ASLA.org - The Dirt

Don't Look Back

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:08:00 -0400

What if landscape architects took the next step and, instead of designing with nature, designed nature itself? That is the question posed in a recent article in both The New York Times and its sibling International Herald Tribune. It explores MIT landscape architect Alan Berger's proposal to basically invent a natural system to purify heavily polluted waters running into the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. While such projects usually focus on restoration, he says, areas such as this site between Rome and Naples are beyond such thinking, calling for far more dramatic measures. And he has the attention of the Italian government.

Land Matters: Owning the Land's Future

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:14:00 -0400

Landscape architects with successful, far-flung practices shape places mostly at arm’s length. They fly in to client communities or project sites, do good work, and fly back to their offices to prepare the working drawings. At arm’s length, they change many places for the better. But when such a landscape architect decides to sink down deep roots in one spot on the planet, how does he or she shape that special place?

I found one answer to that question in August, when I joined a few landscape architects and planners in the remote Okanogan Valley in north-central Washington. There, Grant Jones, FASLA, pictured above, has bought an abandoned farm up near the Canadian border where (though he still puts in 30 hours a week at Jones & Jones in Seattle) he has begun spending more and more time. From what I can tell, he’s already fallen in love with this rugged northern valley hemmed in by dry, wrinkled mountains. The first morning, we hiked up Watch-Over-Us Hill (Grant, a poet, likes to put names to places), where he and his wife, Chong, have interred her mother’s ashes. There he read to us from one of his recent poems:

Standing now for hours on Watch-Over-Us Hill/I’m a compass pulled by the stars/Slowly spinning round this gneissic intrusion/Of weakly foliated, green hornblende./The words rise in my head/ Just like you said:/The land you stand on/And your body are one.

How has Grant begun to reshape this old farm, which he’s dubbed Coyote Springs? First, he shored up the collapsed barn. Then he and Chong fixed up the roughshod original farmhouse to make it livable, but make no mistake—this is no cushy villa for a city slicker’s weekend jaunts. He started a small tree nursery with the aim of reforesting the sagebrush hills above the farm. In the lower field he has broken ground for a garden with a “cosmic” theme—lots of nebula-like spirals—that he’ll build with a couple of hired hands and a vintage tractor.

Grant is connecting with the human landscape of the valley as well, and I was struck by the depth of connections that a landscape architect—a relative newcomer—can make in a relatively short time. For three days we crisscrossed the valley and up the highlands on either side, where Grant introduced us to activists in land trusts, the conservation-minded owner of a 2,200-acre ranch, and a “green building” contractor and his wife, who sculpts with welded steel. We visited families trying to start bootstrap businesses—crafting wines from a small vineyard or cheeses from a small herd of sheep and goats. We heard a farm laborer recite his own poems and an organic gardener preach the virtues of permaculture.

Having woven together these connections, what does Grant actually propose to accomplish in the valley, beyond transforming his own farm? I’m not sure even he knows yet, but the Okanogan, like so many unglamorous, working American landscapes, certainly needs the pro bono contributions of a landscape architect who knows its problems intimately. It has not yet felt the hot breath of development that has transformed the nearby Methow Valley, where a town with an “Old West”-themed main street and mountaintop villas testifies to the power of tourism to commercialize Western valleys. Such a fate may await the Okanogan once it is “discovered”—hence the need for a committed landscape architect to forge a more populist future.

In other watersheds, working rural landscapes, and urban neighborhoods across America, other landscape architects must be sinking deep roots and working pro bono with their communities to reshape their adopted places. Who and where are they?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA

Editor / bthompson@asla.org

Harvard Introduces New Sustainable Design Masters Concentration

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:54:00 -0400

This fall the Master of Design Studies program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design introduced a new concentration area entitled “Sustainable Design,” which more closely integrates the various design professions in the cause of identifying design solutions to environmental challenges.

Coordinated by Associate Professor of Architectural Technology Christoph Reinhart, the program will enable students to research holistic solutions for today’s environmental challenges. Particular areas of specialization are lighting and daylighting design, building performance simulation, green building performance metrics, green roofs, automated controls, occupant behavior and satisfaction, acoustics, as well as lifecycle and embodied energy studies. Reaching beyond the building scale, sustainability studies pursue a broad range of topics that may include the impact of urban and landscape design on local climactic conditions, the investigation and design of water management techniques, traffic and infrastructure studies, strategies for brown fields and other disturbed sites, and questions of landscape ecology.

Election 08 and the Scientific Methods

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:29:00 -0400

The state of science funding, focus and, sometimes, foolishness in Washington, D.C., prompted a small group of concerned citizens to help move the topic of science higher on the political agenda. Spurred on by these concerned few, more than 38,000 scientists, engineers, and other concerned Americans eventually signed on to the effort, including ASLA, nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders, and the presidents of more than 100 major American universities. See who here. Among other things, these signers submitted more than 3,400 questions they wanted the candidates for president to answer about science and the future of America.

