We begin with his younger self destined to be an engineer and product designer, always solving problems, designing stuff and obsessed with Lego. He recounts winning a Lego competition at the age of 10 in California by building a large, complicated Satellite and in his own words, ‘destroying the competition to be fair, looking back they didn’t stand a chance”

Now a Director and Landscape Design Team leader at Define, he is currently leading the landscape team to deliver the parks in Whitcliffe, Ebbsfleet Garden City on behalf of the Master Developer Henley Camland. 

Joe reveals that it wasn’t until he saw a landscape masterplan document that he quickly changed his direction of study and forged a career as a landscape architect. His course in Leeds was artistic and creative and as a student he spent his first-year drawing in the landscape to understand and express its character. Coming home at Christmas he was aware of how he had started to look at the landscape around him very differently.

Here at FrancisKnight we work with artists who often look at places and tease out what makes them special, sometimes focusing on areas that may be forgotten or overlooked creating a narrative and language that underpins and expresses place. We encourage collaboration when working with artists, being open to ideas and showing different perspective, something Joe agrees and has experience of. He reflects on the Golden Square where Joe collaborated with artist David Paten on the new square located in the heart of the jewellery quarter, Birmingham.

This brings our conversation on to the Major Urban Park in Ebbsfleet a collaboration between FrancisKnight, Define and Principal Artist Christopher Tipping. This project has provided us with the opportunity to work from the earliest stages of design, where public art is not just a page at the back of a design and access statement but is placed earlier in the document and filters throughout the thinking of the design of this large urban public space. Contextual research including social, agricultural and industrial heritage has been embedded into the overall vision for the park and the Public Art Pan through the collaboration. This has provided a richly embroidered narrative, accompanied by an extensive catalogue of research for future commissioned artists to access, adding their diverse voices and interpretations.

We end our conversation with a blast from the past as Joe fires up his Japanese Juno 6 synthesizer (part of a larger collection) and transports us back to the 80’s from his shed at the bottom of the garden.

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