In Conversation With Young Talent Of The Year - William Bennett

With half a decade of experience under his belt in the u.a.e, William Bennett shares his love of landscape and how he is applying that to plot a course for a big future.

- Natasha Smith

“For me the passion started as a young boy where all my favourite memories were made outdoors. I lived in suburban Cheshire, UK. It’s a fairly green county and where I lived was equal mixes of urban streets and leafy parks. I benefited from easy access to green spaces and I know that on a global scale I am extremely lucky in that sense. We had a garden too in which my mum spent most of her spare time, tending to various flowers with Latin names I couldn’t pronounce and fighting slugs away from the family’s most precious crop – the strawberries! At the time, I didn’t realise it but seeing my mum care so much for her little patch of this planet was definitely the genesis of my passion. But you can only join up the dots looking backwards.”

Bennett is a Senior Landscape Architect and arrived in the UAE in 2014. He was clearly driven from the outset, delivering his first project, Akoya Oxygen, within 12 months and won both Best Residential Exterior and Best Project of the Year at the identity awards in 2015 for his efforts. Since then, his rapid rise with desert INK has been defined by a steep learning curve which has pushed him to grow his potential and his passion.

“The best thing about working in this region is the feeling that our discipline is on the verge of a significant opportunity, particularly in the UAE. It’s an opportunity that has the potential to shape the entire functioning of this city and the fabric of our urban design; perhaps even the identity we relate to as residents of a desert-based city. To understand that opportunity was the awakening in me when I moved here 5 years ago and that realisation has been at the core of my drive and ambition ever since.”

Bennett has been an advocate for the use of local materials and native planting in contemporary landscape architecture and it’s clear that this sense of identity is his MO: