Daniel Baffsky has a perennial passion for plants and primal power of landscape. Here, he chats to us about his mission to blanket the world with green and the importance of a new socio-economically responsible approach to landscape architecture.
Can you tell us your career journey to date?
I grew up spending lots of time at our family farm and generally outdoors. My mum was also an avid gardener, I remember feeling a connection to landscapes and plants from an early age.
I studied economics at Sydney University and while there, I was considering more creative pursuits, I thought about switching to architecture, but the economy wasn’t strong, and I was hesitant to start on a six-year degree. So, after graduating I took a route that was a little more certain and ended up working in corporate PR, investment banking as well as a short stint in tourism marketing. But nothing was ‘scratching the itch.’
After taking a year off to travel the world and parts of Australia, it was clear that I was drawn to landscapes and nature more so than cities and buildings. I did a correspondence course in landscape design to see if the subject matter was of interest – it was, and I enrolled in a Bachelor of Landscape Design at Lincoln University in New Zealand. They offered a graduate degree with a curriculum that was weighted towards practical education rather than theoretical which I found very attractive.
After graduating, I worked for a landscape design company that focused on residential projects for a year, but the goal was always to start my own practice, I started 360 degrees in 2001.
What projects are you most proud of, the ones that brought you the most joy to create?
That’s like trying to choose your favourite child. The Healing Garden at the Kinghorn Cancer Centre was very obviously purposeful work. The same can be said for anything in the education sector where we foster an environment for learning - anything around communality, something that provides a communal space that offers respite and makes people connect and feel good is immensely rewarding.
Our first project of scale was the rooftop at M Central, a conversion of an old wool store in Ultimo. We repurposed what was once a car park into a beautiful rooftop garden that became the epicentre of the building. The genre of rooftop gardens was untested in Australia at that time, they were championed in global cities like Tokyo, Toronto and Singapore, but this was one of the first in Australia.
When we completed the post-occupancy analysis, we discovered that more than a quarter of the residents used the space daily to relax, connect with nature and create memories with neighbours, family and friends. That project formed the basis of a lot of learnings for us about how to produce a communal space that helped to foster chance-interactions, and it’s underpinned everything we’ve done since.
Since that project, our guiding philosophy has been to blanket everything with green and then to take out what’s needed for human activity. Obviously, there must be some flexibility to this, particularly if we’re designing a space where events need to take place, but human-scale, intimacy of space and how to create communality alongside respite and privacy, were all important lessons we learned when designing that first rooftop space.
What are some of the creative barriers you come up against when designing in an urban environment?
Not every space can be everything to everybody. In fact, the idea that every space should be flexible is one of my personal bugbears. To me that just spells ‘characterless’. We want to create more gardens in the city. And because we also work selectively on private gardens, we typically bring a more domestic and detailed approach to spatial design and planting.
In the last five years public spaces have required, and have celebrated more plant diversity, a fantastic initiative. But I find there is still some rigidity about the design parameters for urban space. Take for example, the amount of soil volume that’s required by some councils. Sydney’s trees and natural landscapes often thrive with very little soil volume – some are stunted and laden with character, and some grow vigorously and beautifully in not much soil at all. This ‘standardised’ approach to designing urban spaces can result in an overly risk-managed environment that lacks variety, surprise and interest. I feel we are too often led to design to a lowest common denominator rather than with a determination to foster unique character, and to invest in long-term care.
What are your influences, what inspires you?
Plants are my passion and creating a powerful experience with them is the intention of our work. For example, we’re working on Western Sydney Airport now. It’s obviously a very special opportunity and an exciting challenge - on a few levels. One of which is creating a planted landscape that has character and interest in an environment that must be almost completely benign. The airport ecology must minimise the attraction of insects or birds to help prevent bird-strike. So, this landscape needs to be designed in a way that’s especially experiential in a totally unique way - to encourage large volumes of people moving through a vast, open space to stop, even if momentarily, to feel a connection to the landscape, the sky and the experience of air travel.
I’m also inspired by the challenge of creating a socio-economic environment that demands more efficiency. In the last five or six years we’ve seen very embellished planting schemes that are detailed, eclectic and diverse but also very expensive to maintain. A new era of cost consciousness means the cycle is shifting to low-maintenance landscapes and I’m starting to think a lot more about how we can transition to expressions that have strong character, experience and narratives.
And finally, I’m inspired by the integration of natives and introduced species. I love Australian natives, back in the early 2000s the native plant movement was in its infancy. That idea has matured now, to the point where there are council requirements regarding the number of natives used in planting schemes. While I think that’s undeniably positive, it does have its limitations. I think our horticultural legacy is about melding the two for both practicality and storytelling, and I’m always inspired and fascinated by exploring that idea.
How can good landscape architecture transform a space?
The way people live has changed, backyards are no longer the norm and there’s an entire generation of people that are growing up and living in apartment communities. Therefore, the quality of open spaces is more important and valuable than ever before. We have learnt very clearly over the last twenty years of practice, that when you create a meaningful, verdant open space that people want to enjoy over and over again, it's better for communities and therefore better for the developers and their bottom line.
You’ve worked on a couple of Coronation projects Mason & Main and Ashbury Terraces – two very different projects in different pockets of Sydney. What is your vision for both projects?
We started Ashbury from scratch, contributing to every element, from designing the pool, to ensuring all the landscape areas were generous enough to accommodate the vision Coronation asked us to deliver.
Ashbury is a multi-cultural precinct with a strong garden culture and village atmosphere. Our approach was to include both native and exotic plants that speak to the area's heritage interspersed with food plants throughout the garden. Ashbury has warmth and depth to it. The planting is generous with scale and the buildings are immersed in gardens. Longevity is also a fundamental of our approach and a hallmark of this design, using classic, tactile textures that will evolve over time, and get better with age.
At Mason & Main, we were asked to come in a little later in the process so there were already technical parameters that governed what we could do. For example, on Eat Street, we created a suite of bespoke pots with plants of different scales so that it feels like a domestic space, rather than an urban one. Materially, we used a neutral palette with natural tones to create a place that feels warm, comfortable and classic that will stand the test of time.
Our designs always consider the overall experience of a space; they’re about comfort, human contact and communality. We pride ourselves on our lo-fi approach – you don’t need to spend a fortune to make something enduring, in fact, it’s irresponsible if it’s not.