Dermot Foley is a landscape architect who established his practice, DFLA, in 2001. With their recognisable projects, DFLA received multiple awards, including the LILA 2024 Jury Award with Airlie Park and the LILA 2023 Winner in Public Landscapes with Bridgefoot Street Park. Through practice, Foley developed methods of using secondary raw materials, from construction and demolition waste, coupled with ecological processes and plants, moving back and forth from planned to unexpected, from precise to loose.

In 2019, Dermot Foley received a PhD from RMIT University, where he developed the creative processes embedded in his work to share with the community of practice. Their book, Chronologies of Practice at Dermot Foley Landscape Architects (Hatje Cantz, 2022), emerged from a paradigmatic and intellectual shift, from innovation towards upcycling and reuse, based on “un-necessity” and imperfection, opening the field towards future ecologies.

We met with Foley at a ruderal space, Krater, and spoke about the tendencies of his approach.

What has changed in your practice over the years?

When I first started out, winning a commission to design public space in Ireland as a landscape architect was very unusual. So the nature of the places we were designing was very strongly determined by the building – the context was determined by the architecture. In this case, you operate in a certain kind of way, as a landscape architect, responding to architecture.

“When you can concentrate fully on landscape architecture you can explore the opportunities that arise out of the looser framework, the more open-ended briefs, sometimes the almost entire lack of a programme.”

But then, as time went on, we got more and more opportunities to make a proposition for public space on our own, a public space, a park, just landscape architecture. When you’re not necessarily responding to the needs of an architect or a building, the framework gets very loose. You really have to start inventing your own framework within which to work. And it’s great. That’s the way we want to practice.

Where do you start, then, building your own framework, from clues on the site?

We don’t necessarily look for something abstract. Our projects emerge from small things. An investigation into something perhaps mundane, which then leads to a more elaborate framework. What you find on site, it could be just a material. If there’s a material that seems appropriate to the task, then the exploration of that particular material gives you the constraints within which you can work.

In a recent lecture at the Landscape Architecture Department in Ljubljana, you used the word geometry to describe a design in a peculiar way, while your designs are far from using geometrical forms.

Yes, the word geometric is often used to describe things that look geometrical — very distinctive corners, circles, recognisable shapes. That’s not what I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is the lines and the arcs and the changes of direction to arrive at any given composition. It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to look geometrical. It’s not the shapes in a formalistic way I’m after — it’s the way in which spaces and functions are composed and superimposed over each other.

One of the things I was trying to reinforce was the idea that the plan drawing in landscape architecture is still very, very important, even though it’s a highly abstract tool. In fact, many people don’t understand plans and find them difficult to read. The point is that when seen in real life, the potential impact of a decision made in plan is so radically different in three dimensions than the plan would suggest. That’s such a fundamental thing, but we keep forgetting it.

So you can open up a much wider array of lines, arcs, directions, circles — you can generate drawings that are perhaps somewhat illegible in the plan, very hard to understand why those lines are the way they are. But then, in reality, when you get not only the three-dimensional perspective but the nature of the material, the planting, the weather — all those other things just become so much more real. The original geometry itself just becomes … I wouldn’t say irrelevant, but it falls away. All drawings, by their nature, are geometrical, but people tend to focus on the use of the word geometrical to describe easily recognisable or repeating shapes, as opposed to things being geometrical by virtue of the fact that they relate to geometry.

Tell us about the processing of the materials on the project Bridgefoot Street Park.

The park is one hectare, and it’s in the city centre, therefore constrained. So to build it, the entire park had to be disturbed and then put back together again. If there were materials that were interesting, they were categorised, put to one side, and reused. Anything contaminated was removed. And then, other material was brought on site, either from city depots, where they’d been stockpiling materials for which they had no use, or taken directly from a demolition site that the city owned. Inert material, such as pavement concrete, was taken straight to the site.

