Future History: Lo-TEK’s Julia Watson on Sustainable Infrastructures, Multiple Permutations, and Symbiosis with the Planet
By Julia Gamolina
Designer, activist, and academic, Julia Watson is a leading expert on indigenous technologies. Her new book with Taschen, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism is a bestseller and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company, CNN, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and more. Julia teaches Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia University. She’s the Principal of Julia Watson, a landscape and urban design studio with a focus on indigenous design.
She has written for Arch Daily, Blueprint, loARCH, Kerb, Seacities, Scroope, Nakhara Journal, Water Urbanisms East and co-authored ‘A Spiritual Guide to Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage’. She is a fellow of Summit REALITY, Pop!tech, Christensen Fund, Charles Eliot, and the Olmsted award. This year she will be speaking at TED, COP 26, Venice Biennale, Dubai Expo 2020 and The Conference 2020 in Malmo, Sweden. Born in Australia, she travels to visit indigenous cultures and sacred sites across the globe. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Julia talks about the multiple permutations of her career and thinking of sustainable infrastructures for urban living, advising those just starting their careers to think about their larger body of work and their core reason for doing what they do.
JG: Let’s start at the very beginning - tell me how you grew up, and what you liked to do as a kid!
JW: I grew up in Brisbane, Australia, with a mother who was born in Egypt and a father who is Australian. My mother’s family were first generation immigrants who were ethnically cleansed from Egypt - they were Greek originally.
We grew up in a neighborhood that was pretty foundational for me; it’s called West End and it was an inner city neighborhood, ten minutes from the center of the city, and known for being the most multicultural. Previously, it was known to be an area with a really large indigenous population and villages. It was an epicenter really, for the indigenous community, and the presence was really felt strongly in the neighborhood and on the street. This was not the case in other areas in Brisbane at all.
A young fisherman walks under a living root bridge at Mawlynnong village, India. In the relentless damp of Meghalaya’s jungles the Khasi people have used the trainable roots of rubber trees to grow Jingkieng Dieng Jri living root bridges over rivers for centuries. Photography by Amos Chapple.
Qasab reed has long served as raw material for homes, handicrafts, tools, and animal fodder with the distinctive mudhif houses of the Ma’dan people appearing in Sumerian artwork from five thousand years ago. Photography by Esme Allen.
A view over the sacerd Mahagiri rice terraces, a small portion of the one thousand year old agrarian system known as the subak, which is unique to the island of Bali, Indonesia. Photography by David Lazar.
What did you study?
I ended up studying architecture in Brisbane, at Queensland University. They had a really strong indigenous design research unit, so every single student in architecture in second year took a seminar called Aboriginal Environments. That was a really strong presence of investigation of and collaboration with the indigenous community in the architecture school, and that was incredibly informative as well.
The other thing too is that I grew up with grandparents who lived at the beach, called the Gold Coast. The beach was an hour away and so I was always back and forth from the city, which lay on this really wide snaking river with mud flats, and the coast of the West Pacific. You’re always exposed to the natural environment, and you’re very aware of your natural environment, living here. Especially because the population here is 25 million, which is basically the population of New York City…so you can imagine the kind of density we have here [laughs]. We have a very strong connection here to nature, to the rainforest, to the river, to the mangroves, as well as a very strong academic and design introduction to indigenous culture and also to urban indigenous culture.
I grew up in Siberia, which I imagine could not be more different than the Gold Coast [laughs]. I’ll send you some photos of our fur coats and hats.
[Laughs] The tundra!
Very much so. How did you get your start in the field?
There was one firm in Brisbane that was a kind of coveted firm to work for, John Mongard Landscape Architects, who were really exceptional in their community design and also landscape assessment. They had also worked on some seminal projects for indigenous public housing. I was studying landscape architecture after I studied architecture, and I got a job with John and his partner Jacqueline Ratcliffe, and ended up spending a couple of years there doing some of the most interesting work.
