Principles in Motion: Ruderal's Sarah Cowles on Cities, Landscapes, Inventiveness, and Rigor
Sarah Cowles, portrait with Arsenal Oasis model. By George Kolbaia.
By Julia Gamolina
Sarah Cowles, ALSA, is founder of Ruderal LLC. Her inventive approach comes from twenty years of international experience and a localized understanding of place. Her projects address geopolitical realities to forge new relationships between ecology and culture. Notable works include the Betania Forest Garden, Arsenal Oasis, and the Mtatsminda Afforestation Plan. Her critical writing appears in many publications, including Landscape Architecture Magazine and Art Papers.
Cowles received a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD. She’s taught at The Ohio State University, University of Southern California, and Sam Fox School of Art and Design. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Sarah talks about an education in cities and accumulating a skillset from years of varied experiences, advising those just starting their careers to find a studio that invests in training their junior staff.
JG: You studied sculpture at the California College of the Arts—why sculpture and why CCA?
SC: My path to CCA started at The Putney School in Vermont, a progressive school where each student spent a semester rising at five in the morning to feed cows and shovel manure. We ran the kitchens, cleaned dorms, fed chickens, read books, and wrote papers somewhere in between. Evenings were for crafts—fiber arts, metals, and ceramics. For my senior project, I learned to arc weld a perfect bead.
I wanted to be a journalist then because I wanted to witness how the world was changing. In the spring of 1989, my Russian class took a trip to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Vilnius, where protests were in full swing. That part of the world felt exciting, and after graduating from Putney, I pursued Russian studies.
Unfortunately for my journalistic aspirations, all that well-rounded, liberal arts, hands-on farm life didn’t translate well to a lecture-based university education. I dropped out to teach snowboarding in New Mexico, until a friend’s mother saw my portfolio and recommended I apply to CCA in Oakland, California.
What do you take away from your time at CCA?
At CCA, I found that studio culture suited me. The campus was alive at night, students worked in the print shop while East Bay punk bands played on the terraces. I studied metals and textiles, alongside part-time jobs sewing bags for Timbuk2 and making parts in the model shop at Skellington Studio for the film James and the Giant Peach.
My understanding of the role of art in society shifted after my art history professor, Lydia Matthews, introduced me to process artists and land art. Making objects no longer seemed relevant, particularly in light of changes in the Bay Area at the time. New urban forms and vistas opened when Caltrans demolished freeways after the Loma Prieta earthquake. I began to see the city as a mutable, evolving stage for culture.
The ruderal team at the Sartichala Nursery, which supplies Caucasian Endemic species for their forest restoration projects. Photography by George Kolbaia.
How did you then come to landscape architecture?
My thesis project was an underground bike event titled “Cyclocross,” which drew from Bay Area performance practices and the Critical Mass movement. At that time, CCA had two campuses—design in San Francisco and fine arts and crafts in Oakland—and “Cyclocross” brought them together in a chaotic, ebullient Gesamtkunstwerk.
This led me to some years as a bike messenger in San Francisco. As a messenger, I saw former military lands like The Presidio and Crissy Field take shape as large parks, and I rested in parks designed by Lawrence Halprin and Peter Walker and Partners. I was inside every architecture and landscape studio in the Bay Area, delivering models and drawings.
Messengering was a life that happened to be a job. There’s also no better education on cities, class, and the information economy. But after the third or fourth time that someone deliberately tried to hit me with a car, I quit to intern with an ad agency right at the start of the Dotcom boom.
How did you then get to Harvard?
Though multimedia jobs paid well, I couldn’t give a shit about the end product–pixels on the screen. I considered getting an MFA, and then I saw the images of the MLA program in the RISD catalog and said, oh, I want to do that! I asked architect and CCA program head David Meckel for his advice on where to study, and he said, “Penn is focused on representation, and Harvard is focused on design.” While I didn’t know the discourse enough to know the difference, I guessed that design was more important in choosing a design school.
