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TAKE THE FIELD At play on New York City’s Randall’s Island
BLOOD RUN Tribes talk, Brenda Williams listens
STACK IT UP A new wetland park overcomes layers of challenge
JAMES ROSE Inside the mind of a brilliant outsider
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LAM
52 OFFICE
14 INSIDE
Getting Paid
16 LETTERS
BY WENDY GILMARTIN
Principals of three firms discuss their strategies for receiving receivables promptly. 62 MINDS
18 LAND MATTERS
FOREGROUND 22 NOW Oklahoma City works on walkability; Britain’s Anglo-Saxon place-names point to water; scientists focus on protecting trees’ genetic diversity; Milwaukee gets Sloshed; and more. EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
Traces of Self-Exile A new biography gives the iconoclastic landscape architect James Rose his due. BY MIMI ZEIGER
70 GOODS
In Motion For bike or bus travel, these transit products improve the commute. BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA
38 TECH
BIM There, Done That Meghen Quinn, ASLA, is co-opting architectural software to make it work for landscape architecture.
LOUISE JOHNS
BY BRIAN BARTH
6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
“ I WAS OUT THERE BY MYSELF, AND I COULD HEAR DRUMS AND SINGING.” —RANDY TEBOE, P. 98
FEATURES 82 WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER The design brief for the Southbridge neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware: Stack a new wetlands park on a brownfield laced with immovable electrical infrastructure. And make it floodable. BY JONATHAN LERNER
98 EARS TO THE GROUND Between Iowa and South Dakota lies an indigenous peoples’ landscape of mythic importance known as Blood Run. Brenda Williams, ASLA, is helping to make a bistate park with a lot of work—and as much receptiveness. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
120 GAME ON Jesse Owens ran and Jimi Hendrix played here. Then Randall’s Island fell into disrepair. Now it’s been transformed into New York City’s sports and recreation hub. BY JANE MARGOLIES
THE BACK 146 HALPRIN ON THE ANACOSTIA Lawrence Halprin’s unbuilt 1960s designs to beautify Washington, D.C.’s “second river” still resonate. BY JEANNE HAFFNER
154 BOOKS
Go There A review of Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim. BY SARAH COWLES
180 ADVERTISER INDEX 181 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 192 BACKSTORY
The Ebb of Floes The artist Zaria Forman captures the poignance of dying icebergs in Antarctica. BY LAUREN MANDEL, ASLA
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 7
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Randall’s Island, where New York City comes to play, page 120.
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Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 2017 ASLA. Subscriptions: $59/year; international: $99/year; students: $50/year; digital: $44.25/year; single copies: $7. Landscape Architecture Magazine seeks to support a healthy planet through environmentally conscious production and distribution of the magazine. This magazine is printed on FSC® certified paper using vegetable inks and is co-mailed using recyclable polywrap to protect the magazine during distribution, significantly reducing the number of copies printed each month. The magazine is also available in digital format through www.asla.org/ lam/zinio or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.
ASLA BOARD OF TRUSTEES PRESIDENT Vaughn B. Rinner, FASLA PRESIDENT-ELECT Gregory A. Miller, FASLA IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Chad D. Danos, FASLA VICE PRESIDENTS David M. Cutter, ASLA Robin L. Gyorgyfalvy, FASLA Wendy Miller, FASLA Thomas Mroz Jr., ASLA Michael S. Stanley, ASLA Vanessa Warren, ASLA EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Nancy C. Somerville, Honorary ASLA SECRETARY Curtis A. Millay, ASLA TREASURER Michael D. O’Brien TRUSTEES Aaron A. Allan, ASLA Brian E. Bainnson, ASLA W. Phillips Barlow, ASLA Robert D. Berg, ASLA Shannon Blakeman, ASLA Gary A. Brown, FASLA Perry Cardoza, ASLA Matthew O. Carlile, ASLA David H. Contag, ASLA Scott V. Emmelkamp, ASLA William T. Eubanks III, FASLA Melissa M. Evans, ASLA David V. Ferris Jr., ASLA Robert E. Ford, ASLA David Gorden, ASLA David A. Harris, ASLA Lucy B. Joyce, ASLA Jennifer Judge, ASLA Ron M. Kagawa, ASLA Roger J. Kennedy, ASLA Mark M. Kimerer, ASLA Joel N. Kurokawa, ASLA Brian J. LaHaie, ASLA Lucille C. Lanier, FASLA Curtis LaPierre, ASLA Dalton M. LaVoie, ASLA Robert Loftis, ASLA Jeanne M. Lukenda, ASLA Timothy W. Maloney, ASLA Eugenia M. Martin, FASLA Timothy W. May, ASLA Bradley McCauley, ASLA Douglas C. McCord, ASLA Ann Milovsoroff, FASLA Jon M. Milstead, ASLA Cleve Larry Mizell, ASLA Dennis R. Nola, ASLA April Philips, FASLA Jeff Pugh, ASLA John D. Roters, ASLA John P. Royster, FASLA Stephen W. Schrader Jr., ASLA Adrian L. Smith, ASLA Susanne Smith Meyer, ASLA Ellen C. Stewart, ASLA Mark A. Steyaert Jr., ASLA Adam A. Supplee, ASLA John A. Swintosky, ASLA Nicholas Tufaro, ASLA LAF REPRESENTATIVES Barbara L. Deutsch, FASLA Kona A. Gray, ASLA NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Carlos Flores, Associate ASLA NATIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Joni Emmons, Student ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Kay Williams, FASLA
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CONTRIBUTORS JEANNE HAFFNER (“Halprin on the Anacostia,” page 146) is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. You can reach her at jmhaffner@gmail.com.
“Halprin’s whimsical drawings for Anacostia Park belie the extensive ecological and engineering studies and plans that took place behind the scenes. The drawing of the swimming lake at the Kingman Park site masks the underlying hydraulic system designed to filter and aerate the water.” LOUISE JOHNS (“Ears to the
Ground,” page 98) is a freelance photojournalist and National Geographic Young Explorer based in Bozeman, Montana. You can follow her on Instagram @e.ljohns.
GOT A STORY? TIMOTHY A. SCHULER (“Ears to the Ground,” page 98) writes about landscape architecture, ecology, and urban design. He lives in Honolulu. You can follow him on Twitter @timothy_schuler.
“I was continually struck by this pervasive imbalance of power, in which the tribes were forced to play by the government’s rules, and yet did so willingly, o en on their own dime, because of how important these places are. That was powerful. “
At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an area of interest you’d like to see covered, tell us! Send it to lam@asla.org. Visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org. Follow us on Twitter @landarchmag and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ landscapearchitecturemagazine. LAM is available in digital format through landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/ subscribe or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.
14 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
LUKAS MAURER, TOP; BECCA SKINNER, CENTER; KAT ARAUJO, BOTTOM
“I wish I would’ve had a greater variety of light and more time with the people, but I also believe there is a reason for everything, and rainstorms create a sort of surreal and sacred feel, especially when you see people out there enduring the elements of nature.”
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LETTERS
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CLIMATE AT THE GSD
I
n her interview with James Trulove (“Martha Schwartz, Reconnecting,” July), Martha Schwartz presents several factual errors regarding our course offerings in ecology and climate change.
states, plant association, but this is by no means the only approach to plants we teach. Our students also learn organism, horticultural, performative, and typological approaches to the study of plants.
Contrary to what Martha states, these two topics are central to our curriculum. Our department counts no less than 10 faculty members who teach a broad range of topics on ecology, including natural and built coastal environments, aquatic ecology, land– water linkages, urban and town ecology, and restoration ecology, to name a few. We do teach, as she correctly
In relation to climate change, we have conducted option studios on the topic for at least a decade, and it has been part of our core curriculum for the past eight years. This spring, as part of our own internal evaluation of departmental offerings, we determined that during the 2015– 2017 period alone there were 12 option studios and 23 courses across
all GSD departments that addressed climate change. The commitments to these crucial topics have a long history at Harvard, the GSD, and the Department of Landscape Architecture, a fact that will become evident with even a brief glance at our faculty profiles and course catalog. I invite LAM readers to peruse this information at www.gsd.harvard.edu/ landscape-architecture. ANITA BERRIZBEITIA, ASLA HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Martha Schwartz replies:
A
nita Berrizbeitia is factually correct about course offerings at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. But the topic has not yet been organized in a concerted fashion where the students are immersed in climate-focused classes. Nor do we represent climate change as being a core mission in our department. Other schools such as MIT and Arizona State University have become leaders in this topic, and the GSD—not only in Landscape Architecture—lags behind in the topic of climate change when it should take leadership. The studios
Anita mentioned are run according to individual instructors who have disparate interests and who may or may not cover topics that should be coordinated in a curriculum. However, the landscape department, under Anita’s guidance, has made great changes away from the fuzzy rhetoric of “landscape urbanism.” It is quickly responding to form a curriculum for teaching our core classes about climate change and to make our department’s commitment to teaching climate change an important component to what is offered at the GSD. MARTHA SCHWARTZ, FASLA NEW YORK
SUBMIT LAM welcomes letters from readers. Letters may be edited and condensed. Please e-mail comments to LAMletters @asla.org or send via U.S. mail to: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS 636 EYE STREET NW WASHINGTON, DC 20001–3736
16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
CONTRIBUTE TO THE FIELD
The Field is a place to exchange information on issues and challenges faced in recent work and to share thoughts and reactions to current events and research. All contributions are by ASLA members, for ASLA members. theďŹ eld.asla.org
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LAM
LAND MATTERS
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LOOK NORTH N
ext to the conversation in this country about harsh rollbacks of environmental regulation by the Trump administration, the news out of Quebec in June seems like a dispatch from another planet. On June 16, the Quebec National Assembly unanimously passed a new law, the Wetlands and Water Conservation Act, to conserve wetlands and other water bodies. Quebec has had a provincial water policy since 2002, but the new law is significant because it fastens a “no net loss” principle for wetlands into the books, which discourages wetland destruction and creates a compensation scheme for mitigation when destruction occurs. A statement by Ducks Unlimited Canada, the conservation group, calls the law “a turning point in the history of wildlife and wetland habitat conservation.” Nina-Marie Lister, Honorary ASLA, an ecologist and associate professor of urban and regional planning at Ryerson University in Toronto, said in an e-mail: “This is a progressive piece of legislation in the province that is the most hydrologically active (in terms of hydroelectric power and dam engineering in the country).” Fifteen percent of Quebec’s 1.5 million square kilometers is freshwater coverage (177,000 square kilometers), the highest proportion among the provinces, exceeded only by the territory of Nunavut (which is larger and 21 percent covered by freshwater). Quebec’s new law iterates the importance of safeguarding both the quantity and quality of freshwater supplies. In language that is almost startlingly frank, it observes wetlands’ role in filtering pollution and in controlling erosion and sedimentation. It cites the importance of wetlands to biodiversity in sustaining ecosystems and habitat. It specifically mentions that wetlands support vegetation that protects the ground from wind and sun to prevent warming and sequester carbon. And it recognizes the role of wetlands in “preserving natural character” and boosting the value of the lands around them. Pierre Valiquette, a landscape architect in Montreal who has worked for 25 years in the conservation of natural areas, said, “this Act is the outcome of more than 15 years of discussions, environmental activism, and sometimes, legal clashes.” He added that Quebec has had wetlands policies “except we had big loopholes.” The new law, which updates Quebec’s Natural Heritage Conservation Act, the Environment Quality Act, and
18 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
other laws, emphasizes the need to protect the watershed of the Saint Lawrence River, which has been steadily hardened and degraded over generations. Ducks Unlimited states that the Saint Lawrence Valley has lost 80 percent of its historical wetlands. In a written analysis of the new law, for which regulations are expected in the next year, Audrey-Julie Dallaire, a civil litigator with the firm Lavery, de Billy LLP in Sherbrooke, Quebec, noted that it will rate proposed development activities around wetlands according to their environmental risk, from negligible to high. Where wetland loss is expected to occur, a mathematical formula will determine how much the owner must pay into a government fund to compensate for the loss. The fund will be used for mitigation. The formula will include a multiplier or “rarity factor” that will significantly increase the cost of disrupting wetlands determined to be unusual. “Developers may consequently find themselves liable to pay financial compensation in amounts largely exceeding the value of the land encompassing the affected wetlands,” Dallaire writes, and in many cases, development will not be allowed. Some landowners may find themselves surprised once the boundaries of protection are drawn around watersheds and subwatersheds, but she says the new measures are “in keeping with the context of a significant modernization of environmental laws in Quebec.” And keep in mind, the new law passed in the 125-member parliament unanimously. Back on our side of the border, of course, we have wetlands protection under the Clean Water Act. But we also have a radical new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who appeared in late June before the Senate Appropriations Committee to defend the Trump administration’s proposed 31 percent budget cut to the agency. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) called the proposed cuts “downright offensive.” Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the cuts were “the worst I’ve seen.” The senators can watch what’s happening in Quebec to affirm that they are not the ones who have lost their minds.
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DESIGN. CULTURE. CRAFT.
FOREGROUND
O|CB
BIM
Use of building information modeling helped Meghen Quinn, ASLA, coordinate work on this dorm at the University of California, Berkeley, in TECH, page 38.
FOREGROUND
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NOW
EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
RIGHT
Streets in downtown Oklahoma City have been rebuilt as a part of Project 180.
COPY AND PASTE OKLAHOMA CITY IS REPLICATING ITS GREENER, MORE WALKABLE STREETSCAPES.
at Howard-Fairbairn Site Design. The firm has worked alongside larger international firms to help guide the ine years after Prevention maga- transformation. zine named Oklahoma City the least walkable city in the United States, Oklahoma City’s transformation is the city’s downtown core has been unusual for how swiftly it has been wholly remade, with a redesign of its realized. In the past five years, an streetscapes and two major park proj- elevated highway has been replaced ects completed or in the works. Today, by a street-level boulevard, a 70the downtown has a Walk Score of 74, acre central park has been planned, rivaling Seattle and Washington, D.C. and streets in the central business “It’s incredible, the amount of private district—eight linear miles in total businesses and urban housing that’s —have been rebuilt, from building come in. It’s a vibrant, bustling down- face to building face, with a focus on town, which is amazing,” says Scott pedestrians, bicyclists, and improved Howard, ASLA, one of two principals traffic flow.
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22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
Following a walkability study by Speck & Associates, the streetscape project, known as Project 180, was led by OJB Landscape Architecture, with 10 civil engineering firms and four landscape architecture offices, including Howard-Fairbairn. OJB surveyed the streets in the central business district and created a new palette of concrete pavers and native plantings that would contribute to the city’s sense of place and make downtown a more pleasant walking environment. The scope of Project 180 was shaped by city leaders, as well as Devon Energy, which in 2012 built a new tower
COURTESY OJB LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
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FOREGROUND
/NOW
LEFT
Design details include custom manhole covers that depict the city grid. BELOW
The city planted more than 2,500 street trees downtown.
OJB’s palette has been incorporated into nearly every project that has followed, including the boulevard— set to open next year—that replaced Interstate 40. “That framework of design, because it’s been so well received, is sort of splintering off in other areas,” Howard says. “It’s really kind of expanding the project.”
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24 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
The new central park, designed by Hargreaves Associates, broke ground this summer. It extends south from the boulevard, hops the new I-40 via Hans Butzer’s Skydance Bridge, and continues roughly a mile to the Oklahoma River, realizing the bulk of the city’s 2008 Core to Shore Plan. (The riverfront is not included in the current park project.) At 70 acres, the park is large enough to allow people to escape the
city, but Hargreaves principal Mary Margaret Jones, FASLA, says it also was important that the streetscapes along the edges of the park take their cues from the newly designed streetscapes in order to continue the downtown’s growing connectivity. For Boss, the city’s metamorphosis “shows the power of infrastructure improvements,” he says. “Project 180 was a great transformation for [the city], and I think as they’ve seen the benefits, it makes it much easier for Mary Margaret and Hargreaves to work through this next iteration of green space in the downtown.” TIMOTHY A. SCHULER, EDITOR OF NOW, CAN BE REACHED AT TIMOTHYASCHULER@GMAIL. COM AND ON TWITTER @TIMOTHY_SCHULER.
COURTESY HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES, LEFT; COURTESY OJB LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, CENTER AND RIGHT
downtown and fronted the city nearly $100 million for the streetscape project. Jereck Boss, ASLA, a principal at OJB, says the funds allowed the team to build momentum quickly. “We wanted to make an announcement, break ground, and build that first street as quickly as we possibly could so that the community could see that this was really going to happen,” Boss says. (OJB renovated the city’s Myriad Botanical Gardens during the same period.)
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ADDITIONAL WINNERS: Makoto Hagi | Seattle, WA Maria Munoz | New Orleans, LA Alison Lewis | Environmental Planning Group — Salt Lake City, UT Olivia Fragale | Terraink — Arlington, MA Louis Johnson | Gresham Smith & Partners — Louisville, KY Lindsay DeCeault | Schmidt Design Group — San Diego, CA TengYen Lin | TYL Design — Seattle, WA Rachel McQueen | Quadriga Landscape Architecture — Santa Rosa, CA Lora Martens | Arterra Landscape Architects — San Francisco, CA Sal Lindquist | Smithgroup JJR — Ann Arbor, MI Boris Wong | S&ME — Orlando, FL Bryan Obara | Rhodeside & Harwell — Alexandria, VA Shannon Forry | AECOM — Cleveland, OH Radhya Adityavarman | AECOM — San Francisco, CA Alex Strader | CARBO Landscape Architecture — Baton Rouge, LA Rae Ishee | Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects — New York, NY Thomas Baker | Michael Vergason Landscape Architects — Washington, DC Emily Bauer | BIG — New York, NY Jason Bingham | Garbini & Garbini Landscape Architecture — San Diego, CA Annie Bergelin | Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects — New York, NY
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First and Lasting Impressions®
/NOW
O WHAT’S IN A NAME? IN BRITAIN, ANGLO-SAXON PLACE-NAMES HOLD HYDROLOGICAL CLUES. BY TIM WATERMAN
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
Bawsey, in Norfolk, England, is a place-name that hints at hydrology; the geoarchaeologist Ben Pears and a local resident at Alrewas, or “land that floods and drains quickly”; a timeline shows historic warm periods.
ne of the joys of travel, even of armchair travel, is the discovery of euphonious place-names. I’ve driven through both Humptulips, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and Quonochontaug, in Rhode Island, and in both cases, these names, which I find flow off the tongue, flow in another way, too. Each describes the place’s hydrological characteristics. Humptulips, in the tongue of the Chehalis Tribe, tells that it is “hard to pole” a canoe through the river, which follows a convoluted course that includes fast, narrow torrents. Quonochontaug (Narragansett for “at the long pond”) is along a string of broad, placid coastal lagoons.
precisely this period. Though few written records remain from this time, even a modern map holds a hydrographic key to possible futures that have been written in the past.
Some of these names have particular poignancy. Muchelney, in the Somerset Levels, was cut off during the extreme winter floods in 2013–2014. Muchelney means “big island.” Communities along the River Swale in Yorkshire have increasingly frequent opportunities to find out that its name derives from Old English swalwe, meaning “gush of water.” The River Trent, meanwhile, The guide that indigenous names can provide to is “the trespasser.” landscape qualities and to human interactions with landscape may be followed any- Richard Jones at the University of where such names have not been Leicester is the principal investigaerased by the conquest of colonial- tor for “Flood and Flow” and a speism. This is no less true in Britain, cialist in medieval landscapes. He where four universities—Leicester, published the paper “Responding to Southampton, Nottingham, and Modern Flooding: Old English PlaceWales—have joined forces under a Names as a Repository of Traditional grant from the Leverhulme Trust Ecological Knowledge” in the Journal of Ecological for a two-year study of place-names Anthropology in 2016. He says the project’s aims fit within a larger understanding of indigenous called “Flood and Flow.” naming. “Place-names are used by all indigenous, In Britain, an extra dimension to aboriginal, and First Nations peoples to commuthe record of place-names provides nicate information about the local presence, bea set of clues to how particular land- havior, and characteristics of water,” he says. “For scapes might respond to global warming in the these communities, such names helped them to near future. In the period between 700 and 1000 share and pass on the traditional ecological knowlAD, temperatures in the British Isles rose rapidly edge gained through generations of observation of after a cold phase that began in 400 AD. Extreme the flood and flow of water through their home weather and an abundance of precipitation in this grounds. As such, such names act as active maktime is a historic parallel to our present-day situa- ers of place rather than the passive markers of space tion, and thus the Anglo-Saxon names have once they have become in the modern western mind.” again become meaningfully descriptive of their sites. Not only is this helpful, but a great many Visit waternames.wordpress.com to learn more of Britain’s present place-names were devised in about “Flood and Flow.”
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FOREGROUND
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ABOVE
A playground in Folwell Park, one of the largest parks in North Minneapolis.
ith its chain of lakes and acres of open space, Minneapolis has a nationally lauded park system. But as of 2015, its smaller neighborhood parks faced a capital investment backlog of more than $100 million, a shortfall that translated to aging structures, walkways full of potholes, and soccer fields that had been ground into mud. Vina Kay, the executive director of the Minnesota-based advocacy organization Voices for Racial Justice, says one can see an ugly pattern in which parks are in the worst shape. “If you were to go on a visual tour, you would see that some parks are more run-down than others and that those parks are most often in low-income communities of color,” Kay says.
is a more equitable system of park priorities. Last year, a team of landscape architects, planners, and data analysts, among others, spent months wading through census numbers and neighborhoodscale maps to get a detailed view of where better parks were most needed. They crafted a funding formula based on a scoring system that weighs a number of factors, including safety and life span of equipment, neighborhood crime rates—an indicator of whether residents feel comfortable even going to their local park—and demographics, particularly whether a park is located in a racially concentrated area of poverty.
Adam Regn Arvidson, FASLA, the park board’s In response, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation director of strategic planning, participated in the Board recently developed what its members hope working group. He says the demographic criteria
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MINNEAPOLIS PARK AND RECREATION BOARD
BY RACHEL DOVEY
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Including the demographic criteria in the formula was intuitive, but a park management analyst, Linden Weiswerda, also part of the working group, says that other metrics required more critical thinking, such as crime rates. “We decided not to use total crime because we were really interested in perceived risk,” he says. He explains that high-profile crimes against people, such as assault, are more likely than, say, auto theft to influence “whether you believe it’s safe for your kids to ride their bike around.” The formula calls for neighborhoods with more than 10 crimes “against persons” per 1,000 residents to receive the highest score. For Kay, of Voices for Racial Justice, the metric’s creation is a hopeful start. But she cautions against relying solely on a “clear-cut, analytical, almost mathematical system” for addressing something as complex as structural racism. Trust for the park board has worn thin among Minneapolis’s communities of color over the years. This spring, the local NAACP called for a boycott of all board meetings and park activities because of what its members see as discrimination in the organizaThe group determined that neighborhoods where tion’s hiring structure. 40 percent or more of the population had a family income of less than 185 percent of the federal pov- “I have sat at tables with park board staff who have erty threshold—and where 50 percent or more of really come a long way in their commitment to residents were people of color—would receive the racial equity…and they’ve put themselves in vulnerhighest score in that category, thus bumping up able positions to do that,” Kay says. “At the same their funding priority. Many of the top numbers in time, in a system that’s part of a broader system of that category appeared in North and South Min- structural racism, it’s not fast enough.” neapolis, where local government had historically clustered public housing and built freeways that slashed property values.
