A Process-based Approach

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices award spotlights North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices that have the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. This year, the League posed a series of questions to the eight practices that received a 2024 award, prompting each firm or individual to reflect on their working theories and methods, the opportunities and challenges of contemporary practice, and what’s next. 

Based in Minneapolis, multidisciplinary practice TEN x TEN’s projects range from industrial reuse to memorial design, united by a methodology that centers place-based research and local investment. Below, Ross Altheimer and Maura Rockcastle and of TEN x TEN discuss building their practice on a commitment to community, from office structure to project collaborators to the physical landscapes they create.

*

What does it mean to be an “emerging” practice or practitioner?

To us, emerging suggests revealing, seeing, acting, and making. As a verb, emerging signifies that what comes forward from our work is clear, powerful, obvious, and that this choice of creating landscapes through a process-oriented way of thinking and working has a material and spatial outcome that is unique and worth doing.

We love that emerging is not something fixed and finite, or a brief state of being, but rather an evolving practice where our mission, ways of seeing and thinking, and process is becoming evident as built landscapes.

We do not believe there is a signature TEN x TEN design form or style. Our power comes in part from how we’ve set out to do this work: embracing a horizontal approach to leadership, more transparent and unbiased methods of practice, and seeking design opportunities that emerge from listening, hearing, and communicating through open-ended and analog methods of making. To be recognized for that approach is validating and a hopeful indicator of where the field is going.

Our process is full of joy, inquiry, and curiosity that we hope leads us to a continuous state of emerging!

What does it mean for you to share your “voice” in the design field, in your community, in your practice?

We love to think about TEN x TEN’s collective voice; how can we expand it and build upon it? There are many voices contributing and responding to the work we create together, and we encourage listening, asking, hearing, and speaking to be cyclical and respectful, and to build power over time.

Within the idea of practice, the voice evolves. You practice, speak it into existence, see how it goes, and then it evolves. To expand it, you pull more people in to contribute and make that voice bigger or stronger or representative of the collective, giving it a different kind of power and contributing to a larger dialogue. It’s never singular; it’s plural—this is a firm of many voices, so we continue to make that a powerful part of our practice.

The voice we have within our local/regional community is also part of a broader conversation with other collaborators and clients. There’s a momentum that a practice can build by living one’s values, by being open and transparent, by uplifting the voices of those who are underrepresented, and by just fundamentally team-ing differently to elevate the larger community.

Where do you locate your practice environmentally, socially, and within the design field? 

Geographically we are in the Midwest within a mid-sized city. The scale of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Twin Cities as a whole, is unique compared to other places. We are deeply invested here and committed to being in community with our neighbors and local collaborators. We embrace opportunities to dive deeper into the environmental and social histories that define our immediate context, to understand the systems that they are connected to, and the policies and power dynamics that shape those things. What we have learned has significantly impacted how we approach social and environmental justice and how we approach these issues at various scales with and for our local BIPOC communities. We believe we can leverage landscape architecture to help tackle these issues, but also acknowledge that there are limits to what design and our medium can change.

What do you see as the main challenges for your firm’s practice in today’s economic, environmental, and political climate?

The biggest challenge for most of the projects that are struggling right now is a lack of funding, lack of sufficient design fees, and to some extent the limitations put on projects by outdated regulatory approval frameworks.

It is important to question and understand who is making decisions, who holds power, and who is at the table (or not). We can control what our practice brings to a project and how to pursue a project (who our partners are, what our fee is, what our engagement or sustainability approach might be), but we cannot always be sure what the client is carrying with them—what relationships, funding sources, or complex history they may hold. While many clients and organizations are changing for the better, or at least open to conversation about this complexity, we too often find ourselves facing systemic challenges rooted in regulatory or political power dynamics that impact outcomes and our ability to lean toward other models of practice.

When you are deciding whether to take on a project or collaboration, what questions do you ask yourself? What questions do you ask the client or collaborator?

One of the biggest questions for us revolves around the client and potential partners. We ask: Who are they serving? Do our values align? Where is the money coming from? Who’s the decision-making authority? Is it singular or collective? If it’s collective, how do we come to a consensus? What does that consensus structure look like? Who have they worked with in the past? From a variety of different perspectives, do we feel like we are the best partner for this? We are guided by a “no asshole” policy and strive to partner with collaborators and clients that share our values.

When considering taking on projects or collaborations, it is equally important for us to show up for collaborators and long-time partners whom we believe in. For example, we will partner on a project where the landscape scope is small, but we’re building a relationship with a women-owned or BIPOC-led firm or organization that is worth investing in.

How would you define research in your practice?

It’s a privilege to be able to commit to research. Our design research is focused on asking questions about design process and ideation, complex site histories and truth-telling, visual storytelling, and sensory experience. We work through open-ended and probing design research questions that aren’t solution-driven. Our agency as landscape architects to address the issues of our time is grounded in part by our ability to challenge the critical foundation of the design process itself and to practice new modes and methods of seeing and making as a generative act.

Our interests gravitate toward analog ways of testing and documenting, such as photography, drawing, cyanotypes, collecting, inventorying, or casting. These techniques activate the senses as a way of seeing and knowing that we believe is a valid form of research. It’s taken time to figure out how to talk about, present, and advocate for pursuing this type of design research with clients.

