The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Nature, Design, and Health: Explorations of a Landscape Architect by David Kamp

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Nature, Design, and Health: Explorations of a Landscape Architect by David Kamp https://amzn.to/3KzabbW The internationally renowned landscape architect David Kamp, FASLA, has written a personal narrative of his innovative and influential landscape design philosophy and practice in Nature, Design, and Health. He traces the first stirrings of his interest in nature and design to his childhood in rural North Carolina. Kamp maintained his passion for landscape through his architectural studies at the University of Virginia, and these in turn helped prepare him for his first design project, the landscape for Australia's grand new Parliament House complex in Canberra (1980–1988). In the mid-1990s, at a pivotal time in his personal life, Kamp volunteered to design one of the first gardens created specifically for individuals with HIV/AIDS, the Joel Schnaper Memorial Garden at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem. The experience proved life-altering, and Kamp resolved to dedicate his practice to exploring the intimate web of relationships connecting design, nature, and modern healthcare. Throughout his career, Kamp has sought to put people of all ages in touch with nature, regardless of their capabilities―from children with autism spectrum disorder to elders with cognitive and physical challenges. He has also explored these ideas in the larger realm, where his plans have revitalized schools, parks, and urban waterfronts. By putting personal health on a continuum with environmental health, Kamp demonstrates that design partnering with nature can lead to more vibrant, resilient, and equitable communities.

Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. I hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurs,

podcasting, corporate stuff, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO. And be sure to check out ChrisVossLeadershipInstitute.com Now back to the show. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate it, folks. As always, the Chris Voss Show, the back to the show. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate it.

As always, the Chris Voss Show, the family loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your grandmother. So there you go, man. We have an amazing guest on the show. He's an architect, and he's been doing all sorts of wonderful stuff around the world. Some of you may have heard of, some of you may, will be hearing about. And he's going to join us about his newest book that comes out August 1st, 2023. David Camp joins us on the show.

He is the author of his new book, Nature, Design, and Health, Explorations of a Landscape Architect, telling us his story and his innovation and influential landscape design philosophy and practice in nature design and health and i think you're going to learn a few things that are going to be really cool about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness uh he's going to be joining us on the show to talk to us about his work and david is the founding principal of dirtworks pc landscape architecture through practice teaching and writing and advocacy and David is the founding principal of Dirtworks, PC Landscape Architecture. Through practice teaching and writing and advocacy, David's leadership and unique contributions promoting health through design and nature are at the forefront of the profession.

He's a Harvard Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies. He's a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Design, and widely recognized through awards, publications, and documentaries. He's a frequent guest speaker and writer, and he's an internationally recognized thought leader in the positive role of nature in the design of the built environment. He's taught and lectured at universities and schools across the United States, Europe, Asia. In 2012, University College, Falmouth, and awarded David an honorary fellowship in recognition of his contributions to landscape architecture profession. Did I get some of those pronunciations correct, Falmouth?

You did very well, Chris. Thank you. Okay, well, thank you. We're trying. I flunked second grade. So welcome to the show, David. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor to have you on, sir, as well. Give us a.com wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please. Very good. NatureDesignHealth.com. All one word and you'll get a little bit of information on the book and me. There you go. So what motivated you to write this book, sir? Well, it was a moment in my career where I had a chance to pause and to look at what I've discovered and to find a way to share with others how landscapes could be designed to promote health.

There you go. Give us a 30,000 overview of some of the tease-outs or details of the book. It's a memoir. It really starts with a childhood fascination with nature and design. Along the way, I discovered a deeper connection. It reduces stress. It strengthens our sense of identity. It instills a sense of hope and promise. And I've realized over the course of my career that crisis isolates. And nature can help reconnect us.

And design can help do that. By offering people what I say is opportunity and choice for everyone to connect with nature in their own way on their own terms and at their own pace and so why do we have this affinity with nature i mean why don't we just adopt you know uh you know the new york sort of skyline and go yeah who needs trees like you know why is that important to us? Well, there really are some significant links. This idea of our connections to nature, there's a number of theories. If I could share a couple with you, I might help frame some of what the work is about. Part of it, and some theories look at the idea of an evolutionary link that compels us to connect to nature. There's an innate attraction to greenness or nature triggers a physiological

response that helps lower stress levels or nature restores our cognitive resources and helping us concentrate. There was an interesting report out that looked at, I guess it came out about a month or so ago, in something called Science Advances. I don't know the magazine, but evidently it looked at the idea of what do we know? And they reviewed hundreds of scientific papers, and they identified over 200 positive links to nature. Oh, wow. To give you an example, just being exposed to nature, it improves our mood. It's the bomb to busy lives.