TOP LEFT
A closed tennis court in Folwell Park. TOP RIGHT
A bench in Fairview Park, also in North Minneapolis.
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MINNEAPOLIS PARK AND RECREATION BOARD
were driven by outreach and codified by a city ordinance agreeing to boost neighborhood park funding by $11 million annually over 20 years. “The one thing we heard from the community loud and clear was that almost everyone would support additional funding, but they wanted to make sure that the funding we got didn’t continue to perpetuate racial and economic disparities,” he says.
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FOREGROUND
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Sinkhole cycad (Zamia decumbens) grows at the bottom of a sinkhole in Belize. BOTTOM
A team collects DNA samples from a remote stand of Cacheo de Oviedo (Pseudophoenix ekmanii) in the Dominican Republic.
STOCKING UP NEW PROTOCOLS WILL ENSURE THE GENETIC DIVERSITY OF THREATENED TREES. BY JEFF LINK
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n what may be one of the largest tree conservation efforts in recent history, a team of environmental scientists from nine botanic gardens, arboretums, and environmental conservation agencies, as well as international collaborators in the Dominican Republic and Belize, is working to preserve and increase the genetic diversity of the country’s living tree collections. Launched in October 2016, the ambitious, threeyear project is a form of insurance for endangered species. “Zoos often have to exchange animals to maintain good genetic diversity across the population. Gardens are just starting to realize they have to manage plant collections in the same way,” says Patrick Griffith, the executive director of the Montgomery Botanical Center in Coral Gables, Florida, who is leading the effort. “We want to know what is the right number of plants to grow in botanic gardens if you want to maintain the genetic diversity of these plant populations.”
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With support from a $439,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, researchers are collecting and analyzing DNA samples of endangered or threatened woody plants across a broad phylogenetic spectrum, including oaks, magnolias, palms, cycads, and Hawaiian alula (Brighamia insignis). From Puerto Rican forests where magnolias are routinely poached to eroding Hawaiian cliffsides only accessible by helicopter, a total of 1,600 specimens will be collected in the wild, says Sean Hoban, a conservation biologist at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, who is involved in the study. These will be compared with samples from curated living collections to determine the number of species that botanic gardens need to maintain, individually and collectively, to capture the full range of a species’s diversity. Many of the trees being studied, such as the buccaneer palm, are attractive, charismatic species whose ornamental value has contributed
Even popular house plants such as the alula can have high conservation value because they are so genetically similar, often grown through trade cuttings and clones, says Murphy Westwood, the director of Global Tree Conservation and a scientist at the Morton Arboretum, who is involved in the project. That’s one of the reasons this research is so vital for tree conservation. Current living collection protocols, lacking scientific rigor, capture only about 40 percent of the genetic diversity found in each species, leaving these populations vulnerable to threats such as climate change, drought, and insect predation. Westwood says she is particularly excited about plans to develop an online portal, similar to those used by zoos, through which reproductive and geographic data about seeds, leaf cuttings, and pollen exchanged among gardens can be carefully tracked. These plant specimens then can be shared among botanic gardens and grown in captive breeding programs before being reintroduced into the wild. “We need to prioritize plants that aren’t backed up and know where there are genetic gaps,” Westwood says, “to inform collecting in the future.”
MONTGOMERY BOTANICAL CENTER/MICHAEL CALONJE, TOP; MONTGOMERY BOTANICAL CENTER/PATRICK GRIFFITH, BOTTOM
to their threatened or endangered status, Griffith says. “Many of these wild plants were dug up and used in landscaping throughout the Caribbean. When you pull these plants out of the wild and grow them in isolated locations, you don’t contribute to reproductive populations,” he says.
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FOREGROUND
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side, tilting its surface. When conditions change, the water sloshes back and forth as in a bathtub, creating a short-term tidal condition and temporal wetlands. This action, which occurs daily or even several times a day—but which is largely unseen by Milwaukeeans, Current says—was the inspiration for Slosh Park, the winning entry in the city’s recent Take Me to the River design competition.
W RINSE CYCLES A NEW PARK FOR MILWAUKEE’S INNER HARBOR ABSTRACTS CITY AND NATURE.
TOP
The park site is at the end of a right-ofway on Milwaukee’s near south side. RIGHT
Portions of the park will “flood” in conjunction with water levels in the harbor.
hen Jennifer Current, a landscape architect at Quorum Architects, looks out at Milwaukee’s bustling Inner Harbor, she sees something a lot of people don’t: the water. “There’s so much going on,” she says. There are trains, barges, and ships in constant motion, and for many, she says, the water is a mirror that simply reflects all of that activity. “When in reality, the water is so active.”
Designed by Current and the landscape architects Jacob Blue, ASLA; Bruce Morrow, ASLA; and Caitlin Blue, ASLA, of Ayres Associates, Slosh Park interprets a seiche wetland through a grid of variable-height stone blocks, an abstraction of the ubiquitous urban street grid. Interspersed with native wetland plant species, lower blocks will “flood” as the river’s water level rises, allowing water to “reinhabit” what once was wetland and drawing attention to the harbor’s dynamism. It also includes seiche-inspired concrete benches and a perforated Cor-Ten steel art wall that depicts fish species historically and currently found in the harbor—a direct link to the research done next door at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s new School of Freshwater Sciences.
Indeed, the water level of the Kinnickinnic River, one of three rivers that meet near the Inner Harbor and flow into Lake Michigan, fluctuates dramatically. It can change up to two feet in just a few hours at times, the result of what’s called a seiche. Seiches occur when strong winds or changes in barometric The park accomplishes all this on just 8,600 square feet pressure literally push a lake’s waters toward one between the school and what had been a city-owned coal pile, a tiny bit of leftover space that was created when a roundabout was added. “The funny thing about our parcel is that technically, I don’t even think it is a parcel,” Adams says. “It literally is the right-of-way.” Despite initial plans to build the park in phases—the competition had asked teams for designs that could be constructed incrementally—Slosh Park has been so well received that Harbor District plans to build the entire project next year, Adams says. It is expected to open in summer 2018.
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JENNIFER CURRENT; JACOB BLUE, ASLA; BRUCE MORROW, ASLA; CAITLIN BLUE, ASLA
Organized by Harbor District Inc., a nonprofit working to redevelop the Inner Harbor, the competition was a way to spark interest in a part of the city that often feels, and sometimes is, off-limits. In early discussions among staff, as well as in comments made during a community charrette, establishing a connection to the river was paramount, followed by an acute need for open space. According to calculations made by Harbor District’s planning director, Dan Adams, the city’s near south side has approximately 1.8 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, compared to the citywide figure of 10.3 acres.
Photo : Bryant Park, New York
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FOREGROUND
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PHILIP H. LEWIS JR. 1925 2017 BY KASSANDRA BRYANT, STUDENT ASLA
P
Gary A. Brown, FASLA, says of his late colleague: “He was always looking at the big picture and the patterns on the landscape created not only by development, but also by its many natural features unique to the region.” Following the completion of his MLA at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1953, Lewis returned to his home state to direct the Recreation and Open Space Study for the state
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During his tenure as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Lewis advised and mentored a generation of professionals, emphasizing a pragmatic sense of environmental responsibility. Ken Keeley, ASLA, a landscape architect and former student of Lewis, says that he “had an undying optimism about the work that he was doing and the work that landscape architects could do.”
SKIP BROWN
hilip Howard Lewis Jr., FASLA, who received of Illinois. He also taught at the University of Ilthe ASLA Medal in 1987, died July 2 in Madison, linois, where he had completed his BLA. Later in Wisconsin, of heart failure. He was 91. his career, he transitioned to a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he went Lewis was widely known for his commitment to on to be named chair of the landscape architecture the protection of natural resources and to build- program. He retired in 1995 and had the title of ing public awareness of environmental issues. He professor emeritus. worked to create a more holistic understanding of landscape systems both in academia and the public Among Lewis’s many notable projects is the Lewis sphere. Lewis was also a pioneer in digital mapping Nine Springs E-Way, a conservation corridor in and was given the ESRI Lifetime Achievement Dane County, Wisconsin. The seven-mile-long Award in 2000 for his early advocacy of computer project embodies his vision of a regional planning graphics in regional design. strategy that celebrates local ecology and culture.
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FOREGROUND
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TECH BIM THERE, DONE THAT ONE PRACTITIONER DEFIES THE HANDICAPS OF BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING FOR LANDSCAPE, DETERMINED NOT TO REMAIN AN EXCEPTION. BY BRIAN BARTH
ABOVE
A Revit model of a trellis climbing the courtyard wall of a San Francisco art gallery is superimposed over a photo of the finished construction.
M
eghen Quinn, ASLA, has a secret. BIM—an acronym that puts moonbeams in the eyes of architects, but makes some landscape architects cringe—is her software of choice. BIM, shorthand for building information modeling, is the 3-D, data-rich software platform embodied by Revit, a product launched in
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2000 by Charles River Software and acquired by Autodesk two years later. By 2012, 70 percent of architecture firms in North America reported using BIM, and in 2016 the American Institute of Architects reported that BIM was used for nearly 100 percent of projects at large firms.
Yet Quinn, who merged her San Francisco practice with the Office of Cheryl Barton in January, is all moonbeams. Well, mostly. “I never want to use CAD again,” she says. “Moving to BIM is like entering a 3-D world from a 2-D world…though the limitations for landscape architects are a bit frustrating.” Despite the software’s limitations, Quinn has used Revit from start to finish for her past several projects: a droughttolerant landscape at the University of San Francisco and a series of rooftop and courtyard gardens at the University of California, Berkeley, among them.
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It seems that so few landscape architects use BIM, however, that no one has ever bothered to collect the data. Its reputation in the field is as a clunky, building-centric, overly complex tool that has put up yet another barrier between landscape designers and architects.
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FOREGROUND
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on some of those inside– outside elements had we not been able to communicate so effectively.”
A perspective rendering of a University of California, Berkeley, residence hall courtyard was modeled and rendered within Revit, except for a final Photoshop overlay of plants. RIGHT
This view from within a student common space in the Berkeley project depicts an interior and exterior bench with a glass wall between.
Another innovation: BIM software is typically cloud-based, allowing all members of a design team to work from a single model that updates in real time. On one recent project, Quinn was designing a bench for a patio space. The architects wanted
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The advantages are legion. Whereas most landscape architects compose their designs in a combination of plan views, sections, and 2-D details, and must create additional 3-D renderings for illustration purposes, with BIM, everything is modeled in 3-D from the start—a huge aid for envisioning how the design will translate from paper to a park or plaza. Every object in the design is linked to its own database, which might include information such as dimensions, weight, carbon footprint, and cost. As a result, chores such as material takeoffs and scheduling, not to mention revisions, are a breeze.
BIM is more time consuming up front than 2-D drafting, Quinn says, but as the project to site an identical progresses, that initial bench inside an adjacent investment more than glass wall, with the goal of uniting pays for itself. “It is vastly the interior and exterior spaces by more efficient. You design in 3-D, drawing the eye along this seamless and then the program creates the 2-D line. “I don’t see how we could’ve construction documents more or less done that if we weren’t both work- automatically. With a 2-D program ing in the same platform,” Quinn like AutoCAD, you have to constantly says. “Every little thing I drew had export and import information to a to be fully coordinated with both the program like SketchUp to do threearchitects and the structural engi- dimensional studies. You end up neer. I think we may have given up redrawing a lot of things, so it’s like
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ABOVE
This Revit screen capture shows the data held in the model for a planting of giant chainfern (Woodwardia fimbriata). This feature facilitates planting callouts and quantity.
you are doing it twice. In Revit, you just model it once, and then you can cut as many sections and elevations as you want, with basically the click of a button.” As I’ve reported previously (see “The Limits of BIM,” LAM, February 2016), a number of landscape architecture firms have dabbled in BIM over the past decade, but I’ve struggled to find even one that incorporates it into daily work flow. Before I was introduced to Quinn, I’d found three, worldwide, who were using it on at least some of their projects.
topographic surfaces. The other big drawback is that the “I” in BIM— information—isn’t available for landscape components the way it is for architectural features. Almost everything in a building, from piping to flooring to office chairs, now has a library of BIM-compatible data available for it, typically supplied by the manufacturer, which adds untold richness to the “model.” BIM enthusiasts often speak of working not in three, but seven, dimensions: time/ scheduling (4); cost/estimation (5); sustainability/energy use (6); and life cycle/facilities management (7).
Besides the steep learning curve to master the tool, and the steep price (a Revit subscription costs $2,000 per year), landscape architects’ chief complaint is that BIM programs are ill-designed for modeling complex
Without the necessary data, however, these capabilities aren’t much help to landscape architects, who deal more in irrigation, drainage, mulch, and shrubs than in drywall and linoleum. But Quinn has found ways to
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work around these limitations—and she believes that landscape architecture, as a profession, has no choice but to do the same. Quinn’s initiation into the cult of BIM began in 2011 when she was working for Sasaki Associates in the company’s San Francisco office. The architects in the interdisciplinary firm had been working exclusively in Revit for several years, and were constantly egging on the landscape architects to “take the plunge,” Quinn says. The ribbing aside, the shift in software preferences was opening a gulf between the two professions, even as they worked side by side on the same project. Sasaki architects had always held the landscape components of a project in great esteem, Quinn says, encouraging their counterparts’ input “on how buildings
O|CB
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were sited, and the overall look and feel of the project. But when they became fully committed to Revit, that collaboration started to break apart because they were working on another platform.” ABOVE
A section of a podium courtyard for the Berkeley residence hall illustrates coordination of landscape, architectural, and structural elements in BIM modeling. INSET
A 3-D model of the same site depicts capture of rainwater conveyed in a concrete channel to a bioretention planter. The canted channel forms the backrest of a bench.
The architects in the office literally began to speak another language— clash rendition (preventing constructability errors), data drop (an information deliverable), federated model (multiple BIM models combined into one)—which further alienated their peers. Quinn’s dread only grew when things started going wrong at job sites. In one instance, the waterproofing lines on a new building didn’t match the landforms designed by the landscape architects in the office because the architects hadn’t properly translated the landscape CAD drawings into the Revit model. The landscape
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ers that are a signature feature in her work. California regulations require on-site treatment of all stormwater on sites above a certain size, which, on tight sites, Quinn likes to take care of in raised beds that hold layers of gravel, engineered soil, mulch, reeds, and other water-loving plants. Different jurisdictions in the state have different requirements for the size of gravel, depth of mulch, and other parameters, which she can architects ended up having to re- quickly alter in a Revit model to suit configure the topography on the fly the circumstances. during construction. “Architecturally, a floor assembly “They stopped looking at our grad- might include things like decking, ing plans as much, and were model- joists, carpet, some kind of subfloor,” ing sites very rudimentarily on their Quinn explains. “The floor feature own,” Quinn recalls. “That’s when that comes out of the box with Revit the lightbulb started to go off for me. allows you to have all those layers, I don’t want architects designing my each with its own dimensions and scope. I want to have a seat at the materiality, and gives you the ability to table and be a collaborative design apply rendering treatments to them. partner. So I started using Revit.” It’s perfect for biofiltration planters— you might have three inches of Fortunately, she had plenty of archi- mulch over 18 inches of soil mix over tects around to teach her. Landscape 12 inches of drain rock, and you can architects have long clamored for a use the floor tool to make those laySIM (site information modeling) or ers. Then you just draw the planter, LIM (landscape information model- set the elevations that you want the ing) tool, but Quinn has found she top of your soil to be, and the procan co-opt the building-based tools gram turns it into a 3-D model.” of Revit for landscape purposes. The “floor” tool, she says, works just fine BIM is most applicable, and easiest for designing the biofiltration plant- to adapt, on landscape projects that
O|CB
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FOREGROUND
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QUINN FIGURED HER BIM CHOPS WOULD BE ONE WAY TO SET HERSELF APART AND “BUILD A REPUTATION.”
dorm currently under construction at UC Berkeley, says she’s the only landscape architect he’s worked with who is fluent in BIM. One of the more complex features of the site is a pair of terraces off the second and third floors, where landscape features climb over and around an armature of sloped and stepped rooflines and appear as extensions of interior elements, visible through large glazed surfaces.
ABOVE
This section is cut from a 3-D model of the topography for a terraced planting at the University of San Francisco.
Quinn reports that BIM data is increasingly available for certain landscape components, such as light fixtures, benches, bollards, and other manufactured site furnishings. For everything else, especially in the plant department, she’s slowly building her own data libraries. “In the early days of Revit, architects did the same thing,” she says. “They would build data sets for whatever they happened to need
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on a project and then put it out on the Internet for others to use. Then the suppliers jumped on board and started doing it themselves. So I’m convinced that landscape architects can take this on. Sometimes you just have to get creative and improvise.”
“It’s a design that couldn’t really be conceived of just in plan, because you’re dealing with at least three elevations, and not all things are orthogonal,” Galbraith says. “In this type of project, where the landscape is a part of the building—which seems to be becoming more and more common—a BIM model allows you to take the design further, to really understand how the landscape features meet and relate to the architectural and structural components, so they can marry and become more seamless.”
When Sasaki closed its San Francisco office in early 2012, Quinn decided to begin practicing on her own. She figured her BIM chops would be one way to set herself apart and “build a reputation.” They have definitely drawn the attention of the architects who have hired her as a One reason that the construction insubcontractor in recent years. dustry has tilted wholesale toward BIM is that building owners find treJeffrey Galbraith, an associate ar- mendous value in having a detailed chitect at Solomon Cordwell Buenz model of every inch of their building who collaborated with Quinn on the postconstruction, an asset when carBancroft Residence Hall, a 775-bed rying out repairs, maintenance, and
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are highly integrated with a building, Quinn says. Laying out the hills, dales, and undulating pathways of a park are trickier, but not impossible. Revit’s three-dimensional surface modeling tools are quite elementary, so she recommends modeling complex, organically shaped features in Rhino, a program with files that are readily imported into Revit models.
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renovation, which certainly has its merits in the context of landscape, as well. Increasingly, Galbraith says, RFPs require BIM as the project platform. If the landscape architect works only in CAD, this means the project prime must translate the landscape drawings to the model—not a position either party wants to be in.
ABOVE
The University of San Francisco terraces after construction, with a retaining wall of weathering steel.
Galbraith is surprised that Autodesk hasn’t made more of an effort to cater to landscape architects, given that a central promise of BIM is improved coordination among trades. Plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and structural engineers have all made the switch, he says, noting that civil engineers are the one other holdout. Quinn once contacted Autodesk to offer herself as a guinea pig should the company want to work on any new landscape-oriented BIM tools, an offer it declined. I’ve spoken with
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other landscape architects who were similarly rebuffed by the company. Seeking answers, I requested an interview with an Autodesk representative. The company demurred, offering only written responses to my questions instead. Some answers were quite blunt: “What it comes down to is a willingness of landscape architects to embrace disruption and creatively engage with new technologies and work flows.” Others, more of an olive branch: “Landscape architects who want more services or plug-ins for Revit should let us know what they need, and we will explore what the art of the possible is.”
offers two free tutorials on using Revit in landscape architecture, and landarchbim.com offers a 33part video series on the subject for $230. The Autodesk representative also pointed me to the company’s Site Designer Extension plug-in (previously known as Siteworks), which Quinn says that, despite being “trashed in customer reviews… bridges the gap in Revit’s site design deficiencies by adding more parametric and algorithmic modeling capability to the topographic features. It shows that Autodesk is taking a step in the right direction and investing in site design—but there is a long way to go.”
She’s not complaining, though. Success is the best revenge. In Quinn’s case, she’s too busy figuring out how to make LIM out of BIM to be annoyed by architecture’s dominance with the software industry. “I think it is paramount that landscape architects take this on. Otherwise we’re going to be relegated to planting and irrigation, and that’s not the only scope Quinn says she’s never come up that I am interested in having.” against a Revit challenge that she couldn’t resolve by studying the BRIAN BARTH IS A TORONTO-BASED FREEmany online forums and tutorials LANCE WRITER WITH A BACKGROUND IN LANDfor the BIM community. Autodesk SCAPE DESIGN AND URBAN PLANNING.
MEGHEN QUINN. ASLA
FOREGROUND
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FOREGROUND
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OFFICE
GETTING PAID HOW TO MAKE YOUR INVOICE LOUDER. BY WENDY GILMARTIN
L
ate payments are inevitable in any business, but it seems designers are particularly at risk when certain hesitant-to-pay clients lag at processing long-sent invoices. When unpaid invoices pile up, how do design firms recoup their payment while managing clients? What are the best ways to get paid, and how are nonpayments settled? What are some successful strategies for negotiating when the timeline, scope, or budget is altered during the course of a project? In strategic contractual wording, through careful scoping, and even by vetting potential clients, among other things. Three landscape architecture firms share their tactics for ensuring timely payments. Interviews have been edited and condensed.
the bookkeeping on the client end. And some issues can be resolved pretty quickly with those two entities talking with each other and finding out that a payment got held up because of this or that. We carry contractual language about late payments and penalties, like interest added to accounts that get late or overdue.
who may not treat everyone as well as they expected to be treated. So you’re being selective and strategic about who you work for and the types of projects you take on. There are riskier projects out there that you know may not be on solid footing, and you might want to avoid that. Funding is one of the things
You start to learn, and I think probably a lot of people would agree about this in their own communities: They know who the clients are who pay well, who treat their consultants well, and then there are those clients
to know about, whether a project is funded and, if the funding’s solid, where that’s coming from. That’s kind of a preemptive tactic to try to avoid any late payment or anything like that.
RIGHT
From left, Jonathan Morley, ASLA; Jordan Zlotoff; and Stephanie Woirol of Berger Partnership in the Seattle office.
I want to talk about what happens when there is a late payment. It’s inevitable, so how does the office avoid that? It starts with good communication between the project managers. They also establish a bit of rapport between our bookkeeping here in-house with
52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
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FOREGROUND
/OFFICE
“THERE ARE RISKIER PROJECTS OUT THERE THAT YOU KNOW MAY NOT BE ON SOLID FOOTING, AND YOU MIGHT WANT TO AVOID THAT.” —GREG BROWER, ASLA, BERGER PARTNERSHIP
Derrick Eberle, Associate ASLA, and Erin Meinershagen in the work space at Bruce Dees & Associates.