Science Debate 2008 worked with the signators to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States. Check out the answers, including Sen. Barack Obama's reference to smart landscape practices to conserve water.

And Think of the Cheese!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:22:00 -0400

Goats are becoming absolutely trendy. Consider a recent item in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that finds Decatur, Ga., officials weighing the merits of goats as part of their plan to revive its 180-year-old cemetery. The inspiration? Kudzu, of which goats apparently can't get enough. The idea was proposed by Lynn Saussy, a landscape architect (alas, not a member--can anyone do something about that?), reports AJ-C's April Hunt. Of course, managing the critters poses unruly problems of its own, but marry this to the local food movement, and they may be on to something.

UPDATE: OK, so this isn't news, but it's growing like, well, kudzu. Today's Express, published by The Washigton Post for commuters, includes an item about Los Angeles employing some 100 goats to clear overgrown weeds on a hillside near the Angels Flight railway. The city rented the herd for $3,000.

Nature, the Enemy

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:07:00 -0400

In the July 21 issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert takes on the lawn. "A NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense," she writes in "Turf War," "determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly 50,000 square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing 200 gallons of water per person, per day." She then proceeds to list the logical alternatives, from meadow to wildflowers to food. Well, nature is in the eyes of the beholder, it seems. In a letter in the September 1 issue, reader Michael Jorrin of Ridgefield, Conn., calls the suggestions "unrealistic. Don't mow and let it revert to meadow? That's not what happens. Our lawns are not planted with native grasses; what you'll get is a hideous tangled, tick-infested mess that you won’t want to step into, and certainly won't let your kids or dogs play in." And Samuel J. McNaughton of Syracuse, N.Y., takes the position, "If we were to let our lawns grow up, we provide attractive habitats for snakes, spiders, rodents, deer (the latter two spread Lyme disease), deer flies, mosquitoes, and other undesirable organisms." Seems there is still an appetite out there to put nature in its place.

Land Matters: Time to Forget Everything You Know?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:05:00 -0400

Does the general public care whether their urban spaces have the elements landscape architects are taught to provide—seating and shade, for example, or plants?

What I saw yesterday evening in Silver Spring, Maryland, an older “edge city” bordering Washington, D.C., made me have my doubts. Silver Spring hires landscape architects to design some of its outdoor spaces, and I’d heard that they offer interesting contrasts. I went to see for myself.

My first stop was the strangest urban space I have ever seen. To cover up an empty lot in the middle of downtown, the city had plopped down 35,000 square feet of artificial turf three years ago. Local young people have since adopted “the Turf” as a favorite gathering place.

Forget everything you ever learned about the elements that are supposed to make places appeal to people—the Turf doesn’t have any of them. Yet last evening, the people were out in force. A young family was enjoying a picnic while a couple tossed a Frisbee, a few boys practiced their soccer moves, and another kid wheeled around on his shiny new bicycle. One couple lay clasped in a warm embrace. Most, however, were just sitting around on the Turf in small groups, talking up a storm.

What’s the attraction of a flat expanse of fuzzy green plastic? Part of it may be that it’s totally unprogrammed: It’s a “blank slate” that users can adapt to their own whims. Importantly, fast food is available just across the street. But if someone can just plop down some artificial turf and attract the public in droves, who needs the skills of a landscape architect?

Just a short walk away, a midblock plaza offered a sharp contrast (see “Beauty and the Turf,” page 78). Designed by local landscape architects, it had everything—chairs and walls to sit on, colorful tile mosaics, shade trees, and a spritzing fountain. Last evening, the place was packed with people, all of whom appeared to be enjoying themselves, with kids cavorting in the fountain seeming to have the most fun of all. Granted, tonight was no ordinary night at the plaza: The city had set up a stage and programmed a hot Latin band that made quite a few of us want to get up and dance. Most of Silver Spring had apparently turned out for it, and the plaza was absolutely seething with urban exuberance.

Here’s the surprise: Most nights, our LAM reporter found that the well-designed plaza was no better attended than the Turf. How do you explain that?

A little farther on was another contrast: the corporate headquarters of the Discovery Channel. Its outdoor spaces, designed by a large landscape architecture firm, were in the high-end corporate garden mold, tastefully designed with plenty of seating and lush plantings. Yet last evening they were almost deserted.

