BY JANE MARGOLIES

Fifteen years in the making, a new public space reunites Chicago with the river that runs through it.

FROM THE MARCH 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

“Isn’t it hot?” Gina Ford, ASLA, asked excitedly, waving a well-jacketed arm around her on a cold morning this past fall as she, the architect Carol Ross Barney, and Terry Ryan, FASLA, met up at the Chicago Riverwalk to show me around.

Not exactly the word I would have chosen, given the temperature, but, yes, the new promenade they designed along the Chicago River, in the downtown of Illinois’s largest city, most definitely is.

Extending eight blocks along the river’s southern bank at a level below the streetscape, the Riverwalk is part of a 1.25-mile path from Lake Michigan inland that some are calling the city’s “second shoreline” (the lake, which borders Chicago to the east, being the “first,” of course). Each block-long space is bookended by the historic bridge houses that operate the movable spans that cross the waterway. And each has its own distinct riverside character, ranging from the Marina, a hub of food and drink purveyors, to the Jetty, an ecology-themed section that includes floating gardens and fishing piers. A continuous pathway stitches the segments together, weaving around the bridge houses before continuing on. And all of it adds up to a grand new setting for strolling, jogging, or simply sitting and looking up at the phenomenal buildings—a virtual museum of classic 20th-century architecture—that rise up along the river.

It only took a century.

The idea of building pedestrian paths along the Chicago River was first put forth by the architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham in his Plan of Chicago, published in 1909, coauthored with Edward Bennett, and better known as the Burnham Plan. But even by the time Burnham was formulating his framework for the future growth and beautification of the city, the river was a far cry from its origins as a meandering, marshy prairie waterway.

An accessible walkway at the River Theater blends seamlessly with the site. Photo by Kate Joyce Studios.

Widened, deepened, straightened, canalized—essentially totally re-engineered—the river today is actually a system of rivers and man-made channels with a combined length of 156 miles. Linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Valley waterways, it offers a route for ships to reach the Gulf of Mexico, and, along with the railroads, is the very reason this Midwest town rose to become the third most populous city in the United States.

But by the late 1800s, the water was fouled with sewage and industrial waste, and the south fork of the river, the dumping grounds for the Union Stock Yards, was known as Bubbly Creek. Because the river flowed into Lake Michigan, the source of Chicago’s drinking water, its condition threatened the city’s water supply. In the early 20th century, engineers reversed the direction of the river, constructing a series of locks that cause water to be drawn from, not emptied into, the lake. Still, the sluggish waterway remained so rank and its banks so trash strewn that few could envision the riverfront as a place they might want to linger by.

Things began to change after the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act, which spurred improvement in rivers here and across the country. In 1979 the nonprofit Friends of the Chicago River was founded and began calling attention to the waterway as a degraded natural resource that needed to be nursed back to health. The group began sponsoring cleanups and working to re-create habitat that had been decimated over decades of abuse. One notable 2005 effort was a “fish hotel,” designed by Living Waters Consultants and WRD, a floating dock anchored to the river wall consisting of man-made islands and submerged “cribs” for fish suspended underneath.

Two Chicago mayoral administrations got behind the Riverwalk and found creative ways to get the job done. In the 1990s, former mayor Richard M. Daley, Honorary ASLA, used a road project to kick-start the promenade—during the reconstruction of Wacker Drive, the historic double-decker thoroughfare faced with a Beaux-Arts arcade that parallels the main branch of the river, the roadway was shifted slightly, providing more buildable land along the river. He also secured permission from Congress to add landfill to the navigable waterway to create a build-out of 25 feet along most of the eight blocks. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in turn, obtained a $100 million Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan to complete the project, to be paid back by fees from vendors operating in the new park.

The bridges that span the Chicago River divide the Riverwalk into distinct “rooms.” Photo by Iwan Baan.

The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), which coordinated design and construction through both administrations, took special pride in building this new civic amenity, according to Oswaldo Chaves, the current project manager, who joined the designers and me on our morning tour. “Usually we’re repairing bridges,” he said.

As we walked the Riverwalk, workmen swarmed, tinkering with the still-spotty railing lighting and putting the finishing touches on the ramp on the last section of the promenade. Called the Riverbank, it overlooks the confluence of the river. Mayor Emanuel had officially declared the entire Riverwalk open at a ribbon-cutting event days before, but a long punch list remained, and the restaurant or other destination attraction expected to occupy the Riverbank section had yet to be determined, let alone designed and built. A heavy downpour the night before had pounded fledgling plants and left the paving wet. But the park has been designed to withstand flooding (which, at any rate, is less of a problem than one might expect since the river’s water level is managed through the lock system). And, besides, nothing could dampen the spirits of the designers as they surveyed their handiwork.

Barney and her Chicago firm, Ross Barney Architects, had designed the first section of the Riverwalk in collaboration with Terry Ryan of Jacobs/Ryan Associates, another local outfit. Completed in 2009, this first portion extended two blocks—one with a plaza devoted to a Vietnam veterans memorial. It was an instant hit. Veterans made pilgrimages to the site—some even held weddings there—and at lunchtime downtown office workers flocked to its grassy terraces. It drew people down to the river, providing an escape from the traffic and bustle—and a tantalizing taste of what a continuous walkway along the water could offer in this dense urban area.

In 2010, when the city issued an RFP for the remainder of the Riverwalk—six more blocks, to the point where the river’s main stem meets its southern and northern branches—Barney sought out help. She contacted Sasaki, with which she’d worked on previous projects, and was introduced to Ford, a partner with expertise in waterfront sites. Ford’s Watertown, Massachusetts, firm joined the design team, taking the lead on the rest of the Riverwalk.

As we strolled along, Barney said the fact that the project proceeded in stages over a decade and a half had benefits. For one thing, city officials became increasingly comfortable with public access to the water. The memorial plaza is elevated several feet off the water and has a railing along its edge. There is no place for human-powered boats to dock—the city was adamantly opposed to this in the early stages of the Riverwalk’s development. Subsequent sections, however, step right down to the river, with boat hookups and railings only where absolutely necessary. “We didn’t want to put the river in a cage,” says Michelle Woods, who was the CDOT project manager before being transferred to the Department of Fleet and Facility Management, where she will oversee the Riverwalk once CDOT finishes construction and turns it over to its sister agency.

A reflective canopy over the promenade protects pedestrians from anything that might fall through the bridge grating above. Photo by Kate Joyce Studios.

The design of the under-bridge connections along the riverside path also evolved. The first two, completed in 2009, directly abut the limestone-faced bridge houses, but later connections are a couple feet out in the river so that water flows on both sides of the walkway. It’s much more fun to step out onto these—you’re essentially walking on water—but there are practical benefits, too: Graffiti artists can’t easily get at the bridge house walls from the walkway. And if the walls need to be repaired, temporary platforms can be installed in the water, according to Chaves. Canopies designed by Barney’s firm provide a protective covering for pedestrians as they pass under the bridges, many of which have open grating. Angular in form and made of mirror-polished stainless steel, the canopies are as cleanly modern as the bridges are traditional, their surfaces so shiny they reflect the rippling river surface, reinforcing the water theme.

The character of the remaining six “rooms” between the bridge houses had yet to be determined when Sasaki joined the team. The designers began kicking around the idea of having each section represent a different riverside “typology,” as Ford put it. The concept stuck.

The Riverwalk plan. Image courtesy of Sasaki and Ross Barney Architects.

Thus, the Cove, one of three sections finished in 2015, has low, rounded-edge precast concrete benches meant to suggest flat river stones, according to Ford, and there are tie-ups for kayaks. Ryan, the plants specialist in the group, filled beds near the river with beachgrasses and tucked woodland plants on the higher level of the plaza—a plant combination “found on beaches all over Illinois,” she says. Another segment, which the designers named the River Theater, is a block-wide amphitheater-like staircase leading down to the water with an accessibility ramp making a dramatic diagonal slit that turns the whole thing into a large-scale sculpture. Meanwhile, at the just-opened Water Plaza, an elevated zero-depth fountain that will function as a splash pad for kids in warm weather has arching jets, bubblers, in-grade color-changing lights, and a color-changing trough uplight. At the front of the fountain, a sheer curtain of water courses down—it’s impossible to resist the urge to reach out and run a finger through it.

Attached to the piers are floating wetlands framed in stainless steel. Photo by Christian Phillips Photography.

The Jetty is experiential in a different way; it was conceived as an outdoor classroom where teachers can bring students to learn about the river, which is far cleaner than it once was due to a decrease in combined sewer overflows and the disinfection of sewage effluent. The stainless steel-framed floating gardens here were inspired by the Friends of the Chicago River’s fish hotel, according to Ford. Ryan specified rows of native iris, sedge, and other water-tolerant plants. Right now the floating beds look a little like mini farm fields bobbing on the water. Eventually, Ryan says, the plants will grow together in a lush tangle. Hidden below the floating beds—and below the piers themselves, which jut out at irregular angles—are underwater amenities for the fish that are making a comeback now that the river is cleaner (increasing from eight species of fish in the late 1970s to 70 species today, according to the Friends of the Chicago River). These amenities include pole hulas (essentially shredded rope) and custom lunkers (caisson-mounted shelves and pockets).

Reading up on the Riverwalk before heading out to Chicago, I had wondered about all the differently themed segments: Would they come off as hokey or disjointed? I needn’t have worried. The designers have conjured abstract interpretations—not kitschy, literal re-creations—of riverside conditions. This is no theme park. Continuity is provided by a sophisticated materials palette that is handled in sensitive ways. Carnelian granite, for example, is used for the paving that abuts the granite-based limestone Beaux-Arts arcade, while more rugged precast concrete suggestive of wooden boardwalk planks is deployed where each section steps down to the river—a contrast that Ford describes as “refined” versus “naked.” (Meanwhile, she calls the Jetty, which is intended to evoke a natural riverfront, “wicked naked.”) And then there’s the unifying effect of the river itself, which is a murky greenish-brown (except on Saint Patrick’s Day, when it’s dyed bright green, and, recently, in celebration of the Chicago Cubs’ triumph in the World Series, “Cubby” blue).

The Riverbank end of the Riverwalk is the least developed, and in some ways the most parklike, section of the promenade. The Riverwalk widens here, much of it devoted to lawn, though Ryan says more plants are coming in the spring. The path wraps around the green space to connect with a ramp leading back up to street level. The city plans to issue an RFP seeking a vendor to build and operate a business on the site. In the short term, the city is considering permitting a temporary use, such as food trucks or a farmers’ market.

Features elsewhere on the Riverwalk, however, are permanently in place—and quickly acquiring fans. Consider the long, tall benches at the Marina, which is packed on warm evenings when the food and drink vendors, whose operations are tucked into the Beaux-Arts arcade, are open. Made of reclaimed teak, the benches serve to stitch together the upper and lower levels of the plaza. Jutting out at the rear are counters on which those imbibing can rest their glasses. The bench back is tilted at an angle so one can comfortably lean back to appreciate, say, Bertrand Goldberg’s “corncobs” (the cylindrical towers of his landmarked 1960s Marina City complex) on the opposite bank, or watch yellow water taxis and double-decker tour boats ply the water. Companion seating, in the form of niches cut into the bench, permit anyone in a wheelchair to pull right up alongside—one of a number of gestures that take the Riverwalk from being merely compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act rules to being actively welcoming for wheelchair users.

Later in the day, after saying good-bye to Barney, Ford, Ryan, and Chaves, I stood on the northern side of the river and looked back at the new public space they helped bring into being. Cars zipped along Wacker Drive, while down below on the Riverwalk pedestrians and dog walkers moved at their own pace.

A couple of runners powered up the ramp at the River Theater. Then I watched a woman in a wheelchair use the ramp as intended. She paused at the top and then rolled down, her black lab trotting behind her. By the time I caught up with her, she’d cruised along the river, careened around, and tooled up the ramp to the splash pad at the Water Plaza. While others snapped selfies in front of the fountain sprays, Karen Sternfield came to a stop, a smile on her face.

A recent transplant from Boston, Sternfield, who has multiple sclerosis, was in the park for the first time. She told me she’d spotted the Riverwalk from a restaurant on the opposite bank. “I saw all the steps and said to my husband, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to get in there. There’s no way I can do it.’” On this day she found out that, thanks to the Riverwalk’s thoughtful design, she can.

Jane Margolies, a New York journalist who is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, last wrote for LAM about Underpass Park in Toronto.

Project Credits

Client The City of Chicago, the Chicago Department of Transportation, Department of Fleet and Facility Management. Prime Consultant Sasaki, Watertown, Massachusetts. Lead Design Architect Ross Barney Architects, Chicago. Landscape Architect Jacobs/Ryan Associates, Chicago. Structural Engineers Alfred Benesch & Company, Chicago. Civil Engineering Infrastructure Engineering, Inc., Chicago. Structural Engineering Rubinos & Mesia Engineers, Inc., Chicago. MEP Delta Engineering Group, Chicago. Geotechnical Engineering Geo Services Inc., Arlington Heights, Illinois. Lighting Design Schuler Shook, Chicago. Water Feature Consultant Fluidity Design Consultants, Los Angeles. Specifications ArchiTech Consulting, Inc., Mount Prospect, Illinois.

April is, of course, World Landscape Architecture Month. This year, to mark the occasion, LAM is issuing a special supplement for young readers, called YOUR LAND. It offers a basic introduction to landscape and landscape architecture, a look at the methods and goals of the profession, a breakout of several intriguing types of projects, a career primer, and, not least, a glossary of landscape architecture terms! Our goal is plain: to encourage the making of more future landscape architects. For many people, landscape architecture is a second career choice after they have made their first, and one they like better—it’s mainly a matter of exposure to the wide range of things landscape architects do in their work. We figure sooner is better, so this supplement is free and available digitally for downloading. For limited quantities of bulk print copies for classrooms or other groups, e-mail discover@asla.org (shipping charges apply).

Our regular April issue is every bit as exciting, covering a range of bold work that is reshaping landscape architecture today. In the cover feature, Michael Dumiak reports on an audacious plan by H+N+S Landscape Architects in the Netherlands, led by Dirk Sijmons, to power the countries around the North Sea with wind energy by the year 2050. It’s a multinational endeavor that transcends bureaucracies as well as boundaries in hopes of making these countries fulfill the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which took effect last year, of holding the average global temperature to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels by reducing emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases.