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we’ll be there on Friday to pick that check up. So just have it prepared and we’ll come get it.” I think there’s no limit to the creative ways you can think up to go collect from somebody.
be aware of and factor into the training how we principals approach it and how we might word certain things. It’s a slow learning process. They might be a great designer from day one, but I don’t think anybody walks into a deWhen you draft contract or propos- sign office being a great bill collector. al wording for something unusual, such as the discount, is it reviewed BRUCE DEES & ASSOCIATES by legal counsel? TACOMA, WASHINGTON If we have unique circumstances we BRUCE DEES, FASLA, PRINCIPAL probably will turn to counsel just to make sure they see we’re not cross- What are some lessons learned or ing some sort of line. And again, that tactics you’ve learned across the particular strategy, not employed very years to coax a hesitant-to-pay client? often, was just one. If we are going We get most of our work with public to keep working with somebody, we clients, and they always do pay. We would like to have them honor our just make sure that we understand work and make sure they’re paying their pay schedule so we get our us in a timely manner. The better invoice in sync with their payment strategy is probably to just move on. schedule. So we generally do not have a problem with public clients paying Is there mentoring in the office for or even paying on time. When we’ve new employees or younger employ- done subwork for architects we’ve had ees where they’re enlightened about more delay in receiving payment, so we make sure we get our invoice to any of these issues? Generally, the burden of conversa- them before they submit an invoice tions about the proposal, the scope of to the client, recognizing we won’t work, payments, is going to go to the get paid until they get paid. And then principals. The project managers are when there are delays, we just make being made aware of it so they’re in- friendly calls to remind them. formed. We’re quite often sharing the lessons learned about these situations So is there a degree of coordination and what can happen. I think even between your bookkeeping team when somebody who’s new to the and, for instance, an architect’s firm or younger in the firm is enter- bookkeeper? ing into that conversation with clients Yeah, just to make sure we know about scope and costs, we just want to when they’re going to submit their
BRUCE DEES & ASSOCIATES
BELOW
It can be a touchy subject. How is it accommodated in a contract, or in a conversation? At one point we had somebody, a client, who was just notoriously late. And they brought us quite a bit of work, so it was kind of hard to turn our back on it. But what we did is we wrote into our contract that if they paid us in a timely fashion, then we would offer them a discount on our fee and that was theirs to keep. It worked a little, and then eventually they went back to their old ways. So we then employed another strategy, which was to ask for a retainer or something up front so we knew we were going to be okay until the next payment came. But the retainer is not a regular process, and not every client is willing to do something like that, at least for our professional services. We’ve actually gone as far as to inform a client who is intending to pay us, “Okay, we’ll be there on Tuesday or
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FOREGROUND
/OFFICE
“WE JUST MAKE SURE THAT WE UNDERSTAND THEIR PAY SCHEDULE SO WE GET OUR INVOICE IN SYNC.” —BRUCE DEES, FASLA, BRUCE DEES & ASSOCIATES
Is there a degree of vetting or an awareness of clients who are coming to you, and could that affect a decision whether to work with that entity? The majority of our work is with public clients and private clients that we’ve done work for; we did vet them. We knew they had the same philosophy that we have and, without sounding discriminatory, we don’t typically work for developers. Ever? We’ve done a couple, and we carefully checked them out.
ABOVE
Shawn Jensen, ASLA, and Rachel Lingard, ASLA, collaborate at the office of Bruce Dees & Associates.
What contractual language do you have set in place to ensure payments? We include an extra work clause related to extending the schedule or adding additional meetings by the client. And we generally use that to encourage them to stay on schedule.
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It sounds like you have a great scope control mechanism set in place, with the detailed estimates. Well, there are always lessons learned, but we try to be systematic in that regard. We approach each
of these projects trying to do the very best we can for the client, and I think that comes through in our attitude and our dealings with them. So when we do ask for extras, the few times we did need to ask, it’s usually not a problem. When we carefully define the scope of work and the budget or the maximum allowable construction cost up front, that’s also to protect the owner so that we don’t get carried away and design something that they can’t afford. MCKNIGHT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA RYAN MCKNIGHT, ASLA, OWNER
Is there any set wording that you use in proposals or contracts to ensure payments come in a timely manner? Or language for additional services? It depends on the project. We’re a small firm, and 50 percent of our work is residential. So, it’s truly relationship based. We do have four- or five-page contracts even for those smaller projects, and there’s a compensation article about payments and when payments are due. I think the thing that keeps us paid the quickest on that particular project type is that we bill at the end of every month, not the end of every milestone, and so it’s an expectation that’s set in the very beginning. They know at the 30th
BRUCE DEES & ASSOCIATES
invoice. We make sure we have ours to them in advance of that so we don’t miss an entire billing cycle. We do not have any kind of clause that requires interest on late payment, or anything like that.
We don’t really use it to ask for extra money but to keep them on schedule. And then when we go to schematic design, design development, and construction drawings, that fee is also negotiated based upon maximum allowable construction cost, or MACC. Most of the work we do is park design, and therefore, a majority of our clients are public clients like cities or counties, and our fees are typically lump sum and often based upon a percentage of that maximum construction cost. We do detailed cost estimates at each step along the way to stay within that maximum allowable construction cost. The issues in the past have been with the client basically increasing the budget, and so we’ve included a clause that indicates that if they increase the MACC, and therefore increase our work, we’re due additional fees. And so that’s worked pretty well. The other place where we’ve had issues with extra cost has had to do with permitting, because oftentimes depending on the agency that we have to go through to get permits, the amount of effort can just change dramatically.
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FOREGROUND
/OFFICE
“WE BILL AT THE END OF EVERY MONTH, NOT THE END OF EVERY MILESTONE.”
of every month, whatever we’ve done on that project to date is being billed, and it sort of establishes a routine, and there are no surprises. There’s also language in our agreements that payments are due in 30 days, and there are penalties for not paying. We’ve never enforced them, as we’ve never had to, so we’ve been very fortunate in that. We’ve had a lot of clients, and the only times I’ve not been paid is when I went against my gut. There was nothing, a contract or anything else, we could have done to get paid on a couple of those projects, but sometimes that’s just the way it falls. BELOW
Staff at work in the office of McKnight Landscape Architects.
ects on a commercial and public level. And in terms of getting paid on those, we don’t have as much control, because nine times out of 10, we’re the subconsultant to an architect and we’re using their American Institute of Architects contract, which is—you get paid when they get paid, and so I rely on relationships with the architects I’m working for.
additional services clauses in our contracts that describe what consists of an additional service and how it should be paid, and there are two options: negotiate a fixed fee or be charged at the listed hourly rate. And it has to be done in writing if it’s a big enough scope change, meaning we’re going to write an amendment to the contract, which we’ve done several times.
Tell me how you secure payments for additional services. We consider additional services as a scope change. But hopefully we’ve done a really good job and have listened to the client in the very beginWhat is the other 50 percent of the ning to establish a to-do list. And if work? additional services come on board, We’ve done larger-scale planning it’s maybe because we’ve pushed the projects and detailed design proj- envelope in the design and they’ve loved something that we’ve done that’s outside of their thinking in the schematic and design and development phases.
But relationships and communication are always key. We’re just smart enough about all these contracts to be dangerous, but if you maybe just put all that aside, be a human being, have a conversation and shake hands with the person, and look him in the eye and understand what he is asking of you, and you have deeply expressed what you’re going to perform for him, you just won’t have any trouble. If you find yourself saying, “I’m just not sure about this person,” then you need to walk away and trust yourself. I’ve made the mistake of not trusting myself a couple of times, and that’s the only times I’ve been burned. I guess I risked those couple of little projects, but they were just so small, and it’s like, all right, if the guy didn’t give me $1,000, I’m not going to die.
And really, additional services only come into play for us on the larger commercial projects. They happen on our smaller residential projects, but we really don’t call them additional services. Most of those proposals are on an hourly agreement. Residential clients know going in that anything we’re doing is paid by the hour, no matter what we’re doing. For commercial, we do have
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WENDY GILMARTIN IS AN ARCHITECT AND JOURNALIST IN LOS ANGELES.
COURTESY MCKNIGHT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS
—RYAN MCKNIGHT, ASLA, MCKNIGHT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS
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FOREGROUND
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MINDS
TRACES OF SELF EXILE “W
Reading the text today, Rose’s words cut through the decades, carrying with them equal doses of wit, creativity, and frustration with the status quo. An uncompromising designer from his time in and out of Harvard (he was expelled in 1937, later returned but never graduated) to his death in 1991, Rose is the subject of the latest volume of the Masters of Modern Landscape Design series published in association with the Library of American Landscape His-
62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
A NEW BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES ROSE EXPLORES HIS DIFFICULT BRILLIANCE. BY MIMI ZEIGER
tory and the University of Georgia Press. It’s the first biography dedicated to the landscape architect, who although a prolific writer throughout his career and author of four of his own books, has yet to receive the kind of canonical recognition bestowed on his Harvard classmates Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley.
As director of the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design—a nonprofit located at Rose’s Ridgewood, New Jersey, home—the book’s author, Dean Cardasis, FASLA, is wellplaced to untangle the competing forces of Rose’s career. Few of Rose’s works survive in their original form,
ABOVE
The landscape architect James Rose with “snake dance” fountain, early 1960s.
COURTESY JAMES ROSE CENTER
ords! Can we ever untangle them?” reads James Rose’s opening salvo in Pencil Points. Appearing in the definitive journal of modernist design thought, the landscape designer’s 1939 essay rejects preconceived ideas of formal or informal design and makes the case for an organic and materials-based approach—an argument approaching revelation at a time when Beaux-Arts methodologies held sway.
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/MINDS
and a spare eight are presented as illustrated case studies—a fraction of the more than 80 projects produced in his lifetime. Much of the book is devoted to advocating for Rose’s achievements while trying to account for the designer’s disillusionment with the culture of postwar landscape architecture and his eventual self-imposed exile to suburban New Jersey. Although these two threads are not in opposition, they do place a strain on the narrative, suggesting a portrait of a man whose increasing radicalism over the course of decades—from modernism to ad hoc material sensibilities to environmentalism—contributed to his own isolation. “He was a rebel’s rebel from the start, an incisive critic destined to follow his own path,” Cardasis says. Early in the prologue for the book, Cardasis describes his first encounter with a 76-year-old Rose (just a couple years before his death). The passage is clearly loving, but also disconcerting. A disheveled and mismatched Rose steps out of a “rusty, egg-yolk-colored 1970s VW van,” and Cardasis writes: “An incredibly long, almost wizard-like straw hat grazed his shoulders and shaded his face. As he looked up I could see he was wearing glasses, but one frame was empty, and the remaining one held a tinted sunglass lens. In that
64 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
instant I had my first silent lesson from the iconoclastic modern landscape architect James Rose: ‘Have no preconceptions.’” It’s from this point that a revolutionary must be nudged into the historical fold. The task isn’t easy, though it is most successful early in Rose’s biography. Cardasis, unpacking Rose’s interest in modernism, finds parallels in the spare poetry of William Carlos Williams and the easy spatial flow of Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road house, which serves as a precedent for Rose’s home in Ridgewood. In both projects, the use of outdoor rooms and landscape features illustrates Rose’s maxim that “landscape design falls somewhere between architecture and sculpture.” Indeed, Rose’s own writings referenced modern artists such as Pablo Picasso and the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo. Rose even wrote that a Georges Braque still life and Kurt Schwitters’s Rubbish Construction are “interesting suggestions for gardens.” The book describes that fascination with collage and assemblage, tracking it through
Rose’s work, where it appears initially in the model Rose made of his future home while in the navy, the materials scavenged from around his military station, or in the scrap metal fountains he improvised in the 1960s and 1970s. The author continues this line of argument to suggest Rose’s use of recycled railroad ties and asphalt—used for the steps and terraces of the Averett Garden and House in Columbus, Georgia (1959)—as an example of Rose’s affinity for “found objects.” But later, as modernism gave way to countercultural influences, it is harder to pin Rose down. Cardasis chronicles the designer’s withdrawal from mainstream landscape architecture and, more generally, American culture, citing a growing aversion to the impact of postwar suburban development on the existing landscape as the cause. He quotes from Rose’s 1958 book Creative Gardens as evidence: “The recipe is simple: first, spoil the land by slicing it in particles that will bring the most dollars, add any house that has sufficient selling gimmicks to each slice, and garnish with ‘landscaping.’”
ABOVE
Eleanore Pettersen, the architect for the Paley house, brought Rose on to design the garden. The site was a rocky, sloping woodland.
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FOREGROUND
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FOREGROUND
/MINDS
ROSE WAS NEVER SHY ABOUT GETTING INTO ARGUMENTS WITH CLIENTS, BUT HE ALSO HAD HIS DEFENDERS.
Given Rose’s then-radical understanding of landscape architecture as an integration of spatial and natural conditions, the banal blanketing of suburban conventions across the United States would surely account for his retreat; however, Rose was not alone in his critique. Other writers, designers, and artists of the period shared his early environmentalist stirrings, so it is strange to find few references, especially given the wealth of parallels drawn in support of Rose’s embrace of modernism. The book makes brief and tantalizing allusion to significant countercultural figures: Timothy Leary (Rose apparently dropped LSD with him but “wondered what the fuss was all about”) and Alan Watts (Rose studied with him but then renounced Watts’s teachings). It would seem that his cantankerous personality instigated isolation as much as his ideology.
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The biography doesn’t hide that Rose was gay, though the narrative doesn’t put emphasis on the designer’s sexuality as an overt source of his outsiderness. “As you know, Rose lived in a time when being gay was extremely difficult, and I can only imagine how that influenced his life and work,” Cardasis said in an e-mail. “Because of this and in deference to his expressed wishes not to belabor the fact, I did not explore the issue further than a simple reference to his sexuality in the book. More (or less), I thought, would be inappropriate.” The result of this tact, however, is that the biography seems a bit closeted— the queerness in Rose’s methods left for others to explore at a later time.
titioners. For the 1960 issue of Progressive Architecture, the editors asked Rose, Lawrence Halprin, and Karl Linn—the environmentalist, activist, and pioneer of urban gardening— to review each other’s work. Rose’s Macht Garden and House in Baltimore from 1956 was subject to strong critique by the others for its expressiveness, particularly what was termed the “incessant” angled terraces. While Cardasis characterizes the grouping of designers as something the magazine “cooked up,” as if it were a bit of a stunt, there was clearly editorial intent here to make alignments between three landscape architects operating outside the conventional mien, with anticipatory ties to social and ecological movements. Despite his iconoclasm, there were As Rose’s work reenters the canon, moments that suggest possible con- more research is needed to better nections between Rose and other prac- situate it historically.
ABOVE
A view nearly without boundaries from inside to out at Rose’s house in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
FROM PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE 1954
Perhaps as a respite, Rose began traveling regularly to Japan and eventually began practicing Zen Buddhism. “He went to Japan in 1960, and that started a love affair with the country that went on for his whole life,” Cardasis told me by phone. “Rose found inspiration in the Eastern tradition, especially in the attitudes to the natural world.”
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Did Rose deliberately push away his contemporaries and potential allies? It’s likely. He was never shy about getting into arguments with clients, but he also had his defenders. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with the architect Eleanore Pettersen on some 30 projects. In addition to sharing his design sensibilities in terms of fluid relationships between inside and outside, she often acted as Rose’s advocate, especially when he put off clients and building officials. There seems to be more to explore here between the iconoclastic designer and his champion. Pettersen apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright and was the first woman architect to start her own practice in New Jersey in the early 1950s. One can’t help but wonder why someone who probably had to fight against social norms throughout her career would willingly stand up for the volatile Rose.
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The answer in the biography points again to Rose’s possessing an irascible genius, the nature of which compelled others to be forbearing. This was a period of his practice when he would meditate in the morning and then go build improvisationally on site without drawings. Pettersen, interviewed in 1992, is quoted in the biography simply telling clients: “It will be worth it.” Justification for that value is elusive and impressionistic. Because of that lack of documentation, the James Rose foundation has a limited record of projects to refer to for backup. Although he published regularly early in his career, writing essays and three books from the 1930s through the 1960s, Rose’s pace slowed afterward, and he published his last book, The Heavenly Environment: A Landscape Drama in Three Acts with a Backstage Interlude, in 1987. Ultimately, it is
Rose’s own home, now the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design, that serves as an interpretative text for understanding the work: handmade, iterative, and as quixotic as its author, with courtyards, roof gardens, and a Zendo, each in various states of repair. The biography puts forth a belief that understanding Rose’s later oeuvre comes mostly through understanding his singular methodology. Words are left behind to untangle. “You can feel it when you go to the site,” Cardasis says. “As you move through, the garden seems as if it could go on forever. There was no plan as an approach; he just moved through, adjusting things to make people aware of their connectedness to things larger than themselves.” MIMI ZEIGER IS A CRITIC AND CURATOR BASED IN LOS ANGELES.
LEFT
Rose and a carpenter confer during roof garden construction in 1970. RIGHT
For the courtyard of an electronics factory and office building, Rose assembled copper sheeting and scrap metal into lanterns and a fountain in 1963.
COURTESY JAMES ROSE CENTER, LEFT; COURTESY JAMES ROSE CENTER/PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HIRSCH, RIGHT
FOREGROUND
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FOREGROUND
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GOODS
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THOMAS TEAL, TOP; COURTESY BIKE FIXATION, BOTTOM
LUNA BIKE RACK
The Luna bike rack is shaped to allow for a bike frame to be simultaneously locked with the front or back wheel. The frame is made of steel and has four finishing options. It can be either mounted or installed in-ground.
BIKE LOCKER MANAGEMENT APP
A new partnership between CycleSafe and Movatic allows for existing and new CycleSafe bike lockers to be accessed via the Movatic app (downloadable to any smartphone). Nearby available units appear on a map and can be paid for through the app. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.CYCLESAFE.COM.
COURTESY BRASCO INTERNATIONAL, TOP LEFT; CYCLESAFE INC., TOP RIGHT; COURTESY SPORTWORKS NORTHWEST, INC., BOTTOM
AXLE
This all-purpose shelter can withstand winds of up to 170 miles per hour and a minimum snow load capacity of 40 pounds per square foot. It comes in four different lengths from 11 to 42 feet, and can be paired with optional accessories such as LED lighting, waste receptacles, and bike racks. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.BRASCO.COM.
TOFINO NO SCRATCH BIKE RACK
The Tofino bike rack is outfitted with Sportworks’s patented No Scratch bumper to help protect bikes from unwanted marks. The customizable frame can be fabricated from either mild steel or stainless steel and comes in a variety of colors, finishes, and mounting options. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.SPORTWORKS.COM.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 71
FOREGROUND
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CONNECTABLE
The ConnecTable can charge up to 150 devices per day with power stored from 530-watt solar panels. It has an autonomy of up to three days and includes LEDs for use after dark. Building materials, colors, screen options, and more are available for customizing.
COURTESY CONNECTABLE
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.THECONNECTABLE.COM.
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FOREGROUND
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CUSTOM BIKE SHELTER
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.DERO.COM.
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DERO
Made by DERO for TriMet, this custom project near Portland, Oregon, provides shelter for 88 bicycles at varying levels of security. The secured section, accessible via keycard, holds 72 bikes, with outdoor rack space for an additional 16. The structure is made from steel with postconsumer recycled content.
FOREGROUND
/GOODS
PV SHELTER LIGHTING SYSTEM
This UL-listed LED shelter lighting system can be mounted to any new or existing transit shelter and is tailored to meet safety, branding, and performance needs. The independent unit is powered with high-efficiency solar panels that charge a battery to allow the unit to operate autonomously for five to 10 days.
COURTESY URBAN SOLAR
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.URBANSOLARCORP.COM.
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ARCHITECTURAL PAVING STONES
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ACO’s general purpose KlassikDrain trench drain system is available in 4”, 8” or 12” internal widths and offers a wide choice of grates, from decorative to ADA-compliant and up to Load Class E. The continuous slope of the modular units makes installation simple and the drainage system very effective. 877.706.2158
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RANDALL’S ISLAND
The trestle beneath Hell Gate Bridge on New York’s Randall’s Island, page 120.
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High tides and a clogged sewer overflow system frequently combine to flood Wilmington’s low-lying Southbridge neighborhood.
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DOUG BAKER, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
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HE CHRISTINA RIVER is a tributary of the mighty Delaware estuary, close enough to the ocean that it is tidal. It meanders through Wilmington like a wobbly M. Most of the city sits on the north shore. As long as anybody can remember, the lowerlying south side has experienced periodic inundation; 90 percent of it is within the 100-year floodplain. The first European settlers, being Dutch, were undaunted. They built dikes and ditches there, and grew salt hay for fodder. Iron mills, coal yards, tanneries, and other nastiness arrived on the south shore throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, mostly located along the river’s edge. Meanwhile, in the marshy center of the M, according to an 1893 newspaper item, there were eight or 10 “flower farms,” the largest named Rushland Gardens. A street grid was platted for this whole river-bound southern piece of Wilmington, but only a sliver of it, a neighborhood called Southbridge, was ever developed. In 1900, when the city’s total population was nearly 77,000, about 3,000 people lived south of the Christina.
WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER SOUTH WILMINGTON WAS WHERE INSALUBRIOUS ENTERPRISES AND MARGINALIZED PEOPLE ENDED UP. CAN A WETLAND PARK MITIGATE THE AREA’S ENDEMIC FLOODING AND SPUR ITS RENEWAL? BY JONATHAN LERNER
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 83
“HOW DO YOU TELL THE WATER, ‘NOT UP HERE!’”
ABOVE
As long as anyone can remember, Southbridge has flooded when high tide and high rainfall coincide. OPPOSITE
The T-shaped outline in yellow indicates the park’s first phase.
Many were recent immigrants, and some were African Americans with deep local roots; the first independent black Christian church in the United States, the Union Church of Africans, had been founded there by a former slave in 1813. Today, industry in South Wilmington appears to consist largely of auto junkyards and storage lots for disused trailers and shipping containers. Recently there’s been some growth—a shopping center with a supermarket, and a waterfront town house and apartment-tower complex built along the northwestern
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edge, facing over the Christina to downtown and the city’s thriving Riverfront redevelopment district. Half a mile east, though, across the wetland, Southbridge feels like an isolated village. Its population has dwindled to about 1,500, nearly all of whom are African American. But it’s a place with a certain integrity. Many families have lived there for generations. Nearly half the homes are owner occupied. There is an active and effective neighborhood association. Still, it floods.
ton Wetlands Park. It’s not exactly a new proposal. A 2006 neighborhood plan offered a description that still applies: “Create a Central Park located to the immediate west of Southbridge. Use this park as the lungs of the neighborhood. Its wetlands should be cleaned up and improved for flood retention.” But flooding is not the neighborhood’s only challenge. Southbridge is more or less surrounded by brownfields left over from those 19th and early 20th century heavy industries. Nearby jobs are few. It’s a food desert, Now there is a plan to transform the with public health issues typical of marshy center into South Wilming- underserved urban communities
COURTESY CITY OF WILMINGTON
MARILYN DRYDEN
TIDAL CONNECTIVITY ANALYSIS C H R IST I NA R I VE R
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with an industrial past. The park vision has been enhanced since 2006, with a plan for added street connectivity around the wetland, and with realizations that a cross park trail will link the neighborhood directly to the shopping center and groceries. The park could be an engine of investment, not only for Southbridge, but also for all the nearby underused properties. That could mean infill for new residents and businesses, and new jobs. Another added dimension: The concept of how to handle the wetland itself has been taken far beyond the basics of cleanup and water retention.
The source of the flooding, aside from low elevation and inexorably rising tides, is an overwhelmed combined sewer system. Unresolved, this situation alone could render Southbridge unlivable. Clarence White has owned a body shop and used car business in Southbridge for some 55 years. Recalling a recent daylong, heavy rainstorm, he said, “That last flood, it came up my steps. When the wind is blowing it looks like a river in the street, with whitecaps. It used to be just rain and river water, but now, some of these houses, they say their basements fill up with sewage.” People describe sewage bubbling up
through manholes. Third-generation resident Marilyn Dryden remembers her father, who was born in 1922, describing the floods of his childhood. She suggests that the city’s occasional efforts to clear storm drains or do other infrastructure work seemed to shift the inundation from one part of the neighborhood to another, adding further unpredictability. “You may think your block isn’t vulnerable,” she says, “but how do you tell the water, when it’s running, ‘Not up here!’” The park’s first phase is planned for a T-shaped 23-acre site; another 10acre marshy parcel may be added.
