SOAKED is a collection of essays that chronicles a deep reading of place gained through global travel, tethered to an understanding of spa design, and includes speculative projects.
Jennifer bloch
I am drawn to and find inspiration in landscapes that have been ravaged by either natural disasters or man. I explore these places for their often lost, forgotten or abandoned beauty, seeking opportunities for remediation and adaptive re-use.
As a landscape architect, working with natural and social systems to create environments is one of the best means to underline the intimate connection between people and nature. The spa is the perfect program to bring this connection to life.
Too often, though, spas are designed with little connection to the natural world. However luxurious, a pool set in a windowless basement is impoverished. Open it to a fog-filled forest, with light filtering through the canopy and juniper wafting in the air, and the senses awake. By joining the inherent virtues of the spa with an experience of natural phenomena, we can both heal the environment and heighten a person’s awareness of our place within it.
During the twenty years in my practice of landscape architecture, I have completed more than fifty projects, including single- and multi-family residential landscapes, adaptive re-use public housing, and winery estates in California and New York. My site-specific sculpture has been exhibited in Fairfield and Oakland, California; Seekonk, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; and Erice, Sicily and is in several private collections. I was an invited participant in Lausanne Jardins 2009 and 2019 editions, a Swiss urban garden/art festival. Several of my landscapes have been featured on garden tours in Northern California, and have appeared in print journals. My writing is included in the 2016 European Cultural Centre Exhibition entitled, "TIME - SPACE - EXISTENCE", an official part of the Venice Architecture Biennale organized by the Global Art Affairs Foundation.
I am a licensed Landscape Architect and hold a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management with minors in French and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Before attending RISD, I studied architecture at the California College of the Arts and also applied my undergraduate experience as an artist’s agent and in hospitality management at Michelin-starred restaurants on the Pacific Coast of the United States.
My travels include several cross-country road trips and back-country solo camping in the U.S., multiple visits to Switzerland, Italy, Thailand, Indonesia (Java and Bali), Fiji, Mexico, and Canada, and singular visits to Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Tanzania/Zanzibar, France, England, Iceland, Hawaii, Australia, Belize, the West Indies, the Virgin Islands (U.S. and British), and Argentina.