“Let the people decide what makes a good urban space,” I’ve always said. But, if the public is choosing the scruffy Turf over the elegant Discovery Channel gardens, what does that tell landscape architects about what people really want from their urban spaces? If you have contributed to the design of urban spaces, what has been your biggest surprise regarding what makes them work for people, and what is the most important thing landscape architects can do to help them better design such spaces?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA

Editor / bthompson@asla.org

Can Landscape Architecture Really Help Manage Traffic?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:30:00 -0400

I have just begun Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt and I'm already hooked. He thus far has tagged just about every bad driving habit I've ever adopted and puts the act of driving to work into frightening and fascinating perspective. Which leads me to think about the role landscape architects can play in minimizing bad behaviors through the use of natural design. Is it possible, in the face of the conflicts inherent in human nature, for streetscapes and transportation corridors to use design and nature to eliminate or at least alleviate traffic woes? If so, what does it look like? I think of the Taconic Parkway in New York State. A seriously beautiful road that drivers nonetheless want to treat like I-95. I should know. It's the site of my one and only speeding ticket.

The Living Building

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:46:00 -0400

A recent post to Plenty celebrates the next level of green building--adoption of practices that actually improve the environment. "The green building of the future," writes Lisa Salin Davis, "doesn’t just do less harm to the environment; it improves it. It won’t just use less water; it will collect and treat it. It won’t just force air; it will filter it. And it won’t just save energy; it will create it. Buildings are not only about to breathe like people—they’ll also give back like good Samaritans." It's good to hear architects more forcefully adopting principles that have long guided landscape architecture projects. The question is, Will it help landscape architects get the recognition they deserve as well as a more prominent place at the project table?

True Confessions

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:02:00 -0400

Sad to say, I gave up my community garden this year after a couple of years of wonderful food raised under less-than-wonderful conditions. My schedule simply made it crazy to give it all the attention it deserved (and demanded).

So I read with interest a recent blog entry on By Design by Allison Arieff of The New York Times called "Grow Your Own." She documents her experience of transforming her city yard into an urban garden that not only feeds her family but also feeds others. This is all accomplished with the help of a farmer brought in to execute and maintain the transition. Goodbye, lawn.

I live in a nice bit of suburbia now, but once lived in New York City. Even there, I grew tomatoes. It's time to rethink my schedule.

So what are you harvesting?

Fountain-Dread?

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:42:00 -0400

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, UCLA’s dean of social sciences wrote about the role of fountains on university campuses and the value they bring. However, he posed an interesting question:

Ironically, fountains have become ubiquitous, albeit in lesser forms. Mass-produced, faux-Rococo fountains dot suburban yards and supermarkets. Desktop Zen pools spout water through bamboo colored plastic piping, keeping shiny marbles spinning. Shopping malls pump lighted water over floor-to-ceiling slabs of slate. Do we risk burning out on them?

As landscape architects, what role do fountains play in your designs? Does the widespread use of reduced-quality fountains desensitize the public to true works of art or trigger a greater appreciation? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain by Alan Ward

What We Don't Know

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:45:00 -0400

What does this transformed schoolyard have to do with making landscape architecture a more visible, more influential profession? By itself, probably not much. But suppose this schoolyard was part of a school-system-wide program for transforming most or all of the schoolyards in a large American city, and a landscape architect was the instigator of it all? Would that not give landscape architecture a more powerful role in community affairs and people’s daily lives?

That’s just what happened in Denver. There, Lois Brink, Affiliate ASLA, a professor of landscape architecture, created a public–private partnership with the potential to transform all the elementary school playgrounds in the city. It began as a grassroots effort to turn the asphalt wasteland of the school Brink’s children attended into a vibrant area with a garden and more kid-friendly play and learning opportunities. In her studio class at the University of Colorado Denver, Brink challenged her students to engage the community in rethinking the space. When she had a plan in hand, she and other parents began raising funds to actually implement it—but after six years, they were still coming up short.

So Brink took a bold step: She ventured out of the safe confines of the university and approached the chief operating officer of the Denver Public Schools. He not only liked the plan but thought the idea was transferable to other schools. He and Brink went to the city and the Gates Foundation for funding, then formed a public–private partnership, the Learning Landscape Alliance—headed by Brink—that coordinated planning, funding, and construction. Local landscape architects were hired to draw up construction documents. The idea caught on with the public, and taxpayers passed a bond to transform more and more schools. As of this spring, 50 schoolyards had been completed, and a bond that would fund improvements for the rest of the district’s elementary schools will be put to a vote this fall.

Consider the Learning Landscape Alliance as a prototype. If other landscape architects took the initiative to rebuild schoolyards—or any other public landscape type for that matter—in their home cities, what would that do for the profession? One caveat: It might require landscape architects to venture into the scary arena of politics. Are landscape architects, including academics, ready for that?

