Professor Daniel Roehr teaches landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia (UBC) www.sala.ubc.ca and lab https://blogs.ubc.ca/greenskinslab/. He is a licensed landscape architect in British Columbia and Berlin, Germany and has practiced in Europe, North America, and Asia (Japan and China) before full time teaching 2006 at UBC.
Drawing has been Daniel’s passion since early childhood, inspired by his father’s work as a stained-glass window painter and artist and his mother, a gallery owner. During his professional practice abroad, mainly in Japan and China he expressed his ideas through the ‘international’ visual language of fast and expressive hand drawings focusing on communicating content rather than refined graphic representation. His years working in Tokyo as a designer had profound impact on his drawing style, where drawing was used as a fast visualization tool. Despite now being in the’post-orthographic phase’ of digital modelling, Daniel believes in the learning process of conceptualizing with the ‘hand’ first prior to the application of digital tools.
‘Off screen studio’ teaching is becoming rare today, but his ongoing enforcement in studio to apply a combination of off-screen and on-screen design teaching produces loose, fast, and creative drawings as well as a healthier studio environment.
Daniel’s second book “Multisensory Landscape Design: A Designers Guide for Seeing”, was published by Routledge in May 2022. He started teaching a seminar called ‘Seeing Environment’ in the falls 2018, 2020 and in spring 2022 relating to this books content ‘seeing’ the environment of the designer with the five senses:
https://wordpress.com/stats/day/seeingenvironment2018.wordpress.com
https://blogs.ubc.ca/seeingenvironment2020/
https://blogs.ubc.ca/seeingenvironment2022/
https://blogs.ubc.ca/seeingenvironment2022fall/
https://blogs.ubc.ca/seeingenvironment2023/
Acknowledgement: This blog would not exist without the advice, interest and passionate archival support of Hailey Gooch (MLA Graduate 2019) and her husband Scot who photographed and categorized all the images, and Hamed Ghafghazi (Guest PhD Researcher 2019) who was so patient in creating the blog and editing all the tutorial movies. The author would like to thank all three of them.