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EXISTING WETLANDS
C H RIS T INA RIV E R 48” TIDE GATE
LEGEND DRAINAGE DITCH FIELD VERIFIED FRESHWATER AND FORESTED WETLAND
48” PIPE CULVERT
NWI WETLAND TYPE ESTUARINE AND MARINE DEEPWATER ESTUARINE AND MARINE WETLAND FRESHWATER EMERGENT WETLAND FRESHWATER FORESTED/SHRUB WETLAND
Existing drainage patterns will be preserved. Stormwater from Southbridge will be piped west into the park, where excavation will create additional storage capacity. The park will drain via channels, connecting through a tide gate to the river. That’s the flood mitigation piece. Here’s the beautiful part: In the course of all that engineering, a cluster of habitats will be created where communities of native wetland species can thrive. “We’re restoring ecology. That changed the whole dynamic, the potential of funding sources,” says the project’s landscape architect, Scott Scarfone, ASLA. (His firm,
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Oasis Design Group, was recently absorbed into Kimley-Horn.) “Every agency that looks at this is going to be on board, because now there’s a greater purpose. We can sell this as an ecological project that by the way solves the stormwater problem.” Build an urban park, which is also a succession of naturalized habitats, on brownfields, which must be floodable: Now, there’s a piece of work. The site has yet another constraint. An electric transmission line runs straight across it, a rectilinear taunt to the serpentine landforms and wavy surfaces of a tidal marsh
and, come to that, of a park as we commonly picture it. The transmission line’s towers can’t be moved. In fact, vehicular access to them must be maintained, and excavation can’t come so close as to destabilize them. The design solution will also provide the park’s main usable feature. A path will trace across the site, from the Southbridge neighborhood on the east to a gateway just across the street from the shopping center on the west. It will traverse wetland areas and channels as a boardwalk— one capable of accommodating utility company trucks—that bridges between “islands,” each of which
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“WE’RE RESTORING ECOLOGY. THAT CHANGED THE WHOLE DYNAMIC.” SCOTT SCARFONE, ASLA
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will support a transmission pole. The poles maintain their straight order, but the curves of the path and irregular shapes of the upland pieces they stand on will disguise it. For anyone strolling through the wetland, the route should feel as untamed and organic as the sinuous watercourses and undulating vegetation of the re-created wetland environment underfoot. Given that the park will be not only wet but also habitat for delicate species, aside from gazing into it from its periphery, walking or biking on the path will be the principal forms of en-
gagement it can provide. That has not stopped Marie Reed, president of the Southbridge Civic Association, from elaborating a bigger dream. She envisions “a kiosk where people can come in and see virtually how the wetland project is built, and how it works, and also learn the history of Southbridge.” She has already convinced the Wilmington Housing Authority, which owns a garden apartment complex along the park’s border, to allocate one of their units for this purpose. “I want to have Southbridge Rangers,” Reed adds, “and use people from the community to be greeters.” This may be ambitious, but Scarfone says,
“It’s good that people are thinking like that,” and points out that something along these lines could provide a sense of security for park users. (Another contiguous six-acre upland parcel may be incorporated and developed as more conventional park space, with picnic pavilions, playing fields, and such. The two likely additions to the first phase will create a roughly square park.)
ABOVE
It’s not only the sponginess that will necessarily limit contact between people and the ground. There’s also the pollution. “Every bit of dirt that we have to take off the site and
The wetland’s surface water quality and hydrology are currently being monitored, to aid in planning for remediation and channel design.
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SOUTH WILMINGTON WETLAND PARK MASTER PLAN
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RK&K
PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY BOARDWALK
ABOVE AND LEFT
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Industrial detritus and invasive vegetation have occupied the site until now.
throw away is expensive, because it’s contaminated with metals and other things,” says the environmental scientist Justin Reel of RK&K, who leads mitigation and hydrological planning for the project. “But for the low-level type of human interaction we’re proposing, with a fairly thin cover we can use it on the site effectively. If you don’t have frequent, regular, intended exposure, these contaminants aren’t super bad. Where we do anticipate frequent soil contact, like our upland islands, we are planning for a cover over top of any native soil.” But resolving the polluted soil problem will be complex.
“It’s one thing to clean up an area for humans. But if you’re bringing burrowing animals in, or shellfish,” a more stringent standard might be required, says Marian Young, the president of the remediation consultancy BrightFields. Scarfone quips, “For the amount of remediation we need, all the earthworms in the world aren’t going to be able to do.” Normally, he says, “for projects like this, you cap it. But here, we want to re-create a functioning system.”
a delightful hint of how it might eventually look—or feel, anyway, because it has yet to be sculpted and engineered. Added water storage capacity and created habitats that can resist recruitment of invasives like Phragmites will both be achieved with a single strategy, lowering the site to alter the hydrology and establish “a different water regime than we have right now, which is very irregular and storm driven,” Reel says. When there is a flush of stormwater from the residential neighborhood, it will collect This spring, the future park was in a forebay, to let sediment settle, cleared of dense Phragmites. The re- and then will cross the site through sulting open, savanna-like vista gave a winding network of channels and
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ponds. These eventually converge on a short, straight connection from the park to the river that is partly open ditch and partly pipe. At the river, the flow, as it is currently, will be controlled by a self-regulating tide gate. An open flow to the Christina and its tides was considered. That would promote the wetland’s naturalization and its connection to fisheries. But properties surrounding and contiguous to the park are low-lying. The park “could be potentially completely full of tidal inundation,” Reel says, “and flood all our neighbors around the edges of the site.” But the tide
gate creates other problems. Young explains that when stormwater is filling the park while simultaneously “the river is high, the gate will be closed and make a big lake. You have to have the stormwater holding, but the plants can only stand it for a certain amount of hours.” Meanwhile, enticing fish to travel in from the river through the pipe, to populate the new habitat, is also a problem, but maybe illumination inside the pipe will attract them. The ditch and pipe connection, however, doesn’t even belong to the city. “Where it outfalls back into the wetland is probably the most contaminated part of the
project,”—a PCB dump, Scarfone called it. “It’s a point source. Every time water flushes over here and back into the river, it picks up some of that.” Remediation is obligatory, “which requires destabilizing some of these edges, and they’re owned by other people.” There’s a gas station on one side and a property development company’s offices on the other. “It’s one challenge after the other that fascinates you and makes a project super exciting.” Reel says, “I’m normally engaged in wetland habitat creation and restoration as a compensatory project for some permit. In those situations, we ↘
ABOVE
Earlier this year, dense Phragmites were cleared from the site.
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Agrostis alba (Redtop) Andropogon gerardii (Big bluestem) Dichanthelium clandestinum (Deertongue) Ilex glabra (Inkberry) Lolium perenne ssp. multiflorum (Italian ryegrass) Panicum virgatum (Switchgrass) Penstemon laevigatus (Eastern smooth beardtongue) Rhus copallinum (Winged sumac) Rhus glabra (Smooth sumac) Rubus flagellaris (Northern dewberry) Rudbeckia hirta (Black-eyed Susan) Sambucus nigra (Black elderberry) Solidago juncea (Early goldenrod) Sorghastrum nutans (Indiangrass) Viburnum dentatum (Southern arrowwood) EVERGREEN FOREST
Ilex glabra (Inkberry) Ilex opaca (American holly) Pinus taeda (Loblolly pine) EMERGENT WETLAND
PARKING LOT
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Acorus calamus (Calamus) Cephalanthus occidentalis (Common buttonbush) Hibiscus moscheutos (Crimsoneyed rose mallow) Iris versicolor (Harlequin blueflag) Leersia oryzoides (Rice cutgrass) Nuphar lutea (Yellow pond-lily) Peltandra virginica (Green arrow arum) Pontederia cordata (Pickerelweed) Sagittaria latifolia (Broadleaf arrowhead) Schoenoplectus pungens (Common threesquare) Symphyotrichum novae-angliae (New England aster)
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Cornus amomum (Silky dogwood) Ilex verticillata (Common winterberry) Morella pensylvanica (Northern bayberry) Sambucus nigra (Black elderberry) Viburnum dentatum (Southern arrowwood) UPLAND FOREST
Betula lenta (Sweet birch) Carya glabra (Pignut hickory) Diospyros virginiana (Common persimmon) Fagus grandifolia (American beech) Liriodendron tulipifera (Tulip tree) Quercus alba (White oak) Quercus rubra (Northern red oak)
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Acer rubrum (Red maple) Liquidambar styraciflua (Sweet gum) Magnolia virginiana (Sweetbay) Nyssa sylvatica (Black gum) Quercus phellos (Willow oak) FOREBAY
Iris versicolor (Harlequin blueflag) Juncus canadensis (Canadian rush) Juncus effusus (Common rush) Scirpus cyperinus (Woolgrass) Typha latifolia (Broadleaf cattail)
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→ try to find the nicest, most natu-
The economic reverberations of new parks are well documented. “When government spends in an area, it sends a message,” says Jeffrey Flynn, Wilmington’s director of economic development. “We’re hoping this $40 million investment drives private investment” in housing and new commercial activity—specifically “space that is not a junkyard…something
94 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
OASIS DESIGN GROUP NOW PART OF KIMLEY HORN
ral site we can get our hands on. I don’t normally do it in the middle of an urban situation, right next to a neighborhood, or incorporate urban stormwater into the site.”
OASIS DESIGN GROUP NOW PART OF KIMLEY HORN
THE CITY’S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR HOPES TO ATTRACT INVESTMENT NEAR THE SITE, “SPACE THAT IS NOT A JUNKYARD.” that requires employees.” His office has informally calculated that within 10 to 15 years, improvement of underdeveloped parcels in a 100-acre zone of influence surrounding the park could bring in $5 to $7 million annually in additional property tax revenue. That may seem slight, but property tax accounts for about a third of the city’s $150 million budget. That’s aside from “revenues you can’t measure. It’s going to psychologically have a great impact for a historically disadvantaged community and residents who may not have been exposed to a natural feature like this.”
The Nature Conservancy, which has recently focused its energy on naturebased solutions for urban problems, is participating in the project. They’ve helped the city purchase some of the land, for example, and are helping navigate the project’s regulatory hurdles. This model of an engineered wetland as both stormwater separation infrastructure and civic space, with all the potential knock-on benefits, can be replicated, says Richard Jones, the organization’s Delaware state director. “Cities tend to have a fair amount of space that is degraded, or has been overlooked. If you have nature there already and can improve
it and make it work for you, that’s fantastic. But what if you don’t? What if it’s parking lots? Can you still make use of that? The answer is yes.” A new amenity like a park often drives up nearby property values, leading to the displacement of longtime residents. This seems less inevitable in South Wilmington. Property taxes there only go up if the millage rate is raised, which is rare, or improvements are made on a specific property that raise its individual assessment. They are not adjusted for every owner as a result of changes in the market. “People come in and
ABOVE
Boardwalks sturdy enough to carry utility vehicles will link “islands” that support transmission towers. OPPOSITE
The park is expected to spur redevelopment in surrounding areas.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 95
ABOVE
On the south shore, berms and privately owned sites make the river’s edge inaccessible now. LEFT
The north shore has been redeveloped with a pedestrian walkway. OPPOSITE
The site—here a distant brown smudge—is surrounded by development.
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What it is not insulated from is climate change. As with any adaptation project, this is the unknowable: How fast and how far will the water rise? “Our tidal connectivity goes away in about a two-foot sea-level-rise scenario,” because gravity will no longer drain the park into the river, Reel explains. “The wetland complex and habitat we created would remain, and we would still have our resiliency and stormwater storage for the neighborhood. But we would have to get that water out, and be ready for the next storm, through a pumping system.” In the longer run, he suggests that the wetland might need
to be expanded, and that additional pumping systems and perhaps revetments be built in the larger South Wilmington area. “We certainly don’t want to make this level of investment for a 20-year life span, or a 50-year life span. So what’s our 100-year life span, or our 200year life span?” he asks. “That longterm approach is bigger than the one adaptation for this system.” JONATHAN LERNER’S MEMOIR OF THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, SWORDS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN: REFLECTIONS OF AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY, HAS BEEN PUBLISHED BY OR BOOKS.
WWW.PETERTOBIAPHOTOGRAPHER.COM
start doing infill housing? The assessed value of the surrounding properties doesn’t change,” Flynn says. And Wilmington speculators and landlords have little motive to force rents up. While the trend for central-city living does express itself there, and the new park should make this part of town more desirable, a great deal of new housing is being built on empty land that was cleared at midcentury for urban renewal or was formerly industrial, in both downtown and along the riverfront. Wilmington seems insulated from the housing shortages and price inflation occurring in many cities.
WWW.PETERTOBIAPHOTOGRAPHER.COM
Project Credits CLIENT/OWNER CITY OF WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. COMMUNITY PARTNER SOUTHBRIDGE CIVIC ASSOCIATION, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. FUNDING PARTNERS DELAWARE DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL, DOVER, DELAWARE; THE NATURE CONSERVANCY, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. WETLAND DESIGN AND CIVIL AND WATER RESOURCES ENGINEERING RK&K, BALTIMORE AND WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. LANDSCAPE
ARCHITECTURE OASIS DESIGN GROUP (NOW PART OF KIMLEY-HORN), BALTIMORE. BROWNFIELD ENVIRONMENTAL INVESTIGATION AND REMEDIATION DESIGN BRIGHTFIELDS, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. INVASIVE SPECIES CONTROL SOLITUDE LAKE MANAGEMENT, VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA; NEW CASTLE COUNTY CONSERVATION DISTRICT, NEWARK, DELAWARE; AND MERIT CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERS, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE. TECHNI-
CAL EXPERTISE AND REVIEW UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, NEWARK, DELAWARE; UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY, BALTIMORE; AVATAR ENVIRONMENTAL, WEST CHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA; ARCADIS, PHILADELPHIA; U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT; NATIONAL OCEANIC & ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION, PHILADELPHIA; U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY REGION 3, PHILADELPHIA.
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BLOOD RUN CREEK
Historic and traditional accounts locate Ioway, Otoe, and Omaha villages near this stream in Iowa.
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EARS TO THE GROUND THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, BLOOD RUN WAS A HUB OF THE GREAT PLAINS. THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT BRENDA WILLIAMS IS HELPING GUIDE TRIBAL EFFORTS TO PROTECT WHAT’S LEFT, MOSTLY BY LISTENING. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOUISE JOHNS
N A COLD, BLUSTERY MORNING
last November, I followed an abandoned railroad grade to the South Dakota and Iowa state line. I had two maps in front of me—one an annotated paper printout, a collage of colors and lines overlaid on an old topo map, and the other Google Maps, open on my phone, my blue dot tacking southwest. I wasn’t lost. I was on a trail that did not yet exist. The route, unmarked and at points choked by trees, had been outlined to me a few days earlier by Brenda Williams, ASLA, a landscape architect and director of preservation planning at Quinn Evans Architects in Madison, Wisconsin. Williams had recently led the development of a master plan for this area, an important but not widely known archaeological site known as Blood Run. The old railway was the proposed arrival sequence.
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ABOVE
Blood Run carves a course through a landscape of low terraces. OPPOSITE
Randy Teboe (second from left) walks the future state park with Brenda Williams, ASLA, (foreground) and tribal representatives.
Typically, the few visitors who came to Blood Run, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1970, parked at the top of a bluff and followed a path down to the Big Sioux River, the state border. But Williams had been explicit: Take the railroad grade. Rather than start high, Williams wanted visitors to begin in the valley, to park and walk along the creek that gives the area its name before reaching the earthen mounds that are some of the site’s more visible cultural and historic remnants. It was, in part, a practical decision: The abandoned railroad provided a level path all the way from the main road to the mound grouping. But mostly it was about being immersed in the place, bringing people into the site with as few visual intrusions as possible, as few opportunities to break the spell.
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RIGHT
An outcropping of Sioux quartzite at Gitchie Manitou State Preserve north of Blood Run.
LOOD RUN has gone by many names over the years. A Sioux Falls physician, Frederick W. Pettigrew, called it the Silent City. The Omaha people called it Xe (pronounced breathily like khay), or the place “where something is buried.” It is unclear when or why it became known as Blood Run. Some think the name comes from the area’s ubiquitous pink Sioux quartzite, which could have turned the creek’s water red; another theory is that Blood was a surname. What is generally agreed upon is that Blood Run was not, as the name might suggest, a massacre site. Rather, it was a place of peace.
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Blood Run is the largest and best-preserved historic site associated with what archaeologists call the Oneota cultural tradition, which is characterized by a style of shell-flecked pottery, though the term generally is not used by members of the many tribal nations—including the Ioway, Omaha, Ponca, Otoe, Missouria, Winnebago, Osage, and Kansa—that maintain ancestral connections to the area. According to tribal histories and archaeological evidence, the area once supported as many DOLLY HOLMES, TOP LEFT; QUINN EVANS ARCHITECTS, BOTTOM RIGHT
To American tourists used to the grandeur of Yellowstone or Yosemite, the landscape at Blood Run may seem unremarkable: gentle bluffs covered in prairie grass, occasional stands of box elders and oaks, and, near the river, an old, stone farmstead, sunken in like a piece of rotted fruit. But as one member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska put it, “Even commonplace landscapes can have mythic importance. Blood Run is such a place.”
IOWA BLOOD RUN RECOMMENDED LANDSCAPE TREATMENT MASTER PLAN
LEGEND STUDY AREA BOUNDARY PRESERVE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES RESTORE PRAIRIE/SAVANNA CREATE BIORESERVE PROVIDE DEMONSTRATION/ED. ZONE SOUTH DAKOTA STATE OWNED PROPERTY LOW IMPACT CAMPING MAINTENANCE/ADMINISTRATIVE PRESERVE WOODLAND VEGETATION PROVIDE VEHICULAR ACCESS EXISTING BUILDINGS RIVER/STREAM/LAKE EXISTING ROADS PROPOSED PRIMARY TRAIL PROPOSED SENSITIVE RESOURCE TRAIL PROPOSED SECONDARY TRAIL PROPOSED VISITOR AMENITIES PROPOSED DAY USE AREA PROPOSED SACRED ACTIVITIES AREA EUROPEAN/AMERICAN HISTORY SITE PROPOSED OVERLOOK PROPOSED OVERLOOK WITH POSSIBLE OBSERVATION PLATFORM PRIMARY RIVER CROSSING POTENTIAL FUTURE RIVER CROSSING
QUINN EVANS ARCHITECTS
CANOE/KAYAK LAUNCH
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1889 LEWIS SURVEY REDRAWN
TOP LEFT
In 1889, T. H. Lewis mapped more than 150 earthen mounds on the Iowa side of the Blood Run site.
as 10,000 people. It was inhabited continuously from AD 1500 to 1714, a cultural and economic hub contemporaneous with the formation of the American colonies. Blood Run had barely even been established when Christopher Columbus mistook the Bahamas for the East Indies.
and songs. Randy Teboe, who until recently served as the director of cultural affairs for the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, describes the city as a refuge, far from the conflicts erupting on the East Coast. Here, tribes built alliances that were called upon as they were driven from their homelands.
People from across the continent made stops here, trading pottery and later European goods for catlinite, a soft, red stone quarried some 50 miles to the north at what is now Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Tribes also traded ceremonies
Today, there is little hint of that refuge. By the middle of the 20th century, 200 years of European settlement had nearly erased this one-time city. Of what had been hundreds of mounds, built for burial and ceremonial purposes, just 68 remained.
TOP RIGHT
Martin Johnson in front of his homestead in 1938. The Johnson property was purchased by the state of Iowa in 1987.
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IOWA OFFICE OF THE STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST, LEFT; STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA, CHARLES R. KEYES ARCHAEOLOGICAL COLLECTION, RIGHT
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IOWA OFFICE OF THE STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST
PETTIGREW’S 1889 MAP OF MOUNDS AND STONE CIRCLES
In 1988, the governors of Iowa and South Dakota announced their intention to turn Blood Run into a bistate park. It would be a first for the United States, and a signature project of their administrations. Soon after, a bistate committee was formed to begin the planning process. In the decades since, both states have made significant progress toward that vision, though at significantly different paces. South Dakota, after acquiring 650 acres, designated its half of the site as Good Earth State Park in 2013 and in May dedicated a new visitor center. Across the river, Iowa owns just 183 acres. There are no facilities or campgrounds, just a mowed-grass path and a small metal sign.
That the two states find themselves at such different stages is a result of politics and funding, but also a difference in approach. For years, South Dakota’s efforts were embroiled in conflict between the state and its tribal consultants (formal representatives from those tribes with ancestral ties to the site), due in part to the pace of construction. The landscape bears the imprint of this rift. In South Dakota, new gravel paths trace the contour of the river bluff but are cut off from Blood Run’s most significant resources. Visitors in Iowa, meanwhile, have no access to the areas of highest elevation, places that, for tribal members, hold particular spiritual significance. Today, rather than a truly borderless, jointly managed bistate park, Blood Run is two distinct halves of a historical whole.
ABOVE
Another 1889 map, by Frederick W. Pettigrew, noted the existence of more than 275 mounds along the Big Sioux River.
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RENDA WILLIAMS works out of a small upstairs office in her house in Madison. She is midwestern to a tee, polite and selfeffacing. She makes her own mustard. She has a husband, a son, and two cats, Sky and Moku (a reference to mokume gane, a Japanese method of metalworking), which wander in and out of her office. She is known for having, in the words of one tribal representative, the “patience of Job.”
tural landscape master plan for its portion of the Blood Run site. By then, a series of conflicts and disagreements had left many of the tribal consultants distrustful of South Dakota’s state officials. Lance Foster, the tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, was one of them. Foster lives in White Cloud, Kansas, and works out of his tribe’s government offices, a collection of red-brick buildings plopped onto the rural landscape. He’s a bear In 2015, the Iowa Department of Natural Re- of a man, but more teddy than grizzly. In overalls sources (IDNR) hired Williams to develop a cul- and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt, he looks as
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if he’s been farming this corner of Kansas for his entire life. In fact, Foster is trained as an anthropologist, an artist, and a landscape architect. Before he moved to White Cloud, he taught painting, drawing, and archaeology at the University of Montana and published The Indians of Iowa, an overview of the dozens of tribes that once called the state home. It was Foster who wrote, in American Indian Places: A Historical Guidebook, that commonplace landscapes like Blood Run can have “mythic importance.” Foster consulted on both South Dakota’s and Iowa’s master plans. He says South Dakota’s officials presented the tribes with a mostly formed master plan and only then solicited comment. They also pursued a project schedule that did not allow for the customary consultation between a tribal consultant and his or her tribal council. “South Dakota had directions from their governor to
rush ahead and get things done, which wasn’t always on a native timescale,” Foster says wryly. At one point, after a prominent South Dakota businessman questioned the importance of tribal involvement, Foster withdrew from the planning process. Marisa Miakonda Cummings, an Omaha tribe member who has served as an official and unofficial consultant to both states, says the process was so “ugly” and disrespectful of her tribe that she threatened to organize a protest and shut down the entire project. “In our language, we have a word; it means, ‘They have no ears.’ They don’t listen,” Cummings says. “And that’s what was happening.” In 2015, when those same tribe members were asked to attend a meeting for Iowa’s master plan, Cummings says she expected more of the same. “We were called to a meeting, and Brenda and her husband are there. And bless Brenda’s heart, we were just at her throat. Like, ‘What are you trying to give us? Show us whatever you’re trying to ↘
TOP LEFT
Ancient peoples ground shallow pits, or cupmarks, into this granite boulder. TOP RIGHT
Brenda Williams at Blood Run in spring 2017. OPPOSITE
Williams walks the railroad grade, the park’s proposed arrival sequence.