And listen, we're all busy. But not only active and, let's say, healthy people are busy, but illness and chronic conditions can be consuming. So this idea of improving mood really does begin to influence stress. I start to see all these connections that sense this exposure to nature begins to affect our bodies and our minds and that great connection between the mind and the body. There you go.

And it's because we're, I mean, in essence, we're really caving when it comes down to it. A lot of what we do really goes back to our biological nature and maybe some could say our sea nature, you know, of crawling up from the sea and, you know, our love of the ocean or, you know, I think maybe we feel that connection with nature, maybe, depending know what you want to believe but i think you know everything we do goes back to caveman times you know hunter gatherer sort of stuff uh when we really behave there's a lot of you know bs that we talk about and go we're evolved not really listen it's it's part of us you know and that's what's kind of interesting is we've had these sort of pendulum swings you know we're sort of part of nature and then we're not part of nature. It's kind of nice to see the pendulum swinging back into realizing, hey, it's simply part of who we are. Yeah. And then oxygen is kind of cool that comes off the trees and, you know, bushes as well.

I've heard that's a really cool thing. That helps. Especially if you're on mars uh and and uh so what you've done is you've spent your career uh designing landscapes as an architect and making them so that uh they have this wonderful design that can kind of inspire people motivate people make people feel good make people you know feel all sorts of different feelings and kind of enjoy something other than looking at brick walls. Yeah.

A lot of what the work is trying to do is offer people choices. And when you're dealing with individual crisis or climate crisis, we need to find ways that help us cope with changing circumstances. Thank you. I'm in Florida right now with a heat index of about 115, and one of the things that I think we're all having to come to terms with is really understanding how we cope with drastically changing circumstances, be it individual or collective. And what I'm hoping to do is show people how design can help us choose health because choosing health is empowering and it's empowering, particularly for those with few options.

There you go. You know, and speaking of that, you had in the mid nineties done something really wonderful and volunteered to design one of the first gardens created specifically for individuals with HIV and AIDS. Yes. The Joel, I'm not sure if I'll get this last name pronunciation correct, Schapner?

Schnapper, yes. Schnapper. Yes. The Joel Schnapper Memorial Garden at the Terrence Cardinal Cook Health Center in East Harlem. Tell us a little bit about that and what you did there. It was a terrific project. It's interesting, Chris.

That is one of those foundational projects that I've drawn upon for decades now. When we were asked to come up to Cardinal Cook Health Care Facility back in 1994. And if your memory holds, this was at a point in the AIDS crisis where there were no cocktails. There were no medical protocols. Misinformation morphed into terrible situations. They asked me to come up because they had no other choice but to offer palliative care. And what they did was they looked to nature,

which we've often done throughout the centuries. Look at Alzheimer's, look at the old monastic gardens. Their, in a sense, mission at the time was simply to care for these individuals. So we had, in a sense, no medical protocols to draw upon, no design research to draw upon. So we simply asked individuals, both staff members, two words that I've used as my sort of foundational design, you know, motivations, providing opportunity and choice. So we built a garden that gave people choices. You can choose to step outside and just, you know, just be a moment outside before you go back in.

You can go further in. But the further in you go, the more experiences that you could enjoy. So in a sense, it was an interesting project to sort of understand the psychology of design, how design can offer you the opportunity to test yourself or simply to say no. So it was an enlightening project, Chris, and one that, like I said, has influenced my work now for decades. There you go. And for a lot of people who are listening and considering this book, this not only applies to what you did, but how people set up their home or how people set up their backyards

or try and, you know, this book can inspire them to maybe do better at building their areas. You know, there's this thing called feng shui. And, you know, sometimes people feel better in an environment that is more, I don't know, you may have a better word for it than I do. Is there any truth to that in, you know, designing stuff so that there's a more flow feeling to things and you can feel better about your life? Absolutely. One of the things that I wanted to share in the book was the range of settings that this applies to. It applies to our schools. It applies to our homes. It applies to parks. It applies to streets. It applies to healthcare settings. And all of those sort of draw upon

one simple idea and that's take the time to pause, pay attention to nature, but also to think deliberately because design can be a tool for living deliberately. Think about where you enjoy your coffee, where you need to have a drink at the end of the day. Be mindful of how design can be a tool. It's a tremendous tool. A lot of people think of design as a decorating item, and sure, that's a piece of it, but design creates spaces, and these spaces can be deliberate spaces for the way that you, meaning you, want to live. And your first design project, the Landscape for Australia's Grand New Parliament House

