Thomas Charney 

As an intern at Takano Landscape Planning, I collaborated with an international team to design a vineyard that encourages access to people of all abilities to engage in art and agriculture. Our client, ACM (Arts and Creative Mind), had purchased farmland in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido (Japan's northern island) and expressed an interest in accessibility, sensory experience, and permaculture. 

For my contribution, I studied permaculture resources, accessible green space literature, and inventoried Hokkaido's native flora extensively. While the first two tasks were intuitive to the client's requests, I felt the latter task was an important topic to educate the client about given the popularity of European and American cultivars in the area. Overall, my contribution was a conceptual layout of the site that had a gradient of ability levels increasing in difficulty as one explores deeper into the vineyard and plant selection. 

Being fluent at a working level in Japanese, I often translated information and requests for my fellow interns and presented my portion of the design document entirely in Japanese to the client.