The landscape architect Julia Watson has one of those careers that’s not easily defined. She is an author, an activist, and an academic. She has installed plants for pollinating insects and birds in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, and transformed the surrounding acreage at Rashid Johnson’s Long Island home into an art-filled preserve. The key focus of her work, though, lay in the built environments and traditional technologies of Indigenous communities around the world. She grew up outside Brisbane, in Australia, not far from sites deemed sacred by Aboriginal people; later in architecture school, she learned about First Nations’ relationships to land and infrastructure. Those interests formed the basis of her 2019 book, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, which blended specialized study and immersive photography in such a way that led Taschen, her publisher, to coin a new genre: “academic art book.” Now at work on the follow-up, Lo—TEK Water, with case studies and contributions from Indigenous experts, Watson finds herself living a Brooklyn life that is both carefully designed and fluid—to be expected with a four-year-old daughter and a son who’s almost 2. (“Plus a dog, a kitten, and a partner,” she says.) As a mother, she is passing along her twin loves of nature and learning. “I was obsessed with National Geographic as a child,” she says. “I remember sitting in front of our endless bookcase and reading through the spines.” The yellow magazines painted a composite portrait of a world shared by so many different people. Now, through her research into the stewardship of sacred landscapes, she sees human progress in collective terms. “It’s a whole culture that are the engineers of these types of systems.”
