San Francisco Civic Center, 1991. Image: Jenni Zell

I don’t remember my favorite class in undergraduate school, it was after all the late eighties and early nineties. What I do remember is my favorite period of development. During my junior year I began experimenting with representation, and simultaneously ideas. It was also the period of development when I received my first “D” grade on a mid-term assignment.

San Francisco Civic Center, detail. Image: Jenni Zell

I liked what I produced for the class, and it is the only school project that I have lugged around with me through my many moves up and down the California coast and across the country. It represents the time after I had begun to internalize the rules of landscape architecture and bend and break those rules in ways that interested me.