Why Stories?

Stories are often treated as peripheral in landscape architecture and the design world, something ornamental rather than essential. Yet this absence is striking, because the very work of shaping the built environment is fundamentally about people, decisions, and experience over time. What is missing is not just narrative in a general sense, but a specific kind of storytelling: the story of the process itself, what happened along the way, what was considered, what was changed, and why. This is, in many ways, a personal account of lived experience within the act of making, a record of how design actually unfolds before it is made real and introduced into the world. This absence is not unique to landscape architecture. It is just as present in architecture, arguably even more so, and extends across urban design and allied disciplines. In many of these fields, the complexity of process is routinely compressed or erased in favor of cleaner, more authoritative presentations of finished work.

Too often, that story disappears once a project is complete. It gets replaced by drawings, metrics, and a polished description that presents the work as resolved and inevitable. When narratives do appear, they tend to fall into two unhelpful extremes. On one end, they are reduced to soft, fuzzy platitudes, language that gestures toward meaning but ultimately says very little. On the other, they lean into academic or theoretical claims that overstate impact, projecting ambitions far beyond what the project actually accomplishes. In both cases, the real story, the iterative, contingent, and human process behind the work, is lost.

One of the reasons for taking this approach comes from years of giving lectures, where the most effective way to communicate work, for me, has been to show projects and tell the stories behind them. Not just what they are, but how they came to be. Again and again, it is these stories, the decisions, missteps, revisions, and trade offs, that resonate most clearly and make the work understandable. That experience has become the impetus for this effort: to make that way of seeing and explaining design more explicit and more central. Reintroducing process based storytelling offers a way to recover that missing layer. It focuses on the sequence of decisions, conversations, and revisions that shape a project before it is built and encountered by the public. This kind of story does not exaggerate, it clarifies. It reveals how a site was understood, how trade offs were made, and how ideas evolved in response to real conditions. In doing so, it makes design more legible, more grounded, and more honest.

In practice, this approach strengthens communication with clients, collaborators, and communities by showing not just what was designed, but how and why it came to be. In teaching, it is even more valuable. Students gain insight into the realities of practice, the uncertainties, the adjustments, the negotiations, rather than encountering projects as finished end products detached from their origins. This fosters a more grounded form of critical thinking and a deeper understanding of design as an evolving process. Ultimately, bringing this kind of storytelling back into landscape architecture, and across architecture, urban design, and related fields, supports the broader mission of making places for people. Public spaces are not only the result of final forms, they are the outcome of countless decisions shaped by human needs and constraints. By telling the story of how those decisions unfold, designers can better connect process to outcome, and in turn, create places that are more thoughtful, responsive, and meaningful.