Waste material has to be processed in some way or another in order to reuse it. Processing is an important concept in terms of how the authorities consider the reuse of materials. To process, to document that you processed something, to say it’s been made safe or usable, is the administrative tool to get this kind of project ‘across-the-line’. The more you contemplate this and the more you do it, the more you process, the more you become aware of the wider context and history of processing.

“The more you process materials, the more you become aware of the wider context and history of processing and reuse.”

The park is in the river valley, which is not apparent now because it’s so built up, but it’s only one block from the quay walls of the river. And if you keep going further west, upstream, there are areas where the Vikings had brought their waste and dumped it near the riverside. If you go east, downstream, you arrive at the location of the centre of the Viking settlement.

Archaeologists have studied these areas and, of course, now some of that Viking waste, some of those day-to-day objects, are incredibly valuable and displayed in museums. Time itself turns out to be a processing agent.

I see processing you describe as a kind of metabolic machine moving through the park, recycling and upcycling it …

In a way, yes. And it raises the question of where reuse ends and demolition begins. There’s a lot of that going on: just destroy, recycle, destroy. We get into these sophisticated conversations about demolishing creatively, so that we can reuse the materials. But you’ve already lost. Because you’re demolishing, you’re into the cycle of constant demolishing, and that’s carbon emissions no matter how you look at it.

“People fully accepted sitting on a reused waste product”.

So there’s the physical and administrative documentation of processing waste, and then there’s the perceptual change, from waste becoming something useful. That’s what I was really trying to get at. We know that civil engineers use a lot of waste in road build-ups, large volumes of reused concrete and recycled asphalt. There’s a lot of recycling going on in the civil engineering sector, but very few people are aware of it. You can’t see it. One of the objectives in Bridgefoot was to make it absolutely apparent. If you came into that park and wanted to sit down on an edge, it was absolutely apparent that you were sitting on a waste product that had been reused.

And what I found was that people were already ahead of this. They didn’t need the legislation to tell them it was acceptable. They fully accepted it.

Bridgefoot has been open for some time now. What are the challenges?

The first time I went to a construction site and recognised something from my drawing, that was probably the most exciting moment in my life as a landscape architect. But you never achieve what you think you’re going to achieve. Looking back, you could be disappointed a lot. I don’t see it like that — I see it as a continuum. At Bridgefoot Street, there are moments of very specific geometry which were exciting and uplifting to witness being constructed, but then there is the vegetation, which is different every time I visit the park.

Now that the park has been built for four years, there is an issue we have to solve around maintenance, primarily to do with the tools the maintenance teams are using. Too much cutting, too many machines. There are two types of vegetation in the park – conventionally planted and spontaneous colonisation. It’s the latter type that presents the challenge. It started out really well for the first couple of years, and then in the last eighteen months it hasn’t worked so well. So we’re engaged directly with the contractor and the city council, helping the people on the ground to understand the design intent again. We have a prototype document with very simple pictograms — a graphic representation of the long forty-five-page written maintenance specification. All is not lost. We know we can get it back.

To build even a modest park, over ten years, start to finish, you could have fifty, sixty, seventy people somehow involved. And we may not even meet half of these people. And then the people who are actually maintaining it, actually gardening the place, those are the ones who carry it forward.

There’s also a community garden in the park, open for everyone, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Within it, there’s an area where people are growing food, with no fencing around it. Just before the park opened, I met with the community gardeners, and we had a very interesting conversation about this — because of the ambiguous nature of the way the space flows in the park, the way people felt they could use the park, that shouldn’t be diluted or interrupted by a fence. And the gardeners said, yes, let’s see how it goes. Children steal plums sometimes, dog gets in from time to time. But if those gardeners were not there, the park would lose a layer of complexity.

Through your PhD, Preciseness, vagueness, you’ve developed a method, a transferable knowledge. And it’s not theory; it’s practice-based, it’s tacit knowledge. What drove you, what were your motives?