Back in North America, Jack Dangermond and his company, Esri, have done as much or more than anyone since the onset of the digital age to help decode the Earth’s landscape with the computational tools known as geographic information systems, or GIS. At this stage of his career, as Jonathan Lerner profiles, Dangermond is putting that might behind his Green Infrastructure Initiative, the goal of which is “to identify and secure the critical remaining large cores of relatively unspoiled landscape” on a national scale. It is a galactic attempt to counter the routine fragmentation of ecosystems and habitats, in hopes of putting them back together in part, if not in whole.

Our other features cover a marvelous renovation of piers in San Francisco by GLS Landscape | Architecture to create a new Exploratorium, the museum that welds art to science like no other, which, as Lydia Lee reports, has relocated from its longtime home to one that could scarcely be more fitting; and the (some would say improbable) collaboration between the landscape architects Stephen Stimson, FASLA, and Julie Bargmann, ASLA, to design the new Phil Hardberger Park in San Antonio. Jennifer Reut considers the dimensions of their “cultivated wild” approach on what little is left of the Texas prairie.

In the Back section, Timothy Schuler follows the quest by Lisa Orr, ASLA, to restore lost place names to the digitized National Map of the United States Geological Survey. And in Books, Elissa Rosenberg reviews Toward an Urban Ecology, by the landscape architect Kate Orff, ASLA, and her New York-based firm, SCAPE, a “manufestograph” that describes the firm’s work but also details its innovative approach to working at the manifold ecological levels of cities.

There’s much more to take in during this World Landscape Architecture Month. You can read the full table of contents for April 2017, or pick up a free digital issue of the April LAM here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating April articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Your Land,” Scott Shigley; “Power Play 2050,” Michael Dumiak; “The Toolmaker,” Spencer Lowell/Trunk Archive; “San Antonio Takes the Shot,” Charles Mayer Photography; “Wet Bars,” Patrik Argast; “From Phyto to Myco,” Nathan Kensinger; “Hard Choices,” © Albert Vecerka/Esto; “New Urbanism, New HUD,” Paul Goyette [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], via Flickr.

BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA

Promising new alternatives to tropical hardwoods come with caveats.

FROM THE APRIL 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

The past decade has brought an explosion in the use of tropical hardwood decking and furnishings in public, institutional, and commercial landscapes. Whereas wood decking was once largely the purview of residential landscapes, now it can be found in urban settings from the High Line to West 8’s sculptural Wavedecks. Tropical hardwoods are so durable, hard, and decay-resistant that they appear to be the ideal material, yet the impacts of using even hardwoods certified by the Forest Stewardship Council can be substantial and threaten the most critical ecosystems of our planet.

Wood is a renewable construction material if you compare the amount of time a wood member is in use to the amount of time it takes to grow a tree to yield a comparable piece. But that is not always the case. For example, it takes 90 years to grow a Handroanthus heptaphyllus tree to yield ipe lumber for deck boards, but the deck boards will likely not be in use for 90 years even if they are reclaimed, refinished, and reused.

As concern for the health of tropical forests is increasingly recognized in sustainable design thinking, alternatives to tropical hardwoods for decking and site furnishings are making their way into the market. The most promising alternatives are thermally modified lumber, polymerized lumber, acetylated lumber, and black locust lumber.

The environmental impacts of logging for tropical hardwoods are well documented (see, among other reports, “A Trail of Stumps” by Jane Hutton, LAM, May 2013, which explained how the legal market for such woods can lend cover to gray- or black-market products). A 2014 Greenpeace study of logging in the Amazon estimated that in Pará State, one of Brazil’s main logging regions, 78 percent of hardwood lumber is harvested illegally. Documents are forged or obtained illegally, trees are cut and dragged from pristine old-growth forests in the dead of night, and logs find their way onto the wrong trucks. The result is that the Amazon rain forest is disappearing at an alarming rate of one acre per second, resulting in an 18 percent loss in the past 30 years.

But FSC-certified tropical hardwoods are OK, right?

Although the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) sets a rigorous, well-respected standard, some experts believe it is possible to cheat the system, particularly in the Amazon and other tropical forests where fraud and illegal harvesting are rampant. The 2014 Greenpeace study states: “Several situations could occur that might result in illegal timber being traded under the FSC label, such as a company further up the supply chain violating laws in the country of origin or the timber’s true origin being hidden from the buyer by means of misappropriated documents.” Additionally, critics cite FSC’s willingness to certify old-growth tropical hardwood forests around the world, including those in the Amazon.

Even selective harvesting of tropical forests (promoted by FSC as a sustainable logging method) for species such as ipe or cumaru can result in the forest’s ecological decline. Research has shown that within years of selective harvesting of high-value species, the forest is likely to be clear-cut and turned to agriculture, contributing to forest fragmentation.

Plantation-grown tropical hardwoods are an alternative to old-growth forest tropical hardwoods, particularly if the plantations are FSC-certified—but they are not a comparable alternative. Tropical hardwood lumber from plantations is not as dense, decay-resistant, or durable as the forest trees that have been growing for well over 100 years. And the most valued tropical hardwoods are very slow-growing, which means their growth on plantations is a truly multigenerational investment.

The European Union and some U.S. municipalities are actively encouraging alternatives to tropical hardwoods for site and architectural uses. European Union legislation requires all importers of tropical hardwood to certify that the wood comes from sustainable sources. And going a step further, the government of Norway has banned the use of tropical hardwoods in all public projects, stating: “There is no international certification that can guarantee in a reliable manner that imported wood is legally or sustainably logged.” New York City, San Francisco, and many smaller municipalities in California have banned tropical hardwoods on projects that receive public funding. This has spurred the development of new wood treatments.

Three new wood modification technologies have come to the U.S. market from Europe in recent years. These technologies—thermal modification, acetylation, and polymerization—use physical, biological, or chemical processes to produce property improvements in softwoods and U.S. hardwoods, resulting in lumber that performs competitively with tropical hardwoods. Manufacturers of modified woods seek to improve durability through resistance to decay and termites, and to improve properties of lumber such as dimensional stability and hardness.

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates used Thermory, a thermally modified lumber, for a deck at Wellesley College. They found radial cuts easier with Thermory than with hard, dense tropical hardwoods. Photo by John Olmsted, Wellesley College.

Thermally modified wood

Thermal modification, or TM, heats wood to temperatures above 400 degrees Fahrenheit, permanently modifying the carbohydrates (hemicelluloses) and rendering the wood inedible to decay organisms and insects. By limiting oxygen and using methods such as steam or hot water, the wood doesn’t burn. During the process, the wood is dried to lower its moisture content and to reduce expansion and contraction owing to moisture changes over the life of the lumber. The result is a lumber resistant to decay and insects that is dimensionally stable and darker in color. There is some loss of strength as well, but testing shows that it is not significant.

No chemicals are introduced in the nontoxic thermal modification process, so the lumber is easily recyclable. Energy to heat the wood and transport it to and from Europe is the main environmental impact; some companies take steps to capture waste heat and use renewable fuel sources.

Both hardwoods and softwoods can be thermally modified, with varying results. Thermory, one of the main suppliers of TM decking, cladding, and lumber in the United States, uses ash, spruce, and southern yellow pine. Some of the ash and pine are sourced from the United States, and although FSC-certified woods are not standard, they are available by special order.

Thermory’s TM ash has a European durability class rating of 1, “very resistant” to decay; its TM southern yellow pine is rated 2, or “resistant.” Mark Challinor, a principal at Thermory, explains that a durability rating of 1 means the wood can be used in ground contact, but it is not guaranteed for that use. In a deck application, the understructure is typically built with conventional pressure-treated lumber, and the decking is Thermory lumber.

JJW Architects used Thermory ash decking at the South Harbour School in Copenhagen, Denmark. The project is the 2016 World Architecture News Education Award winner. Image courtesy of Thermory and JJW Architects.

Challinor explains that owing to its decay resistance, durability, and stability, Thermory is priced at a premium, like ipe, but cost savings come in the ease of constructability. Challinor offers that the product is easier to work than ipe and requires no special tools or predrilling, which cuts installation time and waste. Ipe is very hard and sometimes irregular, with board-end splits and cracks, resulting in time-consuming connections and layout of wood members.

Emily Mueller de Celis, an associate principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), used TM lumber for a deck and custom benches at Wellesley College. She concurs with Challinor’s statement about TM lumber’s ease of constructability. “It allows complicated radial cuts that are difficult to achieve with ipe and black locust lumber.” She adds: “Because it is not as dense as ipe, it does not hold heat, making sitting on the bench or walking barefoot on the deck more appealing in the heat of summer.”

Acetylated wood

The acetylation process uses acetic anhydride and heat to modify wood’s composition, greatly reducing the ability of the wood to absorb water and rendering the wood more dimensionally stable and durable. Wood’s swelling and shrinking are reduced by 75 percent, and its durability is substantially increased. One manufacturer, Accoya, estimates a 50-year use life for its acetylated radiata pine in aboveground applications and a 25-year life given ground contact. As with TM wood, microorganisms and fungi are no longer able to recognize the wood as a food source. Stake tests show that the wood performs better in-ground than lumber treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA), a standard treatment since the 1930s that was voluntarily phased out beginning in 2003.

The acetylation process, similar to that of TM, alters the full cross section of the wood, so cuts and machine holes do not need to be treated with a preservative. Because there is minimal shrinking and swelling of the wood, paints and finishes are expected to last longer.

Accoya, the main acetylated wood supplier to the United States, is given the second-highest rating, gold, by the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, a sustainability certification organization. The institute recognizes it as a nontoxic, biodegradable product that involves recycling of processing waste; an energy-efficient manufacturing process; and responsible corporate policies. However, transport energy is one of the major environmental impacts of Accoya’s most durable product, radiata pine, as it is grown in New Zealand, shipped to the Netherlands for treatment, and then shipped to the country where it will be used.

Polymerized wood/kebonization

Kebonized lumber is softwood impregnated with furfural alcohol (a monomer and agricultural by-product) then heated to penetrate and surround the cell walls of the wood. Kebony, a Norwegian company, is the main manufacturer employing this polymerization process. It ships southern yellow pine and maple from the United States, radiata pine from New Zealand, and Scots pine from Scandinavia to a treatment plant in Norway. The company’s deck boards, cladding, and dimensional lumber are distributed around the world.

Kebonized lumber shares its durability (European durability class 1—“very resistant” to decay), dimensional stability, and color traits with thermally modified and acetylated lumber. But because of the polymerization, it is heavier and harder, comparable to black locust in hardness. Given the hardness and increased brittleness, the manufacturer recommends predrilling screw holes and using self-sealing stainless steel screws. The kebonization process adds an additional 50 percent to the dry weight of southern yellow pine.

Thomas Balsley Associates (now a part of SWA Group) specified Kebony for decking and custom seating at Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in Long Island City. Owing to New York City’s ban on the use of tropical hardwoods in city-funded projects, Balsley’s firm searched for alternatives among wood lumbers, as the designers did not want to use plastic lumber. They proposed Kebony to the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and the department decided to approve its use as a test case for other city parks. Kebony was installed on the project four years ago, and it has been so successful that designers are using it on the final phase of the project.

MVVA celebrated the irregular form of black locust trees at this play structure for a private residence in New York State. The trees, from a nearby site, were debarked, sanded, and sealed with hemp oil. Image courtesy of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

Black locust

Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), native to the Appalachians and the Ozarks, is a fast-growing pioneer species that is considered invasive in some parts of the United States. Black locust trees grow large enough to yield high-quality, dense, decay-resistant heartwood lumber in 25 to 40 years—just 20 to 40 percent of the time needed to grow comparably decay-resistant tropical hardwoods. Its Janka hardness rating, a measure of how well the wood can withstand dents and dings, is 1,700 pounds-force (lbf), tougher than white oak at 1,360 lbf or red maple at 950. The Janka hardness number also can predict challenges in nailing, screwing, sanding, or sawing, and although black locust is hard compared to U.S. softwoods, it is only half that of ipe and cumaru—notoriously challenging woods to build with.

Visually, black locust is known for its knots, mineral streaks, surface checks, and bark insertions. Many proponents of black locust, like Thomas Amoroso, ASLA, of Andropogon Associates, appreciate the natural character of the wood. Clients must be prepared for the appearance—and changing appearance—of the wood. The lumber grain can open up and look like it’s splitting, then close up again within one season. It is quite durable, but clients can be alarmed at what looks to them like failure. Premium grade has few imperfections; No. 1 grade is less expensive but has more imperfections.

In the United States, black locust is not grown on plantations. It is harvested from open areas where it sprouts up at the edge of farm fields and vacant lots, which creates the largest challenge of using black locust lumber—procurement issues. The lead time to source and air-dry good-quality wood to the ideal 11 percent moisture content can be substantial. For benches at Shoemaker Green on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Amoroso sourced the lumber from a local woodworker in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Yet at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., a much larger Andropogon project, the contractor resisted using black locust because large quantities were required, and the project was on a tight construction schedule. The team settled on FSC-certified ipe for the decking. Emily Mueller de Celis cites black locust procurement issues as a reason MVVA shifted its specifications at Wellesley College to thermally modified lumber. She found it far easier to procure, with no lead time at all for the contractor.

Until modified lumber products and black locust lumber came on the market, there were really no comparable alternatives to tropical hardwood lumber. Modified lumber and black locust lumber offer durability, decay resistance, and dimensional stability that sometimes outperform the hardest tropical hardwoods. As most installations of the modified lumber products have been in use for less than a decade, time will tell if they can perform as expected for 25 to 50 years, but their future looks bright.

Meg Calkins, FASLA, is a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Ball State University. She is the author of Materials for Sustainable Sites and the editor of The Sustainable Sites Handbook.

BY ZACH MORTICE

A hydrogel-enabled seed bomb. Credit: U.S. provisional patent application No. 62/465,341. Nahin Shah | Martina Decker, Material Dynamics Lab.

The tools for tactical urbanism seem more likely to be developed in community center meeting halls and anonymous Internet forums rather than university laboratories. But at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), an architecture professor is working on ways to give impromptu urban vegetation efforts staying power with hydrogel seed bombs.

Martina Decker, who directs NJIT’s Idea Factory and Material Dynamics Lab, is combining seed bombs—balls of organic matter that protect and help seeds packed within them grow—with hydrogel granulates, polymers that are extremely hydrophilic, sucking in moisture and swelling to up to 400 times their own weight in water. By nestling this water-attracting material amid seeds, young plants have access to moisture that stays in the soil and won’t evaporate.

Martina Decker. Image courtesy of Jordan Alport.

Decker trained as an architect, but found her way to material science research after realizing how unsustainable many building and planting materials are. By looking at materials at the “molecular level,” she says, “rather than trying to find the right material for an application, we can design materials for the application.”

The hydrogel seed bombs aren’t a fire-and-forget miracle. “It’s really more of a starter medium,” she says. Hydrogel is perfect for inattentive houseplant owners, but successful plants that rely on it still need some added moisture.

Each of Decker’s hydrogel seed bombs places compost, hydrogel granulates, fertilizer, and seeds (she’s been experimenting with wheatgrass, onions, and radishes) inside a water-permeable clay shell. When the bombs are launched and they reach the earth and absorb water, the hydrogel begins swelling with it, pushing seeds out into a wider radius. “You increase the radius by eight inches,” says Decker, who pioneered this research with help from NJIT industrial design student Nahin Shah, the lead designer on the project. It’s a good planting method for large areas that don’t need to be planted with any precision. Moisture is released slowly over time, and is less able to evaporate, especially if the gel makes its way underground. This hydrogel can absorb and release water over many cycles, lasting for several years. Tests with wheatgrass planted with hydrogel resulted in plants that grew faster, larger, and stronger than those with only sparse watering in standard soil.

Hydrogel at various stages of absorption. Credit: Martina Decker, Material Dynamics Lab.

Decker is beginning to look at combining hydrogel seed bombs with drone technology, investigating ways algorithms can program drones to best distribute seeds. She’s also researching the ways hydrogel could work with green wall systems. “One of the biggest issues that we have with green walls is that they’re fighting gravity more than a green roof,” says Decker. “The moisture immediately drains, and they dry out.” By turning liquid into a quasi solid and helping it resist evaporation, water that makes its way into green walls has a better chance at sticking in its shallow soil.

A deployed hydrogel seed bomb. Credit: U.S. provisional patent application No. 62/465,341. Nahin Shah | Martina Decker, Material Dynamics Lab.

The seed “recipe” in each seed bomb is also something Decker wants to refine. There are already off-the-shelf seed mixes at garden centers and home improvement stores formulated to attract bees or specific kinds of butterflies. (And you can buy hydrogel itself at the same places.) Why not put hydrogel seed bombs next to them that attract particular bird pollinators, or that draw bees to feed the burgeoning urban beekeeper renaissance?

Decker says her hydrogel seed bombs are “a good tool to reclaim urban surfaces that have been barren.” These seed bombs are portable, covert, and require only a decent throwing arm to use; they’re ideal for grassroots landscape activism. Decker calls it “stealth gardening.”

Decker found that wheatgrass seedlings planted with hydrogel grew faster, larger, and stronger. Credit: Martina Decker, Material Dynamics Lab.

But hydrogel seed bombs aren’t just useful for gardening vigilantes. In addition to park agencies looking for planting methods that require less water, there is the simple ease and fun of hurling a clay shell to the earth so that it disintegrates and something grows in its place. It’s an inviting tool to get all people—young and old—to take action and ownership of the landscapes in their communities. It’s easy to imagine a class of giddy second graders flinging hydrogel seed bombs in an abandoned empty lot near their school. They will be learning about how the seeds will grow, and how, with a few flowers in a new prairie grass meadow, their neighborhood might, too.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. Listen to his Chicago architecture and design podcast A Lot You Got to Holler, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

BY ZACH MORTICE

Rosetta S. Elkin Live Matter exhibition and publication, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, with support from Harvard Arnold Arboretum, 2015. Image courtesy of Rosetta Elkin.

On April 20, the American Academy in Rome announced its class of 2017–2018 Rome Prize recipients, which includes the landscape architects Rosetta Elkin and Alison Hirsch with Aroussiak Gabrielian.

Chosen by a jury chaired by the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis (and featuring the landscape architects Lisa Switkin of James Corner Field Operations and David Fletcher), Elkin, Hirsch, and Gabrielian will join a multidisciplinary cast of architects, historic preservationists, historians, writers, artists, and composers to pursue independent research at the Academy’s Villa Aurelia in Rome.

Rosetta Elkin. Image courtesy of Rosetta Elkin.

Elkin, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will use her Rome Prize fellowship to investigate plants that “[identify] a region culturally, but also become a kind of naturalized indicator of changing and shifting conditions in the living environment,” she says. Her research proposal, called Shorelines: The Case of the Italian Stone Pine, examines how this tree—an iconic and emblematic piece of Roman culture—has evolved to meet changing ecosystems and biome ranges over time. The source of the Italian staple of pine nuts, stone pines (Pinus pinea) line the Via Appia, Rome’s ancient and expansive road, and are an indispensable part of many Italian Renaissance gardens. The oldest stone pine in Rome is on the Academy’s grounds.

Originally an upland species, the stone pine has become adapted to shoreline ecosystems. It’s been actively cultivated for 6,000 years, Elkin says, and for 300 years farmers along the west coast of Italy have planted these trees in lowland coastal areas to protect fields from salt spray from the ocean. As these trees move into new shoreline ecosystems, they’ll have to contend with coastlines affected by climate change, the stone pine’s next adaptive hurdle.

Elkin wants to elucidate this change over time as way to remind people that even though we often consider natural systems to be static, permanent, and immovable, they’re in fact constantly evolving. This continual change gains added salience when you’re looking at a plant that has such a seemingly unyielding presence in cultural memory. “If we look through the lens of plants at ecological change,” she says, “it can help us align our ambitions with these really complicated timescales that are hard for humans that live for 80 to 90 years—max—to attend to.”

An outdoor performance deck designed by Hirsch and Gabrielian’s design firm Foreground Design Agency. Image courtesy of Foreground Design Agency.

Hirsch, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s school of architecture, and Gabrielian, who is pursuing her doctorate at the university’s school of cinematic arts, will combine the study of landscape and film. Their project, Rome Real and Imagined: Cinematic Fictions and Future Landscapes, will focus on “how the Roman landscape has been constructed through the social imagination through the cinematic medium,” Hirsch says.

The dominant narrative that surrounds film representations of Rome, Hirsch says, first involves ornate and sprawling epics of an ancient, mythic city that’s the seat of empire and civilization, such as Ben-Hur, filmed on Hollywood backlots. And then as a direct reaction, there are the Italian neorealist films like Bicycle Thieves, which were shot on location. These examine the motivations and circumstances of ordinary people faced with prosaic moral dilemmas given weight and pathos by the honest humility of their presentation. Hirsch and Gabrielian (who are professional partners and partners in life) will look for “hybrid ground,” past this established narrative, “prodding that a little bit further by unearthing nondominant narratives [that are] social and ecological,” says Hirsch. One example, Hirsch says, might be ways to represent the long-standing Syrian community in Rome through film. Another research priority will be documenting ways that landscape features have been first established by film representations of the city, only to migrate into the minds and works of the people designing and building Rome itself; these are cases of landscape fiction becoming landscape reality.

Aroussiak Gabrielian (left) and Alison Hirsch (right). Image courtesy of Foreground Design Agency.

Hirsch envisions the final product of this research to be a series of experimental immersive film installations staged in less-documented areas of Rome, what she calls “live renderings” or “cinematic projections.”

The American Academy in Rome is among the oldest American institutions for independent study and research, and grew out of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, when a group of participants (including the architects Charles Follen McKim and Daniel Burnham) sought to create a center for the study of art and culture. They chose Rome, McKim said, because “no other city offers such a field for study or an atmosphere so replete with precedents” as Rome’s “architectural and sculptural monuments” and “galleries filled with the chefs d’oeuvre of every epoch.”

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. Listen to his Chicago architecture and design podcast A Lot You Got to Holler, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

You can almost watch it come to life on the page: In the sprawl of Bangkok, an illegal dump the size of a large city block was scraped clean, sculpted, and planted thickly with 60,000 trees, many of them quite small. It now looks thick as a rain forest, with an elegant skywalk overhead and cobras on the ground (which is why you’d use the skywalk). This remarkable reforestation project, called the Metro-Forest, by Landscape Architects of Bangkok, repatriates more than 275 species once common enough locally, as James Trulove reports, that sections of the city around it bear their names. Thick as it appears, it’s only getting started. The plan is for the trees to engulf the skywalk in their canopy.

How to describe the vindication of taking an embarrassed site and bringing back some form of its original dignity? “Strangely exciting,” is how Gwendolyn McGinn, Associate ASLA, puts it to the reporter Anne Raver in this issue. McGinn, of Studio Outside, in Dallas, is working at the Tylee Farm in Texas, not far from Houston. The farm holds what is left of southern post oak savanna that was overturned and grazed nearly to death since the mid-1800s. With Studio Outside’s founder, Tary Arterburn, FASLA, and Amy Bartell, a project manager, she is working to restore the many ecological segues the site once had for newish residential owners who want to live well—as long as their land does, too.

Also in this issue: Staff writer/editor Katarina Katsma, ASLA, writes about the interlocking of plant science and aesthetics in the designs of Sandra Clinton, FASLA, in the mid-Atlantic; Jeff Link looks at the fine points of poured-in-place rubber playground surfacing; Karl Kullmann considers the new heights of drone mapping; and Jane Gillette reviews City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning by Michael J. Lewis, a book that will leave you thinking about squares. The full table of contents for May can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating May articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Control of the Canopy,” Rungkit Charoenwat; “Side Pocket,” By oinonio [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Flickr; “Along for the Ride,” Gwendolyn McGinn, Associate ASLA; “Color and Cushion,” Site Design Group; “The Right Fit,” Huguette Row.

BY JAMES TRULOVE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY RUNGKIT CHAROENWAT

Landscape Architects of Bangkok has reforested a speck of the Thai capital. The cobras seem to approve.

FROM THE MAY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

It would not be a stretch to think of this reforestation project as a “vest-pocket” park, much in the tradition of the work of the noted landscape architect Robert Zion in New York City. After all, the name of the project, “Metro-Forest,” might suggest as much. Though it is not bounded on all sides by encroaching office towers, this five-acre landscape rests squarely in the midst of equally inhospitable and unchecked suburban sprawl dotted by illegal dump sites (of which this was once one), a tangle of expressways and surface roads, and the din of more than 800 planes landing and departing nearby every day at Suvarnabhumi Airport, which serves Bangkok. Certainly many of the design elements of a vest-pocket park are present: a water feature to mask the clamor of planes and cars, native plants that recall a bygone era, seating to contemplate the surrounding nature, hardscape to create boundaries, and a carefully designed network of berms that increase the overall planting area of this small space while blocking views of the surroundings.

The project, which won a 2016 ASLA Professional Honor Award for General Design, is an oasis, but also much more. It has also become an important laboratory for exploring ways to create a diverse forest ecology. It employs planting techniques developed by the noted Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki and implemented here by the designers at Landscape Architects of Bangkok (LAB) under the direction of one of Miyawaki’s students, Sirin Kaewlaierd. The so-called Miyawaki method is a proven, straightforward approach to reforestation: Seedlings native to the area are densely planted on a site. As the seedlings compete for nutrients and water, the strongest survive and flourish, and within three years the forest is on its way to maturity.

The project brief describes the Metro-Forest as “an ecological regeneration project” on an abandoned landfill site. It is conceived as an exhibition space to educate people about the ecology of the local forest, which consists of tropical lowland. The plantings, both native and introduced, aim to “reverse the trends of suburban sprawl,” particularly heat-island effects and flood proneness. Saplings of many of the trees planted here were prominent around Bangkok during the mid-19th century. Many districts in the area are named after them.

The stream has become fully sustainable, replenished by groundwater and rain. Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

Finding this forest in the thicket of suburban Bangkok sprawl is not easy. No signs mark its existence until you arrive on the site. I arrived in a passenger van that came upon an overpass it was too tall to clear. The van backed up and followed a more circuitous route along surface roads. When we finally arrived at the Metro-Forest, we were greeted at the entrance gate by a crowing rooster, guarding his turf, as it were. Several chickens roam the site, placed there by the client, PTT Public Company Limited, the state-owned oil and gas company of Thailand, perhaps to create a more agrarian atmosphere. (The site is managed by PTT’s Reforestation Institute, which works on sustainable conservation of natural resources throughout Thailand.)

The green roof of the exhibition center. Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

Besides the rooster, there is a small guard station at the entrance. When the Metro-Forest first opened, visitors were required to have made reservations in advance, though, owing to its popularity, that requirement has been dropped.

It was expected that 100 visitors a day at most would tour the site, but as word has spread, weekends have brought as many as 1,500 people. Tawatchai Kobkaikit, ASLA, a lead designer on the project as managing director of LAB, says that neighbors from surrounding housing stop by to enjoy the sunset from the skywalk that encircles the forest at considerable heights.

At the entrance to the site, a broad fire lane leads past an inadequate parking lot that can hold only 12 cars and continues around the perimeter of the forest. The parking lot is now a storage site for exhibition materials, so all visitors have to park along the public access road.

A view of the skywalk as seen from the top of the tower. Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

The formal entrance to the forest is along a rust-colored concrete walkway that leads to an exhibition center. The center is carefully tucked into the site, disguised by a green roof and massive rust-colored walls of rammed earth. Kobkaikit notes that the building, by Spacetime Architects, a Thai firm, is among the first projects in Thailand to use rammed earth, and it has inspired other Thai architects to experiment with the technique. To reach the exhibit halls, you enter a narrow corridor created by two curving, parallel rammed-earth walls that are 20 feet high and open to the sky. Walking down this corridor, I was quickly reminded of the work of the sculptor Richard Serra and his site-specific rust-colored steel walls that embrace and dwarf you as you move into them. You could say that this experience of compression prepares visitors for the drama of the forest they are about to experience. The rammed earth, trucked up from the southern Rayong Province, was chosen as the building medium as a way of emphasizing the importance of soil for this project. Placed along this corridor, as part of Metro-Forest’s educational program, are kiosks that contain samples of some of the seeds used to plant the forest.

The PTT Public Company wanted LAB to create a self-contained environment that would allow people to become immersed in the landscape. To this end, a series of large earthen berms was created, some as high as 13 feet, both to shield views of the surrounding suburban chaos and to provide a carefully engineered soil mixture that would facilitate the growth of the 60,000 trees (mostly seedlings), representing more than 279 species. During a tour of the forest, Kobkaikit repeatedly emphasized the importance of the soil used to create the berms, as prescribed by Miyawaki, to create an optimal planting environment. When the project began in 2013, 48,000 cubic yards of earthwork was brought to the site and mixed with an additional 7,800 cubic yards of planting medium to create the berms. The resulting berms also led “to the creation of diverse microecologies” throughout the forest, Kobkaikit says.