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HISTORIC PERIOD PLAN C. 1500 1714
LEGEND STUDY AREA RIDGELINE HIGH POINT APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF RIVER BASED ON CURRENT CONDITIONS
APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF STREAM BASED ON CURRENT CONDITIONS
APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF MID TO TALLGRASS PRAIRIE APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF WOODLAND ON NORTH AND EARTH FACING SLOPES APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF FLOODPLAIN VEGETATION INCLUDING RIPARIAN WOODLANDS AND AREAS OF CULTIVATION VILLAGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE VILLAGE/MOUND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE MOUND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE INDIVIDUAL MOUND OR ENCLOSURE ENCLOSURE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE PITTED BOULDER ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE WITH LATE WOODLAND PERIOD AFFILIATION
APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF 1889 LEWIS SURVEY SHOWN ON PAGE 104.
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EXISTING TOPOGRAPHY AND VIEWS
EXISTING VEGETATION
LEGEND STUDY AREA IOWA OWNED PORTION OF BLOOD RUN NHL STEEP SLOPES RIDGELINE SLOPE DIRECTION HIGH POINT RIVER STREAM FLOODPLAIN ROAD BUILDINGS VILLAGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE VILLAGE/MOUND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE MOUND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE INDIVIDUAL MOUND OR ENCLOSURE TRANSMISSION TOWERS AND OVERHEAD LINES VIEWSHED
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→ do,’” Cummings recalls. (Williams’s husband, Dan
nity to learn from South Dakota’s missteps. Iowa also has a history of successful tribal engagement. In the 1970s, battles between archaeologists and indigenous rights activists led to the passage of the Iowa Burials Protection Act of 1976, the first U.S. law to specifically protect indigenous peoples’ remains. That law was a precursor to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. “They have really led the That posture, Cummings says, “created this en- way,” Foster says of the state. tirely different dialogue about what would we really want? We want to educate people. We want to At Blood Run, IDNR wanted the engagement show them all of our biodiversity. We want to show process to guide the master plan and was even that we weren’t roaming around just chasing a buf- willing to relinquish the idea of a bistate park. falo with a spear, but that we were agriculturalists. “[They] said, ‘We want you to tell us what it We were engineers. We were architects.” should be,” Williams says. In its RFP, the state asked design teams to visit the tribes at their It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Wil- homes, but Williams thought it equally imporliams alone was responsible for the smoothness tant that the tribal representatives be on site as of Iowa’s master plan process. Dozens of factors much as possible. She included money in her were in play, including the two states’ disparate budget for representatives from the most closely timelines, which gave the Iowa team an opportu- associated tribes to travel to Blood Run. Williams, ASLA, is a landscape architect at Lunde Williams and a member of the project team.) “And she kept saying, ‘Well, that’s why we’re here. We’re waiting to hear what you have to say.’ And it took her probably half a day of saying that over and over again before we were like, ‘Oh, you really want to start from ground zero.’”
ABOVE
From left, Angie Teboe; Dan Williams, ASLA; Lance Foster; and Randy Teboe. OPPOSITE
A view of the river from Good Earth State Park in South Dakota.
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“EVEN COMMONPLACE LANDSCAPES CAN HAVE MYTHIC IMPORTANCE. BLOOD RUN IS SUCH A PLACE.” —LANCE FOSTER, TRIBAL HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICER
Over the next year, the Iowa team—which included Iowa’s state archaeologist, as well as the archaeologist Dale Henning, who served as an adviser to the tribes—formed a close bond, joking and teasing one another. “It’s all about spending time with someone, one to one,” Foster says. “It’s not like a usual client situation. Spend a lot of time with us, get to know us as a person, as a friend, and we will find a way to make it work together.” With Williams, “we all became a team,” he says. “That’s how we saw ourselves.” Iowa’s master plan, which covers some 3,880 acres, including property beyond the current National Historic Landmark boundary, calls for interpretative facilities, campgrounds, and a large bioreserve, complete with a herd of bison. The main trail— which currently cuts through the main mound grouping and leads to one of Blood Run’s unique pitted boulders, large chunks of Sioux quartzite covered in small, man-made divots—will be moved to protect these resources. New, low-impact
secondary trails will be added, along with low platforms that will provide people enough height to see the mounds but will not damage them. Where trails cut through historic resources, they will feature a different material as a visual reminder to visitors that they are within a sensitive area. Some places of spiritual or cultural significance will be completely off-limits. Rather than draw attention to them through interpretation, the state will protect these areas by giving them wide berth. Based on feedback from tribal representatives, the Iowa team also realized that it needed a longrange interpretation and education plan alongside the master plan. Iowa’s approach calls for interpretative facilities at every entrance to the park, to inform visitors how to conduct themselves on site and to provide occasions for reflection at the conclusion of a visit. It was important to many of the tribal representatives that the experience be fluid, changing with the seasons, much like the lives of those who lived at Blood Run.
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And then, of course, there is the need to stitch the site back together. “Obviously, if this is going to be a holistic place, there [need to be] ways to get across the river,” Williams says. “[We] can’t keep talking about South Dakota versus Iowa.” The design team analyzed potential bridge locations, including the old railroad abutment, which had a consistent grade on both sides and a possible connection to a regional bike trail. But some of the tribal representatives were horrified at the idea, Williams says, because the railroad cut through one of the area’s most dense concentrations of historic resources. “That was
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so huge for us to hear that,” Williams tells me. Eventually, a footbridge was suggested north of Iowa’s current entrance. “You need to have that connection, but it needs to be pedestrian,” she says. “No cars, no bikes.” Despite the admittedly light hand Quinn Evans has employed, Williams says she has some trepidation. In a place that is so treasured, any intervention can feel intrusive. “There’s nothing there yet,” she says. “And yet all we can do is ruin it. That’s the fear of creating this thing.”
W
ILLIAMS has devoted her career to cultural landscapes like Blood Run, working with public clients such as IDNR and the National Park Service (NPS). “And that is where I belong,” she tells me. “I have this really insatiable desire to try to make things right with these places that are so special and that I feel like keep getting lost.” But exactly what it means to “make things right” has shifted for Williams over the years. Through projects like Blood Run, she’s gained a newfound appreciation for indigenous knowledge—and also seen it dismissed by government officials and even other designers. She’s been forced to confront her own ignorance and challenge business-as-usual approaches to “stakeholder engagement.” And she’s had to accept that, as a design professional, her rights extend only so far when it comes to a tribe’s particular beliefs and practices. “One of the points that I talk about is not asking for
information,” she says. “Not ‘What is important?’ but ‘How do we protect what is important?’” Recently, Williams has begun writing and speaking about her work, and she’s developed a checklist for landscape architects. Number one: Investigate whether or not a tribe was ever associated with a site. The answer may appear obvious, she says, but many tribes were forced from their homes, relocated to unclaimed territory. Tribes whose reservations today are in Kansas or Nebraska often maintain deep ties to lands hundreds of miles away. At Blood Run, associated tribes live as far away as Perkins, Oklahoma, 600 miles to the south. Number two: Include tribal engagement in the project scope, even if just as an optional service. (When Williams has done so, the client has always added it in, she says.) Number three: Deal only with a formal representative who is authorized to speak on behalf of the tribe. This third point has been made simpler by the creation of the THPO (often
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Marisa Cummings (left), an Omaha tribe member, near the remains of an old springhouse. OPPOSITE
Several structures remain on site, visible from the existing path.
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pronounced “tippo”) role. Following centuries of disenfranchisement, in 1992, an amendment to the National Historic Preservation Act created the THPO program. Besides giving government agencies an official point of contact, a tribe’s THPO gained the authority to make preservation decisions on tribal lands, previously the jurisdiction of the state historic preservation officer. In 1996, with $958,500 from the National Historic Preservation Fund, 12 tribes hired their first THPOs. Today there are 171. Federal funding has gone toward not just hiring but training the THPOs. This has opened up new professional opportunities for tribe members and provided a firmer foundation regarding the legal ins and outs of legislation like NAGPRA. Though the program has its shortcomings (a shrinking pot of money among them), THPOs have become crucial liaisons to both sides, translating their tribes’ protocols for the project team and the planning jargon for the tribal council.
“The good thing about having a THPO is that you usually encounter somebody who at least has some training, some awareness not only of culture and the law, but is also usually educated and willing to engage with the outside world,” Foster says. Williams also advises her clients to build longterm relationships with tribal representatives, because questions that weren’t considered inevitably arise, and tribes should be involved. “There will be decisions about, ‘Can people come here and have a dog show? Is that offensive or not?’” she says. Williams explained her philosophy as we trekked to the top of Effigy Mounds National Monument south of Harpers Ferry, Iowa, some 300 miles east of Blood Run. Williams completed a cultural landscape report for Effigy Mounds, which encompasses 2,500 acres along the Mississippi River, around the same time as she developed the master plan for Blood Run and worked with many of the same THPOs.
ABOVE
Trained as a landscape architect, Lance Foster has consulted with South Dakota and Iowa. OPPOSITE
Iowa’s master plan calls for a footbridge crossing over Blood Run.
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“THIS IS WAY BEYOND THE PHYSICAL LANDSCAPE. THIS IS ABOUT SENSE OF PLACE AS A PART OF THE SCIENCE OF HOW WE DESIGN PLACES.” —BRENDA WILLIAMS, ASLA
Effigy Mounds provides a glimpse into Blood Run’s future. The mounds that give the place its name— massive earthen structures, some more than 200 feet long, formed into the shapes of bears and birds— are easy to make out, thanks to a landscape treatment that provides contrast. Herbaceous plants are being encouraged atop the mounds, which will be burned on rotation, and grass around the mounds is mowed short to exaggerate the relief. Williams is recommending similar practices at Blood Run.
ABOVE
Randy Teboe with his son. The first time Teboe visited Blood Run, he says, he felt a deep spiritual connection to the place.
Effigy Mounds is also a testing ground for how to turn the management of cultural resources over to associated tribes, for whom the how is often as important as the what. At Effigy Mounds, for instance, certain trees need to be removed for the sake of the mounds, which can be damaged by falling limbs. But how those trees are cut down and hauled away is consequential, Williams says, because the trees are sacred too. Currently, protocols have been established to ensure sensitivity, but the hope is that these decisions will eventually be placed in the hands of the tribes—something
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Williams says could happen soon. The master plan for Blood Run recommends that IDNR do something similar where appropriate. Working in these places has deepened Williams’s appreciation for just how personal they are. Albert LeBeau, the cultural resources manager at Effigy Mounds, is an archaeologist and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He’s been part of an effort to improve relations between tribes and entities such as NPS and worked with Williams on the cultural landscape report. Growing up, he tells Williams and me, he attended a reservation school outside Missoula, Montana, where he felt “brainwashed” by history books that referred to indigenous people as “savages.” He became an archaeologist to protect his ancestors, whose bones continue to be desecrated. “When you go out on an island in the Missouri River, and you stop counting skulls at one hundred—when you see the skeleton of a baby, whose femurs have been removed and placed next to them in a skull-and-crossbones fashion—that’s why I do it,” he says.
PROPOSED PRIMARY BRIDGE CROSSING
PROPOSED SECONDARY BRIDGE CROSSING N
BELOW
The design team analyzed potential locations for river crossings.
The area of the proposed primary crossing, looking east toward Iowa.
QUINN EVANS ARCHITECTS/BING MAPS, TOP LEFT AND RIGHT
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LEFT AND ABOVE
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LEFT
Jim Henning, the park manager for South Dakota’s Good Earth State Park. RIGHT
Brenda Williams with South Dakota’s Doug Hofer and Iowa’s Todd Coffelt. OPPOSITE
Spring growth at South Dakota’s Good Earth State Park.
A similar mission motivates Randy Teboe, who consulted at Blood Run on behalf of the Ponca and is now the cultural preservation director and THPO for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. Teboe grew up in Nebraska in the foster care system, starved for a connection to his culture, he says. Eventually, he got a job with his tribe and soon after became the THPO. He first visited Blood Run several years ago, and immediately felt a personal connection. “I was out there by myself, and I could hear drums and singing. I went to a different part of the park, and I could smell food cooking. I know that’s some kind of Jedi stuff. But that’s the feeling that I got.” The way he understands it now is that his ancestors wanted him to grasp Blood Run’s importance. “They were speaking to me,” he says. “They were trying to show me the way.” Williams put it this way: “This is way beyond the physical landscape. This is about sense of place as a part of the science of how we design places. It is not magic. It’s not weird spiritual hoo-ha.” It’s the only chance these places have of surviving, she says. If landscape architecture is to reckon with climate change or any of the myriad issues facing the planet, that effort “has to be informed by an equal understanding of the importance of culture,” she says. “American Indians, and the way they look at the world, can help us understand that.”
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N JANUARY 2016, Williams was hired by South Dakota to assist the state in its engagement efforts as it developed the exhibits for its visitor center. It was confirmation that Iowa’s approach had worked, and that others had taken
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notice. Doug Hofer, who recently retired as the director of South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks, says Blood Run forced the state to reevaluate its approach to tribal consultation. “The state has a greater appreciation for both the skill and the passion that the tribes have to interpret their history and their culture accurately,” he says. “I think we’ve learned that the input that we get really is helpful to the final product. I’d go so far as to say it’s essential.” The arrival of Jim Henning, the park manager of Good Earth State Park, also bodes well. Boyish and naturally curious, Henning was hired in summer 2016, inheriting a more positive template for how to work with tribal representatives. He sees in Williams someone to emulate. “She’s inspiring,” he says. “Her being a part of the conversation helped everybody. I think it helped Iowa, and I think it helped South Dakota.” Henning’s supervisors have encouraged him to visit the tribes on their homelands, and he recently spent a half day with the Ponca in Nebraska. “They have [a] connection to this place that I want to try to understand as best I can in order to respect that story,” Henning says. “If I’m not doing that, I shouldn’t be here, honestly.” As for Iowa, the state is working to acquire the parcels of highest priority, but it will likely take years before the construction can begin. In the interim, much of the site remains unprotected, in
the hands of private landowners. Still, many of those I spoke with expressed hope that each of the entities involved—the states, the tribes, the landowners— would continue to find common ground. This is, after all, the meaning of “good earth.” The phrase comes from the Iowa word “MayanPi,” which means “to make peace,” Foster tells me. “To cause something to become good earth, that’s how we say to make peace.” Though finding a name has been controversial in itself, the goal, Foster says, was to find one that anyone, indigenous or otherwise, could say in their language. It was a gesture toward the land’s shared ownership, giving each tribe and state a way to claim a place that has been home for many. It also can be seen as a wish for the future, when Blood Run might once again be a place of peace.
Project Credits CLIENT STATE OF IOWA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES, DES MOINES, IOWA (TODD COFFELT). LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS QUINN EVANS ARCHITECTS, MADISON, WISCONSIN (BRENDA WILLIAMS, ASLA, AND STEPHANIE AUSTIN, ASSOCIATE ASLA); LUNDE WILLIAMS, LLC, MADISON, WISCONSIN (DAN WILLIAMS, ASLA). INTERPRETATIVE PLANNING QUINN EVANS ARCHITECTS, WASHINGTON, D.C. (ALYSON STEELE AND JULIA SIPLE). CONSULTANTS IOWA OFFICE OF THE STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST, IOWA CITY, IOWA (JOHN DOERSHUK, LARA NOLDNER, JOHN HEDDEN, MARY DE LA GARZA); STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA, DES MOINES, IOWA (JEN BANCESCU); COOLFIRE CONSERVATION, MADISON, WISCONSIN (PAUL WEST); OMAHA TRIBE OF NEBRASKA, MACY, NEBRASKA (MARISA MIAKONDA CUMMINGS AND THOMAS PARKER); IOWA TRIBE OF KANSAS AND NEBRASKA, WHITE CLOUD, KANSAS (LANCE FOSTER); PONCA TRIBE OF NEBRASKA, NIOBRARA, NEBRASKA (RANDY TEBOE AND SHANNON WRIGHT); IOWA TRIBE OF OKLAHOMA, PERKINS, OKLAHOMA (EAGLE MCCLELLAN); AND THE OTOE-MISSOURIA TRIBE, RED ROCK, OKLAHOMA (GALEN SPRINGER).
TIMOTHY A. SCHULER WRITES ABOUT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, ECOLOGY, AND URBAN DESIGN. HE LIVES IN HONOLULU.
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GAME RANDALL’S ISLAND, SITUATED AT THE CENTER OF NEW YORK CITY, HAS BECOME THE PARK AND RECREATIONAL MECCA LONG DREAMED ABOUT. BY JANE MARGOLIES / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY
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ON
LEFT
Tucked under the span of the Triborough Bridge that stretches to Queens, these Randall’s Island fields give New Yorkers from all boroughs of the city a place to play.
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T’S A SUNNY AFTERNOON IN MAY, and lacrosse games are in full swing on Randall’s Island, a 516-acre landmass surrounded by water and, beyond, the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Cyclists pedal on a path under the heroic arches of a 1917 railroad trestle. A middle school track team is warming up outside the stadium where Usain Bolt broke the world record in the men’s 100meter dash in 2008. The landscape architect Rick Parisi, FASLA, and I are not playing lacrosse or cycling or running. But we are roving around the island—which is bordered by the Harlem and East Rivers, the Bronx Kill, and a treacherous strait known as the Hell Gate. Parisi, the managing principal of MPFP, has helped with the transformation of the island over the past couple of decades, and I’ve asked for a tour of some of his firm’s accomplishments. Besides, I have a special request: “Show me where the bodies are buried.” New York, of course, is a metropolis built on islands. Of the five boroughs that make up the city, four are on islands. But in addition to those sizable islands, there’s a smattering of smaller ones, too— Ellis Island, the historic portal for immigrants, perhaps the most famous, and Rikers Island, the site of the long-troubled jail complex, the most
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MPFP laid out paths to preserve mature trees and staked out spots for younger trees to be planted to fill in gaps.
infamous. For much of New York’s history, many of the smaller islands have provided the city with out-of-the-way places where it could park problematic populations or infrastructure. However, unlike, say, Roosevelt Island—once the site of a notorious insane asylum that the 19th-century newspaper reporter Nellie Bly wrote about in an undercover exposé (feigning madness to get herself admitted as a patient), since redeveloped with apartment buildings, parks, and a soon-to-be-completed outpost of Cornell University—Randall’s Island not only had its share of so-called undesirables, but it still does. One of the city’s first wastewater treatment plants is here, and there’s a state psychiatric hospital in a looming complex of buildings, plus a large men’s shelter, among other institutions. At one time the island was also home to potter’s fields—hence my appeal to Parisi. And yet it’s mostly mapped parkland. The 20thcentury master planner Robert Moses tried to make Randall’s Island more parklike and less institutional, but he was only partially successful. The effort revived in 1992, when a nonprofit organization then known as the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation and now called the Randall’s Island Park Alliance (RIPA) was formed. The group began working with the parks department and other city agencies to overhaul the island and has completed capital projects totaling more than $250 million from city, state, federal, and private sources—with $43 million more in the works. They’ve been aided not only by MPFP but a whole cast of local landscape architecture firms, including Mathews Nielsen, Starr Whitehouse, and Quennell Rothschild & Partners. These firms have written master plans and designed biking and pedestrian paths. And then there are the more than five dozen fields for baseball and soccer laid
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out by Parisi’s firm—like one on the southern tip First came the potter’s fields, initially the repository of the island he and I pass, where someone scores for bodies dug up from graves in Manhattan’s Bryand a burst of cheers and clapping erupts. ant Park and Madison Square Park. Then the institutions arrived, including the Inebriate Asylum The island had quieter beginnings. It was actu- and the Idiot Asylum (city leaders then apparently ally two islands when Native Americans fished not prone to mincing words). Conditions were and hunted in these parts. From the 17th century so horrific at the so-called House of Refuge—a on, control passed from the Dutch (the governor reformatory where juvenile delinquents and vageneral of what was then called New Netherland grant youth were thrown together, forced to cane farmed on the southern island) to the British (who chairs and make shoes for outside contractors, and used it to scout sites for invasions of Manhattan) hung up by their thumbs if they misbehaved—that to the colonists (George Washington established newspapers contained reports of inmates trying to a smallpox quarantine on the northern island). escape. Some drowned in the process. Eventually one Jonathan Randel purchased the northern landmass, though as a result of a mis- In the early 20th century, the central location of spelling on the deed it became Randall’s Island. the islands prompted their use as stepping-stones The island to the south was eventually named for transportation infrastructure, connecting Wards Island, also after onetime owners. By the them with the surrounding boroughs. The rail19th century both islands were the property of the road trestle was erected along the east side of the City of New York—which valued them because islands, giving them a series of glorious supportthey were close to the mainland, but, because of ing arches that call to mind a Roman aqueduct. the intervening waterways, not too close. (Amtrak trains now rumble across the tracks on
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ABOVE
Riprap strengthens the island’s southern edge, bordering the waters of the Hell Gate. OPPOSITE, TOP
As seen in this map from 1885, Randall’s Island originated as three landmasses—Wards Island, Randall’s Island, and a small swampy area known as Sunken Meadow. OPPOSITE, BOTTOM
An aerial photo, most likely taken in the 1930s, shows how the islands, then still separated, were used to support a railroad trestle and the Triborough Bridge, linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.
HERGESHEIMER, E. & U.S. COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY. 1885 BLACKWELL’S, WARD’S AND RANDALL’S ISLANDS AND ADJACENT SHORES OF EAST AND HARLEM RIVERS FROM 51ST ST. NEW YORK TO LAWRENCE’S PT. WASHINGTON, D.C. U.S. COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY MAP RETRIEVED FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, HTTPS://WWW.LOC.GOV/ITEM/GM70000123/, TOP; COURTESY NYC MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES, BOTTOM
top.) In 1929, the Triborough Bridge—actually a complex of three bridges connecting Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens (and recently renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge)—was begun, and by 1936 its support arches marched along the western side of the islands; off-ramps made the islands accessible to motorists. By the time the Triborough opened, Moses—who, in addition to heading what was then the Triborough Bridge Authority (TBA), which completed the bridge, was also the parks commissioner—had gotten the city to transfer the islands to the parks department. He cleared Randall’s of institutions and laid out ball fields and tennis courts and built a massive 22,000-seat poured-concrete stadium in the style of the Roman Colosseum. It was here that Jesse Owens won the 100-yard dash in the 1936 Olympic Track & Field Trials en route to his triumph at the Berlin games. It was also in this stadium, in 1938, that Count Basie and Benny Goodman performed in what’s considered the
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department did expand garage and repair facilities on the island that served agency sites citywide. But in 1975, when the Brazilian soccer star Pelé made his American debut with the New York Cosmos in what was by then named Downing Stadium, the field had so little But Wards Island was his Waterloo. His elaborate grass that it reportedly had to be spray-painted park plans for it included a 400-foot “coasting green to make it look respectable for the game. hill,” but he was never able to banish all the institutions there to make his vision a reality. Moses Randall’s was a no-man’s-land by the 1990s. Poidid unite the island with Randall’s, dumping fill son ivy cloaked dead trees, and the island was from construction projects in the channel between pocked with mountains of rubble. Supermarthe two and closing it up. And he also added fill ket carts and other detritus lay scattered around. on the northern and northeast edges, annexing a Roads ran every which way and then petered out, marshy area evocatively named Sunken Meadow marking the sites where buildings once stood. and ultimately adding dozens of acres of parkland Undergrowth was thick. The homeless had set to form a single landmass shaped like an ear. up encampments. But as New York slid into decline in the 1970s, Randall’s, too, declined. Watch the final scenes of The French Connection, filmed on the island, for a sense of the general decay. The parks
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Various city agencies had squatted, too. The sanitation department had staked out a spot where employees learned to use snow plows, pushing earth around in a simulation of the
ABOVE
MPFP shoehorned in as many fields as possible on the southern end of the island while preserving a bucolic edge for walking, biking, and picnicking.
