New Foundations: Dune Hai’s Anooshey Rahim on Setting Her Own Rules and Celebrating the Melting Pot
By Julia Gamolina
Anooshey Rahim is a California licensed landscape architect and Principal of the landscape architecture studio, Dune Hai. As a first generation Pakistani practitioner, Anooshey is passionate about exploring heritage through the evolution of design effected by settlement, migration and adaptation. Dune Hai was founded in 2018 to offer an alternative to current notions of contemporary landscape and invigorate the field with 21st century acknowledgements of material sustainability, cultural diasporas, horticultural experimentation and as a way to celebrate the melting pot.
Before founding Dune Hai, Anooshey worked in award-winning practices on the east and west coast and graduated with dual-masters degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Anooshey believes great design is an expression of its users and should make you gasp ever so slightly upon arrival. In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Anooshey talks about reinventing the foundational practices that guide most firms, advising those just starting their careers to do what makes you happy.
JG: Tell me about how you grew up and how that planted the seeds for what you do now.
AR: I was always a maker as a young person, having had a fascination with creative output of all kinds as a way of expressing my ideas. That being said, I never thought of myself as the subject that needed expression, but rather using art and design to focus on broader content. As an undergraduate student, I was an arts and art history major, and quickly became aware of representation and how so much was reinforcing stereotypes and western supremacy. At one point, I had to fight for my history of Africa courses to count towards my degree, instead of taking a fourth semester of “Art in the Age of Antiquity” or something like that. This really paved the way for me to challenge the status quo and realize that I’m the author of my own canon. I realized that architecture was a great way to continue this exploration because it’s the perfect coming together of practice plus theory.
You then got your Masters at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yep, that took me to UPenn, originally for a Masters of Architecture. However, I had a wandering eye [laughs], and was always poking upstairs to see what the Landscape students were up to. They weren’t architecture-as-object oriented; they were talking about cities, public space, landscape equity, climate, and how humans adapt to all that. That was super provocative to me. What I realized was that I had the humility that it takes to work with landscape, because you have to take a step back and know that you are a small part of something larger, which is something I’ve always loved. I ended up picking up the two Masters Degrees from UPenn.
“...our design is going to look different next year, and the year after that, and knowing that we have to design with that change.”
Tell me more about the humility aspect - to me the humility of those that work with the landscape comes from the idea that they know how little they really can control.
You have to accept change as the given. The landscape is a living thing - everything weathers, there’s no freezing of time. We always have to realize that our design is going to look different next year, and the year after that, and knowing that we have to design with that change.
In the United States, I’ve noticed that we really have this attitude of control - that our destiny is in our hands, that we make our future what it is...and to some extent that’s true, and you certainly don’t want to deny anyone their agency, but I think other countries and cultures honor that we really don’t have that kind of control.
Exactly. You totally hit it on the head that it’s a cultural fallacy that we need to get over, because that’s a lot of people’s attitudes towards climate change. Like, “This is just an engineering project, we can engineer ourselves out of it.” But it’s not! It’s about scaling back and taking huge inventory of the way we live and design, from start to finish.
With this in mind, talk to me about the practices you’ve worked for prior to starting Dune Hai, and what you’ve learned.
I started in the exact place where I am today, which is working for practices that were trying to do things differently. All of my internships were in edgier places that were unhappy with the machine of the corporate world.
LA River Flags is a project that won the LA River Public Art Project award and is in a proof of concept phase. A collaboration between Anooshey Rahim and Graham Laird Prentice. Artwork by GLP.
Helen Diller Civic Center Playground. Image courtesy of Dune Hai.
I can totally relate to that. The anti-establishment.
Yes, and they were all trying to create new models of practice. We were experimenting with community-led design, and trying to figure out what architecture means in that regard. Then when I graduated, I went to work for a firm called Land Collective in Philly. They would talk endlessly about empathy-driven design, and I still carry that with me.
I then moved to California and started working with Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, which was another amazing experience. I learned so much about design and construction, and I really learned the art of the craft and that things that look effortless actually require a lot of effort.
These varied experiences have been really good for me, and I’ve never had one kind of job. I saw a lot of good possibilities within the world, and within the industry.
Tell me about starting your own practice after this.
I’ll start a little bit before I started Dune Hai, because a big initial milestone for me was working on the Hellen Diller Civic Center Playground. I had a lot of agency within the project - I did the design, the drawings, supporting the engineers, interfacing with the city and the contractors. It was all really empowering, and the veil was also lifted on getting high profile projects through the approvals process and through construction. Having gone through this milestone, I saw that I could take things on my own from start to end.
