Earth is a Living Sculpture.

I’ve long felt that Earth is a Living Sculpture; nowhere do I feel this is more apparent than Hawaiʻi nei.

Hawaiʻi Island’s Mauna Loa is birthed of fire from an eternal hotspot connected directly to the Earth’s core. A massive shield volcano, her nascent beauty is defined by gently rising coastal plains, spanning dry forest to wet, with an alpine snow-capped peak. The soft and steady slope of this mountain contains Earth’s multitudes of ecosystems in a regal rise from the ocean floor to the heavens above. The defining beauty of this elegant rise is a function of lava fountaining down her faces successively over time.

Diametrically opposed are the aged, cragged, and infinitely rain-sculpted cliffs and mountains of Kauaiʻs Nā Pali coast. Wind-swept sheer cliffs give way to myriad fertile and farmed river valleys. Herein lies the duality that, taken together, define the divine beauty of the Hawaiian Islands as Earth’s living sculptures. As Mauna Loa rises, she traps the global tradewinds’ moist ocean air, precipitating orographic rainfall. When plate tectonics inevitably pull her off the hotspot from which she sprung, it is her very prominence that is her demise: the rains she summons engender erosion and deposition, sculpting-away at her slopes to eventual oblivion.

Every moment from her birth to her death is sculpture: the young, gentle slopes borne of fountaining lavaflow, to the aged and sculpted river valleys beneath cragged sheer cliff faces.

As landscape designers and land artists, everything we do seeks to reveal, celebrate, and elevate the truth of this divine living sculpture. We hope this becomes apparent in the subtext of our work presented herein. It is the inspiration, motivation, and animation behind our creative practice: to be witness to and participate in Earth as a Living Sculpture, as it is so, has been, and will be ad infinitum.

-Dominic Baitoo Riolo, Founding Principal