I thought that this was it, that this was the best I could do - I was working for an amazing practice and doing the type of work I had wanted to. Then, all my friends from high school moved to London – they called me every Saturday night, which was Sunday morning in Brisbane, and tell me what a great time they were having and how much fun it was [laughs]. And I was like, “Gosh, I have such a great life here, but what am I missing out on!” So I was basically peer pressured into moving to London. I wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t, but I did go to London to live with seven other Aussies in a tiny flat.
“Ultimately, I am thinking through where the most impact can be made and where the most advocacy and allyship can happen, and what can we, in the little time that we call one life, do for the mission of humans being more symbiotic with the planet.”
Where did you work?
I worked for a lord in London, Lord Randle, on some incredible landscape projects - things for the Valentino Garden in Holland Park, for example. I did take a bit of a side path in my work in London though, because I really was interested in design within indigenous communities on the island of Borneo, and especially one that had been working with the Swiss environmentalist communities and assisting them with their advocacy to retain rights to the land in the center of Borneo.
So I went to Borneo, completely on a side trip, which is not something many Aussies do, and I spent a month visiting the communities. That was a really pivotal moment in understanding what was happening in places around the world that wasn’t being discussed. There were and are a lot of political tensions associated with these topics also, and I was trying to understand all of it. This time in my life was really about piecing the puzzle together between aboriginality, indigeneity, land, sacredness, ecosystems, and what points of intervention and activism, as a designer, could relate to a body of work and my relationship professionally and my interests.
How did you get to the United States?
I eventually went back to Australia and worked for another exceptional practice there, and through that met Mario, who was a landscape architect and was talking a lot about Harvard. So I thought, “Oh, maybe I should apply for a post-professional Masters there,” and I did, and I went! I moved in 2006 with a one way ticket and a dream, thinking I would go back to Australia and come back when I graduated. This was now nineteen years ago, and I’m still here!
A line of evenly spaced spoil craters snake along the surface of the desert from the high Elburz Mountains to the Plains of Iraq and is the only evidence of an invisible, subterranean man-made water stream called a qanat, first constructed by the Persians during the early years of the first millennium BCE. Photography by Alireza Teimoury.
In the Southern Wetlands of Iraq, an entire Ma’dan house known as a mudhif, which is built entirely of qasab reed without using mortar or nails, can be taken down and re-erected in a day. Photography by Jassim Alasadi.
Tell me how your own studio came about - there have been a few iterations of it, and I’d love to hear about the full trajectory.
I graduated with a concentration of looking at sacred indigenous landscapes and the contestation that happens around those landscapes, and then started teaching and founded a firm soon after. The first project for that firm was working with a really incredible academic who has spearheaded a lot of programs with various institutes around the world, and I worked with him on the biodiversity conservation plan for the UNESCO cultural heritage of the landscapes of Bali, and Bali’s first UNESCO world heritage site to start figuring out tourism in that area and what these sacred places, landscapes, and living cultures needed to be protected from systems that were put in place, like world heritage, that often disrupt indigenous communities governance and have impacts from tourism to pollution to disruption of labor cycles. And that was how the studio started!
Where do you feel like you’re in your career today? What’s exciting to you right now?
I’ve always been one of those people who has been excited by everything, which is both a blessing and a curse [laughs]. Obviously twenty years of research and seven years of writing Lo-TEK, and the publication of Lo-TEK, has pushed my career in a trajectory from primarily teaching and doing projects on the side to projects at larger scales, and within that, working with more complexity and introducing some of the ideas that have evolved through my teaching and writing, into the built world and practice.
