Taking A Leap To Meet My Mentor

For those of you who admire someone who is a professional in a field or area of interest to you, I highly recommend reaching out to them.  Most people are excited and flattered that someone is interested in their work and more than willing to meet to share their thoughts and perspective.

It took me a while to have the balls to actually do this.  And when I say a while, I mean years.  No joke. I met Kevin Sloan after attending a presentation he gave to the local APLD chapter.  It was a tour of the Urban Reserve project — one of Kevin Sloan Studio‘s designs for local developer and modernist, Dianne Cheatham.  When I heard about the tour, I knew I wanted to go.  I’d visited Urban Reserve before but didn’t know Kevin or anything about his work.  All I knew about the development was that it was cool and modern. Urban Reserve is more than just a cool development, though..

The land Cheatham purchased for the site was an old, abandoned dumping ground that was overgrown and filled with various detritus.  Instead of scraping the site as many developers do, Kevin’s design embraces the land’s history through the reinterpretation of the materials and forms that were already there. Kevin had the abandoned elements that were dumped, reorganized artistically, and placed in forms that now resemble a collage of sculptures, rather than the piles of trash they once were.  Concrete scraps are reinvented as block-formed retaining walls, for example. 

Such acts in creativity are not only imaginative, but also illustrate a softer hand, and one that serves as reverence to the history of the site. The reinterpretation of materials, or “Bricolage,” as Kevin referred to French Anthropologist, Claude Levi Strauss’ concept, brings a richness to the overall design: it is reinvented, but not contrived. 

This Arcadian sense, I believe, serves to create a cultural landscape of sorts that celebrates what it once was, rather than burying it in another trash pile where only further carbon imprints would be made and forgotten.  This is the genius loci or “spirit of place” we learn about in design school that is, unfortunately, so often forgotten.  It is what I strive for in every one of my designs — to celebrate a place and honor what it is — elevating it aesthetically without turning it into another entity entirely. There’s a subtle difference.  But, there is a difference.

Good designers, like Kevin, know how to do this, how to enhance a site, and honor it at the same time. Needless to say, after attending the tour and hearing Kevin discuss the project and his thoughts about design and Landscape Architecture in general, I knew I had to meet him.  So, I sent an email and introduced myself, and asked if he would meet with me to talk more about his work.  The following week we met at Lark on the Park (Have you been there?  It’s a great restaurant, btw if you haven’t tried it. This also, incidentally, put me at ease, as I thought, even if the conversation were strained, at least the food and atmosphere would be good.  LOL.) 

We got along really well and had a great discussion.  Something sort of clicked in our conversation and for whatever reason, I mentioned that I regretted never having worked at a large practice or under someone with a classical approach to design like he had.  Kevin asked if I had a mentor and I joked back, “No, would you like to be mine?”  Remarkably, he said, “Yes.”

Remember how I told you it took years for me to get the guts to blindly introduce myself to someone I admired?  Well, Kevin told me he was indeed flattered by my inquiry and that he was impressed with how comfortable I was with approaching him to talk about his work.  He had no idea that I had never actually had the guts to do that before.  LOL!  It’s actually pretty amazing.  Who would have thought that a simple gesture to meet up would lead to gaining a mentor? 

I am so excited to learn from Kevin and share the experience with you.  And, I hope that maybe this will inspire you to also reach out and get to know someone who’s doing something you find interesting.  You never know what will come of it.  Whoever you reach out to, let me know about it.  I’d love to hear how it goes.