Taryn Wiens
I’m a landscape designer and researcher. I look for ways to foreground time-based land practices as a primary medium of designing with landscapes and people. I research how thinking with soil can expand public knowledge and engagement around land toward social and ecological justice in a thick temporal context. I currently work as a Landscape Designer at Ground Workshop and manage Test Plot PDX, an initiative to co-create post-industrial restoration gardens with communities in North Portland.
My research is primarily concerned with how earth materials show up in entangled relations and structures of power through diverse timescales. Recent projects consider soil as a lens for revisiting labor histories at Bos Park, how the ground holds the memory of land practices changed by colonization and incarceration,and how temporary design actions can engage with the racialized history of vacant parcels to counter a blank-slate development approach.
My writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Landscape Research Journal, and an award-winning issue of Site Magazine, and presented at the National ASLA conference. My work has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, a Benjamin C. Howland Traveling Fellowship, and the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation.
As a designer at Nelson Byrd Woltz and Ground Workshop I’ve worked on a wide range of projects,from residential gardens and affordable housing to the Jackie Joyner Kersee Campus for the Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition Center in East St Louis, a comprehensive landscape plan for Filoli in California, the Dell Slopes at the University of Virginia, Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, NC, a conservation agriculture project in Northern Virginia, and a public park in North Bend, Oregon.