I think that double relationship of being urban but understanding and appreciating big nature has conditioned my interests.”Īfter graduating from Manchester Metropolitan University in the early 1980s, Corner began working on urban landscape projects, including Liverpool’s fondly remembered International Garden Festival Park.

So we’d travel to the Lake District or the Peak District and go camping and climbing, hiking and parachuting. “I had this double experience growing up in Manchester in England on the one hand enjoying life in the city – nightclubs and bars and museums and street life – but also exposure to big nature. “I’m fascinated by the interplays between city and nature, between the garden and geography, between small scale and large scale, between art, imagination and something more tangible,” he says. It’s an apt location for our interview, because urban landscapes are Corner’s great obsession. The view extends across the cityscape an ocean of clustered rooftops – none more striking than Antoni Gaudi’s fairytale-like Sagrada Familia – that gradually fade into a horizon dominated by a sweeping mountain range. I meet Corner at the rooftop bar of one of Barcelona’s fancier hotels, where he’s in town to judge the annual Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize. As one of the world’s foremost landscape architects and theorists, he’s worked on projects as varied and celebrated as Chicago’s redeveloped Navy Pier, London’s South Park at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and – most famously – New York’s High Line, along an elevated section of disused Manhattan railroad.įorthcoming projects masterplanned and designed by his practice, James Corner Field Operations, include the redevelopment of Seattle’s central waterfront and protective seawall the transformation of a former military base in San Francisco, into a 14 acre stretch of parkland and the creation of a 10-mile “linear park, urban trail and living art destination” running below Miami’s elevated Metrorail tracks, known as The Underline. Ultimately it’s how we identify with places.”Ĭorner, it’s fair to say, is a man who knows the subject inside out.

It’s how we give form to our land and cities. “But a landscape is so much more than that – it encapsulates society, politics and our own existence on a planet where we’re bound by natural forces. When you think of a landscape, you think of romantic green gardens and hedges and flowers, right?” James Corner asks, intently.

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