The exhibition center as seen from the skywalk. Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

Given that the project is essentially constructed in a swamp filled with brackish water, plants were selected that thrive in this water and planted along the embankment created by the berms. Similarly, a diverse mix of deciduous forest plants and lowland dipterocarp cover the area along the riparian edge, atop the berms.

The exhibition center is divided into two halls, the first with displays focused on the value of ecology. The second is a theater that was screening a short film designed to appeal to young students on the value of planting trees. After the film ends, the large screen, divided into vertical panels, pivots open, dramatically revealing the forest and the skywalk. A quick jog across the lawn leads to the beginning of the skywalk that quickly ascends above the tree canopy and follows a zigzag path around the perimeter and then into the core of the forest. The 600-foot-long skywalk was mandated by the client but initially opposed by the landscape architects, and yet it has turned out to be a very important design element on two fronts. First, because of the rapid and spectacular growth of the forest, visitors ascending the skywalk find themselves moving through and above the tree canopy while leaving undisturbed the undergrowth of the forest. A second, more practical consideration has emerged supporting the need for the skywalk: cobras. The district in which the forest is located is known in Thai as Nong Ngu Hao, which translates as “cobra swamp.” Needless to say, a walk along the ground floor of the forest could become an Indiana Jones-like adventure. And then there are the occasional monitor lizards to further balance what is becoming a sustainable landscape.

Successional growth of the lowland dipterocarp forest over time.

As you ascend higher on the skywalk and ultimately above the tree canopy, the illusion of being lost in a forest is quickly dashed. In the immediate foreground just beyond the forest’s boundaries, the illegal dumping site that was once the Metro-Forest has simply moved on to adjacent plots of abandoned land. And in the distance to the east, silhouetted in a haze of smog, are the office and residential towers of Bangkok. Some four miles to the west is the control tower of Suvarnabhumi Airport, seemingly animated by the heat waves in the scorchingly hot and humid Thai climate.

The reception area within the exhibition center. Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

Not to be outdone, the Metro-Forest has its own tower (also mandated by the client) that is accessible from the skywalk. Here the energetic can climb an additional 65 feet or so to fully appreciate the uniqueness of the Metro-Forest within the context of its surroundings. According to Kobkaikit, a height restriction was placed on the tower owing to its proximity to the airport. From here, the notion that you are indeed immersed in a laboratory becomes dramatically apparent. Looking down on the forest, the design of the Metro-Forest microcosmos fully asserts itself. The closed circulation, the designed waterfall and stream that meanders through the forest, has literally taken on a life of its own and requires no liner to sustain the water levels. It is replenished by groundwater and rainwater. Sounds from the robust waterfall reassure you that nature is not far away. From the tower, the skywalk dips down to the forest floor and a small footbridge crosses the stream, and a path leads you back to the exhibition center. Given the concerns regarding the cobras, an elevated walkway in this area is under consideration. As you leave the forest, the rooster is still at his post. For now.

James Trulove is a publisher and editor of books on architecture and landscape architecture.

 Project Credits

Client PTT Public Company Limited, Managed by PTT Reforestation Institute, Bangkok. Landscape Architect Landscape Architects of Bangkok Ltd. Architect and Interior Design Spacetime Architects Co., Ltd. Mini-Theater Interior Design designLAB NLSS Co., Ltd. Ecological Forest Consultant Sirin Kaewlaierd. Landscape Design Consultant Angsana Boonyobhas. Energy and Green Building Consultant Architects 49 Limited. Quantity Surveyor Langdon & Seah (Thailand). Construction Management EDA Consultant Co., Ltd. Commissioning Authority SCG Green Building Department. Exhibition Design Pico (Thailand) Public Company Limited. Lighting Consultant 49 Lighting Design Consultants Limited. Structural Engineering H Engineer Co., Ltd. MEP Engineering MITR Technical Consultant Co., Ltd. Main Contractor Ritta Co., Ltd. Softscape Contractor Cordia Company Limited. Waterfall Contractor Tropical Garden Ltd., Part. Rammed Earth Subcontractor La Terre Co., Ltd. Earthwork Contractor Psatanachod Kanyotha Co., Ltd. [NOTE: ALL ARE LOCATED IN OR AROUND BANGKOK.]

BY ANNE RAVER

Studio Outside coaxes many landscapes from one neglected ranch.

FROM THE MAY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

There’s a journey-like feeling to this landscape, both in space and time, as the path curves through dense stands of red cedar and yaupon holly, then out to open savanna, dotted with live oaks and groves of post oaks.

“You can’t really understand these landscapes and the plants on the surface until you understand the underlying soil types and drainage patterns,” said Tary Arterburn, FASLA, a founding principal of Studio Outside, one sunny cool morning in early November.

“It’s sand, sand, and sand,” said Amy Bartell, a project manager at Studio Outside, who has spent countless hours on site here. She knows where the fine clayey sands of the Southern Blackland Prairie to the west finger into the coarser sands of the Northern Humid Gulf Coastal Prairie to the east.

The Dallas-based firm first walked the 132-acre property in 2015 to assess the site and create a master plan for clients with seemingly opposing interests: The nature-loving wife wanted to increase plant diversity and habitat for birds and other wildlife; the husband wanted a polo field and barn for his seven horses and those of visiting equestrians. How to buffer birds from thundering horses (plus horse trailers and vehicles and the madding crowd) is as much of a challenge as bringing back little bluestem to the forgotten prairie.

Little bluestem, croton, and wildflowers flourish among native post oaks and water oak seedlings. Photo by Raylen Worthington.

Tylee Farm, about 75 miles west of Houston, is a remnant of the Southern Post Oak Savanna. Tucked into a narrow ecoregion called the East Central Texas Plains, it is a land of transitions, with the diversity that comes with many edges. Bison once grazed here, always on the move, so deep-rooted grasses quickly grew back. Seeds hopped a ride on animal hides or in their guts, germinating in the soil broken up by sharp hooves. Natural fires, or those set by Native Americans to attract game to the fresh shoots that sprouted in the ash, kept the grasslands open and diverse. But by 2005, when the current owners saw the For Sale sign and climbed over the fence to explore, the long-abandoned ranch had been overgrazed for centuries.

“There was a little grove of post oaks, and a higher pasture with oaks, and we found the little duck pond, but the interior of the property was so brushy it was mostly impassible,” recalls the client, who did not want her name to be used.

There were a few cattle, to keep up an agricultural easement, but eastern red cedars, water oaks, and a tangle of vines and yaupon holly had grown up in the old fields. The rolling savanna landscape appealed to them. It wasn’t too far from their home in Houston, and their three young sons would have a place to roam. The land was a remnant of the 4,600-acre land grant from the Stephen F. Austin Colony to James Tylee in 1834. Born and raised a New Yorker, Tylee had left the city with his young wife, Matilda, to homestead. But Matilda left him soon after setting foot on the prairie. And Tylee died at the Alamo in 1836.

“My husband is from New York, so that was one connection,” says the owner, who also felt a pang for a man deserted by one love, and then killed before he could enjoy the other. They bought the first 82 acres in 2007, and named it Tylee Farm. A few years later, they bought 50 more acres from a neighbor who owned a rustic camp house perched on a slight rise to the southeast, adding not only higher ground but two more ponds, an intermittent creek and seep, and hardwood forest to the property.

The Tylee Farm master plan. Image courtesy of Studio Outside.

They had hired a caretaker, cleared underbrush and cedars, and built a house by Dillon Kyle Architects, with gardens and a main drive designed by the landscape architect Sarah Lake. They were about to put the horse barn next to the caretaker’s house when it occurred to them they needed a master plan.

“We were clumping everything on one side of the property, without thinking of the overall scheme,” the owner says. A path their young boys had unthinkingly made through the lawn and up through the meadow was not only unsightly, but causing erosion. The gardens around the house were languishing in too much shade from fast-growing sycamores. The additional land had opened up new possibilities, not only for a barn site, but more vistas and nature rambles. They could picture eventually adding home sites for future generations.

So the Texas architect Ted Flato suggested they call Arterburn, who has a feel for natural landscapes. The team from Studio Outside—Arterburn, Bartell, and Gwendolyn McGinn, Associate ASLA—walked the farm with the clients in early 2015. Arterburn recalls the interplay of open meadows and woodlands, especially “the savanna landscape over by the pond, where trees floated out over the field.”

He could visualize the viewsheds from the front and back of the main house, as trees were selectively cleared. He recognized the potential of the half-mile drive, which curves through dense woods and open grassland. By taking out unwanted species and adding intense plantings of hollies, wax myrtles, and other natives, or a few oaks in the right place, by varying mowing patterns to emphasize the drive’s curves, or a particularly beautiful tree or vista, a simple ride becomes a journey.

“I like to devise ways for people to move through nature, to make it as experiential as possible,” he says.

Bartell, who has a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture and a deep knowledge of plants, was amazed by the feeling of expanse on a relatively small farm. “It has so much diversity on it, even though there are only a few high and low spots,” she says. “But the way the viewsheds are set up, you feel like you’re walking in the state of Texas.”

Management plans for Tylee Farm’s various landscape types. Image courtesy of Studio Outside.

After hours of discussions with the owners, the team pulled together data from a wealth of sources: topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, hydrology maps from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, ecological systems and vegetation classification maps from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and images from Google Earth. “We had a sense of how the site was laid out, we saw the ridgelines, and started to understand how the water flows,” says McGinn, who has a graphic arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and has since left Studio Outside to work with Spackman Mossop and Michaels. By mid-June of 2016, in a steady rain, they assembled on site with a team of experts from the Ecosystem Design Group of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. McGinn marched along, her GPS receiver held aloft on a stick, like some modern-day Joan of Arc, mapping the existing roads and pathways, noting washouts and key trees, wood duck and bluebird boxes. As the rain came down, only a few weeks after an 18-inch deluge had flooded Houston, they saw what the lines on the maps really meant.

“You can make assumptions based on topography,” McGinn says, “but the site was saturated, so all the hydrology was extremely evident. Where there were low points and intermittent streams, all that started to come together.”

Bartell mucked about with the hydrologist and soil scientist, learning that the three ponds were sized correctly for the watershed, where boggy conditions ruled out roadways and pathways or buildings, and just where water drained off the slopes and into the seep.

Arterburn and the client glued themselves to botanists and ecologists from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, recording plant species and getting a sense of which areas could be restored by prescribed burns. McGinn found the ridgeline that had shown up on the USDA topography map, running on a north–south diagonal through the center of Tylee Farm. The relatively wide, flat ridge, hidden in the woods, suggested itself as the best place for the five-acre polo field, with adequate runoff. And little soil would have to be moved to create it. McGinn also came upon a lovely opening in the dense red cedars, cleared years before by the owners, where beautyberry carpeted the forest floor.

“Amy and Tary were working more slowly and scientifically in many ways, looking at plant species, whereas my mission was to cover as much of the site as possible,” McGinn says. “So I had a walking experience of the site, more of a knowledge of what it felt like.”

The ridge, with a dense cedar forest to the west, also suggested a natural dividing line between sporting equestrians and quiet birding and walking. Winding trails to the southwest led through the much more open post oak savanna, around the ponds, and into the shady seep where birds and many other animals come for water, food, and shelter. Arterburn had been a bit confused by the water oaks proliferating in the woods. But he was reminded by ecologists that these, along with red cedars, are the pioneer species that seed themselves into old fields, gradually turning them into forests like the one covering the ridgeline.

“It had been agricultural at one point, so it had the least desirable trees,” Arterburn says. “Which meant we wouldn’t be losing any long-lived trees, like oaks, to build the polo field.” The meticulously groomed field, planted with Bermuda grass, would be a dramatic contrast to the surrounding horse pastures and paddocks, planted in native grasses. “They are much more nutritious than coastal Bermuda,” Bartell says.

The barn, large enough to accommodate 16 horses, could then be sited at the top of the polo field, where a north–south breeze would cool the horses. That epic day in the rain began a conversation across disciplines and laid the foundation for the master plan. As McGinn later wrote, “priorities were developed for habitat restoration, increasing the diversity of plant species and the curation of aesthetic experiences.”

In its analysis, the Ecosystem Design Group noted, “Historically, in the presence of natural wildfire cycles, the ecological climax community for these soil types would be a savanna system with a composition of 75 percent grasses, 20 percent woody plants, and 5 percent forbs.”

And as Arterburn says, “once you understand the climax community, then you know what to shoot for.” The team set out to develop a timeline for managing three different canopy types—grassland, savanna, and woodland—with a goal of restoring 50 percent of the farm to prairie–savanna. They worked with the Cat Spring Wildlife Management Association to prepare the site and carry out the first prescribed burn in January 2016 on two meadows on the front and back side of the house.

“We had a very wet year the year before, so there was a very small window when they thought it was dry enough to burn,” Bartell says. “And some areas were too wet to burn.”

Bartell had orchestrated the selective clearing of the overgrown meadow beyond the pool the previous fall. “I had tagged some of the trees, mostly cedars and a few water oaks, and we cleared one at a time,” she says. Then she would run back toward the pool to check on the view, and to get a thumb’s up from the owners sitting by the pool. “Because you could not put them back, or replant them.”

It was the husband, she recalls, not the nature-oriented wife who encouraged them to keep going as two live oaks were revealed, and the forest on either side of the meadow became more transparent. “He said, ‘That’s what I’m looking for,’” Bartell says. “He could see the tall tree trunks and a high canopy. Those cedars can block your view completely, so you can’t see through the woods. But now we were looking at the trunks of water oaks and live oaks.”

And by saving a few oaks and venerable red cedars, they created an artful viewshed. “We didn’t want a bare meadow going up that slope; it’s the composition of the remaining trees that gives it a bit of character,” Bartell says. Their intense work together that day had created a kind of epiphany. “When people have that moment, they know it,” Bartell says. “You have to wait for it to appear. It appeared, and we all got on the same page immediately.”

By November, when we walked the farm one morning, little bluestem and bushy bluestem were flourishing in the upper reaches of the burned meadow. And the path that used to cut straight up the slope has been moved, to curve in and out of the eastern woodland. But Bartell shook her head over the wet patches that had refused to burn at the bottom of the slope, where the team envisioned a tall wildflower meadow.