VINCENT LAFORET
first outdoor jazz festival (and, decades later, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, and Steppenwolf would play). Moses also built a deco-style administrative building for the TBA from which he oversaw his many fiefdoms.
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On weekends, families make themselves at home near picnic tables in the shade.
skills they would need to master by winter. The fire department ran a training academy where they practiced putting out fires and maneuvering engines. Almost everyone interviewed for this article characterized the island at this time as “the Wild, Wild West.” Enter Karen Cohen, a former interior designer with children in private schools that held games on the island’s then-rutted fields. (Many New York City schools—public and private—lack outdoor sports facilities.) Watching her kids play, Cohen conceived the idea of upgrading the fields and turning the island into a sports mecca. She had zero park experience, but she was willing to donate her own money to the cause and to use her considerable connections to convince other heavy hitters—such as Andrew Tisch, a cochair of the Loews Corporation, and Michael Bloomberg, Honorary ASLA, the media mogul and philanthropist who would become mayor of New York in 2001—to join the foundation’s board. She made the rounds armed with an oversize map of Randall’s Island glued atop a sturdy board and a kit containing little models of possible new features for the island—a marina, a driving range, a pool, and more—that could be moved around the map. Aimee Boden, a can-do parks official who was assigned to work with Cohen, knew it wasn’t going to be so easy. Still, says Boden, who’d had previous experience working on projects that required raising private monies, Cohen’s focus on improving athletic offerings was “conducive to outdoor park development” and “meant we had to upgrade the basic infrastructure on the island.” And, besides, public–private partnerships were gaining traction as parks department budgets shrank. The foundation modeled itself on the Central Park Conservancy, and its efforts reflected both the huge public benefits to be had from such partnerships as well as the drawbacks.
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Although improving fields was the foundation’s initial thrust, just getting to the island—and getting around once you were there—was a priority, especially considering that many New Yorkers do not own cars. The private school children were transported to the island via jitneys. For everyone else, there was the M35, a bus that ran infrequently and made few stops. There were pedestrian ramps on the Triborough, but only a single pedestrian bridge, from Harlem to the southern end of the island.
the path system, from the pedestrian bridge to the stadium, encompassing a gravel walkway down along the Harlem River and an asphalt path at a higher elevation for cyclists. Although it would take many years for the land to be cleared and the path system built—and require the repair of the crumbling seawall as well as negotiations with the state hospital to coax it to pull back its chain-link fence from the water’s edge—this stretch has become one of the loveliest parts of the island, providing open views of Manhattan and weaving The foundation—partnering with the city’s eco- through decades-old Norway maples and by newly nomic development agency, which has had a hand planted perennial beds fragrant with lavender. in many of the capital projects on the island— hired RG Roesch Architecture & Landscape Ar- But back in the 1990s, the big question was how chitecture (now RGR Landscape) to brainstorm to make the entire island “look, feel, and smell ways to make it easier to get to, and around, the like a park,” in Boden’s words, “given the reality island by foot and bike. Completed in 1996, the that it’s home to a lot of other things.” A team Randall’s Island Access Plan mapped out, among that included Quennell Rothschild, Signe Nielsen other things, a walking/cycling loop around the Landscape Architects (as Nielsen’s firm was then island. The firm also did the construction docu- called), and the architecture firm then named ments for the crucial first one-mile segment of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates took a swing at
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LEFT
Performances by Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin are part of the island’s history as a concert venue. BELOW AND OPPOSITE
Spectators gather fieldside; the expanse set aside for outdoor concerts must be returfed after each event.
a master plan, released in 1999, which incorporated recommendations from the Access Plan. It was short on details but laid out the foundation’s vision of a sports-focused destination dotted by privately operated athletic facilities including indoor ice skating rinks, a games center, a tennis center, a water park, and a new track and field stadium, plus an amphitheater for concerts. The idea was to use the revenue from the private facilities to pay for the renovation and maintenance of Randall’s Island Park. It fell to Parisi and Ricardo Zurita, an architect who partnered with MPFP on this and subsequent projects on the island, to help figure out whether it would all work. Their involvement began in a modest way, with two small feasibility studies. The first study related to the siting of a new track and field stadium—the multipurpose Downing, deemed too big and too difficult to renovate to comply with international track and field requirements, was demolished. Should the new stadium go at the northern end of the island, where the master plan had it, between the Triborough’s span to the Bronx and the railroad trestle? The “two Ricks,” as the designers were called, determined that a stadium wouldn’t actually fit there, and ultimately decided that the best place for the stadium was where the old one was—almost. Downing had been tucked into mounded-up earth, with a row of oaks on top that had been part of Moses’s entry sequence. When the building came down, what was left was a curved, treetopped berm that could not be moved because it held inside of it electrical conduits that lit up the Upper East Side. To Parisi, the earth form was “quite a nice feature.” Yet if the new, smaller stadium was built inside it, the view to Manhattan from the stands would be blocked—and, just as
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The island’s one-sided stadium provides views of Manhattan on the other side of the Harlem River.
significantly for those who sought to show that exciting things were happening on the island, the stadium would be hidden from view when Randall’s was seen from Manhattan. The solution was to shift the new stadium slightly to the south, opening it up to the view, and to snuggle inside the sweep of the berm the island’s first new soccer pitch. Made with synthetic turf and lighted so that it could be played on at night, it was not only the island’s first new field, it was its “premier” field, on which, if you were a high school player and your team made it to citywide tournament finals, you’d get to strut your stuff. As for the stadium, an open-sided 5,000-seat affair designed by Zurita, RIPA was still fundraising for it when construction commenced—“a risk,” Boden admits. Money ran out before the roof could be built. Adrian Benepe, Honorary ASLA, now the head of the Trust for Public Land but at the time the city’s parks commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg (and a former high school runner), helped put RIPA in touch with Carl Icahn. The investor forked over the final $10 million on the condition that the stadium be named after him. Although many were none too pleased that “Icahn Stadium” was emblazoned in eight-foot letters on the roof, Benepe, who, like Bloomberg, has been a proponent of public–private partnerships, was unapologetic in a recent interview. “I wanted people to see that and know there were sponsorship opportunities on the island,” he said.
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RIGHT
A railroad trestle opened in 1917 gives the island a series of monumental arches through which a bike path is being developed by Starr Whitehouse.
After the stadium project, Parisi was given the job of laying out fields for the island—a field production project on a scale never attempted before in the United States, according to a turf expert, Frank Rossi. “When we hit 55 fields, they said they wanted 65,” recalls Parisi. “Every time we added a high school size field, they said, ‘We need four fullsize fields.’” And with every field MPFP laid out, it came up with construction cost estimates and maintenance cost estimates “so everyone could understand what a field would cost if it was turf, if it was synthetic, and weigh the difference in maintenance,” Parisi explains. Squeezing in as many fields as possible involved negotiating with fire department officials to convince them to relocate their driving range to another part of the island. “It was like this giant real estate jigsaw puzzle, except it was on public land,” Parisi says. With work on the fields came infrastructure upgrades— power, water mains, storm sewers—for the entire island. Parking was tucked under the Triborough to free up parkland. The island’s roads were put on a diet. Michael Barnicle, ASLA, a senior managing associate at MPFP, remembers redundant roadways left from the Moses era. “As we got into these areas and redeveloped them, we’d ask, ‘Do we really need that road? Can we take that land back and plant trees?’” Granted, there were bobbles. A scheme to have private schools provide funds for the fields in exchange for a guarantee that they would get to practice and play when they wanted ran aground of public opinion and led to a lawsuit. The tennis center, another Zurita design, was built, but other facilities fell by the wayside. Ground was broken for the water park, but the developer stalled and stalled and then could not line up financing (silver lining: room for more fields on the north end of the island). The proposed amphitheater got bogged down in lawsuits (brought to protect other concert venues) and also went belly-up. But by then Boden
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had already moved forward with outdoor concerts on nine acres of lawn bordering the Harlem River. Every July, Governors Ball, a three-day outdoor concert, attracts 120,000 attendees—Parisi’s 20-year-old son and my own son among them. When he and I were touring the island, the big white tents were being set up for the annual Frieze art fair, which has become a must for people in the art world. Cirque du Soleil has made frequent appearances on the island as well. It was a brilliant idea to clear the area under the 100-foot-high arches of the railroad trestle— where city agencies had fenced in areas and parked storage containers—to make room for a
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bike trail. Starr Whitehouse designed this trail, called the Hell Gate Pathway, which has been built in stages, with one segment remaining to connect to the Queens side of the island. In 2015, a Mathews Nielsen-designed Randall’s Island Connector was opened, leading from the Hell Gate Path, crossing the narrow Bronx Kill, and linking Randall’s Island, which is officially part of Manhattan, with the Bronx. Eric Peterson, the deputy administrator for the park who oversees on-island operations from offices in Icahn Stadium—where a big, old, circular Cosmos sign leans against a wall—says his staff put up a meter to count users on the connector and has
ABOVE
A path for walking and biking is separated from the roadway circumnavigating the island. OPPOSITE
Clearing the island’s edge has given parkgoers a chance to experience the waterfront.
been surprised by the results. Peak activity is between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. In other words, Bronx residents are availing themselves of the connector to bike to and from work, using Randall’s as a waypoint en route to and from Manhattan and Queens. Today you can walk or bike to and from any of the surrounding boroughs. Clearly, RIPA, which has a staff of 140, including seasonal employees, and an annual operating budget of $8 million, has expanded the notion of what the island can be. Whereas Moses thought primarily of playgrounds and ball fields and sta-
dium events, Boden sought to ensure there were opportunities for families to picnic—or just chill. A small “urban farm” has been set up, and there are free programs including catch-and-release fishing for kids, evening yoga, and history tours. Anne Wilson, RIPA’s senior director of planning, has helped conceive natural areas that filter water and serve as habitat—there’s a newly created salt marsh and a freshwater wetland—and, in recognition of these efforts, RIPA recently received an “Environmental Champion” award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A “living shoreline” pilot program is currently being developed for an ungainly
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LEFT
The horticultural staff of the Randall’s Island Park Alliance planted this bed that stretches nearly a mile along the path system designed by RGR Landscape.
part of the island where the seawall is in particularly bad shape and where materials tend to get piled during construction projects. People on the island refer to it as “the Boneyard.” Which brings us to the potter’s fields. They remain a bit of a mystery. When excavation was being done on the southern end of Randall’s during field construction, contractors uncovered the foundation of one of the old hospital buildings. Parisi rushed out to the site to find “old walls and doors to rooms underground…porcelain-coated metal bowls…parts of the white bathroom tile.” Test pits were dug on parts of the island where work was being done, but no bones were found. On our tour of the island, Parisi waves in a vague way to an area on the Wards Island end where he thinks the potter’s fields once were because, he says, it’s an area where maps never showed the presence of buildings. In a New York Times article from 1855, a reporter recounts being rowed out to Wards Island to visit the “jolly” guardian of the potter’s field. But there are so many twists and turns in his description of the route they take until “climbing a slight hill and entering a gate” to the two acres “enclosed within a tight board fence”—where coffins were buried in trenches, and then the mounds turfed and planted with willows and cedars, and in single graves marked with headstones or wooden boards painted with names and ages—that it’s hard to know where the two ended up. There may have been more than one burial place on the islands, and it’s even possible that at some point bodies were disinterred and transferred to Hart Island, which still functions as a grave site. The truth is, the earth on the island has been roiled up so many times—for the construction of the railroad trestle and the bridge and the building and demolition of institutions—that it might be impossible to pinpoint what earth, if any, is in its “original” place. Wilson estimates that a third of
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the island is fill brought in from off-island sites— which would make it not unlike much of the rest of New York City, especially its much-altered shoreline areas. A 2012 investigation by Geoarcheology Research Associates showed no evidence of human remains but much evidence of, as Wilson puts it, “a long history of turbulence and rebuilding, going back centuries.” Today, Randall’s Island still has a “free-flowing Fellini feel to it,” Boden readily admits, although you will not round a corner and behold an upended car, the way Parisi did in his early investigations of the island. You may, however, stumble upon, say, the police department’s marine harbor unit, located next to the new fields on the north shore of the island. When the Manhattan parks division buys clay for its baseball fields, it gets dumped here before being divvied up and taken to parks throughout the borough. When there were steel girders and railroad ties left over after the construction of the High Line,
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In a city where most residents don’t have a backyard, the island is a good place to loll on the grass. BELOW
The 103rd Street Bridge over the Harlem River provides crucial nonvehicular access to the island. OPPOSITE
A newly created salt marsh attracts migrating birds.
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Fishing is a popular Randall’s Island pastime, day and night.
in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, they were stacked here so the city could honor its commitment to preserve original parts. “It’s like the backyard of Manhattan parks,” Peterson says. If it never becomes the prettiest park on the planet, it’s because it’s too busy doing so many other important things. When I spoke to the landscape architect Stephen Whitehouse, ASLA, about Randall’s in the days before its turnaround, he commented that its remoteness had led it to suffer more than parks that have people living across the street from them. “It lacked a constituency,” he said. That’s no longer the case, as was abundantly clear at the most recent annual fund-raiser, held at Lincoln Center. The event attracted 700 guests and raised more than $1.7 million, according to Paula Stein, RIPA’s director of development. For the first time in all the years the organization has been holding the event, every table had been filled. When I stopped in during the cocktail hour, the bar areas were jammed and a photographer’s flashbulb was lighting up the lobby. Just before 7:30, the catering staff circulated, gently striking handheld xylophones with small mallets, alerting people that it was time to make their way to the dining room. Before I said good-bye, Parisi, Wilson, Boden, and I paused on the ground floor, marveling at the crowd and reflecting on the many years of effort it took to make Randall’s Island Park what it is today. “There certainly were challenges,” Boden says. Parisi smiles. “But you know,” she continued, “if we tried something and it didn’t work out, we just tried something else.” JANE MARGOLIES IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST IN NEW YORK AND A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO THE NEW YORK TIMES. HER LAST PIECE FOR LAM WAS ON MILL STREET COURTYARD IN YONKERS, NEW YORK.
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PORTLAND JAPANESE GARDEN/PHOTO BY BRUCE FORSTER
THE BACK
PORTLAND JAPANESE GARDEN CULTURAL VILLAGE
At Oregon’s Portland Japanese Garden, the architect Kengo Kuma has designed the new Cultural Village, a hypnotic compound on three acres that is his first public project in the United States. Kuma collaborated with Sadafumi Uchiyama, ASLA, the garden’s curator, to make the spaces much like those of monzenmachi, or temple towns, of Japan. The buildings house a learning center, a garden house, and a café arranged around a flat terrace that includes a small tsubo-niwa, or courtyard garden. The hipped roofs of the buildings are vegetated with eight varieties of Sedum and also licorice fern. Around the perimeter runs the Castle Wall, derived from medieval forms by the 15th-generation stonemason Suminori Awata and built with 500 tons of granite quarried near Baker City, Oregon. For more information, go to japanesegarden.org.
THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
ABOVE
Lawrence Halprin’s aerial sketch captures Kingman Lake Park, the master plan’s centerpiece.
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HALPRIN ON THE ANACOSTIA AT THE URGING OF LADY BIRD JOHNSON, LAWRENCE HALPRIN IMAGINED WASHINGTON, D.C.’S “SECOND RIVER” AS A WAY TO BRING PEOPLE AND WATER AS WELL AS PEOPLE AND PEOPLE TOGETHER. BY JEANNE HAFFNER
I
n October 1966, as part of Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify the nation’s capital, Lawrence Halprin began working on a set of designs for the Anacostia riverfront in Washington, D.C. Johnson’s beautification campaign was an early example of what might be called a green urban renewal program: Instead of wide-scale destruction of urban areas, her efforts aimed to revitalize cities through ecological and aesthetic improvement. Halprin’s designs for Washington’s second river—which was consistently overshadowed by the Potomac, highly polluted, and surrounded by the city’s poorest and most disenfranchised residents—were intended to address criticism that the beautification campaign was limited to planting flowers. Plans for the Anacostia riverfront would get back to what Lady Bird Johnson meant by “beautification” all along: that beauty is a human right that should be accessible to all, and that its power to improve lives and livelihoods should be deployed in the neighborhoods that need it most. But Halprin’s designs for Anacostia were ultimately shelved. The initial investment from the philanthropists Stephen and Audrey Currier covered only the master plan, not its implementation. With the end of the Johnson administration, the political will that fueled it had disappeared. Halprin’s unbuilt project nevertheless captures an important moment in the history of thinking about waterfront development, one that anticipated present-day
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T
he site for the proposed Anacostia Park stretched from Kingman Lake and Island in the west to Kenilworth and Oxon Cove on the eastern side of the river. Owing to a century of industrialization, sewage, and waste disposal, the entire area was toxic to varying degrees. At the time, Kingman Lake was a receptacle for six storm sewers that dumped sewage directly into its waters, and additional storm sewers were located on the eastern bank of the Anacostia. Kenilworth was an open-burning trash site that was being converted into a sanitary landfill, mainly because a child living nearby had accidentally been burned to death in the fires. Tree studies were used to locate the most polluted areas of the dump so that designs could go around them. Oxon Cove, the largest of the three areas at 700 acres, was also a landfill for the city’s refuse. Most of Halprin’s site analysis photos from the fall of 1966 show the Anacostia riverfront studded by gates, parking lots, housing projects, smokestacks, and trash. Others, however, encapsulate the river’s serenity and natural beauty, perhaps suggesting its future potential. Halprin studied the Anacostia riverfront through January 1967, as well as proposals for the area outlined in the McMillan Plan of 1902 and contemporary documents produced by the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service. He was presented with citizen surveys completed in the Capitol East neighborhood in 1965, in which residents expressed great interest in recreation. “We need a swimming pool
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THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
interests in waterfronts as places for real estate development, recreation, and environmental awareness and education. In Halprin’s designs for the Anacostia riverfront, water isn’t merely a means of transporting goods or a place for urban ABOVE elites to enhance their social status, as it had Connecting three sites, been before the 20th century. Water is instead a Halprin’s plan showed central element in urban redevelopment, social the relevance of landscape architecture and economic justice, and civic identity. Moreover, to waterfront Halprin’s vision for the Anacostia and its environs development. inspires reflections on the intersection of water and urban living today. What kind of relationship BELOW do we, as urban dwellers, want to have with our A 1966 site analysis rivers—and what role do landscape architects play photo depicts an unwelcoming riverfront. in making such a relationship possible?
THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
for the kids in summer,” one resident stated. “We can’t afford to go to the beaches.” Halprin shared Lady Bird Johnson’s belief that beauty was not skin deep. Echoing both the “broken windows” theory, which holds that even small acts of vandalism can have large-scale impacts on disorder within urban neighborhoods, and earlier theories of environmental determinism, the beautification campaign’s underlying hypothesis was that transforming ecology and aesthetics in city neighborhoods could improve individual lives and lessen racial tensions and crime. “Our
search,” Halprin wrote to the Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, “has been for a vocabulary of beauty which will grow out of the deep-rooted needs and desires of the inhabitants of Washington; a functional beauty which will enhance their lives by solving their living problems as well as appealing to the eye.”
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The cultural amusement center at Kingman Lake Park was designed for movement and play.
Practically, Halprin’s vision was to connect three existing recreational areas—the National Arboretum, RFK Stadium, and Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens—into a unified inner-city park that would
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Aerial sketch of Kenilworth Park.
serve as an amusement and cultural center, much like the Tivoli amusement park and pleasure garden in Copenhagen, Denmark. The centerpiece would be Kingman Lake and Island, with swimming, boating, an amusement park, and a cultural center. Washingtonians on Anacostia’s west bank would enjoy a closer connection to the water’s edge through 300 acres of trails, parkland,
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sports fields, and picnic areas leading up to a sandy beach and 100 acres of swimmable water. The island would link Kingman Lake Park to an even larger offering of sports and other amusements, including a roller coaster, a pleasure garden, beer gardens, dance pavilions, art galleries, bandstands, theaters, boardwalks, restaurants, and many other amenities.
THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
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THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
Halprin imagined Kenilworth Park, on the river’s east side, as a thriving garden and recreational center. Here residents would enjoy a more serene and sublime experience with nature through activities such as gardening, canoeing, horseback riding, and camping. Bordering Kenilworth Courts, a public housing project constructed in 1959 next to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, Halprin envisioned a series of allotment gardens, like those popular in Europe. Here, inhabitants would produce food and build a stronger sense of community; it might even, he and others surmised, lessen racial tensions.
ronmental education, especially for children and teenagers. “Nature lectures” would be held in an outdoor amphitheater, and a children’s farm would “introduce city children to farm life with emphasis on the ecology of the farm.” There would also be a tree nursery, golf course, marinas for small and large boats, and an overlook for scenic views of the Potomac. Trails would run throughout the site, connecting each section within the park and to surrounding areas.
Creating such spaces, however, required massive shifts in ecology and transportation infrastructure. Kingman Lake was surrounded by no less Farther south was the final, and largest, site: than six storm sewers; making this area swimOxon Cove Park. This area, part of which was mable was a major undertaking. At the time, the created by landfill, would be reserved for envi- lake was being filled in to make way for the eastern leg of a proposed inner-loop freeway. Halprin successfully stopped this project, with promises from his engineers that the lake could, in fact, be made suitable for bathing. He then proposed new routes for the freeway.
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The proposed Anacostia Park’s greatest engineering feat would have been to make polluted Kingman Lake swimmable. BELOW
A site analysis photo from 1966 points to the riverfront’s beauty and potential.
Halprin’s Anacostia design, therefore, was no small affair. It was a large-scale infrastructure project that involved ecological studies, engineering plans, and even freeway design. The plan for Anacostia Park demonstrated what all landscape architects working today already know: that landscape architecture as a field involves engineering, the creation of habitats, and, at times, large-scale
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Facilities for boating at the Oxon Cove Marina were intended to help connect Washingtonians with their waterfront.
transportation networks. This is nothing new; at Frederick Law Olmsted’s home and studio in Brookline, Massachusetts, for instance, he and other landscape designers worked directly across the hall from engineers like Calvert Vaux, ensuring daily interaction and dialogue. Halprin himself recognized the reach of the plan for Anacostia Park when he wrote, “The significance of the Anacostia Plan includes its importance as an early example of multidisciplinary and interagency planning. Here are the fruits of an integrated approach where landscape park design has been able to incorporate freeway design, recreation design, community programming, ecological planning, as well as engineering, into an environmental concern for an entire river.”
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he Committee for a More Beautiful Capital responded positively to Halprin’s work, as did the public. Recreation was thought to be the answer not only to suburban flight but also to a host of social problems, from juvenile delinquency to race riots. It was certainly easier to think about waterfront development than the Vietnam War, but in a way, the two were related. Based in the nation’s capital, the Anacostia, like the Potomac, was a symbol of American democracy and ways of life. Halprin repeatedly stated that this riverfront would be for everyone, insiders to the neighborhood as well as outside visitors. It would represent democratic values at a time when they were under threat. Water, in other words, had become a global, and highly cultural and symbolic, issue—and it remains so today.
THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
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THE ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BY THE GIFT OF LAWRENCE HALPRIN
Washington is still debating what to do with its second river, and landscape architects are central to this discussion. Instead of programmed recreation, the future of waterfront planning in Washington and other cities centers on issues that lie at the very core of the field of landscape architecture: environmental awareness, education, and remediation. Residents in Washington, as in other cities across the United States and the world, want to be reminded of the “naturalness” of their rivers—even if this has to be designed. Along the Anacostia, numerous groups have already found creative ways to foster this connection; the Living Classrooms Foundation, for instance, is currently using Kingman Island to educate young people in the District about ecological restoration. One can
imagine that a Washington version of the New ABOVE York Harbor Foundation’s famous Billion Oyster Oxon Cove’s golf course was to be Project is not far away. built on a landfill. In the 21st century, water continues to shape urban form and urban life as much as any other element of urbanism. The Anacostia riverfront is a laboratory for understanding the impact of water on cities and vice versa. In a city of eight wards, the river itself should, perhaps, be considered Washington’s ninth—one that pushes all other wards on the map in new directions. JEANNE HAFFNER IS THE MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN URBAN LANDSCAPE STUDIES AT DUMBARTON OAKS.
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BOOKS GO THERE CARTOGRAPHIC GROUNDS: PROJECTING THE LANDSCAPE IMAGINARY BY JILL DESIMINI AND CHARLES WALDHEIM; NEW YORK: PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, 2016; 272 PAGES, $50. REVIEWED BY SARAH COWLES
M
aps beguile and enchant by combining rigorous cartographic conventions with art. Artful cartography allows us to project ourselves into a proxy landscape. To pore over a map is to project yourself into a deadpan fiction, an image that promises not to abandon you, toss you into an unwanted allegory, or lead you astray with a capricious mark.
With mobile devices’ limited screen size, we don’t pore over maps; we swipe and pinch and pull and toggle layers on and off. Pushy navigation interfaces transcribe maps to routes that are sensitive to traffic and construction delays. Bitter navigation conflicts can arise between “turn-by-turn people” and “map people.”
A proper map allows us to go there, both in our imagination or into the physical landscape itself. Proportion and scale are paramount in maps; we trust that this is twice as far as that and plan accordingly. Maps are aids to time travel: We imagine “Where will I go?” and recall “Where did I go?” Maps are projective and reflective: They inform our mental models of landscapes and inscribe memories to draw upon in real time. They cement the spatial memories of a journey and how elements relate to one another.
Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim, Honorary ASLA, is divided into 10 chapters covering cartographic techniques, including figure–ground, shaded relief, stratigraphic column, and cross section. Short essays introduce the history and conventions of cartographic representation. A selection of exceptional reproductions of historic maps and contemporary works of landscape architecture follow the essays. The images are described with extended captions that detail the content of the maps (depictions “as is”) and plans (depictions of “what might be”). In each topical chapter, the authors make links between maps and design: the way in which “the topographic map offers a precise reading of landform, material, and occupation at a humanly accessible scale. It allows for immersion, through which the landscape can be seen, imagined, and ultimately designed.” The maps and plans are the third—and richest— texts of the book; thus the book operates more as an exhibition catalog. The fact that Cartographic Grounds was initiated as an exhibition at Gund Hall of the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2012 is a curious omission.
Maps and their attendant geospatial data and algorithms are embedded in much of the technology that surrounds us today. We no longer need to study maps before we set out into traffic in a new city, because we can dial up a target address while in motion. Mobile devices bind maps to us and our trajectories. The right map at the right time is potentially always with us (or until the battery dies or the signal is lost). With our app location services switched on, we are individual, mobile beacons, simultaneously navigators and surveyors, our way determined by algorithms and our paths transcribed back again.
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This map of the distance (some 700 kilometers) between Mangalore and Fort St. George in India hews to William Lambton’s “grand meridian line” across the continent. The web of smaller meridians and interconnected triangles was used as a method of measurement.
Maps are how we plan and make plans; they lie under tracing paper or are stacked in layers in graphic and drafting software. Through convention and scalar displacement, maps are tools for suspending disbelief and stimulating a landscape imagination. To reunite the map with the plan, the authors analyze how contemporary practitioners draw from cartographic techniques to analyze, imagine, and construct new material landscapes. If a plan is a map of a virtual place, then a successful plan will support suspensions of disbelief.
hovers between “the purely geographic and the freely abstract.” This perspective, illustrated throughout the book, is helpful in reconciling the variety and volume of geospatial data available today with the studied work of evolving plans within such a surfeit of information.
The authors’ pairings of exemplary maps with plans and sections of works by Lateral Office, Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Mosbach Paysagistes are valuable in this alternative, “cartographic read” Maps are a means to claim territory. In Cartographic Grounds, of contemporary works of landscape architecture. Waldheim and Desimini claim that the mapping trend—the graphic marking “of unseen and often immaterial fields, In the chapter titled “Conventional Sign,” the authors argue forces, and flows” in the landscape—may be coming to a that reading a map key in isolation is a worthy exercise, as the close. They hold their two-dimensional ground in the con- “listing of symbols and conventions is analogous to an article tested dialogue between maps and mappings. “Between these abstract” and that the signs are “the very instruments used to two schools of thought—the purely geographic and the freely construct that content.” The iconic symbols in Lateral Office’s abstract—is a representational project that merges spatial technologically sublime Salton Sea shoreline proposal are exprecision and cultural imagination.” They critique today’s emplary of the land-machine dominated magical thinking of abstract information graphics as superficial and less instru- late landscape urbanism, where a compelling aesthetic system mental in terms of design than their promise: “Yet this data of symbols and pattern forswears any semblance of engineercan be alluring, both in content and form. It is all too often a ing or economic realities. crutch for design, eliminating speculation and agency, while supporting a methodology that looks for projects to emerge A potent example of how cartographic techniques can operout of an illusory objectivity.” Describing maps as a “founda- ate critically to reveal alternate readings is nearly lost in the tion to intervention,” the authors argue for a close tailoring chapter titled “Sounding/Spot Elevation.” Here William Lambof the “idea-driven spatial strategy…forced to respond to the ton’s General Plan of Triangles: An Account of the Trigonometrimap.” The designed plan is “a spatially precise drawing of a cal Operations in Crossing the Peninsula of India is juxtaposed grounded, material, and topographically rich landscape” that with Mathur and da Cunha’s reinterpretation of Lambton’s
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COURTESY THE KISLAK CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, RARE BOOKS, AND MANUSCRIPTS, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
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triangulation journey. In this work, Mathur and da Cunha transpose Lambton’s abstract sight lines to land again in their context. Mathur and da Cunha’s recent graphic work focused on the Mumbai estuary demonstrates how a critical approach to remapping landscapes can repatriate lands from a colonial reading. Unfortunately, the authors avoid addressing this critical aspect and implications of such methods of reinterpretive cartography. RIGHT
This drawing by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha reinterprets William Lambton’s journey across India from a land-based perspective. Their critical approach to remapping landscapes is a means to reclaim colonial readings of territory.
A side-by-side comparison between a General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans by the International Hydrographic Organization and Agence Patrick Arotcharen and Estudi Martí Franch’s Les Echasses Golf and Surf Nature Resort is an illustration of leveraging collective literacy of cartographic conventions. Rather than a line dividing wet from dry, they use gradients of color to fill contour shapes, giving the impression of an ever-changing landscape of coves and peninsulas. Such conventions will no doubt be applicable in an era of rising sea levels and increasingly severe storm events. We are at a moment where the pitting of binaries—rather than fluctuating gradients—between wet and dry conditions is truly a recipe for disaster.
tice of Landscape Gardening; and on Gaining and Embanking Land from Rivers or the Sea) paired with sections of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ Brooklyn Bridge Park. Loudon’s drawings delineate the tectonics of earthwork and highlight how little these technologies have changed in 200 years. The Van Valkenburgh series reveals the artifices supporting the picturesque landscape plan draped on the surface. Van Valkenburgh’s section depicts the fine corsetry of today’s urban landscapes, how they are tailored, tucked, and plumped within and around horizontal and vertical infrastructural impositions such as freeways, bulkheads, and energy conduits. In the case of Loudon, the section does landscape while the Van Valkenburgh section does landscape and does landscape representation. The volume features two iconic works by Mosbach Paysagistes—the Taichung Jade Ecopark Competition and the Bordeaux Botanical Garden—that exemplify artful translations from analysis and interpretation of cartographic illustration to constructed landscapes. The pairing of these works with their cartographic counterparts reveals the deeper intelligence of Mosbach’s sculptural-tectonic approach that results in uncanny and inscrutable landscapes.
The chapter “Cross Section” features a series of historic drawings of retaining walls and embankments by John Claudius Mosbach’s “environment gallery” at Bordeaux features a series Loudon (from Observations on the Formation and Management of extruded 100-square-meter gardens revealing the changes of Useful and Ornamental Plantations: On the Theory and Prac- in geological epochs and the soils that determine species and
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RIGHT
Mosbach Paysagistes’s plan for the Taichung Jade Ecopark appears as a lithospheric painting, revealing stratigraphic gradients between wet and dry and high to low.
In Cartographic Grounds, the authors lure us close to a critique of contemporary landscape architectural practice and representation. Yet rather than go there in any distinct way, Desimini and Waldheim instead interweave the volume with a series of confounding, abstract maplike compositions. Each chapter features Desimini’s visual distillations (or legends) of cartographic conventions and techniques that are drawn from primary sources. These are coupled with exploratory “metamaps” by groups such as Future Cities Lab, and the animation stills from Robert Gerard Pietrusko, which only reinforce the exhaustion with academic and abstract mapping practices. Although these visual interludes are a respite from the intensity of the detailed maps and plans, their inclusion within this context makes their ambiguity taunting. Their abstract nature may serve as tools for meditative points of entry, or are instructive as “works in progress,” but the authors do not make their contextual role in this volume explicit.
vegetation patterns. The authors comment on how “superimposed sections allow for the topographic shifts to register, and the shifts themselves reveal material stratification.” This reading of the Bordeaux project aids in unpacking and resounding Mosbach’s works at Taichung and the Louvre-Lens museum. At Louvre-Lens, Mosbach daylights the disturbed section, in a mannerist interpretation of the extraction processes that shaped the landscape before recuperation as a cultural center. Desimini and Waldheim describe how cartography is where landscape, architecture, and engineering share a representaIn “Stratigraphic Column,” Mosbach’s Taichung Jade Ecopark tional field. The illustrative plan may be the domain of landCompetition proposal is paired with William Smith’s A Geo- scape architects and planners, but the intersection is where logical Map of England and Wales and Part of Scotland. In this the technical intelligence of landscape architecture is manifest.
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COURTESY MOSBACH PAYSAGISTES
dialogue, the Taichung plan is revealed not as a soils map but as a lithospheric painting that prefigures the ongoing evolution of this landscape. Smith’s map depicts geological strata, where one can trace the veins of coal and chalk. It is a subsurface map of energy and mineral resources and a revelation of the specific material potential of the landmass, showing how what was formed in the past will sustain a nation’s future populations. These paired images poetically acknowledge and specify the components of the terrestrial body, and the embedded scales of time below the surface. Sympathetic works of studied daylighting such as Bordeaux, Louvre-Lens, and the Vogt Landscape Architects stratigraphic walls at Novartis are welcome departures from the superficial yet graphically heavy-handed patterns of contemporary urban landscapes.
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Two views of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris by Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand: A contour drawing illustrates the engineered underpinnings of the landscape, and a shaded relief drawing of the site heightens the topography.
However, the intelligence of the section is often hidden under a second layer that is a representation of nature. Though on the surface the “Stratigraphic Column” and Cross Section” chapters are taxonomically fitting, their inclusion is provocative in their potential to bring richness to imaginary landscape tectonics, while the abstract mappings by Pietrusko and Desimini’s symbol distillations are mere surface patterning.
of cartographic practices influence contemporary landscape architectural practice. They also provide instruction for designers to marshal the data from a range of surficial, topographic, and infrastructural maps—to divine grounded and intelligent plans for landscape. A more exhaustive tracing of such map-to-landscape processes can be found in recent monographs on the work of Vogt Landscape Architects, including Distance and Engagement (2010, Lars Müller Publishers), that document the studio’s design Though the call for cartographic rigor over abstract mappings development process from map to site visit and tracings, to studio is timely, perhaps this is the right book at the wrong time. The iteration through modeling and mock-ups. techne of landscape architectural practice is advancing rapidly in our attempts to insinuate multifunctional and permeable In his recent essay, “The Thick and the Thin of It,” James Corner, landscapes into our cities. The section is where the precision ASLA, speaks of the thinness of the plan and how its implicaand advancement of the art is revealed, from fitting fertility tions are often symbolic. “The fact that the plan is inevitably within gaps in infrastructure to the deadpan imposition of and universally ‘thin’ runs the sure risk of superficiality and picturesque compositions on former wharfs such as Brooklyn overwriting, but it is also the most potent device we have for both Bridge Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, or the the analysis and organization of more significant place-form,” he structural contortions of Weiss/Manfredi’s Olympic Sculpture writes. While the landscapes themselves “are materially thick, Park. This volume exposes how a range of contemporary Eu- in terms of geology, soils, hydrology, layers of foundations, and ropean practices, such as Vogt Landscape Architects, Mosbach construction. They are temporally thick, in terms of complex Paysagistes, and Estudi Martí Franch, are revisiting and rein- interactive ecological processes.” We have come to another reckterpreting the intelligence in cartographic techniques to divine oning at the intersection of the plan and the section: between sections adapted to both the necessity and art of the practice. A the thin and the thick. As ice melts to reveal new Arctic shipprecedent worth revisiting in this light is Jean-Charles Adolphe ping lanes and energy fields, and sea levels rise, erasing former Alphand’s Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where the curvilinear coastal boundaries, the plan is increasingly at the mercy of these plan composition is reconciled with the dramatic excavations sectional dynamics, with the landscape imaginary responsible and contours of the quarry. for a productive reconciliation between the two. The volume is a rich resource for landscape planners and architects, urban designers, multimedia designers, students, and educators. The authors make a case for how rigorous interpretations
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SARAH COWLES IS AN ARTIST AND AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE AT THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN LOS ANGELES.
COURTESY THE FRANCIS LOEB LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN
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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY: CREATING POSITIVE CHANGE THROUGH DESIGN
NEW NORDIC GARDENS: SCANDINAVIAN LANDSCAPE DESIGN BY ANNIKA ZETTERMAN; LONDON: THAMES & HUDSON, 2017; 288 PAGES, $45.
BY JOSHUA ZEUNERT; NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY, 2017; 320 PAGES, $51.95.
In this engaging textbook, Joshua Zeunert, International ASLA, a lecturer in planning and landscape architecture at Australia’s Deakin University, provides a comprehensive overview of sustainability’s place in landscape architecture. So much is covered, in fact, that the deep level of detail achieved is a surprise. Topics include environmental infrastructure, food systems, social sustainability, resilience, and more. The book is lavishly illustrated with color photography of sites around the world, and each chapter closes with an interview featuring practitioners such as Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA; Richard Weller, ASLA; Douglas Reed, FASLA; Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA; and Kongjian Yu, FASLA.
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THE PLANET REMADE: HOW GEOENGINEERING COULD CHANGE THE WORLD BY OLIVER MORTON; PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015; 440 PAGES, $16.95.
As the effects of climate change continue to threaten the planet, drastic interventions seem ever more feasible —and suddenly more reasonable. Morton does a good job explaining various methods of geoengineering (cloud seeding, biomass capture— even an artistic wrapping of Kilimanjaro’s diminished snow to shield it from the melting sun), but the most valuable and entertaining part of the book is the backstory of how things got bad enough for us to need humanmade solutions in the first place.
“Scandinavian design is renowned worldwide: comprising work carried out with a high level of attention to functionality and quality, and based on philosophies of modesty and equality,” says Annika Zetterman. But Nordic landscape designers also like to break out of the “simplicity” box, and the book is filled with photographs demonstrating their departures: a slabbed concrete carport with a green roof of wild grass, a sculptural skatepark, and an aboveground pool fitted with a window so large, swimmers inside would seem to splash inside a big-screen TV.
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www.hanoverpavers.com • 800.426.4242 Contact Hanover® to find your local representative.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 171
ZADIG BENCH by
THE CAST STONE COLLECTION Endless Possibilities—from Classic to Contemporary
1.877.613.1449 | WWW.PLANTERSUNLIMITED.COM
172 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
distributed by MALIK OUTDOOR
movenpick resort & spa | INDONESIA
Connecting the world through play. AQ UATI C P L A Y F E A T U RE S ACTI V I T Y T O W E RS WATER M A N A G E M E N T
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westernjuniper.org
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 173
174 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
LINEARITY PAVERS Ŷ LARGE SCALE CALARC
800.572.9029
stepstoneinc.com
OU TDOOR SE ATING IS A LOK . Who says outdoor seating has to be made of metal? The aluminum bleachers at most stadiums get uncomfortably hot in the summer and can cool in the evening to an icy cold. Not to mention the racket from foot-stomping crowds. That’s why architects and landscape designers are turning to VERSA-LOK retaining wall systems for outdoor seating. Economical, comfortable and . . . quiet. That’s the VERSA-LOK promise. To find out why design professionals prefer VERSA-LOK, call (800) 770-4525 or visit www.versa-lok.com.
Freestanding Walls
Mosaic Random Face Patterns
Fully Integrated Stairs
Random-Pattern Tall Walls
Freestanding Columns
Multi-Angle Corners
©2016 Kiltie Corporation • Oakdale, MN
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 175
CONTINUE YOUR EDUCATION Browse an archive of webinars providing information on new and evolving practices and products. The ASLA Online Learning series provides convenient and affordable distance learning opportunities and offers LA CES-approved Professional Development Hours (PDH). Presentations are recorded and made available for on demand viewing. learn.asla.org
176 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
WHAT’S YOUR INTEREST?
TM
Project: Cafe Pergola, Farm Neck Golf Club, Oak Bluffs, MA - 86 ft long overall, 32 ft. radius beam, 3 lighted apexes, 21 - 8" sq. columns, all crafted in AZEK.
800-343-6948 • See video of project at walpoleoutdoors.com Fence, pergolas, arbors, gates, trellis, lattice, railing, planter boxes, and more for your home or business.
ASLA offers 20 Professional Practice Networks (PPNs) —national platforms for networking and exchanging information on specific topics. Find your interest area and join for free. www.asla.org/PPN
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 177
Music for All Ages
Rhapsody® Outdoor Musical Instruments invite everyone to join the band. With a new line sized just right for kids ages 2 to 5, this complete collection is ideal for childcare facilities, playgrounds, community centers, schools, and more. Learn more about bringing music to your environment at playlsi.com/rhapsody. ©2017 Landscape Structures Inc.
MOST DEPENDABLE FOUNTAINS, INC.™ The one water source trusted for over 25 years.
Custom SHADE
RESIDENTIAL & COMMERCIAL
www.MostDependable.com
800-552-6331
)V[[SL -PSSLYZ +YPURPUN -V\U[HPUZ 7L[ -V\U[HPUZ 6\[KVVY :OV^LYZ 4VYL
178 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
Canopies & Outdoor Structures CALL Today 800•894•3801
shadetreecanopies.com
DRIVABLE GRASS®
The nation’s #1 supplier of natural stone products
Driveways Parking Fire Lanes Utility Access Pathways Drainage Channels
Flamed and Polished Midnight Black Granite Amazon Lobby, Seattle WA www.soilretention.com 800-346-7995
Suitable for indoor and outdoor use
800-779-3234 | coverallstone.com
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 179
THE BACK
/ADVERTISER INDEX
ADVERTISING SALES 636 Eye Street NW Washington, DC 20001-3736 202-216-2335 202-478-2190 Fax advertising@asla.org PRODUCTION MANAGER Sarah Strelzik 202-216-2341 sstrelzik@asla.org
ADVERTISER 2017 EXPO Promotion Acker-Stone Industries Inc. ACO Polymer Products Inc. Amish Country Gazebos ANOVA ANP Lighting Aquatix by Landscape Structures ASLA Annual Meeting & Expo Bartlett Tree Expert Company Belden Brick Co. Belgard Hardscapes Berliner Play Equipment Corporation Bison Innovative Products by UCP Brentwood Industries, Inc. Calpipe Industries Inc. Campania International, Inc. Canaan Site Furnishings Carl Stahl DecorCable Innovations, Inc. Classic Recreation Systems, Inc. Columbia Cascade Company Country Casual Coverall Stone Inc. Cycle Safe Inc. DeepStream Designs Doty & Sons Concrete Products DuMor, Inc. Easi-Set Buildings emuamericas, llc Envirospec, Inc. Equiparc Ernst Conservation Seeds Eurocobble Evergreen Walls US Fermob USA Forms+Surfaces Fountain People, Inc. GAF - Streetbond Goric Marketing Group Inc. Gothic Arch Greenhouses Green Roofs for Healthy Cities GreenBlue Urban Greenform LLC greenscreen HADDONSTONE Hanover Architectural Products, Inc. IAP Illusions Vinyl Fence Iron Age Designs Ironsmith, Inc. Kafka Granite Kaswell Flooring Systems Kichler Landscape Lighting Kornegay Design Landmark Ceramics, Inc. Landscape Forms Landscape Structures, Inc. Livin the Dog Life Madrax Maglin Site Furniture Inc. Malik Gallery Collection Meteor Lighting Most Dependable Fountains Nature’s Instruments Ohio Gratings Inc. Pavestone Company Permaloc Aluminum Edging Petersen Concrete Leisure Products Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc. Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice Planterworx QCP Roman Fountains Salsbury Industries Shade Tree Systems Sitecra Sitescapes, Inc. Soil Retention Products Spring Meadow Nursery Inc. (Proven Winners) Stepstone, Inc. StressCrete Group / King Luminaire, The Structureworks Fabrication Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging Tensile Shade Products, LLC Tournesol Siteworks/Planter Technology Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock U.S. Green Building Council Unilock, Ltd. Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System Victor Stanley, Inc. Vitamin Institute Vortex Aquatics Structures International Walpole Outdoors LLC Water Odyssey Waterplay Solutions Corp. Wausau Tile Wayne Tyler, Inc. Western Juniper Alliance Williams Stone Company, Inc.
