VITA Featured in Green Business Quarterly Magazine Article
When In Rome…
By Courtney Boyd Meyers
Nov/Dec 2010
VITA Planning and Landscape Architecture may not be of the cultures for which it designs, but it traverses ancient Hawaiian traditions and Buddhist ideas with a reverence that speaks volumes of its dedication to the community.
As today’s massive engineering firms continue to gobble up small architecture agencies, the few boutique firms left must hold their ground with incredible talent, personalized client attention, and unique vision. And in many cases they are; one has to look no further than VITA Planning and Landscape Architecture, a small company of 15 planners and landscape architects located in California’s beautiful Marin County that hold to a very special, holistic design philosophy. According to Don Vita, the founder of VITA, good design is both culturally and socially relevant; good design has a sustainable component to it, not only environmentally responsible but also socially responsible; a well-designed community creates jobs and is able to support itself, as opposed to draining resources from elsewhere; and “good design has some expression of the individual that created it,” he asserts.
The man behind the philosophy has been in the industry for more than 30 years and goes to great lengths to research local customs, environmental issues, and history before laying pencil to paper. Out of respect for both the natural and cultural aspects of a setting, VITA strives to merge the built environment with nature through thoughtful, collaborative design. The firm takes great care to work with local cultures as a part of sustainable development. When planning the Kukio Beach Club in Hawaii, Vita implemented an ancient Hawaiian tradition called Ahu’PuaHa. Ahu’PuaHa is the process of dividing long, skinny pieces of land that run from the ocean to the mountains. This allowed the indigenous people to access all of the island’s resources—seafood from the ocean, drinking water from fresh water streams, and harvestable wood from the mountains’ forest areas to make canoes and build shelters.
In Hawaii, the orientation of mountain and ocean is called mauka (mountain) and makai (sea), and it remains a strong cultural feature of Hawaiians’ everyday life. (Even new residents learn the terms early on, because, as “north” and “south” have little relevant meaning, mauka and makai are the words used when giving directions.) VITA placed new plots along long-view corridors so that guests could walk from their lanais (the Hawaiian word for patio or terrace) to the ocean in bare feet.
Last year, VITA worked in South Korea planning 800 acres at the Preserve at Oak Valley, located outside of Seoul. For this plan, VITA drew on influences from the Buddhist tradition. Before entering a Buddhist temple, one must pass through three symbolic gates as part of the purification process before one is worthy to pray. For the Preserve at Oak Valley, VITA used this idea to create three gates in the community. The first is the gatehouse of the community. Then the visitor passes through a tunnel of trees and comes upon a fissure. Here the visitor passes under a bridge, symbolic of the second gate, to come upon the view of a preserved hillside. Finally, the designers created a tunnel, and its exit acts as the final gate. After the viewer leaves the tunnel, an expansive valley floor opens up and the visitor has finally entered the inner sanctum of the community.
In the United States, the firm recently finished Branson High School in Ross, California, which is the first school in the area to received LEED Platinum certification. Christian Lemon, the principal landscape architect on the project, restored the surrounding land back to native grasses and vegetation and implemented green roofs and rain gardens. “Our master plan effort was to tie the campus together in an understandable fashion,” Lemon says, “putting car traffic on the perimeter and establishing an interior, like a college campus.”
“The school is very close to where I live,” Don adds. “For me, the project was so special; it was about making something I’d want in my own backyard.” His colleague, Lemon, a landscape architect for nearly 20 years, was first inspired to work in landscape architecture after growing up in winsome Lake Tahoe. “I think there’s a small portion of the profession that was doing sustainable design all along,” he says. “But now, as opposed to 30 or 40 years ago, sustainable design is market driven and there are a lot more clients now who are interested in it. When we design, we try to save the natural systems that are already in place. We don’t want to re-design the lay of the land. If we can just do less, that’s the best sustainable method.” With this simple, holistic, less-is-more philosophy, VITA works with clients on the entire process, from helping them choose a piece of land to putting in the very last shrub, an attitude that will continue to bring them business over larger firms.
