capture the attention of readers and fellow architects?

The winning designs, honourable mentions, and editors' choice all show different creative and critical approaches to the design of the Museum of Natural History's forecourt.

One aspect that readers might observe is proposals that consider the worldwide locations present in the museum collections.

Several designs take symbolic approaches to the collection sites. Along with my design, the Garden of Extinction project by Maura McDaniel and Isiah Scharen from the United States has a literal strategy for interacting with the collection sites.

Another common theme in the submissions that my design shares is a focus on the hype-visual experience of natural history museums where visitors have come to look at things.

Several designs approach this situation by reversing who is doing the looking. For example, some designs position humans as the ones being looked at. My design is sympathetic to this but takes a different approach to the decentring of the human. Instead of reversing the relation between the viewer and the viewed, my proposal alters what humans look at by distorting and partly declassifying taxonomic conventions.

Were there specific influences, whether artistic, cultural, or environmental, that played a role in shaping your design philosophy and approach to Landscape Architecture?

My approach to Landscape Architecture is heavily influenced by positioning design as research, that is, as a method of inquiry.

I am lucky enough to have been supervised by Head of School at the Wellington School of Architecture Rod Barnett during my Master of Landscape Architecture and in my PhD by Senior Lecturer Hannah Hopewell and Associate Professor Simon Twose, who have extensive creative practice research experience. They no doubt influence my approach and style of research.

As Landscape Architecture is a broad area of practice, I draw from various fields; having said that, inspiration and influence primarily come from being in a landscape.

Could you share any memorable moments or challenges you faced during the design and development of the Declassifying Forecourt project? How did you overcome these challenges, and what lessons did you learn throughout the process?

One of the challenges, which tends to be for all creative projects, is finding a productive relation between handling the complexity of the landscape situation and the simplicity of the concept or intervention; this is perhaps especially true for competitions where communicating ideas tend to be the focus.

Once I arrived at the design approach, I had to strictly edit out other related ideas to allow the concept to be direct. The experience of this design was another lesson in trying to communicate multiple complex narratives through a single physical intervention.

Looking ahead, what are your aspirations as a Landscape Architecture student, and how do you envision your work contributing to the broader discourse within the field? Are there specific themes or issues you're eager to explore in your future projects?

In the last few months, I’ve been looking into the history of image-making in the sciences and how images play a critical role in producing knowledge.

Before scientific objectivity gained influence in the mid-nineteenth century, an approach now called ‘truth-to-nature’ was the dominant practice of scientific image-making. Radically different from objectivity, scientists following truth-to-nature practices would collaborate with artists to illustrate plants, animals and landscapes in typical and idealised forms.

I am interested in participating in image-making strategies, such as truth-to-nature, that foreground ways of seeing landscape but distort and unsettle the agency of the human viewer and image-maker by practising more collective approaches to landscape and its representation.