Topher Delaney
Topher Delaney is a San Francisco-based Landscape Architect, who utilises the landscape to create art and is known for her designs of healing gardens and sanctuaries. Her rationale for creating these spaces came from having cancer when she was 39, during which she made a pact with God that, if she were to survive, she would dedicate her work to helping others heal. One of her first healing gardens was for the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Centre – the panel, upon seeing her idea, declared it ‘too colourful’ and said they hated it. Delaney reminded them that ‘none of you are patients. You are the agency, the managers, and you’re concerned about us. We want to live. We don’t need a sanctuary garden about passage off the planet. We want passage on the planet’. She got the project.
Her philosophy is about creating comfort, healing and faith within her work, beginning as way of showing her commitment to the environment but she says, over time, ‘what I have realised along the way is the tremendous power gardens can have on people’s psyches. My work, it seems, is always a series of programmatic responses to complex emotional issues’. She uses the word sanctuary for her work as the word garden originally meant enclosure and she declares that ‘a garden should be more than just a pretty object. It should be like an embrace’.
I really admire her ethos, she creates spaces that people actually want and need, as opposed to the societal interpretation of what people should want. The idea that her landscapes are an embrace is also something that I love, creating spaces that offer comfort to those who need it.
References
Kubany, E. (2002) Topher Delaney. Available at: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/12630-topher-delaney (Accessed: 6 May 2021)
Forecast. (n.d.) Creating Artful Sanctuary Through Healing Gardens. Available at: https://forecastpublicart.org/artful-sanctuary/ (Accessed: 6 May 2021)
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