BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA
Practicality resides at the core of every Virginia Burt design.
FROM THE MARCH 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
?I want to create gardens that really are truly meaningful and touch people,? says Virginia Burt, FASLA, the founder and principal of Virginia Burt Designs in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and Cleveland, Ohio. She?d been practicing nine years by the time she was invited to start on a partner track at JSW+ Associates in Richmond Hill, Ontario, but said she was looking for more in her own work. ?My personal life was deeper and more meaningful than the kind of work that I was doing, and I said, ?You know what" I wanted to be more.??
Burt could have easily gone down a number of paths. She is an avid skier and author, and thought at one point she would go into veterinary medicine. But since high school she had known exactly what she wanted to do. ?My brother brought home a woman for Thanksgiving who was in landscape architecture, and I was like, ?I love drawing. I like being outside. I love nature. Oh, my God, you get paid to do stuff like that"?? She was so sure of her path that during an entrance interview for the landscape architecture program at the University of Guelph, she remembers fielding the question, ?What?s your plan if you?re not accepted"? with an immediate: ?There is no plan; I?m getting in.? No detail is too small for Virginia Burt?s holistic approach to design. Photo courtesy Richard Mandelkorn.
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