The Chilean landscape architect on taking inspiration from the natural world, the pleasures of working around the globe and the importance of planting more trees Words Jimena Martignoni, portrait John Campbell
Chile, where Teresa Moller grew up, is a long country of many varied landscapes framed by the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Her first memories of the natural world, from family camping trips, are of desert and woodlands; landscapes that shaped in her an intimate connection to nature. “I always felt that the mountains meant strong protection, the forest was shelter, and the ocean and the desert immensity,” she says. “I believe Chile is a country where nature expresses itself in a very dramatic and powerful way, and this profound feeling dwells within every one of us Chileans.”
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Although she is of Danish and Spanish ancestry, Teresa’s identity seems strongly rooted in the essence of the Chilean land. This love of nature is what, in the end, remains as an unmistakable imprint on every one of her designs.
Following her studies in garden design at the New York Botanical Garden, she set up her own office in Santiago de Chile in 1986, and quite rapidly became a prominent figure in Latin-American landscape architecture.
Her first significant project, in the hilly areas of Santiago, featured a series of abandoned pools and tanks – part of an old water-collection system fed by local streams – running down a natural 15m elevation. Taking advantage of the existing slopes, she rebuilt the pools with stone to receive the water that had been concealed by trees and shrubs and that was rediscovered after clearing up the site.
Trees are one of the greatest gifts to the planet. I would love to add as many as possible
“The water was always there, we just allowed it to run freely again,” she says. “My oldest daughter was a baby at the time I first started to work there, and I used to visit the site with her strapped to my back. Now both my daughter and the project are more than 20 years old and they are both flourishing.”
For Teresa, every one of her designs has to be based on what is already there and the spirit of the land being worked on, and her aim is always to bring people closer to the experience of nature.
She has turned the once-wounded land into a flourishing ecosystem
“We need to let nature surprise us and show us how a territory can grow and bring forth new life in a harmonious and sustainable way, without artificial impositions.”
In this sense, her best-known project, Punta Pite, is the perfect representation of what she does. A path sculpted around dramatic cliffs by the Pacific Ocean, it has featured in publications around the world, and was the starting point for her own “laboratory”.
After working for months with the stone craftsmen who constructed the path, she naturally “fell in love with the site”, as she describes it, and started building her own summer retreat in the area. Her house and plot, perched on a slope severely damaged by road construction, became an experimental spot for native and non-native, drought-tolerant coastal plants. Restoration was Teresa’s ultimate goal, and by observing, trying, planting and growing plants for more than 15 years, she has turned the once-wounded land into a flourishing ecosystem, which has naturally integrated pioneer native species living in an adjacent creek.
As a personal endeavour, she started a pistachio plantation in 2014 on a family-owned piece of land outside Santiago
The most significant moments in her career include being on the jury of the Barcelona Biennial, lecturing across Europe, Australia, and China and, in 2021, receiving the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture sponsored by UNESCO in recognition of her work. “I am delighted to be able to work on different scales and in different places around the world, because it helps me to understand and study how each place has its own character, identity and shape,” she says.
A standout achievement for her was being invited to create a site-specific work for the Venice Biennale in 2016. Made of discarded pieces of travertine found in quarries of northern Chile, the composition leads the visitor to rest by the waterfront. The following year, she was invited to the International Garden Exhibition in Germany, where she recreated a forest from southern Chile with Nothofagus antarctica, an ancient tree that is representative of southern latitudes of the planet and well-suited to the environmental conditions found in Berlin.
“Trees are one of the greatest gifts to the planet,” says Teresa. “Having the possibility to plant so many trees, I feel, is my humble contribution.” As a personal endeavour, she started a pistachio plantation in 2014 on a family-owned piece of land outside Santiago, now with 5,500 trees and running a small business selling home-grown roasted pistachios.
Regarding upcoming projects, she expresses her desire to work in public spaces and anticipates a large tree-planting proposal for soil restoration and boosting urban biodiversity in Chile’s Metropolitan Region. Based on the Miyawaki method, which mimics the way a forest would recolonise itself to create dense urban mini woodlands that require minimal maintenance, this plan aims to create pocket forests in the city. “I would love this to come to fruition and to add as many trees as possible to urban environments.”
Useful information Find out more about Teresa Moller’s work at teresamoller.cl/en/