“I’m experimenting with the species that like wet feet,” she said. And instead of sowing seed, she is using one-gallon pots. In other areas, coastal Bermuda grass, long used as forage in Texas pastures, continues to outcompete young native grasses, sprouting after the burn. So some areas have been spot-treated with herbicide. But watching these prairie grasses take hold is part of the experience of the place. Much of what Studio Outside is doing here is standing back, and doing less.

At the duck pond, fed by a seep that drains down the eastern slope, the owner planted native irises in the shallow mud. But the edges are no longer mowed. Invasive species will be removed, but as Bartell says, the natives will come if you give them half a chance. “In this part of the world, things make themselves at home all the time. You don’t have to force it. They’re there. It’s just a matter of making sure the yaupon doesn’t shade everything out.” McGinn suggested putting in a boardwalk, around part of the perimeter of the pond, and going partway into the water.

Attentive management, including controlled burns, mowing, clearing, pruning, and weed control are essential to curating nature at Tylee Farm. Image courtesy of Studio Outside.

“Right now, we can’t see the critters on the edge, but you could go over and see everyone who lives down there, by looking into the water,” McGinn said. It’s one of those “curated moments” that Arterburn is after, to intensify one’s experience in nature. (And lifting one’s head from the intimate life in the pond, to the wide expanse of the savanna, as one turns to continue up the path, is another one of those moments.)

We strolled along the wide mown path, through open grasslands punctuated by post oaks, and occasional live oaks, to another pond, which in summer is covered by white water lilies. Three live oaks stand together at the far end of the pond, their low branches forming a perfect shelter—once for cows, now for humans.

“I think they’re so perfect the way they are, I wouldn’t dare try to improve on that area at all,” Bartell says. The team will remove any water oaks or yaupons growing into the dams of these ponds—“we won’t pull them off, we’ll just cut them off,” Bartell says, to keep the dams intact. “We’ll do less mowing around that pond, to let the natural species re-emerge.”

One of the client’s favorite spots is the seep that runs down this slope, between the lily pond and the meadow that leads toward the old camp house. The land forms a natural crease, where water runs or trickles, depending on the weather, and yaupon holly, wild grape, Chinese tallow trees, and water oaks have made a dense thicket for birds and other wildlife.

The team wants to put a series of weirs along the seep, to slow down the flow of water and create the kind of puddles and trickling water that attract many birds and other animals. A small boardwalk would allow the client and others to quietly observe life up close.

McGinn has been fascinated by the different plants that spring up, as soil and conditions change, even in the slightest. “This area has distinctly different habitats, so where there is a wetland, we’re trying to find a way to cultivate it more, create more intense diversity.” They will take out the Chinese tallow and other exotic species, and cut back the leggy yaupon, to encourage the hollies to fruit closer to the ground. “And we’ll add various things for the birds, which have very specific needs,” says the owner, who has started collecting books and expert advice on the subject.

The emergence of American beautyberry and other natives in an edited woodland. Photo by Raylen Worthington.

As McGinn says, the project isn’t so much about “selecting plants and defining a set spatial plan” as it is “about creating relationships and responding to the site.” She adds, “It’s strangely exciting to design something that will never be any one specific thing, but something that grows and changes.”

One reason for burning the meadows near the house was not just aesthetic. Its progress can be noted daily by the owners. The bird lover has started to record what birds she sees, what flowers are blooming throughout the seasons.

She watched the bluestem sprouting in the spring, after the first burn. “I’d only seen it before as a tall grass,” she says. “But after a burn, these little mounds of green start to shoot up. It’s a completely different look.”

And in the evenings, she hears the barred owl call near her house. And she answers back.

Anne Raver gardens in Warren, Rhode Island, and writes about nature and the environment. 

Project Credits
Landscape Architect Studio Outside, Dallas. Ecosystem Consultant Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin, Texas. Burn Team and Seeding Wildlife Habitat Federation, Cat Spring, Texas. Land Management Natural Resources Conservation Service, Bellville, Texas. Landscape Installation JMA Living Landscapes, Bellville, Texas.

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

From “Control of the Canopy” in the May 2017 issue, by James Trulove with photography by Rungkit Charoenwat, about an oasis of tropical forest in the midst of Bangkok’s unsightly sprawl.

“Stairway to heaven.”

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Martha Schwartz, FASLA, began her lecture last fall at the University of Southern California School of Architecture with a dire warning, and an invitation to play.

In “Beyond Practice” (her comments start at 13:08), she began by outlining the ecological imperative that climate change and carbon emissions place on landscape designers and the rest of the world: the exceptionally long tail of ocean warming, and methane bubbles released from melting permafrost that clog the atmosphere.

From there, it’s a quick exposition of Schwartz’s carefree straddling of the art and landscape architecture worlds. She recounts her 1979 Bagel Garden, when she designed the garden at her Boston home with only materials she could purchase on her block: bagels, purple flowers, and purple aquarium gravel. That act of strident whimsy prompted LAM editor Grady Clay to put this project on his magazine’s cover, bordered in neon pink and hand-drawn bagels. It was an early curation of “native” landscape materials combined with boundary-pushing art installations. “It’s a Dada piece. It’s Duchamp’s toilet,” she says. And it also made her name in landscape architecture.

A survey of Schwartz’s contemporary work (detailed further in this month’s cover story) demonstrates her continued emphasis on offering users quirky art objects to interact with, such as the train-cart seating at Manchester’s Exchange Square, and the gawking polygonal pavilions at Fengming Mountain Park in the Chinese city of Chongqing. This narrow slice of her work shows off a wild range of cultural conditions and aesthetic treatments. There are gritty, postindustral reuses, razor-sharp Libeskind-esque angles, and meditative contemplations of vernacular materials and forms.

When the landscape architects at Mahan Rykiel Associates found themselves with uprooted trees they couldn’t fit back onto a newly designed and built mixed-use building site, they offered them to a local Baltimore middle school in the Locust Point neighborhood. But after talking with the principal of Francis Scott Key Middle School, they quickly realized that there was an opportunity for a much deeper collaboration than simply donating some foliage.  So the landscape architects began designing a school yard with four different types of learning environments, to aid what they call “STEM-based environmental education.” Project Birdland will be the first phase of a partnership between Mahan Rykiel Associates and Francis Scott Key Middle School. Students will work with a biologist and the fabricators at Gutierrez Studios to design and build birdhouses for endangered and threatened bird species. From the outset, the project gives students an introduction to the humancentric world of design and craft and also to the creation of habitats for their neighboring fauna.

BY ZACH MORTICE

Improbable Botany. Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.

Wayward is a collective of landscape architects, architects, urban growers, artists, and other assorted creative types who design landscape installations for “exploring new models for how green space can work in cities,” says its founder, Heather Ring. The group’s experimental and often temporary projects emphasize creating “narrative environments that tell stories through the spaces.” The projects have included chromatic explorations of algae growth and weaving slow-growth sculpture from living trees.

It’s an outsider’s perspective on landscape design that might have earned Ring’s London-based band of designers the high school graduation accolade of “landscape architect most likely to commission a science fiction anthology,” because that’s just what Wayward has done.

Having raised nearly $16,000 during a successful Kickstarter campaign, Wayward will publish Improbable Botany, a collection of 11 short stories of sci-fi landscape futurism that extrapolate our current relationship with the planet’s flora into magical and terrible places. The book will ship in late October, in time for Halloween.

Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.

“We see science fiction as a future forecasting,” Ring says, “an ability to creatively look at what sorts of developments are happening right now, and what could potentially happen in the future.”

Edited by Gary Dalkin, the book includes full-color illustrations by Jonathan Burton that convey a warm and recognizable future, more playfully surreal than mercilessly technological. This sensibility is reflected in a number of the stories themselves. “The most iconic sci-fi around plants has either been a fear of nature taking over the world, or a seed being the last hope, like Wall-E,” Ring says. But Improbable Botany seems to suggest a middle third way, where nature is neither a vulnerable sacrament nor a devouring maw. Characters find small moments of charity and humanity amid tectonic shifts in their relationship to plants and their environment. The specter of climate change is an implicit undercurrent. This dynamic is expressed at an individual scale and at a global scale, often set in a near future that’s just off-kilter enough for us to recognize. In Eric Brown’s “The Ice Garden,” a mysterious country manor reunion story is brought about by some astral horticulture. In “The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy” by Ken MacLeod, we see a world where plants work as factories, growing complex mechanical elements, and where nature can be co-opted to leap ahead of the relentless pace of unsustainable globalized industry for only so long.

Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.

Ring sees this project and Wayward’s entire body of self-initiated work as a counterpoint to the dominant corporate practice of landscape design. The group’s members are the “wayward ones who really want the autonomy and the creative freedom to explore different things,” she says.

Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.

And that’s an open-ended sort of freedom that landscape architecture could stand to embrace. Landscape architecture’s current well-established paradigm largely conceives of landscape as elements of functional infrastructure. Ring is excited by the prospect of her book opening up new disciplinary avenues that consider landscape architects as bioengineers and landscape as technology, the humanistic endeavor that’s such a fundamental ingredient of sci-fi. As the profession casts about for a new lodestar, Ring may be tinkering with the spaceship that helps it get there.

 Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

BY ZACH MORTICE

Galveston Island State Park in the year 2060. Image courtesy of Studio Outside/Google Earth.

This is Part 3 of our conversation about Hurricane Harvey with the design team at Studio Outside in Dallas, which has won a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning for its work on Galveston Island State Park. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found below. Correction appended below on August 28.

Studio Outside’s resiliency plan for Galveston Island State Park earned a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning, drawing praise from the jury for its comprehensive and forward-looking anticipation of the havoc a hurricane could release. But Studio Outside’s Andrew Duggan and the design team, led by principal in charge Mike Fraze, knew they were pondering ironclad eventualities, not hypothetical disasters.

Over the weekend, the city of Galveston and Galveston Island State Park to its southwest found themselves in the path of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall on Friday night, a Category 4 storm that has prompted mass evacuations of the Houston region.

Studio Outside’s project, “Storm + Sand + Sea + Strand: Barrier Island Resiliency Planning for Galveston Island State Park,” tracks the loss of habitat and land as perpetuated by sea-level rise, encroaching development, and hurricane flooding. It prescribes soft and green natural barriers to storm surges, assisted by flexible infrastructure. As a barrier island bordered by Texas’s West Bay to the northwest and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast, there are few places to hide from floodwaters or to absorb them, and even less given that this part of the island was partially paved over to accommodate RVs in the 1970s. On Friday and over the weekend, Duggan (based safely in Dallas) and members of the design team (Fraze and Duggan of Studio Outside, and Jennifer Dowdell and Ed Morgereth of Biohabitats) emailed LAM some thoughts on how the storm might play out for Galveston Island State Park.

****Post will be updated as the storm progresses****

Part 3: Thursday, September 7

 Was most damage caused by rain as the storm hovered over the island, as you suggested last week?

Andrew Duggan: I did visit with one of our contacts for the project with [the] Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) on Tuesday, August 29, and as of that time there were no real reports from the site yet. But the expectation was somewhat grim that each of the coastal state parks in the system would likely have some damage, potentially heavy. During the planning phase of the project, there was talk about TPWD policies for securing the site, transport of vehicles to higher ground, and evacuation of staff in advance of storms. Folks around here are primarily focused on rescue at the moment, and it seems that the assessment and recovery phases will be coming next week. Anecdotally, however, I [saw] on the news [on] Thursday that Texas A&M University’s Galveston Campus is back in for classes on Monday or Tuesday of [this] week with apparent minimal damage. Although that campus is on the east end of the island that has the sea wall, that is positive news.

How did this hurricane compare with recent past hurricanes that have struck the area?

Jennifer Dowdell: From all we have read, this hurricane was unique in recent historical records given the amount of time it spent in the region—[it was] almost stationary—and given the rainfall amounts that have been reported. The National Weather Service had to add colors to their mapping palette in order to report on this much rainfall in one storm event. Because there was not a direct hit on Galveston Island, it has probably avoided some of the most catastrophic damage to structures that we saw after Ike, but we will have to wait to see.

Ed Morgereth: Before Hurricane Harvey, there had been four hurricane landfalls in Texas in the 21st century: Claudette (July 2003), Humberto (September 2007), Dolly (July 2008), and Ike (September 2008). Hurricane Rita (September 2005) technically made landfall in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, but also affected Texas. Of these storms, Ike was the strongest as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 miles per hour at landfall; it was surpassed by Harvey as a Category 4 storm with 130-mile-per-hour winds. The last Category 4 hurricane to make landfall in Texas before Harvey was Carla in 1961, with winds of 145 miles per hour. It should be noted that the total amount of rainfall with a storm, and the associated rainfall impacts, aren’t necessarily associated with storm category intensity. Many slow-moving tropical storms also have had significant heavy rainfall impacts in Texas, such as Amelia (1978), Claudette (1979), and Allison (2001).

Andrew Duggan: Each storm has its own personality, a signature issue that people remember. For Harvey, it will likely be the rain and inland flooding. It will also be remembered by the spirit of the Houston community, who have reached out to help their neighbors. Although the rain has stopped, there are also bound to be some more surprises that occur when the water recedes.

How long does it take these ecosystems to recover from a shock like this? 

Ed Morgereth: That can be highly variable, taking a range of days to decades to recover. The timescale for recovery depends on the spatial extent of the area affected, and the intensity of specific impacts. Only time will tell.

Andrew Duggan: I was visiting with one of our clients at Audubon Nebraska who was telling me about habitat assessment teams that are already on the ground assessing things. The example from Audubon was the potentially affected whooping crane habitat in South Texas that serves as wintering grounds for the species. The question is, when a threatened or endangered species returns south as part of an annual migration, and their expected habitat has been significantly impacted since their last visit, what do they do? Where do they go to search out suitable wintering grounds? What is the long-term impact on the species? Natural habitats are generally more resilient than developed areas, but this has been an extreme event.

Do you plan to go to Galveston Island State Park and assess damage? Might this be an opportunity to revise your plans?

Andrew Duggan: We are most interested in visiting the site and seeing how it fared. The point of all the long-term planning for the site is to anticipate these events and how they quite literally change the site. Storms such as Harvey were part of the modeling that our team developed to predict the future of this diverse island environment. This storm likely hastened some of those predictions, but it may be years until we know by how much. Hopefully this unfortunate storm event will encourage decision makers to invest in plans that embrace resilient and restorative approaches to park development. This is the only way that we can work with the natural ecosystem to deliver unique experiences for all visitors—both now and for generations to come.

