Roderick Wyllie is a founding principal of San Francisco-based landscape architecture studio Surface Design, alongside James A. Lord. After a stint at the City of Sydney, and then Peter Walker and Partners, early in Wyllie’s career, the practice emerged from a deeply held belief that meaningful landscapes are born from a profound and holistic understanding of place. Much like an anthropologist, Wyllie approaches landscape as a layered narrative, which he describes as, ‘peeling back the strata of material, geology, climate, ecology and culture, while listening for the stories and whispers embedded within each site’.
Drawing inspiration from the poetics of art, music, and craft, Wyllie has helped cultivate a practice that approaches each project as an ongoing dialogue between ecology, material and tectonics. His work explores the delicate exchange between natural systems and human intervention, whether through the design of public landscapes or private gardens. Wyllie sees landscapes as living expressions—simultaneously wild and cultivated, adaptive and resilient, and deeply emblematic of the communities and ecologies from which they emerge.
