Responses to landscape: David Trubridge's The Other Way
In 2022, David Trubridge - best known as one of New Zealand’s most successful designers of lighting and furniture - drew from his journals and photographs of trips he has made to some of the wildest places on planet Earth to bring a “love letter to land and sea” alive.
He called it The Other Way, and its 13 chapters, written with an energy akin to Matt Vance’s Innerland, offer a life-affirming unfolding of observations from his adventures in Antarctica, Australia, Iceland, Japan, the Grand Canyon, Italy, Rapa Nui, Valparaiso, Patagonia, Argentina and Alaska, concluding with masterful memories of a special trip made in early 2021 to the “fecund darkness” of Tamatea/ Dusky Sound.
In a brief review for BayBuzz, Louise Ward writes: “It’s the philosophy that’s the thing. David’s writing is gentle but firm … He makes us look, really look, like we would have as children”.
In the book’s foreword, David’s good friend Kennedy Warne writes: “When you meet some people there’s a sense of inevitability, an intersection of lives and journeys that couild not be otherwise. I think of albatrosses, who, after long years of oceanic solitude, align with others of their kind, winging homeward.
“This was the case when I met David at a symposium in 2013. We discovered a shared interest in everything from Paleolithic cave art to paddleboarding, and in the mystery of human connection to landscape [and] we spoke of our admiration for the wordviews of indigenous societies, where people do not see themselves as separate from nature”.
Warne states that “the testimony of The Other Way is that when a person seeks an encounter with landscape that is alive to all its vital being, the land reveals itself generously, lavishly and sometimes with astonishing force”.
He gives the book its due place not just as a ‘love letter’ but as a ‘visual poem’: “From fractured planes of ice to burnished copper reflections on water, from Kandinsky-patterned rocks in the Pilbara to the weathered grain of an Italian door, image after image signs the land’s song”.
Before teaching himself to make furniture David trained as a Naval Architect in England. This year marks 40 years since he settled in Aotearoa with his family, living mostly in Hawke’s Bay where his business is based. His first major international breakthrough came at the 2001 Milan Furniture Fair when his now famous Body Raft was picked up for manufacture by Cappellini, a hugely influential Italian furniture company.
When David learnt that April is World Landscape Architecture Month he said he would be honoured to contribute to a celebration of landscape architecture by sharing a chapter from The Other Way. This is reproduced here:
Valparaíso
Ageing Gracefully - Valparaíso, by David Trubridge from The Other Way
Valparaíso, you are a beautiful old lady and you wear your age with pride and grace. You are covered in wrinkles, cracks and decay but still you sparkle with colour. You have not been overrun by gentrification. The wealthy will buy anything with character and in owning it they suffocate it. So far, they have not claimed you; they have not glossed you over with a lifeless veneer as they have in so many other towns.
I stated at the outset that I struggle in cities, but I found something special and more innately human in ‘Valpo’, similar to what I found in the market squares of Italian villages.
Here are people who have grown old with the city, people who, it would seem to me, have not lost their spirit. Artists have left their marks on every surface, telling their stories, bringing to life their visions with brilliant daubs of colour. But as we float through for a few days, how can we really tell what is going on behind these walls? I see faces of old men in open windows, gazing out, sometimes only a few inches away from my world on the pavement. What is their story? Some houses are empty ruins, vacant shells or ragged piles of rusty corrugated iron. The former owners, the 'disappeared' victims of the past dictatorship, cannot be legally declared dead so no one can buy their properties, which remain as mute and recriminating memorials.
These decaying remains, devoid of human life, generate a sense of mystery, of questions that remain unanswered.
I pay a few pesos at a turnstile and ride an ascensor, or funicular railway, up the steep hillside. The rickety, bent rails gleam with black oil and the ancient cabin sways and creaks on its angled perch. Young tourists take selfies of themselves, seeing the world as it relates to them. I gaze out at the steeply rising tracks and try to imagine all the people who have travelled here in the past.
Descending, I follow a street, too precipitous and narrow for traffic. It twists and turns down a ridge with a walled drop on one side and a staircase of houses on the other. A small chalkboard leaning against a step announces a café and I wander in. It is called ‘Trabalenguas’ which means 'tongue twister'. No espresso machine—only patiently made filter coffee and home baking. It is shared by six people who each work one day a week; they are happy with the slow pace and serving only those few people who stumble on it, like me.
It is fitted out entirely with recycled timber and furniture. In places the old wooden skeleton of the building is revealed up to the high ceilings. This is the norm here, where the new stands out like a plastic bottle on a pristine beach, arrogant and assertive, indifferent to the beauty of its surroundings, raw and untouched by time or use.
Valparaíso, you are beautiful like no other city I have seen. I hope you remain so.
Here is a tiny plaza to which Linda and I are drawn by loud and lively music. Every surface is covered in mosaics of brightly coloured tile fragments. Sunlight glitters through fresh green tree leaves, shafts falling on the pavement and steps. A few makers sell their craft and food. We buy something, as much to contribute to this place as for any other reason.
