DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Good design is intuitive, intelligent, alive, and inherently pragmatic.
Our work is rooted at the intersection of art, architecture, and landscape. We create designs that say something about who we are as a culture, and how we are evolving. We see each design that we undertake as a singular piece of art within a broader social and environmental context. Our designs encourage exploration, invite curiosity, and evoke a sense of awe in our natural and constructed world.
Space
In physics, space is seen as a continually altering field of energy. The space of architecture, always elusive and mysterious, is the space in which we may develop a greater awareness of ourselves.
We often tend to think of objects in space as the raw material of architecture, but it is the relationship between the space and ourselves that we maneuver through, and feel, as we experience a building or environment. What do we experience as one moves through space - seeing, feeling, and sensing the unfolding of perspective, the changing spatial realms, patterns of light, the quality of sound on changing surfaces. What is behind the surface of things, in what we cannot see, in emptiness.
What is the quality of winter light on a matt surface, reflected light, warm light, how are we affected by silence, how does a room or a space sound, when outside noises fall away.
Sustainability
Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age when learning how to live sustainably is no longer an option. As landscape architects, we have the ability to encourage and support the systems upon which live depends, and to be advocates for an intelligent and kind interaction with our local and global environment.
We strive to use local materials, minimize waste, conserve resources, re-use materials when possible, and consider carefully how materials will age. We search for ways to use waste streams from other industries, for example, using fly ash (a by-product of the coal used to fuel power plants) in concrete, which improves the concrete’s strength and durability, resulting in increased longevity (the Pantheon was built using ash based concrete), while displacing the demand for other concrete ingredients, resulting in significant energy savings, and keeping the fly ash out of landfills.
Time
In the Middle Ages, people would sit in cathedrals all day and watch the patterns made by the ever changing, evanescent waves of light shining through the stained glass windows, as they shifted almost imperceptibly from moment to moment, across the wide stone spaces. In the modern world, we have all but lost the reverence for and awareness of our internal, psychic time, as opposed to external culturally conditioned time. We create environments that encourage us to slow down and experience the duration of time, experience the ever present now as something tangible, rather than ephemeral.
CHRISTOPHER YATES BIO
Christopher is the principal of Field Landscape Architecture.
Christopher received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from The George Washington University in 1984, and a Masters of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990. Upon graduation, he moved to San Francisco and joined the firm of Peter Walker and Partners, where he gained experience on a broad range of urban and commercial projects, including: Nishi Harima Science Garden City, a development plan for a new town in Japan; Vila Olimpica, a hotel and retail center in Barcelona, and Hotel Kempinski, a parterre garden at the Munich Airport Center.
In 2002, Christopher founded Field Landscape Architecture. Located in San Francisco, the firm specializes in unique, imaginatively designed modern residential landscapes.
Christopher is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and when he is not busy designing, he can usually be found hiking in the hills with his quadruped hiking partner and white wolf imitator, Mozu.