Another milestone towards starting my own firm was waking up one day and realizing I was completely fed up with the exploitative practices of architecture firms towards their employees. I wasn’t the only one feeling this way, I was seeing all of my friends at mid-size of starchitects practices across the states were going through it too. The endless hours, the constant deadlines, the never-ending iterations. Also all these projects with low fees but that needed a lot of work. I was so jaded and baffled by how the industry was underbidding itself, and it all just felt like a race to the bottom. Also, the salaries of entry-level architects have not changed for the past fifteen or so years! So I was really disenchanted with a lot, and I basically thought to myself, “You know what, fuck it - if this is what the state of the industry continues to be, I may as well do what I want and do my own thing.”
“I’m from a family of parents who moved from Pakistan to Texas, and there was so much layering of culture, and aesthetics, and texture. And all of it works, and it can work together!”
Tell me about Dune Hai.
Dune Hai has been around for about three years, so I feel like I’ve dug my heels into the ground. We are a burgeoning firm that is gaining recognition and commissions, and we’re also young and on a mission to blow up what contemporary landscape architecture looks like and how we’re doing this kind of work.
Also, a firm that is owned by a woman of color just simply operates differently. I purposefully did not name the firm after myself, because design is always a team effort. I want everyone who works under the Dune Hai flag to raise it proudly! I’m the middle of four siblings so I know how to share the limelight [laughs].
How does a firm that is owned by a woman of color operate differently?
I’m coming into it with the idea of equity, very foundationally. I don’t think that’s how most people start if they haven’t dealt with that their whole life. I always try to lift up the people around me because that’s what I wish someone did for me. Those experiences of being a woman of color and feeling like I had to fight my way through life a lot of the time, I don’t want to push that same challenge on others. I want everyone to feel like they have a voice, and that they can express it.
What have been some of the biggest challenges throughout your career?
I think the question should be, “What isn’t a challenge [laughs].” Everything about starting a business is challenging, but it’s also insanely rewarding. I’m realizing that you probably can’t have one without the other. Business ownership does take a warrior-type of person to power through. A recent challenge though has been finding a voice in terms of figuring out exactly what I want to put out into the world and represent. Coming up with a framework and a philosophy for the practice was difficult, and I very much had to shut out the surrounding noise to be able to focus on what I care most about.
This took an intense process of unlearning of a lot of the things I was conditioned to believe about myself. I asked myself repeatedly, “What does good design look like? What is it made out of? Who’s allowed to have it?” I didn’t think good design had to look a certain way. I’m from a family of parents who moved from Pakistan to Texas, and there was so much layering of culture, and aesthetics, and texture. And all of it works, and it can work together! I want to celebrate that story for people of any diaspora, and adapt these things into contemporary design and building practices. Celebrate the melting pot.
Hill Planes by Dune Hai
Hill Planes by Dune Hai
What would you say your mission is? What’s the impact you’d like to have on the world, and on the industry in general?
The impact I’d like to have is to leave the world and the industry better than how we found it.
Oh I love that.
And that is ecologically, humanistically, and for the working conditions throughout that process to be fair in every way. Design is a holistic process and should be treated as such. The whole cycle - the waste stream, the work ethic, the maintenance - is what being sustainable means. And this needs to be the given as a modus operandi going forward, not a consideration. We should operate this way for and throughout all projects, period.
So that’s the foundation, that’s where we begin. And then from there, our mission is to, like I said before, celebrate the melting pot! I’d like to bring ornament, respectful referential design, into design, and allow people to celebrate their interests and their differences in the spaces that we create for them. I want people’s cultures to come to the forefront - not every contemporary project needs to look the same way.
“Design is a holistic process and should be treated as such. The whole cycle - the waste stream, the work ethic, the maintenance - is what being sustainable means.”
Who are you admiring right now?
I’ve been looking at lot at what’s happening in the food world right now. I’m the biggest Padma Lakshmi fan girl ever, and David Chang is an all-around badass too. They’re doing exactly what I’m talking about - celebrating the diaspora, and how dishes with different influences live next to each other. Bringing that subversive way of looking at food into design is really powerful.
Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers? Do you have any additional advice for women specifically?
My advice is to speak your truth and to do what makes you happy. Don’t pay attention to what people expect of you if it isn’t what you want for yourself. You can’t be successful when you’re operating in the world in a way that you don’t want to be. One thing every generation is illuminating further and further is that there is not one single professional path to follow.
Something people also don’t talk about is that you can always go back! There’s no shame in that, to try something different and realize what you were doing before is more fitting, and to go back to that. I love having that safety, knowing that I can always go back to working at an office if I need to. That’s just my truth!
My advice for women is essentially the same, but maybe to a greater level - don’t take anyone’s shit. Ask questions, reach, figure it out...that’s what everyone does. A lot of women think they can’t do something because they don’t know enough, but no one tells men that something isn’t their place. They also aren’t born knowing everything - they learned things on the job. And so can we! Big exclamation mark.