William Wenk
Alumnus
BS, landscape architecture, 1969
Founder, Wenk Associates Inc.
Denver, Colorado

I wanted to redesign the storm drain, which is that thing in the street that everyone ignores except when it doesn’t work. You know, it’s where the storm water goes. And that sort of lowly element that is literally everywhere in the city that is ubiquitous, that—and it’s really a metaphor for rethinking how we treat urban water so that it’s no longer a waste. It becomes a resource. It becomes part of our daily lives in a way that we seek it out, that we welcome it.

I think that is really kind of—it’s profound to me in that if we can rethink a framework of the city in a way that it creates a garden, even though we don’t call it a garden, then I think we’ve succeeded as a profession. We design public landscapes that have a strong environmental focus, that deals with urban water resources in a number of creative ways, in a way that is really beneficial to the public in that we create open space, habitat, trail corridors, parks, things like that so that people can enjoy public funds that not only solve the problems but that create those sorts of public amenities.

I grew up in southern Michigan on a farm, very small farm near the town of Chelsea, and really kind of graduated from high school believing I wanted to be a farmer but intrigued with what my vocational agriculture teacher described as landscape architecture. So I took an introductory class in landscape architecture and never looked back, really, because it combined my interest in the land, in environmental issues, which really weren’t described as such back then in the mid-’60s and really brought them all together. Art was interesting, so that sort of combination fit my interests, or what I was intrigued with anyhow.

Most cities are spending tens of billions of dollars retrofitting their storm sewer systems to deal with pollution, so these are enormous public investments. And what we’re saying, and a lot of cities are really, I think, trying very hard to innovate and do things in creative ways to make sure that that public investment really garners as much benefit to the community as it can, but it’s billions of dollars.

City councils are now saying, “We don’t want any more big pipes. What can you do?” And we’re looking at some cities and how they can solve their problems with storm water, not just for a very localized area but for the entire metropolitan area. So that’s pretty exciting, pretty encouraging when you can think systemically. It gets back to that notion of the storm drain. It’s not a drain; it’s a system. It becomes a landscape that I think is very meaningful to us wherever—the collective us, to the societies that we live in.

I guess I never thought I’d end up here thinking about these things. And you just wonder, “How did this happen? How did I end up here at this sort of point in thinking about the world at that scale where you believe you can influence how billions of dollars are spent and how it’s the right thing to do?” Maybe it’s just that certainty. And everybody else ought to know it.