Part 2: Monday, August 28

A primary challenge is to identify and plan for a site in constant transition – predictive models forecast impacts and reveal a dramatically different site in 50 years. Image courtesy of Studio Outside/Google Earth.

Do you know how much damage was done to the park with the storm’s initial impact?

Andrew Duggan: The park is closed, and I haven’t seen any footage from the site. I am curious how the “temporary” facilities that the Texas Parks & Wildlife [Department] constructed after Hurricane Ike have fared—namely a visitor [center] building on the beach, and some restroom structures both on the beach and on the bay, none of which were significantly elevated. The only other new facilities that have been built since Ike were two park ranger/manager residences on the bay side that were elevated, and a new maintenance facility that is two levels. Finally, the restoration of two historic homes on the bay side of the property as group cabins was completed a few years ago, but as they were historic, they were not elevated. Those may be susceptible to some flooding. We’ll have to wait and see as the rain subsides.

How long might it take for torrential rains to begin significantly impacting Galveston Island State Park and causing excessive erosion?

Ed Morgereth: Episodic bands of heavy rains have been pushing through the region, and are projected to continue for the next several days. Inundation and flooding is expected to continue all around the Galveston area, including West Galveston Island. Localized erosion can be an issue where intensive runoff occurs, particularly in exposed soil areas. Erosion from this hurricane is more of an issue on the Gulf-side beach, and on dunes from onshore-driven wind and waves.

Andrew Duggan: The master plan purposefully moves the beach-side camping behind a generous setback from the beach, to allow for a dune field to be restored. Many factors contribute to beach erosion during storms, not the least of which is the storm surge, and then the receding waters that pull sand back into the gulf. Hurricane Ike took 90 feet of beach from Galveston Island State Park, with an almost direct hit. Should be less this time, but down where Harvey came onshore it could be worse.

How much water can these types of wetlands absorb and contain? Per day, per hour?

Ed Morgereth: That is difficult to answer quantitatively. Generally speaking, the brackish and salt marsh wetlands in the park can handle tremendous amounts of rain, as they are directly connected to the tidal waters of Galveston Bay. Freshwater wetlands in the swales behind the beach dunes and the ponds in the park will fill up with rainwater. They go through a pattern of drawing down in dry or droughty periods and recharging in wet weather. The amount of rain projected before Harvey’s effects are over with is extreme over the next several days, potentially measured in feet of rain.

Would the hurricane have been worse and stronger as it traveled deeper into Texas if it hadn’t had to pass over a series of barrier islands first?

Ed Morgereth: Barrier islands tend to be a first line of defense in absorbing storm impacts. Naturally functioning extensive wetland systems help absorb hurricane storm surge impacts. Without the functions provided by barrier islands and wetlands, direct hurricane impacts would be felt farther inland. Their protection, conservation, restoration, and management are important to long-term coastal resiliency protection including from tropical storm/hurricane impacts.

Andrew Duggan: The proposed “Barrier Island Discovery Center” is intended to engage visitors with the overlapping storylines of the barrier island environment: tropical storms, wildlife, habitat, beach, bay, cultural elements, and many others. It is intentionally located on the bay side of the park so that visitors are encouraged to explore all aspects of the island transect rather than primarily visiting the beach. Hopefully as we come to comprehend these systems, we can better learn to anticipate and plan resilient systems that can accommodate these periodic events. It is how we manage and care for these systems between episodic hurricane events that dictates how they perform during one. It should be noted that our team also included Joey Coco, a hurricane engineer, now with Forte & Tablada in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who helped us navigate the possible storm scenarios that may face Galveston Island State Park in the future. His data, combined with the predictive sea-level-rise models prepared by Biohabitats Inc., became the basis for the planning vision. We had to comprehend what the site may be in 50 years before we could think about what to rebuild there today.

Part 1: Saturday, August 26 

Studio Outside’s “Storm + Sand + Sea + Strand—Barrier Island Resiliency Planning for Galveston Island State Park” predicts severe land loss due to sea-level rise by 2060. Image courtesy of Studio Outside/Google Earth.

What happened to Galveston Island State Park in 2008 with Hurricane Ike? How was the island affected? How was it damaged?

Mike Fraze: The entire site was inundated with over eight feet of storm surge, and the result was complete devastation. It seemed that half of the beach side campsites were simply gone, and the other half were covered in sand or broken [into] pieces. Roads buckled and utilities were uprooted.

Ironically, this level of destruction created two phenomena: [It] recalibrated the lens of park planning in coastal environments by proving that buttressing and fighting Mother Nature does not work, and a reconsideration of best practices was required. And [it created] a relatively clean slate to [re-envision] this park. The planning process was a rare opportunity to literally rebuild from the ground up. [The] Texas Parks & Wildlife Department and the planning team seized the chance to rebuild with a natural system resiliency mind-set.

What are the biggest risks to the island and Galveston Island State Park with this hurricane? 

Ed Morgereth: There’s the potential for high winds and coastal flooding, and with that, there may be saltwater inundation of some of the freshwater wetlands found within the park. But let’s be clear that there are a lot of unknowns with this storm including its exact landfall location.

Andrew Duggan: And the forecast is changing hourly. The situation with Hurricane Harvey is very different as it relates to Galveston than were the conditions with Hurricane Ike in 2008. Harvey is bearing down on Corpus Christi—about 200 miles southwest of Galveston—where Ike was almost a direct hit on the island. The biggest risk with Harvey might be an ongoing rain deluge and associated flooding if the storm stalls, and meanders up the coast over a period of days with a continuous assault of rain. That said, the churning of the gulf and expanded wave action will most certainly contribute to more rapid beach and dune erosion.

Is Galveston Island State Park particularly vulnerable to hurricane flooding? 

Ed Morgereth: Yes. And it is worth noting that Galveston Island is very low-lying. Much of it is less than [10 feet] above sea level, so effects during a hurricane with a large storm surge on the system are inevitable. The question becomes, how resilient is the landscape to flooding and storm surge?

Because of all of the changes that have occurred over the last several decades, we see significant reductions in wetlands and [marshes] (key natural features in the absorption of some of the effects of storm surge) present when natural conditions prevail. But here, the natural conditions on the island as a whole have been replaced by roads, buildings, and infrastructure. And within the park there is a reduced amount of wetland habitat on the bay side available to help absorb the storm surge and the flooding that is likely to occur. Dunes on the beach side of Galveston Island have been compromised, reducing their storm attenuation function.

Jennifer Dowdell: As an undeveloped natural feature, the barrier island could respond to these weather systems with natural cycles of erosion, sedimentation, and dune migration. The winds and waters pick up the sand and move it in natural ebbs and flows, and the plants reseed themselves with time. But when it is populated, those natural features are gone, or are much smaller. At Galveston Island State Park, we have remnants of unique and important ecosystems, but they are represented within the 2,000 acres of the park. The island is about 134,000 acres in total.

Mike Fraze: The broader context of the story, however, is that development patterns on the island and degradation of natural habitat have increased the vulnerability, as natural systems are generally more resilient to storms than the historical construction patterns on the island. Although many lessons were learned from Ike, construction on the island continues.

How does hurricane flooding disrupt ecosystems in the region: the health of plants and animals, migration patterns for fauna, etc.? 

Ed Morgereth: If we step back and consider this as a natural system, without the human impact, this barrier island system has always had hurricanes playing a role. The system has evolved to be resilient, with the migration of dunes, and natural erosion and sedimentation patterns. That resiliency is diminished by human development patterns.

Often, in the naturally functioning barrier island/dune system, the wildlife have evolved to survive these events. The birds will fly inland. The terrestrial creatures move to higher elevations. The aquatic species may take refuge in deeper areas of the water. Unfortunately, in an altered system like what we have left at Galveston Island State Park, there is less refugia available on the island overall, and the systems have been fragmented such that the wildlife may have a harder time migrating to these safer high elevation spaces. Storms such as Hurricane Ike [had] a storm surge that [covered] essentially all of the island’s habitats. The saltwater inundation of the freshwater ponds and of inland areas might also cause impacts to species sensitive to saltwater, such as the live oak mottes found within the park.

Sea-level rise brought on by climate change is predicted to swallow up almost a quarter of the park’s land by 2060. How does this anticipated land loss affect how the island handles hurricane storm surges? 

Ed Morgereth: Unfortunately, we have seen significant wetland loss since the 1970s in the Galveston Island system, and this has been exacerbated by sea-level rise. If sea-level rise is accelerated as projected, then at some point we are going to see a system of migration and accretion of wetland habitats lose their ability to keep up with the rate of change. The barrier island’s natural responses may not be able to keep up with the sea-level rise, causing loss of habitats and functions including storm abatement. This is why it was so important during our planning process to consider the steps needed to take to restore and manage habitats and their ecological function within the park. The park needs assistance in recovering function and habitat value in the face of storms and climate change.

Correction: An earlier version of this post indicated that Andrew Duggan led Studio Outside’s design team. The principal in charge was Mike Fraze. We regret the error.

BY SARAH COWLES

At Washington University, students document and memorialize a landscape in flux.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The crane whined, the cable tightened, the tree swayed, and the crowd murmured. But Tree B5, an 80-year-old, 85-foot-tall, 15-ton Quercus palustris, did not budge from its place in the Brookings allée. Earlier, a crew used high-pressure hydro-excavation tools and a giant vacuum to daylight the oak’s filigree of roots, and arborists jumared up with four cable slings to steady the crown. The audience in front of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis was transfixed by this massive marionette, anticipating the moment the formidable machine might pluck it like a weed. After the failure of the initial tug, the crew phoned the crane supervisor to ply more tension, and yet some grounding force would not let go. B5 was defiantly planted.

Choreographing this potent—and at times absurdly moving—tree-removal ceremony was Jesse Vogler, Affiliate ASLA, a 21st-century Fitzcarraldo and an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Vogler and his team of students thought this act of landscape demolition required a worthy ritual: extracting one tree of the 32 slated for removal for a new student center. They would honor its service, scale, strength, and site relationship, and also laser scan the tangled root complex.

The removal of Tree B5 marked the start of construction for the East End Transformation, an 18-acre expansion of facilities for arts, architecture, and engineering at Washington University’s Danforth Campus. The capital project includes an underground parking structure in place of the current Brookings Drive allée, to be topped with the new Ann and Andrew Tisch Park, designed by Michael Vergason Landscape Architects.

The roots were exposed using a combination of high-pressure water and a huge wet vac. Photo courtesy of the One Tree Project, Washington University in St. Louis.

To address the impact, Vogler and Ken Botnick, a professor of art, hosted a semester-long, interdisciplinary studio that asked students to physically engage with the scale, duration, and materials of the in-between landscape: “For some of [them], this was the first time they had held a shovel and dug a hole,” Vogler says. Over the semester he dispatched spades, laser levels, and 3-D scanners in the hands of students to analyze and interpret this landscape in transition. In the initial weeks of the studio, participants homed in on “obsessions” related to the culture and material qualities of oak trees. They initiated provisional projects to instigate discussions at the intersection of conceptual art, landscape architecture, and high-performance construction techniques. “The topic was well defined: to bring friction from this moment of demolition and construction,” Vogler says. “But the process of how we would make meaning from it was truly open-ended. We didn’t start out by saying, ‘We’re going to hire a crane to extract a tree out of the allée.’ We were building the ship while sailing it.”

The One Tree Project, as it became known, is exemplary of the innovative methods of landscape education that close the gap between low-risk methods of paper-based or digital design abstraction and the critical risks of working in landscapes at actual size, where true forces and materials are charged with powerful vulnerabilities and contingencies. “Critical lifting” is a specific crane operation, one that may involve an irreplaceable load, an uncertain weight, one with a potential shock load (the doubling of weight due to gravity), or a load that is unstable in flight. The critical lifting of Tree B5 engaged these material and safety risks—and risks of conceptual failure—in sharp relief.

Near the end of the day, a nearby excavator was dispatched to the scene to hasten the process. The operator leaned the boom and bucket against the trunk, pivoted, pushed again, and finally, Tree B5 gave way, its fall cradled by the careful slackening of the crane cable. Partway down it caught, the crown shuddered and blossomed, and it was finally laid to rest to bittersweet applause.

BY HANIYA RAE

Meet Vinobot and Vinoculer, a duo that can visualize how plants adapt to their surroundings.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

In a cornfield in Missouri, two robots, one stacked on top of the other, file down the narrow rows. As they move, they collect information about the plants using various sensors—enough to create a 4-D graphic model on a computer. By building these models, scientists can show how plants react and adapt to their surrounding conditions. Someday, more robots like these might toil in cities and forests as well, helping humans determine how a plant species is responding to climate change.

“We wanted these robots to investigate different species of plants,” says Gui DeSouza, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Missouri’s Vision-Guided and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. “One plant may respond better to flood conditions, another to extreme heat. We’re essentially trying to correlate the plant’s phenotype, or the plant’s observable behavior during an environmental change, to its shape and physiology.”

DeSouza’s research as an engineer centers on formable objects, such as plant leaves, and devising ways to calculate their measurements. Leaves, he says, constantly move and sway, making their surface area and structure difficult to calculate. But with two robots collecting images, DeSouza says it’s possible to illustrate how plants adjust to their environment over time and build visualizations of complex plant behavior that have traditionally been difficult to capture.

Vinobot, one of the two robots, has sensors at three levels: near the ground, a few feet above the ground around the midlevel of the plant, and at the top of the plant. At each level, the Vinobot gathers information about light, humidity, and temperature. The top level of sensors on Vinobot has a quantum sensor model that can measure photosynthetically active radiation, or the amount of light the plants are able to use during photosynthesis.

The other robot, Vinoculer, is a tower equipped with an arm that has two steady cameras, one of them using infrared to detect temperature changes over time, that rotate around plants to create a 3-D image of the plant as well as a 4-D temperature change model that displays heat on the plant at different times. It can also scan its surrounding area from 30 to 60 feet in any direction to identify plants of interest, such as ones that are struggling.

“We can measure leaf angles and the distance between leaves,” DeSouza says. “We can also measure seeding and the size of the corn—which suggests how that family of corn is responding.” Once the imagery is taken, it’s compiled and sent back to the lab, the Bradford Research Center, for further analysis. This might entail comparing older 3-D models to newer 3-D models to see how the plant’s growth is progressing.

