Understanding Rhythm and Balance

Landscape architecture graduate student Alexandra Romeero and Professor David Hopman, as they tour the UTA campus during a lecture on landscaping and plant identifiction. Hopman is currentley assisting with the Center Street Green project in efforts to make UTA a greener, more sustaintability minded campus (Photo The Shorthorn Jazzmyne Greer).

David Hopman believes in a hands-on approach, whether it’s in his first career as a classical guitarist or his second as a landscape architect.

The newly appointed landscape architecture assistant professor said musicians and architects share skills like understanding rhythm and balance. Hopman taught classical guitar at the university in the mid-1980s before he returned to become one of the few full-time professors at one of the country’s best architecture schools.

Hopman led the way in getting the first green roof in North Texas above the university’s Life Science Building, designing the 1,000-square-foot space as an experiment two years ago.

Now he’s working on a pilot project for the U.S. Green Building Council similar to its LEED certification for buildings, except for landscapes. The Center Street Green, a plaza for the Sustainable Sites Initiative, could be the first certified in the country, he said.

Sonal Parmar, a former student of Hopman’s, now works as his researcher on the Sustainable Sites Initiative. She said his dedication shows and that he is often more excited than his students.

“He is one person who actually sets the standards for teaching in our department,” she said.

Hopman said he traveled extensively growing up: from Austria to Spain, Washington, D.C. and Germany. He lived in New England before coming to Texas, where he’s been for 30 years.

Hopman ties traveling, like everything else in his life, to architecture.

“I think you have to anchor into where you are and learn to appreciate where you are,” he said. “Learn to enhance where you are, but don’t try to make it into something else.”

Hopman said he started playing the guitar while living in Spain and had a successful freelance career in the 1980s.

“I played guitar four to five hours a day for 35 years,” he said. “And I said, ‘You know, that’s enough guitar.’”

Hopman said he combined his love for nature and understanding of design, which he learned from his mother, to get landscape architecture. Hopman’s mother earned her architecture degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1942.

He said his expertise in an approach called critical regionalism could stem from his understanding of classical music. In critical regionalism, architects tie in ideas on local issues pertaining to climate or culture with ideas from around the globe, tempered to the specific climate. He’s written a book and teaches a class on the subject.

“So that’s something that I’m very committed to and something I’m very interested in,” he said.

He said the same concept happened to classical music in the late 19th century. He said many composers learned a basic language of music, Impressionistic music, which he compared to jazz. Composers like George Gershwin studied the language in Paris then returned to their original country.

“You get these different composers taking their nationalistic folkloric elements, and combining it with the same kind of design language, or in their case musical language, and making it into something new,” Hopman said. “That’s kind of what critical regionalism is.”

Landscape architecture senior Rhonda Fields said Hopman understands what a landscape architect needs to function. She used something she’d learned in his class everyday at her summer internship, she said.

“He tries to give us information that is critical to our practice,” she said. “He gives you very nuts and bolts, down to earth stuff.”

Source: Sarah Lutz, The Shorthorn