Complex in Canberra, tell us about that. I was very young. My boss at the time told me I would never see another project like this in my life, and I haven't. But it was another one of those foundational projects in the sense that we were part of a design team that won a competition. This was considered one of the major design commissions of the 20th century. And we came down to Australia to design the government's home. And what I learned during that project, Chris, was how design can instill a sense of identity.

We had to design for one individual who was coming to visit, and yet we had to design as an expression of what the nation was about. So you can begin to see how design and this idea of instilling identity transcends scale um you know it it reached the individual and it reached the collective um so it was a tremendous project to understand the power of design um and how it can be used to do good there you go you know you have uh a lot of uh what are those famous gardens in france oh um do you mean like you know in paris like the truly yeah or uh i mean i'll talk about a

great public space um and again it it it's a it's a space to be intimate with nature and yet it's a collective space to all be part of an experience. And I love that idea of balancing public and private, intimacy and in a public sense. A lot of our gardens that we've designed in public settings have tried to look at very individual needs, somebody who shuffles their feet, somebody who has cerebral palsy, somebody who's blind. We need to engage those individuals in a public setting as well as a space for those who might be more healthy or more, let's say, accessible. And throughout the world, they have beautiful gardens.

I think the ones I was trying to remember were some from Marie Antoinette. Didn't she do some sort of? Oh, Versailles has some pretty significant gardens. Very much, again, about the power of an individual's choice. Those were designed to express a sense of power. And yet, when you walk them, they're incredible moments of intimacy. And I love for people,

and people have to allow themselves this, to have that intimacy in nature. Not everyone seeks it and not everyone, you know, welcomes it, but it's an immensely satisfying feeling. And I think that's where some of those collective senses that will help us through challenging times. Finding those threads that we all share to help us deal with the challenges we have. There you go.

So as we go out, what sort of final thoughts do you have or teasers on the book that you want to share that people might find inside of it to pick it up? Well, I hope people read this. It's simply a way to look at the world and to understand our place in it, how to improve it, how to understand the tools we have at our disposal,

and perhaps in the process, help understand and perhaps find a desire to protect nature, to nurture that which nurtures us. There you go. And certainly beauty helps. I think oxygen helps. I mean, one thing we're finding now with climate change is having trees around really lowers the temperature a little bit. So, you know, I've kind of noticed that when I go in my backyard,

it's full of these old trees. It's like the temperature is very much different in the backyard than it is in the front. Yeah. But isn't it great to all of a sudden become aware of something you've taken for granted for so long? Exactly. Yeah.

And it's time we probably stopped taking certain things for granted. Cause I mean, you see what's going on in some of the horrors around the world. We recently saw the fires in Maui and Hawaii. Just extraordinary and sad. Nature is an important aspect and part of us. We've got to take care of us because it seems to take care of us a little bit. That's well put, Chris.

I like my oxygen. I'm into that these days. I just picked it up lately. It's a new thing. It's a new hobby of mine. Enjoying oxygen. I like that oxygen. I'm into that these days. I just picked it up lately. It's a new thing. It's a new hobby of mine, enjoying oxygen. I like that breathing thing. I'm not going to Mars anytime soon. Screw that.

Screw that, man. Let's stay here and work on what we've got right here. Yeah, exactly. Let's take care of that. So, David, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot coms again so we can find you on the interwebs. NatureDesignHealth.com. There you go.

Well, David, it's been wonderful and insightful to have you on the show. And thank you for the wonderful things you've done for people around the world and inspired them. And keep up the good work, my friend. Thank you, Chris. I enjoyed this so much. Bye-bye. There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com. For just Chris Voss. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold. Nature, Design, and Health. Explorations of a Landscape Architect, available August 1st,

2023. You can order it wherever fine books are sold. Thanks for tuning in, folks. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys

next time. And that should have sounded damn good. day.