“What we’re really studying is how climate change is changing migration patterns and temperatures,” DeSouza says, adding that a California orange orchard has been in contact about using the robots for studying orange trees, and he expects other farmers will want to build their own robots to gather plant information. DeSouza says that these robots are cheaper to assemble than unmanned aerial vehicles and don’t need Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly, making them attractive options for studying vegetation. “Anywhere that a deformable object changes, any type of plant, Vinobot and Vinoculer can use our algorithms to model the object,” he says, “and show how different variables affect it.”

BY TIM WATERMAN

The colonial past and the horticultural present take tea at London’s Garden Museum.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Just upstream and across the River Thames from the long, neo-Gothic bulk of the Palace of Westminster, which contains the houses of Parliament and the tower that contains the bell Big Ben, are two venerable buildings that have been added to since the Middle Ages. One is Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The other is the old church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now the home of the Garden Museum.

The Garden Museum’s main focus is British gardens and gardening, including not just the most elaborate and vaunted ones, but also a more intimate history of smaller gardens. Featured in particular are those of the middle classes, which have given Britain the sense of being a “nation of gardeners.” For landscape architects with an interest in either stately or domestic gardens in Britain, the museum, which has been recently redeveloped and now includes a building addition, two newly redesigned gardens, a superb café, and an expanded collection, will be a delight. Rather than serving, as a botanical garden might, to narrate garden history through garden spaces, the Garden Museum’s collection gives a more personal-scale view through tools and ephemera that help relate the space of the garden to the space of the imagination and desire. The museum fits compactly into the space of a historic neighborhood church and the tightly bounded urban churchyard.

The Garden Museum opened in 1977, following the church’s deconsecration, but it had come perilously close to demolition—its creepy, boarded-up dereliction made it suitable for use as a location for the supernatural horror film The Omen. It was saved by the efforts of garden enthusiasts Rosemary and John Nicholson, who were drawn to the place because of its association with the great 17th-century plant hunters and naturalists John Tradescant the Elder and his son (the Younger), who are both buried in the churchyard, alongside William Bligh, himself a plant hunter, and whose ship, the Bounty, uncomfortably crammed full of potted breadfruit plants, was the site of a famous mutiny. The Tradescants’ elaborate tomb, once in the churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth, what is now the site of the museum’s new extension and its courtyard, is adorned with reliefs of exotic Mediterranean landscapes, and on one panel, a deeply carved many-headed hydra and a skull—a memento mori. The hydra would become a metaphor, in the 1700s, for the multiple insurgencies of piracy, mutiny, and slave rebellion faced by the British Empire in the early days of globalization.

The plantings by Christopher Bradley-Hole play nicely against a foil of yew. Photo courtesy of the Garden Museum.

The museum, in fact, is full of such reminders, and the English garden in modernity—since the 1600s—is itself a record, not just of a love of beauty, nature, and design, but of a violent history of conquest. Plant hunting is now a much more gentle quest, and the fruits of vigorous global botanizing, courtesy of Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones of the celebrated Welsh nursery Crûg Farm, are visible in Dan Pearson’s design for the new Sackler Garden. Dan Pearson is a celebrated British plant designer and horticulturist whose practice employs a number of landscape architects. Pearson’s courtyard garden, barely 1,000 square feet, replaces the staid knot garden that once occupied the churchyard around the tombs, and it is framed by a light but confident bronze-clad addition by Dow Jones Architects. The bronze cladding echoes the scaling bark of the vast London plane trees that ring the museum, and some of the apparent lightness of the structure may be attributed to the fact that it had to be built without foundations, due to the roughly 20,000 bodies that have been interred in the churchyard since before the Norman Conquest.

One wonders if the roots of the plantings mingle with bones. If so, it’s heartening to think of the death below springing into life above. Some of the new addition around the courtyard of the Sackler Garden covers the old churchyard, but not the tombs of Vice Admiral Bligh and the Tradescants, which now visually anchor Pearson’s design. Plantings have an Anglo–Dutch sensibility, arising from the continuing conversation between British designers such as Pearson and the powerful influence from the Netherlands, particularly Piet Oudolf.

Among the plants, Ficus carica ‘Ice Crystal’ is one of the stars here—it is literally starry—its striking palmate snowflake-starburst leaves spangling away in one corner. Everywhere plant forms are celebrated. There is no distracting variegation, so one is given the luxury, for example, to contemplate just what a softly unearthly hue of green is Melianthus major, or just how starkly alert the stems of Equisetum are. Plantings are in succinct drifts—just large enough for an appreciation of the massing, but not so much as to become a monoculture. Plant forms are accentuated by these tight groupings. Plant heights are seemingly random, but the courtyard is small enough that low spots frame vistas punched through. From the new Garden Café inside the new extension, those views are to an educational kitchen and a classroom—the Clore Learning Space—where city kids can get their hands on plants, soil, earthworms, and food, though not all at once. “Many children in this neighborhood haven’t seen a worm or touched a plant,” says the museum’s director, Christopher Woodward. All these rooms have clean, elegant glazed walls facing the courtyard. The café has glazing on two sides, and Pearson’s plantings continue in a narrow strip before the street. One dines amid the plants.

At the main entry to the museum, the old church door, is another garden created by the minimalist designer Christopher Bradley-Hole. When I visited in August, the garden was incomplete, with gravel where there will soon be Croatian limestone. The space is formed by two elongated lozenges, edged round with waist-high clipped yew hedges. The outline of the space is traced out with bright LED strips at the base of the hedge. The use of such lighting has already lapsed into cliché owing to overuse, and here, as in so many other applications, any sense of mystery or shadow is sacrificed. Though the space is generous and its expanse of reflective stone will light up the heavy shade under the plane trees, it is both bland and static, and small areas of perennial planting near the door lack the verve of Pearson’s choices.

Planting plan. Image courtesy of Dan Pearson Studio.

There is continuity, at least, from the lighted outline of the garden to the museum interior, where strip lights continue up the stairs and along the balconies. Visitors’ faces are uplit as they gaze at the exhibits. As in the courtyard, where the building must not intrude upon the historic remains, the museum is a freestanding installation within the old church structure that must not touch the walls. As a result, the structure, of blond wood, twines and floats through the arches and recesses. The collection housed in the museum was originally composed of vintage tools, which over the years expanded to include garden ephemera. There is now an archive (which includes the records of the British garden designers John Brookes, Beth Chatto, and Penelope Hobhouse) and a growing selection of books, artworks, plans, and drawings. Highlights include Humphry Repton’s 1793 Red Book for Sundridge Park in Kent and Dominic Cole’s general layout plan for the Eden Project. The design drawing display is limited, but there is much else to delight garden enthusiasts.

At the end of the church is a gallery for temporary exhibitions (this autumn there will be one dedicated to Repton), and opposite, where the altar once stood, is now a small room with an idiosyncratic miscellany on display called the Ark Gallery. It is a reference to the Tradescants’ private museum by that same name, once one of London’s wonders and a classic cabinet of curiosities. Some of the items are on loan from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and include such items as a Native American ball club, elk skulls, a statue of Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, and, most bizarre, a hoax object called a “vegetable lamb.” This was purported to have been a plant that fruited sheep. The “lamb” is, in fact, pieced together from nascent, fuzzy fern fronds. The miscellany might seem random, but it helps to see how the garden was viewed as a collection, or a naturalist study by the Tradescants rather than primarily as a designed or aesthetic space.

Standing in the Ark next to a portrait of Tradescant the Elder with some of his collection of exotic seashells, I ask Woodward whether the museum will have international appeal. “The thing about plants,” he replies, “is they’re as local as the flower in your eye or as distant as a breadfruit.” The Tradescants believed that all the dispersed plants of Eden could someday be collected in a botanic garden. What better place to contemplate the cosmopolitan nature of the garden, and the darker side of conquest, than a museum at the heart of a former empire.

Tim Waterman lives in London and teaches at the University of Greenwich and the Bartlett School of Architecture. You can follow him on Twitter @tim_waterman.

BY MIMI ZEIGER

Marijuana wafts across the California landscape as legalization of recreational use approaches.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Ed Rosenthal grows weed. He has for decades. The Oakland, California-based horticulturist, author, and activist is the go-to expert on home cultivation. He’s written more than a dozen books on the subject and the policies that surround medical marijuana and legalization. Their titles fall somewhere between what you’d see in your local nursery and your corner head shop: The Big Book of Buds (volumes one through four), Marijuana Garden Saver, and Marijuana Pest & Disease Control.

“Growing is addictive,” Rosenthal says with a laugh, and then quickly clarifies that the drug is not. “Given the right conditions and a sunny backyard, marijuana can be grown almost anywhere in California.” He speaks poetically about marijuana’s diverse morphology: It has male and female plants. Some are tall, some wide, and there are different strains like indica or sativa that range in color—like heirloom tomatoes—from absinthe yellow–green to maroon and deep purple. To cultivate cannabis for its THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and psychoactive properties, only the female plants are grown. The male plants look a bit like wild mustard; the female plants are the ones that produce buds for consumption. “With humans and cannabis, the female is considered more beautiful,” he explains. “I have a bunch of marijuana plants growing, and they all look different, like six different varieties of a dahlia. Each plant is an individual.” He compares homegrown marijuana to homegrown tomatoes. “The person who grows the best marijuana is the person who is growing at home. Everybody loves their own produce.”

It’s a vision of cannabis production that is far different from what the public imagination associates with marijuana: the resource-heavy hydroponic “grow house,” which makes high demands on labor, energy, and water. Or the news reports of thousands of plants seized and destroyed on illegal grow sites on U.S. Forest Service land.

In 1996, Californians passed Proposition 215, permitting the use of medical marijuana. This measure allowed state residents with a medical ID card stating that they have a condition treatable by consumption of cannabis to grow up to six plants at home. In 2018, thanks to the passage of Proposition 64 last November, California will join Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia, in legalizing recreational use. This means that cultivation will grow across many scales as it hits the mainstream—from the home user to industrial nurseries. And, at the moment, it is up to cities and counties to regulate who grows weed and where. In 2018, the California Department of Food and Agriculture will begin to oversee marijuana cultivation. The proposition will still allow localities to tax and regulate, but state regulations, licensure, and taxes will be imposed on all retail sales and cultivation.

As legalization approaches, industrialized cannabis cultivators are poised to take advantage of the expansion to recreational use with large grow facilities in areas not typically known as marijuana country. For decades, Northern California’s Emerald Triangle—Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino Counties—were (and still are) the best-known sites for legal and illegal pot production. But the impact of the green rush is felt across California, even in unlikely landscapes such as Desert Hot Springs, a suburban community just outside Palm Springs that voted in conditional-use permitting for cultivation on industrial or undeveloped land in 2014. In September 2016, the Santa Barbara grower Canndescent opened the first facility in the Coachella Valley. But its 9,600-square-foot state-of-the-art warehouse will soon be trumped by a 111,500-square-foot operation from Cultivation Technologies Inc. in Irvine. Located on a six-acre plot of land that was once a wrecking yard, the megacampus broke ground in June.

Gavin Kogan of Grupo Flor is betting his refurbished Dutch greenhouses on Californians accepting marijuana as just another crop—like lettuce. Photo by PFW Consulting.

But what is the impact on the environment when usage changes from relatively light demands on water and power services to high-tech cultivation? Cultivation Technologies Inc. boasts an energy-efficient campus that relies on features such as LED grow lights. Most cities and counties across the state regulate energy use as a condition of permitting. As for water, a single marijuana plant consumes on average six gallons per day: Multiply that by the tens of thousands of plants per facility. (The cultivator Dan Grace of Dark Heart Nursery explains that growers will generally plant from one half to one plant per square foot of canopy, depending on the utilization of a given warehouse.)

Officials of Mission Springs Water District, which serves Desert Hot Springs and the Coachella Valley, worry that a booming industry will put a strain on their water infrastructure. The water is there—sourced from the Mission Creek Subbasin aquifer—but there may not be the means to deliver it. Under the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act and overseen by the Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation, growers will be required in 2018 to account for their sources and consumption. State law SB 837, drafted during California’s recent drought, is unique compared to other states’ regulations for its emphasis on water conservation and environmental impact. The law addresses the effects of unregulated outdoor grow sites (mostly in Northern California), among which are the diversions of streams or creeks that have damaged fish and wildlife habitats.

Mourad Gabriel, the executive director and cofounder of the Integral Ecology Research Center (IERC), has seen firsthand the devastating effects of trespass growing on state, federal, and tribal lands. He regularly works with law enforcement to find and eradicate a small fraction of some 350 illegal sites annually discovered on public lands. He explains that the U.S. Forest Service, Region 5, in Northern California is particularly attractive to the drug trafficking organizations. The area is the size of Connecticut and is monitored by one or two law enforcement officers. Nationwide, most illicit growing activity occurs in California. In 2016, according to a U.S. Forest Service agent, Stephen Frick, 1.5 million marijuana plants were seized on national forest land in the state. Seizures elsewhere in the country totaled only a few more hundred thousand. “Free land. Free water. No regulation. No taxes,” he says. “With a $10,000 to $30,000 investment, you get a couple million dollars in profit. It’s a great investment,” Gabriel says.

Gabriel and his team track water and soil contamination caused by illegal marijuana crops and damage wrought on protected landscapes and wildlife ecosystems. Trespass growers hike into sites (some just a mile off a road, others five miles into the wilderness), packing in plants and equipment. They clear native vegetation and use irrigation hoses to divert water. Whereas medical marijuana growers have strict regulations over the use of pesticides, illegal operations have no such restrictions. Gabriel regularly finds trash and open containers of herbicides, rodenticides, and pesticides scattered across grow plots deep in the woods. The pesticides and rodenticides leach into the ground and pollute waterways. Animals eat the chemicals and then the poison travels through the food chain. “Deer and elk also eat marijuana plants—they are browsing sites with chemicals that are banned for use in the United States and Canada because of human health risks,” he explains. “We find certain chemicals that the EPA says only last two to four weeks. We see them lasting three to four years.”

The IERC has limited money and muscle to eradicate and remediate sites. The remoteness of these grow plots and the threat of armed growers mean that trash must be cleared out on foot or by helicopter in a single day. As a result, on the 30 to 60 sites the team cleans annually, only a tiny percentage of the natural environment is able to be restored. Gabriel wants to bring more attention to the damage to the environment. He sees these illegal grows as a violation of the public’s will. “We are not talking private lands. This isn’t the war on drugs,” he stresses. “Our public lands are being utilized for private gain. You can’t grow corn, tomatoes, strawberries, or marijuana on public land.”

Pesticide-laden trespass grows on U.S. Forest Service land threaten natural habitats and damage the environment. The IERC is on a mission to eradicate them. Photo by the IERC.

