We often speak of landscape architecture in terms of functionality, aesthetics, or ecological value. But what about meaning? What about those less tangible but deeply resonant elements — memory, narrative, identity — that bind people to place? As designers, our work is not just about shaping space; it’s about shaping how people feel, remember, and connect. Meaningful landscapes are revealed through stories, uncovered through listening, and anchored in material that holds memory. And it is through this that landscapes become well-loved and withstand the test of time.
Between the lines
The notion of landscapes as a cultural text is not new. Writers like James Corner, Christophe Girot, and Elizabeth Meyer have long considered landscape not simply as a backdrop to human activity, but as a layered, temporal medium. Corner’s concept of recovering landscape invites us to ‘uncover’ rather than ‘impose’, calling for practices that respond to context and reveal latent meaning. Girot’s idea of ‘landing, grounding, finding, and founding’ proposes a sequence of gestures for revealing a site’s identity through its topography, memory, and use.
This approach to landscape as living stories is evident in the work of Walter Hood, whose projects bring visibility to histories often overlooked. Closer to home, the new Cape Town Labour Corps Memorial in The Company’s Garden takes up the same challenge. It reframes memorialisation not as an act of monumental permanence, but as a textured, living surface within a layered public space.
Panorama Park by Hood Design Studio, photographed by Steven J. Magner: the new spaces create a palimpsest in which the layers of history can be read.
Holding stories
Our practice at Yes& Studio has increasingly focused on public spaces shaped by everyday use and layered histories. We are working towards a methodology of understanding space, rooted in listening, research, and contextual depth, in order to give us clues about how to design. One such project finds its home on a key historical square in Langa, a place marked by control and surveillance under apartheid, but also by stories of the everyday. We have viewed the entire project as an opportunity to uncover the complex stories and multiple histories of the place. In developing a narrative, we conducted interviews with community elders and, in so doing, identified themes that will impact the designs of the place. Similarly, our work at the Adderley Street Flower Market reveals another mode of storytelling: one rooted in multigenerational trade. Here, flower sellers have occupied the same stretch of the city since the early 1900s. Theirs is a living heritage. Our work here involved co-creating a visual and oral archive with the flower sellers. We asked: who appears in your oldest market photographs? What plants did your grandmother sell? How has the market changed over time?
In both Langa and Adderley Street, meaning did not come from design intent, but from listening. It came from holding space for stories that are often overlooked, particularly those told by women.
The materiality of memory
More than shaping form or surface, materials carry embedded narratives and associations that allow a landscape to resonate at a deeper level. When chosen with care and contextual sensitivity, materials can evoke memory, mark presence, and prompt reflection. Stone, for example, can express permanence, weight, and deep geological time. Its textures and mineral compositions speak of the land from which it was extracted, and its weathering over time can reinforce the sense of a landscape that is alive, ageing, and evolving. Rough, uncut stone may evoke the rawness of nature, while precisely cut or polished stone might suggest ceremony or reverence. The choice between them is never purely aesthetic — it’s laden with meaning.
Ilhaam Benjamin, photographed by Ashraf Hendricks: Ilhaam has been a flower seller at the market for the last 45 years.
Timber, by contrast, can convey warmth, tactility, and a connection to human scale and touch. Its grain can evoke a link to the once-growing tree and its susceptibility to wear and decay, which, if untreated, remind us of impermanence. Reclaimed wood, in particular, carries traces of previous use — inviting reflection on cycles of reuse and transformation.
Weathering steels like Corten patinate over time, becoming more textured as they are exposed to the elements. This weathering can be seen as a gesture of temporal marking — allowing the material itself to record time and environmental change. Polished metals, on the other hand, may signify precision and control. When metals are etched, punctured, or layered, they can begin to hold shadow, light, and trace in ways that suggest absence or reveal what is hidden. Materiality is not just what a space looks like; it is how a space feels, how it changes, and how it communicates. Through wear, patina, and interaction, materials accumulate stories and hold memory. They are the physical interface between people and place. Sustainable landscape design is about injecting meaning at every turn, from the material use to the structure. In this way, you create spaces that are weighted with the stories of the past and hold space for the stories of the future.
Langa, photographed by Kurt Ackerman