More broadly, is this the kind of contribution this profession adequately celebrates or values? Currently, landscape architects reserve their highest reverence for one-of-a-kind built landscapes. There may be good reasons for this: The best of such built landscapes are invariably beautiful. Sometimes they are even embraced by the public. Taken together, these one-off projects seem to constitute the image that the profession wants to present to the world.

But equally compelling, if less imageable, are landscape systems that alter, in a much more sweeping way, the places we and our families live in every day. Yet too often, these large-scale initiatives remain unheralded. Denver is a good example. Until our writer visited some of the schoolyards with Brink and began researching the initiative, I had no idea of its magnitude. How can some of the profession’s most notable achievements be communicated to the public if they remain well-kept secrets? What other grand civic initiatives, with landscape architects as major players, are out there waiting to be discovered?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA

Editor / bthompson@asla.org

Landscape Architecture in Venice

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:30:00 -0400

This year’s Venice Biennale, the 11th International Architecture Exhibition titled “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” and scheduled to open September 11, 2008, will feature a prominent, stand-alone landscape architecture project that promises to shine a significant and dramatic light on the profession on a global scale.

While landscape architecture projects have been included in past exhibitions at this highly visible and respected event, this year’s project by Gustafson Porter and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, in keeping with the event’s theme, steps outside the exhibit halls to occupy a significant piece of land.

The Biennale typically attracts well in excess of 100,000 visitors, including a huge press contingent that results in coverage across the media spectrum. The “Toward Paradise” site will be located within the grounds of the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini, a Benedictine nunnery founded in 1205 and demolished in 1869.

The firms have sent out a call for both financial patrons to help finance the project and supporters willing to donate time and materials to the installation. (To learn more, contact Anne Hill, marketing coordinator at Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, at 206-903-6802 or anneh@ggnltd.com.) What kind of impact do you think such global design projects have on the public's understanding of the profession?

Putting a Price on Parks

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:04:00 -0400

As landscape architects prepare to head to Philadelphia this fall for ASLA Annual Convention, they can take heart in that city's renewed dedication to the value and development of parks. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, "Philadelphia's parks are worth nearly $1.9 billion annually in services, income, and taxes to the city, Mayor Nutter and advocates said yesterday," referencing a report that sets the stage for hearings regarding the future of Fairmount Park. (See report at http://www.tpl.org/content_documents/PhilaParkValueReport.pdf) That's a lot of green.

With declining tax revenues and a slowed economy beginning to threaten the outlook for park development in cities large and small, are such analyses the right tool at the right time? Has anyone else attempted to assign a dollar value to your parklands?

Can This Urban Plaza Be Saved? Should It Be?

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:42:00 -0400

I visited Boston’s City Hall Plaza in the company of one of our LA forums (“In Search of Public Space,” August 2001), and the place struck me as an urban design disaster—a featureless expanse of brick on which pedestrians look dwarfed and lost. Our forum included four big-city landscape architects and an expert on urban spaces from Harvard. Not one of them had a single good thing to say about it.

Their bad opinion is widely shared. Project for Public Spaces rated it the worst urban plaza anywhere, and while PPS is controversial among landscape architects, in this case it has plenty of company. Ever since the 11-acre plaza was built in the 1960s, Bostonians have repeatedly called for its demolition.

Imagine my surprise, then, to read an appeal by Boston architect and architectural historian Gary Wolf to preserve City Hall Plaza. In the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s e-newsletter, MoMoMa (www.tclf.org), Wolf calls the plaza “a grand civic forum” and suggests that any perceived shortcomings could be remedied by “improvements” to the existing design along the lines of an arcade that was installed in 2001. (In my observation, it didn’t help much.) Mayor Thomas Menino has proposed more drastic solutions for the space, from building a hotel to setting up a wind turbine. I personally like the wind turbine idea, but why not a whole wind farm? It couldn’t make the place any worse.

Rather than proposing little tweaks to the existing plaza, a better line of questioning might be: How could landscape architects and others transform City Hall Plaza into a human-scaled, inviting downtown park for the people of Boston? One thing’s sure: Any satisfying redesign would require the demolition of much if not all of the existing plaza. As I write this, however, any suggestions may be moot. The mayor is trying to build political momentum to sell the whole place and build City Hall somewhere else

More broadly, are historic preservationists good at choosing their battles—or do they really think that every historic landscape, anywhere, should be preserved? Some modernist-era landscapes, for example, merit preservation, but many are cold, inhuman expressions of architectural arrogance—such as the “windswept plazas” of which City Hall Plaza is perhaps the epitome. In any case, doesn’t the preserve/demolish debate leave out the important third voice—those who advocate extensive redesign of failed places for human comfort, pleasure, and inspiration?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA

Landscape Architecture Editor / bthompson@asla.org