The practice-based method strongly encouraged the researcher to delve into their personal history, as well as their history as a designer and to identify ‘fascinations’ – specific interests that are foundational to one’s personal as well as professional history.

Any individual PhD candidate in the practice-based system, such as I was involved with, will identify a fascination, or multiple fascinations, which are peculiar to them. It’s not to say you wouldn’t have two researchers identifying similar fascinations. For example, bricolage, the idea of doing something yourself (DIY) with reused materials, is very strong amongst landscape architects. I wasn’t unique in that at all.

At DFLA we had already designed a project in London which had been constructed, a public space for the University of Kingston. We also worked with recycled materials there, not to the same extent as in Bridgefoot, but in a significant manner. Having done that, you gain a lot of confidence. It becomes a foundation for saying: we can do this again, and maybe in a more sophisticated manner, or experiment with a slightly different version of the same method, founded on the same fascination.

The goal is — having established some level of confidence in reusing construction waste — can we do it again, and again, and again, but always adding a little bit of new knowledge? Each site is going to be different, different waste coming in and out, different shapes, different clients. It doesn’t mean it sequentially gets better — there are ups and downs. But you keep building on it.

Nevertheless, is there a theory or an idea you follow?

As soon as you start building, you’re into risk, and people don’t like that. A lot of practitioners take the other route, the big, blue-sky, strategic thing. They get into policy, they write reports, they don’t build anything. And there’s less risk that way. So as soon as you commit to building, you have to acknowledge that and say: how are we going to understand what this is, manage it, share our knowledge of it, discuss it with people, navigate through it. That’s a very different proposition.

“As soon as you start building, you’re into risk, and a lot of practitioners don’t like to risk”.

I’ve seen too many big ideas, too much abstract or strategic thinking. And I always feel that there’s a distinction between that kind of innovation and the other kind, where it’s one step after the next, and the innovation is a small step that builds on fifty other smaller steps over time. That second type is what I’m interested in, because it’s more plausible. You can see into the future with it. Whereas the so-called ‘big idea’ – it’s just completely overwhelming. It rarely goes anywhere.

Is landscape architecture a type, or a subset of architecture, in a way?

The reasons I got into landscape architecture are utterly different, I would suggest, from the reasons why any given architect would become an architect: a profound interest in the natural world. Long periods of time, from very early on, being fascinated by being outdoors. Time spent alone in the hills as a teenager. Very visceral and memorable experiences in what we call nature. I loved gardening from an early age.

“Architecture and landscape architecture are like siblings — close to each other but utterly different. I see landscape architecture students as softer. More open. Less polemical.”

In general, when I see landscape architecture students, there can be a certain kind of person. Softer. More open. Less polemical. Possibly a curiosity that they can’t really define. Whereas young architecture students — there’s a clarity there which I feel doesn’t just come from centuries of architecture culture and teaching. It comes from the person’s character. A higher proportion of them have a clear focus on where they’re going. Possibly more ambitious, but often less in tune with a world wider than the world of the building, a world outside logic and rational thought.

Architecture and landscape architecture are like siblings — close to each other but utterly different.

When you can concentrate fully on landscape architecture you can explore the opportunities that arise out of the looser framework of landscape architecture, the more open-ended briefs, sometimes the almost entire lack of a programme. For me this is most evident with the design of public space — it’s the public space that gives you the opportunity to reflect on such notions as vagueness and ambiguity. With public space and particularly public parks its apparent that something contrapuntal is going on – that people can occupy a place in ways that are contradictory, and that they can coexist and share ‘ownership’ of the place through this counterintuitive way of being. As I said earlier, fifteen or twenty years ago, in Ireland, there were very few opportunities to do that. But there are quite a few now. City councils, local authorities and government agencies are trying to implement objectives around public space, public health, active travel, nature restoration and habitat. These objectives alone can be in conflict. They can be contradictory, yet through this they can lead to very interesting design process and equally interesting experiences of that designed public space.