Further down, on the other side of the street, a musician serenades a couple with his singing and guitar. We pause and listen, then clap; he raises his hat and offers a namaste gesture of thanks. Around the corner we come on more recycling: an old prison has been turned into a 'Parque Cultural'. It is an open green space where many people are gathered for picnics and kids play around newly planted trees. A rusting tower, built to keep watch on the prisoners, now stands guard over a wall of street art painted on old brickwork. A more imposing and higher stone fortification is being used as a climbing wall with traceries of ropes and spreadeagled figures trying to climb in where prisoners once dreamed of climbing out.
From our hotel room we gaze out over the placid Pacific Ocean. Ships of the Chilean Navy are rafted up together and small freighters lie at anchor, protected by the steep hills of the point from the winds farther out. Before the Panama Canal opened, this was the most important and modern port city in South America, built largely by the British. Like Mariehamn, Valparaíso is another name that resurfaces from my youth, reminding me of my love for the great days of sail. Windjammers, working around Cape Horn and up the west coast as far as San Francisco, would stop here and fill this harbour with dense patterns of spars and rigging. Now they are only a memory, like so much else here.
I am in Valparaíso in 2017, after Rapa Nui, to give my presentation ‘Beauty Matters’ at a Festival of Ideas. The event closes with a cocktail reception in an art gallery. The small low space is full and at first I see only the throng of people.
But then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a proud face. He is staring at me from an old black and white photograph. He wears furs, and a few white marks are dotted across his skin. Alongside him there is a similarly dressed woman; equally arresting in her commanding gaze. She stares down the lens and over the passing years.
I discover that these are Juan Kocitel and Rosa Kauxia of the Selk'nam tribe in Tierra del Fuego. The exhibition is a series of photographs taken in the early 1920s by Martin Gusinde, an Austrian missionary and anthropologist.
The crowd behind me is forgotten and I become immersed in a tragic past. Gusinde documented in intimate detail the last remaining members of three tribes from Tierra del Fuego, the Selk’nam, the Yámanas and the Kawéskar, before they became extinct.
There are many head-and-shoulder portraits; all stare blankly—and to my eye accusingly—at the camera. There are pictures of naked figures covered in white paint patterns against a backdrop of snow, and depictions of secret spiritual ceremonies. Some show assimilated tribe members in European dress.
Behind them is the harsh Tierra del Fuegian landscape, tangled dwarf forests and glacier lakes. Even were the photos in colour, they would look no different because the hues of the wintry landscape are a bleak monotone.
The contrast between this world and the people around me is heart-breaking. The colourful crowd stand with backs turned, drinking cocktails and nibbling on canapés. They are drowned in their own hubbub, with no inkling of, or interest in, the faces that stare at them. I want to shout out, to make the crowd to see what I’m seeing, to notice the contrast and vast gulf between the world we occupy today and this view of the past. I can’t blame them—they would probably be sympathetic if they would only turn around. But the privilege on which I ride cuts deep. I share common values and concerns with my peers here—we can communicate in a way that would have been impossible with the Fuegians, had I met them. And yet in a certain way I feel closer to those proud figures in their rugged landscape. I would be more comfortable walking in the silent space of their open moors, breathing in clean air, than contained in this noisy and affluent city building.
When a people die so does the voice of the land. Over thousands of years Indigenous populations come to know their land like no other. They have learned the properties of the local plants, what they can eat, what they can use as medicine; they know the weather and seasons; they know the other creatures that live there on land and water, and how to hunt them sustainably. They have their own words for all this, and when they die, language and knowledge go with them. We all know the settler story by now: how they came in with their own knowledge, how they believed their ways were superior, how they thought they could ‘use’ the land better. But the repeated outcomes are too many to ignore: settlers know nothing of the place, they try to impose their own ways from elsewhere and they seldom ask the natives for local wisdom before wiping them out. Now the Fuegians are no more, and the land has lost a valuable voice.
In his closing epilogue to The Other Way David writes:
Imagine you are standing up close to a tree. Its trunk fills your vision. Initially it is just a brown blur, but with time you start to notice details. Your eyes follow deep rivulets in the bark. Lichens grow in blotches of grey and yellow colour. Insects occasionally trickle up and down. You have known nothing else: this is your entire world in all its intricate detail and texture.
Now take a step backwards. Your range of vision widens and you realise that there are other trees, some like yours, others quite different. And in between something new: patterns of green foliage, clusters of ferns fanning up from the ground, looping coils of vines. Your world becomes more complex with a new palette of colours and range of textures. There is a hint of perspective, a depth between the near and far trees … This is Life.
David’s first book, So Far, was published by Nelson-based publisher Potton & Burton in 2015. Amongst his favourite writers he lists Robert Macfarlane, Barry Lopez, Patti Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Bernard Moitessier and Bruce Chatwin.