It all clicked when I visited George Hargreaves’ studio on the LA River at the GSD open house and saw the work on the walls: urban analysis, finding gaps in the city to retrofit with green infrastructure, and brownfield projects. In the early 2000s, the GSD was solid in site design. I studied with Martha Schwartz, Gary Hilderbrand, and George Hargreaves. The Fresh Kills and Downsview Park competitions shifted the landscape curriculum from “shapes on the ground” postmodernism to process-based, ecological approaches to site formation.
“I define success as setting principles in motion, providing the resources for something new to emerge, bringing people to a cause, and watching others take that momentum and run with it. I want the next generation to look at what we do and say—I want to do that; where do I start?”
How did you start the Ruderal Academy?
The Ruderal Academy began at Ohio State. I led a seminar called “Elegantly Wasted/Like a Virgin” that dug into the relationship between the “disturbed lands” genre of fine art and contemporary brownfield reclamation projects. On weekends, I explored the abandoned railyards, drive-in theaters, and quarries of Columbus’ fringes.
One such site, The Salt Mountain, was a massive road salt pile amid a ruderal forest in a former railyard. After rains, the salt would lay down stunning multicolor gradients, and that toxic brine flowed straight into the storm drains. I imagined a landscape that would reveal this beauty and create a sublime and constantly changing wild place but contain its danger. Ruderal Academy started when I gathered a crew of students to map the interactions between surface and salt, ruderal species, and soil.
And how did you end up taking Ruderal to Georgia?
In 2010, Lydia Matthews invited me to exhibit the Salt Mountain work at an exhibition in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. I stayed for weeks after, traveling with artists in Georgia, and returned that year to plan an art residence outside the capital. In my first years teaching at OSU, I’d lost several close family members, and I couldn’t find space to grieve and regenerate myself amid the demands of practice and tenure-track work. Georgia had a different pace . . . it held that space for me.
I won a Fulbright to teach in Georgia, but my sponsor got fired in a coup when I arrived, and suddenly I had no position. So, I initiated Ruderal Academy 2. A friend rounded up a strong group of art and architecture students and suggested I run a field school in Chiatura, a mining city. We spent a month riding cable cars, exploring caves and industrial ruins, drawing the sublime landscape, and we presented the work in an exhibition at the Tbilisi Triennial.
Now tell me about Ruderal, the landscape design practice. What are you focused on these days?
The turn from Ruderal Academy to Ruderal the practice began during my OSU tenure review period. When I read the committee’s evaluation letter, I saw that the initiatives I led that had the most potential, intellectually and for social connection and collaboration, were not seen as worthy; they were, in fact, outright discouraged. These personal, community-based, and site-specific projects gave me energy and were dear to my heart because they had sustained me through times of intense grief. That letter was meant to straighten me back onto the tenure track, but instead pointed me to an alternative, more abundant, open-ended, adventurous, and connected life.
We’re expanding our reach beyond Georgia, building partnerships with larger A&E firms to work on larger-scale landscape and infrastructure projects, and growing our production support services for landscape architecture and planning studios. We’re also busy on the ground. Our associates and interns from Germany, Denmark, and the US are expanding our horticultural research and supporting our community partners.
Betania Forest Garden, which includes a Miyawaki Forest planting of Cacuasian endemic tree and shrub species. Photography by Grigory Sokolinsky.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
Our challenges come in two flavors: force majeure and contextual. On the force majeure side, major setbacks included the departure of my first business partner, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ukraine War.
When my partner left, I had to decide: can I lead this by myself, or shut down? With friends cheering me on, I decide to lead. Then, we had only a few recent graduates on the team. But I remembered working at a studio when the entire senior staff quit, leaving only fresh graduates. The founder handed them the projects and had them figure it out. It’s a bit extreme, but that example showed me that while younger people may lack experience, they have fresh and brilliant approaches, workflows, and perspectives. I did the same at Ruderal, and the team rose to the occasion.
