Charles Morris Anderson

Other notable projects by Charles Anderson include providing landscape design for the Anchorage Museum expansion, as well as Seattle’s 8.5 acres (3.4 ha) Olympic Sculpture Park, Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, and Manhattan’s Arthur Ross Terrace.

The quality produced through Emo Urbanism is paramount to the tangible connection of person to place. Anderson has described this connection as the “thinness.” It is the simultaneous perception and implicit understanding of the past, present, and future. Excellent design will achieve this in a manner that is simple, immediate, and direct. Anderson believes that its traditional counterpart, “context,” is often just a justification to make a designer’s brand fit the site. Within Emo Urbanism, the brand is created from the thinness. The result can embrace or contrast the physical manifestation of place, but it must always produce a unique fingerprint.

Anderson’s award-winning urbanature includes the Alaska Museum of History and Art, the Olympic Sculpture Park, and Trillium Projects and can be seen throughout his monograph, “Wandering Ecologies.”

Anderson has defined his emerging design theory as “Emo Urbanism.” It is differentiated from other conceptual processes with a focus on art, culture, ecology, and the fourth dimension. He emphasizes authentic landscape—habitat and complete ecosystems—within an ordered human environment. His work on the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, WA is an example of this with its paradigm shift in nature/human interaction. Anderson’s stroke introduced entropic organization along Seattle’s Elliot Bay. His intervention created a native ecosystem responsive to flora, fauna, and the hard lines of existing infrastructure. Anderson made vital the natural processes that sustain a dynamic, human centered world.

Anderson defines the practice of Emo Urbanism as “urbanature.” In practice, he differentiates between the wilderness and wildness. Henry David Thoreau held that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Urbanature implements wildness—the authentic landscape—within the urban environment. Urbanature demonstrates that nature does not exist solely in an untouched wilderness. Ashton Nichols, a professor of English Language and Literature at Dickinson College, first developed the term in relation to ecocriticism and how people perceive the world around them. He states that “the interconnectedness demanded by urbanature insists that human beings are not out of nature when they stand in the streets of Manahattan any more than they are in nature when they stand in the mountain above tree-line in Montana." Urbanature provides the tangible benefits of nature in an environment not traditionally thought of as appropriate. A clear example can be seen in Project Phoenix, an in progress soccer stadium in Haiti. Here Charles has composed a landscape entirely of edibles and a lake containing tilapia for consumption. Composting and recycling facilities are also integrated. Anderson contends that the landscape cannot just be an aesthetic tool, it must also provide for the mental, physical, and social health of people regardless of where they live.

The critical theory of Emo Urbanism was the basis for a seminar of the same name at the Arizona State University in 2012 and 2013.

The Washington State Chapter of American Society of Landscape Architects inducted Anderson into the Council of Fellows in 2006.

Anderson also had special interest in the work of Robert Smithson, an influential artist of the 1960s and 1970s, James Turrell, a contemporary artist who focuses on light and space, and Julie Bargmann, who focuses on regenerative landscapes.

Charles Morris Anderson (born 1957) is a landscape architect and fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, He is a Principal of the Phoenix-based landscape architecture firm, Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture, which is the continuation of his practice of the Seattle-based firm Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture.