Jamie Conway

My father was an electrical engineer, and at the age of seven I spent two weeks of my summer holidays working alongside him. My job was simple: to draw the electrical wiring routes onto architectural drawings, back in the years before CAD. It was quiet, careful work, but it taught me early how systems sit behind what we see.

During that same period, my father took me on a client visit that would quietly set the direction of my life. The project was a restored 16th-century Elizabethan barn. There was a Ferrari in the driveway, a river running through the land, and the client’s son fishing from a small bridge. I was completely captivated. I asked my father what the client did for a living. He was an architect — and from that moment, I decided I would be one too.

By the early 1990s, landscape architecture was emerging as a distinct field of study, and I was drawn to it immediately. Alongside formal training, I became deeply grounded in permaculture design principles and adopted an explicitly ecocentric approach to design — positioning human needs as part of, rather than dominant over, the systems they inhabit.

At the time, the professional landscape field in the UK offered limited scope for this way of working, so I moved to Spain and established a small landscape design studio. Much of my work involved translating conventional briefs into designs that were environmentally restorative, culturally sensitive, and materially efficient — often pushing those boundaries just far enough to deliver something genuinely better by the time the project was built.

Until 2007, I worked largely on a design-and-build basis. That year marked a significant turning point when I was invited by BioTop España to design a 4,000 m² competition-scale sustainable water feature for El Dhub, a government-led project in Barcelona. Through this work, my long-term relationship with natural swimming pools and living water systems began. The project received recognition from the European Fund for Regional Development, and my practice expanded into a fully fledged environmental design studio.

From that point onward, my work increasingly involved collaboration with local and regional government, national environmental programmes, nature trail development, Section 21 schemes, and the organisation of community seminars and public engagement events. I later completed a postgraduate diploma in Sustainable Municipal Environmental Management for Rural Areas at the University of Granada, which helped formalise and contextualise the work I was already doing across policy, infrastructure, and community-scale systems — and clarified where institutional frameworks support, and where they fall short of, living realities.

In 2011, we moved to Brazil and began again. The scale, complexity, and social realities of the work there were unlike anything I had encountered before, but the underlying image that first shaped me — of land, water, home, and coherence — remained intact.

Today, my work focuses on helping teams, communities, and institutions design places as integrated systems — where ecology, infrastructure, culture, and economics are treated as one living field. Over time, this approach has evolved into a collaborative, international network of environmental practitioners, engineers, researchers, and designers working under the name Qatuan.
Through Qatuan, I support the creation of places that are not only environmentally sound, but socially intelligible, economically grounded, and capable of adapting over time. My role is not to impose solutions, but to help people see their systems clearly enough to design them responsibly — a practice rooted in the same quiet curiosity that began, years ago, with wiring lines on paper.