The pandemic ended up creating an opportunity for us. When the “Great Resignation” happened in the US, we began providing design production support services to companies in the US and EU. This work stabilizes our revenue and makes the business more resilient. Our staff delivers work at international standards and learns how different studios design, document, and complete projects.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
I’ve shifted my focus from the pulse of project timelines to business timelines: getting the work, setting the project's tone, and trusting the team to deliver. In Playing Big, Tara Mohr writes about how women are “good students”—good at following instructions, over-preparing, deferring to authority figures, and seeking approval from them. These skills get you to mid-level, but there are no authorities or clear steps to follow in leadership. I’ve found that while I may trust my design approach when leading a particular project, I used to have less experience reframing that intelligence to build and sustain a business.
In this recalibration, I’ve structured my days with early mornings of focused writing, drawing, or analysis before meetings and collective decision-making. Time outside is critical: I get my best insights into long-term thinking about the practice while walking in Tbilisi’s hills, immersed in what’s blooming or changing color.
“Don’t confuse seriousness with rigor. While seriousness will protect you, rigor is what structures risk-taking. However wild your project is, draw it so rigorously that people say, ‘Holy sh*t, she’s really gonna build that.’”
What are you most excited about right now?
We just celebrated our fifth anniversary. We’re moving from startup to established practice, and I’m actively seeking advice from studio founders on navigating the next five to ten years—write me! Seeing our team’s knowledge growing and coalescing in how we plan, design, and build landscapes and streamline our management processes is energizing. We keep a record of this work in progress, field research, and collaborations on our Substack.
The Black Sea region is also turbulent right now, which is both exciting and nerve-racking. We see the next ten years as pivotal in climate and geopolitics. We pay close attention to the news: Which armed conflicts will start or resolve in the region? How will transport corridors remap around those conflicts? Georgia looks set to be a transport and commerce center in a new geography linking Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Who are you admiring now and why?
The faculty leading the landscape architecture program at Auburn University: David Hill, Emily Knox, Sarah Coleman, Rob Holmes. They’ve built a program focused on deliberate site study and tactile work. In terms of practitioners, I’m admiring Catherine Mosbach. I describe her as a stratigraphic painter of landscapes: building landscapes through section, exposing the layers’ thickness and material.
Then there’s Mimi Zeiger, because she’s forged her own path, as culture-maker, interlocutor, and dot-connector. She is living proof that you can go from self-publishing a zine to an international curator. She brings people and practices on the risky fringes to our attention by dropping a prism onto their work, and building the frameworks for us to interpret why that work matters.
Finally in Georgia, community leaders Data Tsintsadze and Ana Trapaidze who are working to reclaim and rehabilitate sections of the Mtvari River floodplain in Rustavi and Tbilisi, respectively. They are fighting legal battles, winning grants, and creating an ambitious movement for environmental protection and the reclamation of public space in the city.
Sarah Cowles at the Arsenal Oasis opening, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. Photography by George Kolbaia.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And what does success in that look like to you?
I want to build landscape spaces and systems of reconciliation, refuges, gardens of restitution, and places to hold difficult conversations. Gardens—if we give them time and attention—provide perspective by bringing us closer to lives and timescales outside of the immediate situation.
In my work, I aim to find the loopholes and surpluses in systems to initiate and guide ecological and social processes and tend them as they unfold; to uncover the latent ecological intelligence around us and make it visible, legible, and open to interpretation. I define success as setting principles in motion, providing the resources for something new to emerge, bringing people to a cause, and watching others take that momentum and run with it. I want the next generation to look at what we do and say—I want to do that; where do I start?
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Practice is a long game. Skills take a long time, but the first years are critical. When interviewing, ask what training they provide. What are the processes, criteria, and timelines for advancement? Determine what that studio does best—plants, detailing, CD sets, concept, etc—and latch onto the person with the most experience. It’s good for the studio—you’ll be doing more of the core “good thing” they do—and if you get laid off, you can take that gorgeous planting plan with you.
Don’t confuse seriousness with rigor. While seriousness will protect you, rigor is what structures risk-taking. However wild your project is, draw it so rigorously that people say “Holy sh*t, she’s really gonna build that.”
Finally, buy a chunky statement ring, made of enamel, turquoise, agate, resin, or whatever. This is your “I am going to pretend I didn’t see you underestimating me” ring. Wear it every day, and rest your hand with the ring on the table anytime you need to reclaim your space.