SITE: San Francisco, California

SCOPE: Permanent installation featuring wayfinding and interpretive elements

Gondwana Garden, otherwise known as the Forest of Gond, is a meeting place created for telling the stories of the southern hemisphere’s continents and their natural history, including the diversity of life forms that they share. Each element in the Garden provides an interpretive and experiential opportunity.

Important to our understanding of this site was its visibility from the path as one approaches it. The garden circle is conceptualized as a place to occupy and rest: this is seen to manifest in the aspect of physical scale, the element of time and change experienced through diurnal and microclimatic cycles, a sense of stillness, a sense of mystery, a sense of delight, a sense of discovery, and a sense of belonging to the gardens.

Our goal is to create a place that tells a larger story of phenomena and geological process through intimate contact with this place.