I am still writing though - I’m working on a sequel, I’m working on an original content television series, and I’m working on exhibition that’s opening in May with Buro Happold, and specifically with Smith Mordak, who is the head of sustainability there. We’re working with three indigenous communities to come up with scenarios for future technologies for the year 2040 whereby Lo-TEK has become the way we start to design infrastructure for cities. It’s an imaginary project that went from reality to future history, but it’s very exciting. And I’m still doing consulting work with different big global companies to try and help them with systemic change to move them toward being more sustainable. Ultimately, I am thinking through where the most impact can be made and where the most advocacy and allyship can happen, and what can we, in the little time that we call one life, do for the mission of humans being more symbiotic with the planet.
“...the more that you find the essence of the work that you want to be involved in, and a community of people who support that work and understand what it is that is so important about it, the lesser the challenge becomes and the more strategic you can be.”
Within all of that, and in your career at large, what have been some of your biggest challenges? How did you manage through them and arrive to where you are today?
Everything is a challenge [laughs]. The beginning of any new thing is a challenge, and then you get through it and you think, “Ok, what’s going to come my way next?” And then you get pregnant and have a baby and think, “Yep, now this is the biggest challenge,” [laughs]. I had a child almost a year ago, and I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges of recent times, finding that balance of being an incredible mother and partner and also being able to have time to keep on forwarding the body of work that allows me to thrive and survive.
Writing a book though felt like a first child; just every step of the process felt like such a challenge, but was also so rewarding. There is no guidebook that I found to writing a book, so I was certainly making it up as I went along. That was one of the most difficult but incredible projects I had ever taken on.
Having your own practice comes with incredible challenges, although so do partnerships, and so I think the more that you find the essence of the work that you want to be involved in, and a community of people who support that work and understand what it is that is so important about it, the lesser the challenge becomes and the more strategic you can be.
With the community of people who understand and support your work in mind, who are you admiring right now? Who is out there in the world doing work that you’d want everyone to know about?
There’s one author that I’m reading, Tyson Yunkaporta, who is an Australian indigenous author and academic, and he’s blowing my mind in many different ways. The book is called Sandtalk, and it talks about indigenous systems thinking and how it’s a completely different perspective on how we think about systems for problem solving. For example, how do we think about economics in an indigenous way? Even though I feel like I’ve been exploring these communities for a long time, I’ve never read anything like this and the way that he writes and the accessibility to these ideas is incredible. It is not easy to write like this [laughs], and he does it! His work is mindblowing, and his talks are too.
Las Islas Flotantes is a floating island system on Lake Titicaca in Peru inhabited by the Uros, who build their entire civilization from the locally grown totora reed. Photography by Enrique Castro-Mendivil.
Las Islas Flotantes is a floating island system on Lake Titicaca in Peru inhabited by the Uros, who build their entire civilization from the locally grown totora reed. Photography by Enrique Castro-Mendivil.
Built by the Tofinu, the city of Ganvie meaning ‘we survived’ floats on Lake Nokoué surrounded by a radiating reef system of twelve thousand acadja fish pens. Photography by Iwan Baan.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their careers?
I think that it takes a lot for an individual to stay engaged in and inspired by a profession, especially a profession like architecture, for a really long period of time because you’re met with so many different challenges. And, if you’re really passionate, you’re always wanting more and you’re hungry and I don’t think all of your needs are met by some of the positions and opportunities that are afforded to you when you’re younger in your career. I do think though that thinking of every job and every project you take on, as a piece in building your larger career and body of work, and your thesis as to why you do what you do, can be very productive.
All of your investigations are building toward something, and that’s how you can find satisfaction in the more mundane parts of life - like writing that email, or doing that floorplan, or the rendering that takes up your entire weekend. We do have portfolios that represent our body of work, but I’m not sure that a portfolio truly does justice to all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. So finding within yourself what your core thesis is, will guide you through what a career might be.
Also understanding that within a career, there will be multiple permutations, is calming because you know that your progression will take the form of many means. Your role and classification can always be fluid, and for me, that has always been necessary. I think that at the end of your life, if you can say that you’ve tried your best to make your impact, then that’s something that you can sit with.