Remembering Donald L. Walker, Jr.

by Mollie Babize ’84

With the death of Don Walker on August 13^th, the Conway School lost one of the pillars of the school’s remarkable curriculum in ecological design and planning. Don was the second director of the Conway School, following the departure of the founding director, Walter Cudnohufsky, in 1992. He retired in 2005, and focused his attentions on establishing and maintaining a rich native plant community on the property surrounding his home with landscape architect Ruth Parnall in Conway.

A licensed landscape architect with a Master of Fine Arts in Landscape Architecture, Don taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Illinois for 15 years and at Ball State University for two. As a graduate student, he had taken courses in botany, geology, geomorphology, soils…a focus on earth sciences that, in his words, are “what landscape architects need to know before they start screwing around with the earth.”

Don’s interest in the Conway School was piqued by an article in Landscape Architecture magazine. He was further intrigued when he met up with Walt and a handful of Conway students at LABash, a conference for students of landscape architecture, in Guelph, Ontario in 1978. That summer, Don and his wife, Ruth Parnall, stopped by the school, and when Walt said there was no faculty position open, Don enrolled as a student. There began Don’s 28-year immeasurable impact on the school and nearly three decades of Conway students.

From “The Making of a Meliorist” in con’text (2004) By Donald L. Walker, Jr. ’79, Director 1992–2005:

I had the serendipitous opportunity to spend three days with the entire Conway School of Landscape Design at a conference in Guelph, Canada. I discovered that Walt Cudnohufsky, founder and director, held some of my beliefs and was practicing them:

1. The education of landscape architects should be changed.
2. Students should learn by doing and so gain confidence.
3. Students should have the responsibility of solving real problems, which requires curiosity and the motivation to develop real understanding.
4. Students should learn by having to explain to others using oral, written, and graphic means.
5. The school should strip its curriculum to essentials so students can afford the time and expense.

I wanted to be a part of this unique place, and because there was no opening as a teacher, I enrolled as a student.

Within the year, Walt’s assistant, Lawrence Kornfield, announced his departure to visit Japan, and in 1979 I was CSLD faculty.

Don’s passionate and creative teaching grew out of his concern for the health of the earth. Starting with a focus on native plant communities, he essentially established what has become the foundational tenet of the Conway School: design informed by and in harmony with the earth’s systems.

Eric Weber ’77, a student before Don’s time and subsequently on the faculty with him, remembers “a kind of recursive questioning about design work” that complemented Walt’s stages of a rigorous design process. Where Walt brought a systematic and orderly process to achieve a good design solution, Don saw the stages as overlapping and continuous, not discrete and sequential. Where Walt pushed students to move quickly, Don urged them to look deeply. He insisted on a rigorous investigation of the systems that influence every site. He continued to question students about proposed solutions, asking them to consider other alternatives.

Sue Reed ’87 notes where Walt came from the Kevin Lynch system of site planning—focusing on the human experience—Don focused on the natural world. Don’s teaching methods sometimes frustrated her, saying he taught from an “oblique angle. He wanted us to come to our own assessment, to figure it out for ourselves.” However, Don’s entire message—“the importance of seeing the world as a multi-faceted, ecological system of which we’re a part”—inspired her career as a landscape architect.

In my life, Don Walker is the teacher who changed everything. He showed me a new way to understand nature, he helped me see how I could—and should—make a positive difference in the world, and he pointed me toward work I would feel proud to do. Then he helped me do it.

— Sue Reed ’87, Author, Energy-Wise Landscape Design

Former trustee Liz Vizza ’82 says Don’s perspective became a cornerstone of the school, “guidance we needed to (create) an appropriate, and integrated, and successful, and sustainable design.” It is a fundamental teaching, one she hopes students retain while remembering we are creating landscapes for humans as well.

Walt Cudnohufsky, Conway’s founding director, says the word he associates with Don is courage: the way he consistently walked his values, including leaving a secure faculty position for this tiny school in the hills of western Massachusetts. “He was the ultimate Socratic teacher,” says Walt, “modeling and engendering questions from the student.” In a letter he wrote shortly before Don’s death, Walt noted “You brought wisdom and integrity of purpose, nature- and people-based knowledge, and an…investigative approach to ‘what is going on here’ studies of place.” Don coined a term for this continual search for clues in the land: “landscape archi-detecture.”

Despite their differences, which could erupt in loud and passionate arguments, Walt treasures the memory of working with Don, Richard Williams, and Randy Griffith: “We really were a team at the core.”

Randy Griffith was involved early on in the development of Conway’s curriculum, and guided students in writing and presentations. She remembers how Don would ignite a spark in students, as he opened their eyes to the complexity of the natural world. His site visits might include a close examination of tiny plants clustered around a large rock in the woods, and contrast that rich community with the typical residential lawn and foundation plants. He would ask students to consider the walls, the floor, the ceiling of a particular garden or space. He could be tough on students, she recalls, but he was also tender, which was more touching as a result.

I recall the magical and complementary (if occasionally contradictory) education that team provided our class of 1984. Don was an inspired and creative teacher, using experiential examples to teach design principles. He asked a student to take the school van out to a gravel parking lot and drive it in a circle; then we had to measure the diameter of the circle as a lesson in turning radii. On a field trip, he pointed out a park bench, then had us each draw how to build it—a hands-on lesson in construction details. He would spend hours in the basement of the barn at student desks, often well past dinner time, pushing us to dig deep into the analysis process to inform the design. And when someone would ask in frustration, “When do we get to design?!”, he would respond, “this is ALL design.”

Don’s pressure to look more deeply often conflicted with the need to finish a project. In fact, one lesson from Don is that design projects are never finished, there is always more to learn. But time (and money) run out; clients need a solution. There is no one solution, no single truth—just one that is best suited to the site, the client, the designer, and the overall project goal. In the phrase that perhaps best encapsulates the teaching of Don Walker, “It depends!”

Don’s tenacious presence at the school was essential for its continuing evolution as a graduate program of ecological design. If there is a Don Walker legacy that permeates Conway projects today and the on-going work of alums, it is the priority to protect and restore the earth’s fragile systems.

Mollie Babize ’84 is a trustee of the Conway School who has also filled various positions at Conway over the years, including Administrative Director (1992-98), Planning Adjunct (2006-2011 and 2016-2018), and Associate Director for Admissions (2011-2013).