THE POET IN THE LANDSCAPE

Teresa Moller (Chile)

Teresa Moller is a highly distinguished Chilean landscape designer. She runs a landscape architectural studio based in Santiago from where she works on both national and International projects.

Tere´s work and design concepts have been highly influenced by listening to the landscape of her country.

Chile is a fascinating place that spans a large variation of different landscapes from Patagonian tundra to the desert lands in the north. Tere´s sensitivity in design comes from a poetic understanding of the dramatically differing environments that make up Chile as a country. The vital variations in climate, soils and aspect in each site means that she has an acute understanding of plants, climates and aspects allowing her approach to a site to be very sensitive and acute to the surroundings, as there is no way she can approach a new project with the same ideas as the last. Each site in Chile has vastly different needs and challenges. Tere is an observer, she sees, she absorbs and then lightly touches the landscape where needed.

She studied garden design at the New York Botanical Gardens and created her own studio after coming back in Santiago.

In 2005, the British landscape magazine Garden Illustrated pointed out Teresa Moller as one of the World’s ten most interesting current landscape designers. The project, Punta Pite, her most well-known work includes many interesting features. The most dramatic is a stone pathway and a series of stairs that lace their way throughout the ragged cliffy coastline just north of Santiago. Tere built a path only where the natural cliffs did not allow people to pass so her hand touches the landscape only where necessary. As a result her granite walk sits warmly and comfortably into the cliff-scape.

Her design approach illustrates in a very subtle and poetic way how it is possible to interact within nature, making landscapes useful whilst ensuring the existing positive and subtle features of the site are savored.