180 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
WEBSITE www.aslameeting.com www.ackerstone.com www.acousa.com www.amishgazebos.com www.anovafurnishings.com www.anplighting.com www.playlsi.com www.aslameeting.com www.bartlett.com www.beldenbrick.com www.belgardcommercial.com www.berliner-playequipment.com www.bisonip.com www.brentwood-ind.com www.calpipebollards.com www.campaniainternational.com www.canaansf.com www.decorcable.com www.classicrecreation.com www.timberform.com www.countrycasual.com www.coverallstone.com www.cyclesafe.com www.deepstreamdesigns.com www.dotyconcrete.com www.dumor.com www.easisetbuildings.com www.emuamericas.com www.envirospecinc.com www.equiparc.com www.ernstseed.com www.eurocobble.com www.evergreenwalls.com www.fermobusa.com www.forms-surfaces.com www.fountainpeople.com www.gaf.com www.goric.com www.gothicarchgreenhouses.com www.citiesalive.org www.greenblue.com www.green-form.com www.greenscreen.com www.haddonstone.com www.hanoverpavers.com www.iapsf.com www.illusionsfence.com www.ironagegates.com www.ironsmith.biz www.kafkagranite.com www.kaswell.com www.kichler.com www.kornegaydesign.com www.landmarkceramics.com www.landscapeforms.com www.playlsi.com www.livinthedoglife.com www.madrax.com www.maglin.com www.malikgallery.com www.meteor-lighting.com www.mostdependable.com www.naturesinstruments.com www.ohiogratings.com www.pavestone.com www.permaloc.com www.petersenmfg.com www.americaspremierpaver.com www.hooksandlattice.com www.planterworx.com www.quickcrete.com www.romanfountains.com www.mailboxes.com www.shadetreesnursery.com www.site-cra .com www.sitescapesonline.com www.soilretention.com www.provenwinners.com www.stepstone.com www.stresscrete.com www.structureworksfab.com www.surelocedging.com www.tensileshadeproducts.com www.tournesolsiteworks.com www.carderock.com www.usgbc.org www.unilock.com www.versa-lok.com www.victorstanley.com www.superthrive.com www.vortex-intl.com www.walpolewoodworkers.com www.waterodyssey.com www.waterplay.com www.wausautile.com www.waynetyler.com www.westernjuniper.org www.williamsstone.com
PHONE 202-898-4444 800-258-2535 440-285-7000 717-951-1064 888-535-5005 800-548-3227 763-972-5237 202-898-2444 877-227-8538 330-456-0031 877-235-4273 864-627-1092 888-412-4766 610-374-5109 800-225-7473 215-541-4627 877-305-6638 800-444-6271 800-697-2195 800-547-1940 240-813-1117 206-937-5200 888-950-6531 305-857-0466 800-233-3907 800-598-4018 800-547-4045 303-733-3385 716-689-8548 800-363-9264 800-873-3321 877-877-5012 770-840-7060 678-884-3000 800-451-0410 512-392-1155 973-628-3000 617-774-0772 251-471-5238 416-917-4494 866-282-2743 310-331-1665 800-450-3494 866-733-8225 800-426-4242 510-534-4886 631-698-0975 206-276-0925 800-338-4766 715-687-2423 508-879-1500 800-659-9000 877-252-6323 931-325-5700 800-430-6205 800-328-0035 800-931-1462 800-448-7931 800-716-5506 510-784-8929 213-255-2060 800-552-6331 416-931-3643 330-477-6707 866-409-7971 800-356-9660 800-832-7383 800-334-8689 760-707-5400 718-963-0564 951-256-3245 877-794-1802 323-846-6700 614-844-5990 800-221-1448 402-421-9464 760-966-6090 800-633-8859 310-483-6979 800-268-7809 877-489-8064 800-787-3562 520-903-9005 800-542-2282 301-365-2100 202-552-1369 416-646-3452 800-770-4525 301-855-8300 818-503-1950 514-694-3868 800-343-6948 512-392-1155 800-590-5552 800-388-8728 858-560-4800 503-221-6911 800-832-2052
PAGE # 190-191 77, 187 79, 182 188 25 61, 185 189 5 9 157 65 166 168 161 50, 183 C2-1, 187 144, 183 179 169 73, 165, 185 47 179 178 174 183 20, 184 188 176, 184 186 41, 184 188 55, 186 182 35, 184 11, 182 189 4 159, 187 12, 189 170 31 171 17, 185 67, 188 171 170 182 51, 182 8, 182 80, 187 187 49, 185 27, 183 75, 188 2-3, 19, 37, 57, 78, 183 23, 178 186 43, 185 60 172 169 178 155 168 C4 163, 186 176 13, 188 172 174 15 33 185 178 53 184 179 59 175 186 189 186 69 29, 188 187 167 39 175, 183 184, C3 177 45 177 189 173 63 179 173 188
THE BACK
/ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY
ASSOCIATION/FOUNDATION
PAVING/SURFACING/MASONRY STONE/METALS
Landscape Forms
2017 EXPO Promotion
202-898-4444 190-191
Acker-Stone Industries Inc.
800-258-2535
77, 187
ASLA Annual Meeting & Expo
202-898-2444
5
Belden Brick Co.
330-456-0031
157
U.S. Green Building Council
202-552-1369
167
Belgard Hardscapes
877-235-4273
65
Western Juniper Alliance
503-221-6911
173
Eurocobble
877-877-5012
55, 186
GAF - Streetbond
973-628-3000
4
DESIGN CONSULTANTS GreenBlue Urban
866-282-2743
31
DRAINAGE AND EROSION
Hanover Architectural Products, Inc.
800-426-4242
171
Kafka Granite
715-687-2423
80, 187
Kaswell Flooring Systems
508-879-1500
187
Landmark Ceramics, Inc.
931-325-5700
75, 188
800-430-6205
2-3, 19,
37, 57, 78, 183 Madrax
800-448-7931
Maglin Site Furniture Inc.
800-716-5506
43, 185 60
Malik Gallery Collection
510-784-8929
172
Petersen Concrete Leisure Products
800-832-7383
176
QCP
951-256-3245
15
Salsbury Industries
323-846-6700
185
Sitecra
800-221-1448
53
Sitescapes, Inc.
402-421-9464
184
Victor Stanley, Inc.
301-855-8300
184, C3
ACO Polymer Products Inc.
440-285-7000
79, 182
Pavestone Company
866-409-7971
C4
Iron Age Designs
206-276-0925
51, 182
Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc.
800-334-8689
13, 188
Ironsmith, Inc.
800-338-4766
8, 182
Soil Retention Products
760-966-6090
179
STRUCTURES
Ohio Gratings Inc.
330-477-6707
168
Stepstone, Inc.
310-483-6979
175
Amish Country Gazebos
717-951-1064
188
Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock
301-365-2100
187
Classic Recreation Systems, Inc.
800-697-2195
169
Unilock, Ltd.
416-646-3452
39
Easi-Set Buildings
800-547-4045
188
Gothic Arch Greenhouses
251-471-5238
12, 189
Shade Tree Systems
614-844-5990
178
Structureworks Fabrication
877-489-8064
189
Tensile Shade Products, LLC
520-903-9005
69
Walpole Outdoors LLC
800-343-6948
177
FENCES/GATES/WALLS Carl Stahl DecorCable Innovations, Inc.
800-444-6271
179
Wausau Tile
800-388-8728
63
Williams Stone Company, Inc.
800-832-2052
188
Evergreen Walls US
770-840-7060
182
Illusions Vinyl Fence
631-698-0975
182
Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System
800-770-4525 175, 183
GREEN ROOFS/LIVING WALLS Green Roofs for Healthy Cities
416-917-4494
170
greenscreen
800-450-3494
17, 185
LIGHTING
PLANTERS/SCULPTURES/GARDEN ACCESSORIES Campania International, Inc.
215-541-4627 C2-1, 187
Coverall Stone Inc.
206-937-5200
Greenform LLC
310-331-1665
171
HADDONSTONE
866-733-8225
67, 188
Aquatix by Landscape Structures
763-972-5237
189
Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice
760-707-5400
172
Brentwood Industries, Inc.
610-374-5109
161
Planterworx
718-963-0564
174
Fountain People, Inc.
512-392-1155
189
Tournesol Siteworks/Planter Technology
800-542-2282
29, 188
Most Dependable Fountains
800-552-6331
178
Roman Fountains
877-794-1802
33
Vortex Aquatics Structures International
514-694-3868
45
Water Odyssey
512-392-1155
189
Waterplay Solutions Corp.
800-590-5552
173
179
ANP Lighting
800-548-3227
61, 185
Kichler Landscape Lighting
800-659-9000
49, 185
Meteor Lighting
213-255-2060
169
PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS
StressCrete Group / King Luminaire, The
800-268-7809
186
Bartlett Tree Expert Company
877-227-8538
9
Wayne Tyler, Inc.
858-560-4800
179
Ernst Conservation Seeds
800-873-3321
188
Spring Meadow Nursery Inc.
800-633-8859
59
818-503-1950
177
LUMBER/DECKING/EDGING
(Proven Winners)
Bison Innovative Products by UCP
888-412-4766
168
Envirospec, Inc.
716-689-8548
186
Permaloc Aluminum Edging
800-356-9660 163, 186
STREET FURNISHINGS AND SITE AMENITIES
Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging
800-787-3562
ANOVA
888-535-5005
25
Calpipe Industries Inc.
800-225-7473
50, 183
Canaan Site Furnishings
877-305-6638 144, 183
CycleSafe Inc.
888-950-6531
178
DeepStream Designs
305-857-0466
174
Doty & Sons Concrete Products
800-233-3907
183
DuMor, Inc.
800-598-4018
20, 184
emuamericas, llc
303-733-3385 176, 184
186
OUTDOOR FURNITURE Country Casual
WATER MANAGEMENT AND AMENITIES
240-813-1117
47
PARKS AND RECREATION Berliner Play Equipment Corporation
864-627-1092
166
Columbia Cascade Company
800-547-1940
73, 165, 185
Vitamin Institute
Equiparc
800-363-9264
41, 184
Goric Marketing Group Inc.
617-774-0772 159, 187
Fermob USA
678-884-3000
35, 184
Landscape Structures, Inc.
800-328-0035
23, 178
Forms+Surfaces
800-451-0410
11, 182
Livin the Dog Life
800-931-1462
186
IAP
510-534-4886
170
Nature’s Instruments
416-931-3643
155
Kornegay Design
877-252-6323
27, 183
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 181
BUYER’S GUIDE
TRANSFORM YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Leadership by design
WITH PLANTABLE CONCRETE RETAINING WALLS
DESIGNER CASTINGS
Evergreen’s eco-friendly landscape walls increase in integrity, while decreasing maintenance and deterioration. Install, plant and watch it become part of the environment.
TO FIT YOUR DRAINS Lexington
Visit www.evergreen-walls.com
ironagegrates.com
acodrain.us
877-418-3568
Made in USA. Recycled/Recycleable Materials
tree grates
trench grates
www.ironsmith.biz
bollards
paver-grate®
800-338-4766
Contact us today at (800) 247-2819 or Clay.Warner@evergreen-walls.com
TRIO BENCHES timeless style | backed and backless designs | wood or metal slats coordinating bike racks, table ensembles, bollards and pedestrian lighting www.forms-surfaces.com
182 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
BUYER’S GUIDE
BE AUT Y IS A LOK .
ARCHITECTURAL, SAFETY, AND HIGH-SECURITY BOLLARDS • Fixed, Removable, Retractable, Lighted, and MORE • Manufactured in the USA from carbon steel, Type 304 or 316 stainless steel Protecting Times Square and hundreds of other public areas since 1998
(877) 283-8518 calpipebollards.com
VERSA-LOK.COM
©2012 Kiltie Corporation • Oakdale , MN
Masaru Series
L A N D S C A P E C O N TA I N E R S
35COLLECTION The 35 Collection grows with a new generation of high performance products. :OV^U PU H ZHUKISHZ[ ÄUPZO
Designed by frog design. 800.430.6205 landscapeforms.com
KornegayDesign.com | 877.252.6323
DESIGN. CULTURE. CRAFT.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 183
BUYER’S GUIDE
www.fermobusa.com
VICTOR STANLEY RELAY ™ S T R E E T L E V E L S E N S I N G ™ & WA S T E C O N T R O L S E R V I C E
150 NEWBURY STREET, BOSTON, MA
CONTAINER 162 CONTENTS GENERAL WASTE
LAT. 42.350781 LON. -71.077917
LAST COLLECTED
90% CAPACITY
6/30/2017
48 LBS COLLECTION REQUIRED
AVG. TIME BETWEEN COLLECTIONS
60% CAPACITY
2-DAYS
30 LBS
10% CAPACITY
BATTERY LEVEL
5 LBS
100%
INCREASED EFFICIENCY
SIGNAL STRENGTH 97%
40%
US Patent D785,269 S.
An orderly revolution in waste control.
184 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
For over 30 years, lighting designers, engineers, and ZWLJPÄLYZ OH]L [\YULK [V ANP Lighting for state-of-the-art technology and a wide array of S\TPUHPYL HUK IVSSHYK Z[`SLZ #5132G ADJUSTABLE MOUNTING CLIP
Three-dimensional modular green facades
Project Showcase 7HJPÄ J *P[` c /\U[PUN[VU )LHJO *(
Visit our website for information about our versatile trellis system with attachments. resources for design, detailing and delivery @
greenscreen.com 800.450.3494
Discover why Kichler has been the industry standard in LED landscape lighting for more than 25 years.
ANPlighting.com | 800.548.3227
TM
TimberForm City ®
Engineered smarter – so you look better. Why choose Kichler Integrated LED? All-weather performance Superior results Easy design & installation
15
YEAR
LIMITED WARRANTY
On the light engine and electrical components. Warranty subject to change without notice. Visit www.kichler.com for full warranty and limitations.
View our full line of integrated products at kichler.com/landscape
Featuring stackable chairs and demountable, storable tables
Contact us at 1-800/547-1940 or asla@timberform.com
www.TimberForm.com Columbia Cascade LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 185
BUYER’S GUIDE
High-performance LED lighting solutions
BUYER’S GUIDE
HISTORICAL DESIGNS Advanced LED Technology
Lower your cost to elevate & level rooftop pavers.
Form & Function. Forever.
Aluminum edgings for: landscape | hardscape green build
permaloc
®
w w w. S t r e s s C r e t e G r o u p . c o m
Paver Pedestal System Envirospec Incorporated Phone: 1-905-271-3441 www.envirospecinc.com
S U S TA I N A B L E E D G I N G S O L U T I O N S
permaloc.com | 800.356.9660
NATURAL DOG PARK PRODUCTS
eurocobble
®
Phone: 800-931-1562 www.GymsForDogs.com Sales@GymsForDogs.com
186 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
engineered modular paving
877.877.5012
www.eurocobble.com
BUYER’S GUIDE
Experience the AckerStone Difference.
play
exercise
health
Style
Water Play
KAFKA STABILIZED DECOMPOSED GRANITE
The finest playgrounds known to children
( DOES YOUR DG DO THIS? )
Real Wooden Blocks for Exterior Use
See our 50+ colors at 60 Pleasant St. Suite 7A Ashland, MA 01721
KAFKAGRANITE.COM 800-852-7415
(508) 881-1520 www.kaswell.com
www.AckerStone.com 8002582353
goric.com | 1-877-467-4287
Granite
End Grain Black Locust Blocks Made in the USA
Carderock Stone ®
one resource
FOR
D E S I G N | P R O D U C T S | M AT E R I A L S | AVA I L A B I L I T Y
Stone®
Tri-State and Building Supply, Inc. Quarriers and suppliers of distinctive natural stone since 1926. Bethesda, Maryland
301.365.2100
www.carderock.com
ve n e e r • wa l l s t o n e • t h i n ve n e e r • s t e p p e r s • b o u l d e r s • landscape chips • tumbled
215-541-4330 www.campaniainternational.com/projects projects@campaniainternational.com
P l a n t e r s • F o u n t a i n s • Ta b l e s • B e n c h e s • P o t t e r y • A c c e n t s
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 187
Main Street, Park CIty, Utah
BUYER’S GUIDE
WS
WILLIAMS STONE COMPANY
celebrating 70 years of superior domestic granite www.williamsstone.com 800-832-2052
Unique contemporary designs from the stone experts haddonstone.com 866 733 8225
GAZEBOS
7+( ($6,(67 :$< 72 %8,/'
Restoring the native landscape
PAVILIONS
$PODFTTJPOT t %VHPVUT t 1SFTT #PYFT t 3FTUSPPNT 8PSLTIPQT t 7JTJUPS $FOUFST t &MFDUSJDBM .FDIBOJDBM 0óDFT t 4FDVSJUZ 4IBDLT t 4IFMUFST t 4UPSBHF NPSF
PERGOLAS ernstseed.com sales@ernstseed.com 800-873-3321
188 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
FREEL! TO O
Design Your Own Gazebo AmishGazebos.com
PRECAST CONCRETE BUILDINGS ZZZ (DVL6HW%XLOGLQJV FRP
BUYER’S GUIDE From hobby to large scale, commercial greenhouses… to customized, high-end enclosures…
We have the products you need.
CREATE FUN WAYS TO SPRAY & PLAY!
GREENHOUSE KITS CUSTOM ENCLOSURES EQUIPMENT SUPPLIES
Formerly Aquatic Recreation Company
We’ve got new designs on water 800-531-GROW(4769) GOTHICARCHGREENHOUSES.COM
Let us light the way.
We provide innovative solutions to help you create unique aquatic play experiences.
952.445.5135 • 877.632.0503 aquatix.playlsi.com ©2016 Landscape Structures Inc.
www.fountainpeople.com
512.392.1155 | waterodyssey.com
Del Ray Tower Multi-unit residential property in Alexandria, VA featuring two custom Trex® PergolaTM shade structures. Learn more about this project at: www.structureworksfab.com/drt
WHAT’S YOUR INTEREST? ASLA offers 20 Professional Practice Networks (PPNs) – national platforms for networking and exchanging information on specific topics. Find your interest area and join for free.
www.asla.org/PPN
877.489.8064 • structureworksfab.com
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017 / 189
ASLA EXPO 2017.... the place landscape architects go to experience new products and services THE SELLING POWER OF TOUCH, SIGHT, SMELL, AND SOUND By Russ Klettke
how do certain LED lighting innovations enable color manipulation? Meeting designers face-to-face – allowing them to experience products with their hands, eyes, ears, and noses – is what the ASLA EXPO is about.
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Suppliers can take a cue from Sonos, the wireless home audio company. Their high-fidelity speakers and components are more than wires and woofers: they deliver very high quality sound. So even though electronics in general are heavily dependent on online marketing, the company now builds listening rooms in bricks-andmortar retail partnerships that allow discriminating music lovers to get physically involved – live, in person, productto-ears – in the shopping process.
The digital revolution has unquestionably changed how products are sold. And yet most products are best distinguished by their sensory features – touch, smell, sound, and aesthetics – which is hard to communicate through a glass screen.
For landscape architects, the ASLA EXPO offers a similar opportunity. Here is what exhibitors at the 2016 EXPO in New Orleans told us:
Suppliers to the landscape architecture industry routinely face this dilemma. What do new cultivars smell like? What does stained concrete looks like in the light of day? What do composite seating materials feel like? And
“Shows like this let people see the product, touch, and feel it. We learn from customers’ ideas and adapt the product designs as a result.” – Mark Davidson, Dabmar Lighting
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“Our products, outdoor musical instruments, do not perform in print. People need to touch and hear it. When they do they discover, smile, and enjoy it.” – Donna Codd, Freenotes Harmony Park “Architectural concrete is a visual medium. Designers are motivated by what they see: texture, color, and $0/53"45Fm t ". *--"3A $0ʵ&-% Jeff Gibson, landscape business manager at Ball Horticultural Company, adds that along with the sensory experience, the ASLA EXPO facilitates in-person dialog. “The ASLA EXPO provides landscape architects with a unique opportunity to learn about new plant varieties with one-on-one discussions directly with the plant breeders, growers, and nurserymen,” he says. “It’s an essential part of the experience.”
There is a fair amount of research to indicate live, sensory experience leads to sales. According to an article in the Harvard Business Review (“Please
ASLA LA2017
Annual Meeting and EXPO October 20-23 Los Angeles
Common Ground
#ASLA2017 EXPO Floor PPN Tours Almost 140 landscape architects engaged in last year’s intensive, 10-minute presentations by ASLA EXPO exhibitors in the Professional Practice Networks (PPNs) tours. It was a first time the tours were provided at the Annual Meeting, with attendance numbers as follows:
Design-Build Residential 29 Transportation 19
EPNAC PHOTOGRAPHY ©2016
Touch the Merchandise,” part of 2011 series “The Future of Retail”), “Touch can create symbolic connections between people and products, and between buyers and sellers. Physically holding products can create a sense of psychological ownership, driving must-have purchase decisions.” The 2017 EXPO will again feature the Professional Practice Network (PPN) tours. These are coordinated visits to categories of exhibitors (SEE SIDEBAR) that allow landscape architects to earn credits in the Landscape Architecture Continuing Education System (LA CES) while learning about products. Tours are organized around as many as 11 categories, within which three or four exhibitors present a ten-minute educational tutorial on the
design and technical challenges that can be addressed by that category of products. PPN organizers are currently fielding proposals from exhibitors to present at the 2017 EXPO in Los Angeles. Other categories being added are Sustainable Design, Healthcare + Therapeutic Design, Historic Preservation, and Parks + Recreation. For more information on becoming an exhibitor in an EXPO 2017 PPN tour, contact Learn@ASLA.org.
Digital Technology 18 Children’s Outdoor Environments 19 Water Conservation 8 Ecology + Restoration 26 Planting Design 21
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BACKSTORY
THE EBB OF FLOES T
he Brooklyn-based artist Zaria Forman draws in fine detail to capture expansive corners of the Earth. Her large-scale, hyperrealistic pastel works feature, most recently, Antarctic landscapes affected by climate change. “I’m trying to offer people a time and a place to connect with these very far-flung places,” Forman says. “If they can fall in love with [these places] in a similar way that I have, then that will lead them to want to protect and preserve them.” Forman has been completing a drawing series and video installation for an upcoming solo exhibition, Antarctica, inspired by her first trip to the polar continent as an artist in residence aboard the National Geographic Explorer in winter 2015. Whale Bay, Antarctica no. 4 captures the fragility of a remote harbor off the Antarctic Peninsula that is filled with melting icebergs that calved, drifted, and ran aground on the shallow seafloor. Forman says that as the icebergs melt, “it’s like the
192 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE AUG 2017
ARTIST ZARIA FORMAN’S LARGE-SCALE PASTELS DESCRIBE A VANISHING ANTARCTIC. BY LAUREN MANDEL, ASLA
wind and the water are just hands, just making these most incredible shapes that you can’t even conceive of until you’re there.” Bays that enclose icebergs like these are called iceberg graveyards, a term that “captures the eerie solemnity of the site,” Forman says, “but to me serves as a metaphor for the bigger picture.” According to NASA’s Global Ice Viewer application, the ice that covers 10 percent of the Earth’s surface is rapidly melting, with roughly 118 billion metric tons lost annually in Antarctica alone.
objects in pencil. “I jump in pretty quickly with color,” Forman explains, “layering pigments onto the paper, using my fingers and palms to smudge everything.” She then breaks the pastel into tiny shards to overlay fine detail. Forman completes one area of the drawing before moving to the next, always from left to right and top to bottom. “It’s just the way my brain works,” she explains, adding the practicalities of avoiding smudges and gravity-laden pastel dust atop lighter-colored pigment. “I think I enjoy that simplicity because I get so lost in the tiny details that I think otherwise Forman took thousands of photos during the I’d never know when to stop.” expedition, “collecting information and documenting as much as I can on camera so that Antarctica will be at Winston Wächter Fine Art in I can then construct and compose the draw- Seattle from September 7 to November 4, 2017. See ing compositions when I get home,” she says. zariaforman.com for more information. For Whale Bay, Forman stitched several photos LAUREN MANDEL, ASLA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND REtogether, combining features within adjacent SEARCHER AT ANDROPOGON AND THE AUTHOR OF EAT UP: photographs. Once the project was on paper, THE INSIDE SCOOP ON ROOFTOP AGRICULTURE (NEW SOCIETY she delicately sketched the composition’s main PUBLISHERS, 2013).
COURTESY ZARIA FORMAN
THE BACK
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