We are learning about what works or what could work, what builds new knowledge, and how to ask stronger questions. We are figuring out how to pair questioning with various modes of experimentation and more traditional forms of research in our projects. Some methods are more quantitative, and some are more qualitative, and both are important to our approach to design research.

Do you teach? What is the interplay between your teaching and practice?

Yes! We are both adjunct teaching at the University of Minnesota in the landscape and architecture departments. It can be a challenge to find balance between teaching and running a practice. The bottom line is we love both and are each committed to finding that balance.

Teaching allows us to test and evolve our approach, challenge our thinking, and work with students to build an expanded vocabulary of what a process-based approach means or can create. We bring a different perspective that feels important, and we love how students push and stretch that perspective. We also love the limitations of a semester: making informed decisions in a very short period of time, with the need to commit to something and build upon it quickly. We have also been working hard to develop a more successful community-engaged studio and work with highly contested sites embedded with deep and powerful layers of social trauma.

Do you prefer to work in a certain scale or typology, or do your projects range in scope? Is there a project type that you would like to design for but have not yet?

We work across scales happily, though we dream of working on sites that are bigger and have the capacity to engage more people and systems. Our projects range in typology, from residential to large parks to plazas, zoos, urban mixed-use developments, cultural and post-industrial landscapes, lakefronts, and riverfronts. We do design and planning work, as well as interpretation, wayfinding, and experience design. Our planning projects span contiguous landscapes upwards of 1,200 acres, while our implementation projects range from 5-40 acres typically.

When do you consider a project complete?

Projects are never complete! When we step away, they continue to grow and evolve; that is part of the magic and challenge of what we do. We design within a dynamic medium and completion perhaps marks a phase or stage from a contractual standpoint, but we design projects to thrive and change over long periods of time, so completion as an idea is limiting. 

How did you meet your partner? How did you decide to practice together?

We had heard about each other from various friends in Minneapolis for almost a year before we finally met in person in 2014. After sitting on student design juries together at the University of Minnesota, having coffee and sharing our previous work, talking about the future of practice, and doing a design competition together–we decided to make the leap and founded TEN x TEN.

Can you name a person, book, film, or other source of inspiration?

Maura: I love poetry, particularly Ada Limón; her book The Carrying is incredible. I recently read and loved Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl and am currently reading Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, from which I learned that there is a beautiful word for the smell of rain…petrichor.

Ross: On the Robert Macfarlane train I just finished his book Underland, I am obsessed with all things subterranean. I love film, and always come back to Andrei Tarkovsky movies, especially Nostalghia, for visual inspiration and the construction of both phenomenal landscapes and characters. I also am inspired by driving cross-country and experiencing big landscapes from the car.  We spent some time in Paradise Valley in Montana this past spring with my family, and those mountains, valleys, bison, barbed wire are still stuck in my brain.

Are there references, of any sort, that you find yourself drawing on again and again?

Maura: Mostly I draw inspiration from the physical world – microclimates, evidence of decay and mold, weathering, and places that have been left to their own devices or adapted by communities in unexpected ways. We also both draw significant inspiration from artists and have visited several particularly impactful exhibitions across the country together over the last decade such as Julian Charrière’s Erratic exhibition at SFMOMA, the Fragments of Epic Memory and Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts and Merce Cunningham: Common Time at the Walker Art Center.

Ross: Always art with Maura! I live near the Mississippi River in the section where it is a gorge and there are some spatial transitions that continue to feed me experientially, climbing down the bluff, smell of the seeping rocks, sound of the waterfalls, the wildness of the floodplain, moving into through the forest into the gorge, ice formations, caves, the coyote, it’s kind of endless.

What did you last draw?

Maura: A couple weeks ago I made a series of cyanotypes down by the Mississippi River using materials along the shoreline and the river itself to create the images. I also recently created a listening device to track specific emotions tied to remembrance and memory. The device was a simple pre-drawn grid (themes in the y-axis and time in the x-axis) and I developed a process for mark-making to track frequency and intensity of both the visible and audible emotion of the speaker, as well as my own emotional response. The drawings that resulted are simple and abstract, they are powerful reminders of a shared space of trust and vulnerability.

Ross: I began a series of movement drawings a few years ago and have a practice of sketching while running marathons to challenge the preciousness of drawing. I find the act of sketching while moving to be both a kind of meditation and a way to document the spatial/emotional/phenomenal experience. Recently, I ran 50 miles on the Appalachian Trail and made a drawing at every mile of the run. I used my thumbs on an iPhone app to capture a perspective, movement, or the sound of breathing. They are a raw, imprecise, record of 14 hours on the trail.

What do you need to do your best work?

Maura: Time, space, lots of great questions, and proximity to the outdoors.

Ross: Expansiveness, joy, ideas, coffee, dialogue, more coffee

What’s next?

So much of the joy of this practice has been embracing the unknown with as much fearlessness and grace as we can, so whatever is next—we are ready!

We have several projects on deck that we are very excited about— a contaminated riverfront site in northern Minnesota, a youth-oriented public landscape in upstate New York, a regional Midwest art museum landscape, and several campus landscapes focused on transformational innovation and storytelling that span from memorials to development projects.

TEN x TEN will be TEN years old next year, so of course a birthday party next April!