Travel Talk – Landscape Architecture Magazine

A travel grant yields walking as art and research.

Interview By Timothy A. Schuler

Rachel Valenziano, ASLA, an associate at TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, is the inaugural recipient of the Roger Bond Martin Travel Prize, a $10,000 fellowship established by the ASLA Minnesota Chapter and the University of Minnesota that is awarded to one emerging landscape architect per year. Valenziano recently returned from Rome, where her project focused on the “everyday and the in-between.”

Why Rome? 

I [chose Rome] because every inch of the city has such a rich sort of—“lasagna” is what they call it, unironically—history, and of politics, and of change. I wasn’t taking any transportation; I wasn’t riding a bike or taking a bus. I was only looking at things within walking distance, and I knew that anywhere I went there would be a meaningful story that I could start to investigate through walking. 

What did you do to prepare for the experience?

I read a lot of books and spoke with people who were interested in walking. The biggest piece of preparing was to experiment in ways of drawing. I had an idea about making these long, linear drawings to capture the walks, but I needed to experiment a little bit more to hone the ways that I was drawing. 

How did experimenting with these different ways of drawing change what you saw?

When you’re drawing your walk, it takes a long time. [I realized] I can’t make one single drawing that spans the whole city in one day. It was a continuous process of zeroing in and distilling down the ideas. The experimental drawings were really informative for that process.

[In Rome] I was also tracking on GPS everywhere that I went. I have this map that represents me moving through the city, and you start to see where those main thoroughfares [are]. The urban fabric starts to appear. It’s a way of drawing—literally drawing with my body moving through space. I found a lot of Richard Long’s work in that vein [inspiring], understanding the traces that walking leaves. In my case, it was these digital traces that [became] a way of drawing in itself.

What were the three best books about walking that you read?

The first is Francesco Careri’s Walkscapes. That’s about walking as an aesthetic practice, and it lays out the whole history of how people have walked as a way of making art. Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome by Kristi Cheramie is a beautiful endeavor to distill all of those layers of the lasagna that I was talking about. And then Will Self wrote a book called Psychogeography, and that one really helped me get centered on how I’m walking as an observer, and how I am positioning myself as a designer detached from the space around me.

The project feels very romantic, in many ways. Were there moments of unpleasantness? 

This project is very romantic. That was kind of the idea—to let yourself be inspired and be delighted. It’s easy to get cynical, especially with climate change and everything that’s going on. But I think that it’s important for us, as designers, to savor these really precious and intriguing moments and to practice noticing them—to practice observing in fine enough detail to really notice and be delighted by [them]. But there were totally unpleasant times. And there were some days I just didn’t feel like drawing. And I didn’t make myself draw. I tried to only draw when I felt like it was the right thing to do that day.