the ephemeral
Begin by noticing. Stay long enough to see. I am drawn to fleeting things: cloud shadows moving across a summer field, a weed holding its ground beside a barn, white stone fading in the heat of an afternoon. I photograph them, paint them, and sometimes make something in the landscape and leave it to the weather. We see what we want to see, and only for a moment.
What holds me is almost always ordinary and unrepeatable. The work begins with being there, and staying long enough for the ordinary to show itself. This is harder than it sounds. We live among an abundance of things asking to be looked at, most of which will still be there tomorrow. Four minutes of light will not. They do not wait to be noticed. Seeing them before they go is a choice, and the work is making that choice again and again.
I am not trying to preserve these moments. I am trying to admit how briefly they were offered. That is the subject, really: attention, and how little of it we give.
I work between Lausanne, Switzerland, and Vermont. Outside the studio, I fly small planes, run in the mountains, play the fiddle, swim in open water, and raise my children.
Bio
Attention travels. It is the same instrument in a field at dusk as in a room where people are deciding what to build, and it has been the through-line of my working life.
I studied Visual Arts and Neuroscience at Brown, then Landscape Architecture and Design Studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, with years in between at RISD, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and two terms in southern France at L'École des Arts in Lacoste. An itinerant education, and it left me permanently curious about places and the people who are formed by them. It led to design research in mountain cities of Bariloche, Kyoto, Bilbao, Lausanne, Palmer, Alaska, where the landscape is doing much of the work of shaping the character of the people. It led to public works and private gardens, to years with the Arnold Arboretum and the Nature Conservancy, and to teaching at the GSD and the Boston Architectural College.
What all of it keeps returning to is the part of a place you cannot see. We design for the eye, and then wonder why a room is exhausting. Sound is the most obvious of the senses we leave out, and the one I have argued for longest; it reaches farther than sight, it is the first sense we have in the womb, and nature privileges it but it was never the whole of the question. Atmosphere is. Air, temperature, texture, scale, the mood a space is carrying before anyone has said a word in it. Neuroaesthetics and environmental psychology are now describing what designers have always half known: these conditions act on our cognition and our feeling whether or not we are paying attention to them. I founded Sound x Design Lab to pursue that as research and as art at once, in painting, in installation, in sound.
The same question arrives at other scales, and I follow it there. Through Winterworks Studio Suisse it becomes workplace design and the cultural systems running beneath it. Through Rejigger Atelier it becomes one person at a time developing creative confidence, and the redesign of a working life through transitions that resist easy categorization. This work draws on an Executive MBA from INSEAD and training as a Becoming You certified practitioner. A room, a landscape, a life. The design problem hardly changes. Notice what is actually there, then build for it.