Although some proponents argue otherwise, Gabriel is skeptical that Proposition 64 will produce a decline in trespass growing. Harvests are generally not produced for medical dispensaries. Rather they find their way across state lines for black market sales and consumption. Meanwhile, farther down the coast, Monterey County government officials are interested in bringing rogue cultivators into the fold. They offered incentives for growers to come forward and become legal by August 2017. Those who obtained permits would get amnesty, and those who didn’t would face law enforcement.

California’s Central Coast is a longtime agricultural region. Row after row of lettuces and strawberries blankets the Pacific bluffs. Although the region’s temperate climate would be great for growing weed outdoors, both the cities in the area and the county ban outdoor cultivation. Plasha Fielding Will, a political consultant and founder of the Monterey County Cannabis Industry Association, says that officials wanted to ensure that Salinas Valley would remain the lettuce capital of the world. They worried that the more lucrative marijuana crop would take over. Other fears included odors, security, and criminality—all issues that fall under what Gavin Kogan, an attorney, entrepreneur, and founder of Grupo Flor, calls “cannabigotry.” Area regulations encourage marijuana cultivators to restore existing Dutch greenhouses that previously had been used for cut flower production. They’d been shuttered as a result of the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement of 2012, which has bolstered flower exports from Colombia to help the country free itself from the cocaine trade.

One of the most interesting by-products of the green rush along the Central Coast is cultural. For generations, Japanese and Filipino families operated these old Dutch greenhouses, but as the cut flower business was undercut by imports, their businesses closed. As the cannabis industry beckons, some are benefiting by selling their properties, while others are getting involved in production. Kogan looks to these farmers for their skills in scaling a business, knowledge of agricultural processes, and ability to reduce labor costs. “I’m excited about this cross-cultural evolution…bringing expertise with cut flowers and combining it with cannabis cultivation,” he says.

So far, the Salinas Valley’s rolling landscape seems unchanged by a booming industry. Yet inside those refurbished greenhouses, high-tech growing practices are at work. “Greenhouse cannabis cultivation is really new,” says Kogan, whose self-described “ecology” of companies under the Grupo Flor umbrella includes property management, cultivation, edibles production, and dispensaries. “It’s not common because it is hard to hide it. With passage of the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act and adult use, people are more comfortable stepping out into full view in the economy.” That visibility, though, comes with rules and costs that can be frustrating to growers used to the freedoms of the underground. Legal cultivation comes with building permits, fire permits, business licenses, and taxes. And while Grupo Flor boasts 2.6 million square feet of properties and operations in permitted zones, security concerns with the Salinas Valley community requires that eight-foot-high fencing wrap its holdings. Cultivators favor chain link with green side striping through the links—an identifying tip for those driving through the area.

Kogan bridles a bit at the need for this kind of constructed opacity, which is paired with security guards and closed-circuit television cameras. It harks back to the highly opaque dealings of illegal practices. He’d rather see transparency both in physical space and permitting processes. This past June, Grupo Flor was the first marijuana company to participate in the Forbes AgTech Summit in Salinas alongside local producers such as Taylor Farms (salad greens and lettuce) and Driscoll’s (strawberries). He hopes that people will eventually see marijuana simply as an agricultural crop, albeit a lucrative one.

Years before Dan Grace founded Dark Heart Nursery in 2007 with his partner, Sara Ubelhart, he was an activist and spent time in Kentucky working in community gardens. His earliest cannabis grows were the efforts of an informed hobbyist. Today, Grace runs his nursery out of a 20,000-square-foot warehouse, a former food processing plant. Dark Heart specializes in developing premium clones for growers in Northern California. They entice with fantastically evocative names: Romulan Grapefruit, Sour Diesel, Gorilla Glue #4. Their industrial building, however, blends into its East Oakland environs—the city’s “green zone,” a designated area for permitted cannabis cultivation. But warehouses are ill suited for agriculture. Humidity is a problem; air-conditioning is a problem. And cooling systems just add to already heavy energy loads. “Indoors, you have to control the whole world,” Grace says.

Oakland is considered a leader in permitting marijuana. In 2004, it became the first city to give permits to dispensaries, a move that seemed unthinkable at the time. “It was the Bush years. John Ashcroft was attorney general,” says Oakland Councilmember at Large Rebecca Kaplan. Today, the Trump administration is echoing the sentiment of those days. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has threatened to crack down on states that allow medical and recreational use. Although 60 percent of Americans live in an area that permits some legal use, Sessions plans to target marijuana providers.

“I was involved in this ‘wild experiment’ from the very beginning, when everyone said we were nuts. I asserted that what is causing crime is not the marijuana, it’s the prohibition. Just like the Mafia and alcohol prohibition,” Kaplan says. She hopes that permitting cultivation will put an end to jerry-rigged electrical wiring and other unsafe warehouse conditions. Still, rules go beyond simply governing the grow facilities’ odor mitigation or environmental impact. Cultivators are also asked to submit a community beautification plan that details “specific steps your business will take to reduce illegal dumping, littering, graffiti, and blight and promote beautification of the adjacent community.”

For Grace, permitting has allowed cultivators to stop hiding. “We introduced ourselves to our neighbors and invited them in for tours,” he recalls. “We found a sense of community. Here in Oakland, we have plenty of shared problems like crime and vandalism in the neighborhood. It took a lot of courage to do that back then. You were always worried you were going to run into a stick-in-the-mud neighbor who would call up the drug enforcement agency.”

But Oakland’s openness has created a rush on the limited number of existing spaces and parcels where cultivators can set up shop. Real estate prices have more than tripled for green zone warehouses. “There’s a mismatch on supply and demand in certain areas,” Grace says. Concerns remain that better funded entrepreneurs will shut out local business, especially in historically African American neighborhoods. This spring, the city council approved an equity permit program for cannabis businesses. It aims to prioritize issuing permits to people most affected by the war on drugs as well as residents who were arrested and convicted of cannabis crimes in Oakland over the past 20 years. “Look at the history of the war on marijuana. It’s a war on black people,” Kaplan says. “Racism is fundamentally intertwined in the system. [With legalization], it would be more unjust if we excluded them from the chance to profit.”

As 2018 approaches, the cannabis landscape in California promises a host of social, economic, and environmental complexities. Legalization is unlikely to solve cultivation’s impact on habitat in Northern California. Special Agent Frick has seen only steep and steady increases in illegal activity as the state loosens its laws. And it’s hard to predict whether it will bring equity to hard-hit Oakland communities. It does, however, seem to provide new opportunities for industry in areas that need revitalization. Home grower Ed Rosenthal offers some philosophical advice to an uncertain future. Of growing marijuana, he says, “You know that life is fragile. The plants die in a season.”

Mimi Zeiger is a critic and curator based in Los Angeles. She was recently selected as a cocurator of the United States Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

BY BRETT ANDERSON / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY

Disparate but urgent efforts to address sea-level rise in the Virginia Tidewater, one of the country’s most important strategic centers, are striving to keep up with visible realities.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The first question that sprang to Ann C. Phillips’s mind soon after she moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in 2006 was, “Why, when it rains, does the whole place submerge?”

She wasn’t referring only to dramatic weather events, although Phillips, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, landed in Norfolk during a bumper crop of those: Norfolk saw more major coastal storms and hurricanes in the 2000s than in the four previous decades combined, according to the city government.

Harder to fathom were the floods caused by light rains and “blue sky floods” triggered by lunar tides. Tidal flooding affects low-lying areas of Norfolk nine times per year on average.

These more regular floods were unlike anything Phillips experienced growing up in Annapolis, Maryland. They’re an alarmingly routine part of life in Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads area of Virginia, and dangerous, too, even if they’re not the stuff of Weather Channel viewer bonanzas.

“If you have a doctor’s appointment,” Phillips said, “you can’t get down the street. That’s a problem.”

It’s one of many problems, big and small, that floods cause around Hampton Roads, the name of a channel linking three rivers with the Chesapeake Bay as well as the coastal community that is home to 1.7 million residents and a dense collection of cities and towns, including Newport News, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, and Norfolk, Virginia’s second-largest city.

The area, striped by rivers and creeks, is literally surrounded by water. Its coastal location is magnetic: Hampton Roads is home to the world’s largest naval base and the East Coast’s third-largest port, as well as NASA’s Langley Research Center, Langley Air Force Base, and a crazy quilt of government agency outposts.

A green infrastructure retrofit along Knitting Mill Creek in Norfolk. Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Since retiring from the navy in 2014, Phillips has devoted significant energy to understanding the granular irritations of the persistent floods as well as the macro consequences of the crisis behind the floods: sea-level rise.

She recently enrolled in the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification program, designed to bring landscape professionals up to speed on the Hampton Roads watershed. It’s part of an ongoing education that has aided Phillips’s efforts to restore the wetlands in her Norfolk neighborhood along Wayne Creek, which runs past a collapsing bulkhead in her backyard.

Phillips had already taken a leadership role in bringing together the region’s sundry municipalities to collaborate in the fight against sea-level rise. And she serves on the advisory board of the Center for Climate and Security, a high-level, nonpartisan policy institute focused on the existential threats climate change poses to the country and its defense.

Phillips tidily represents the wide-ranging if still largely informal effort to fortify Hampton Roads before it’s too late.

“It helps being able to tell the story from the military level down to the grassroots level,” Phillips said. Her diverse volunteer work portfolio puts her in front of audiences from all walks of life. And when she speaks to them, she invariably circles back to Hampton Roads’ considerable assets.

“When I rattle off all these facts and figures, people say, ‘I had no idea there were so many people there; I had no idea there was a port there; I had no idea there was so much military there,’” Phillips said of the response she receives from military, government, and citizen audiences. “The goal is to inform people about just how much is at risk here.”

Map by Dolly Holmes.

If more people understood what was at risk, the thinking goes, then more people would be alarmed to know that Hampton Roads is one of a handful of American communities most vulnerable to sea-level rise.

Hampton Roads was developed without much thought given to paving over native grasslands and wetlands or filling in waterways. It is widely believed that the floods caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, a sprawling metropolis that grew in a similar manner, were more severe given the absence of these naturally pervious surfaces, which act like giant sponges during heavy rain.

But the root of the problem in Hampton Roads has to do with the land and the water going in the wrong directions. Much of the land in the low-elevation community is subsiding, while ocean circulation patterns have caused Hampton Roads to experience above-average sea-level rise. Relative sea-level rise takes into account both of these factors.

“When it comes to relative sea-level rise, we’re second only to New Orleans,” said David Imburgia, the environmental and sustainability manager with the City of Hampton.

Absent a headline-grabbing weather event like Hurricane Katrina (or, more recently, Harvey, Irma, or Maria), Hampton Roads’ concerned citizens and civic leaders are left to point to nuisance flooding as evidence that the area faces grave dangers—dangers that will only grow graver if the community is numb to the warning signs.

“Mom and Dad come riding bikes down here, like it’s completely normal to ride in a foot of saltwater,” said Larry Atkinson, a professor of oceanography at Old Dominion University (ODU). We were driving down a street last April in Larchmont–Edgewater, a Norfolk neighborhood, on a tour of the city’s flood-prone, subsidence-scarred areas.

Carol Considine, an ODU engineering technology professor coguiding the tour, said many of Norfolk’s neighborhoods were built atop creek beds. “They’re the ones having problems.”

Atkinson pointed to a sailboat in the distance on the Lafayette River. “There used to be a spit of land that went out that far,” he said. “There’s nothing there now.”

Atkinson, Considine, Imburgia, and Phillips are players in a large-scale effort to address sea-level rise in Hampton Roads by any means available—and, in the process, cut through the denial to chart a path toward sustainable living. The effort is diffuse and still embryonic, but it’s also sincere, with many interrelated projects on the way to producing groundbreaking results.

On Fort Monroe, a decommissioned military installation in Hampton, off the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula, Glenn Oder, FASLA, a landscape architect and the executive director of the Fort Monroe Authority, has had to balance the need for innovation with the design limitations baked into the fort’s designation as a National Historic Landmark District. One innovation has been to turn the moat around the original fort into what Oder calls “a man-made retention basin.”

Stone groins, built after Hurricane Isabel in 2003, created a fan-shaped beach that breaks up waves before they hit a seawall. “It’s not going to solve sea-level rise,” Oder said, “but it’s great protection.”

ODU, thanks to the efforts of Atkinson, Considine, and others, has positioned itself in a leadership role, specifically through its Resilience Collaborative, a facilitator of cross disciplinary research and education in climate change and sea-level rise. ODU was central to the application process that last year brought more than $120 million in grant money from the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC), funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rockefeller Foundation, to aid in the fight against rising seas in Norfolk.

Image courtesy of Waggonner & Ball.

The area had already been named one of four urban coastal areas at the center of another Rockefeller-funded initiative called Structures of Coastal Resilience. The project, created in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, studied and then proposed urban designs for the chosen areas, which also included Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island; Jamaica Bay in New York; and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Such efforts productively shape the anxiety emanating from citizens, who are starting to raise questions similar to those of Phillips.

“What’s really starting to irk people is the frequency with which this stuff is happening,” said Terry O’Neill, the City of Hampton’s director of community development. “Floods used to happen two to three times a year. Now it’s 10 times a year. That frequency is starting to raise people’s antennae that there’s something happening here.”

O’Neill’s team, which includes Imburgia, a climate scientist by training, is working to implement public projects that both generate revenue and alleviate persistent flooding.

I visited the sites of two early-stage initiatives in the city of Hampton, one a proposed linear park along Newmarket Creek, the other a modification to an existing waterfront park in Phoebus, a historic district in downtown Hampton. Both are being designed by Waggonner & Ball Architects, a New Orleans firm, and are animated by ideas generated during the Dutch Dialogues, a workshop held in 2015 with the goal of applying integrated water management expertise from the Netherlands to Hampton Roads.

Waggonner & Ball principal David Waggonner conceived the first Dutch Dialogues in New Orleans with Dale Morris, a senior economic adviser with the Royal Netherlands Embassy. It was a series of symposia and charrettes held from 2008 to 2010 that focused on water management, infrastructure, and landscape design. The result is a citywide “water plan” that emphasizes the importance of natural drainage systems, not just the constructed ones.

“To make water the primary element is the big change, and the Dutch were who really taught us that,” Waggonner explained in an interview at his Garden District office in New Orleans. “They said, ‘If you don’t have a water system, you don’t have a foundation.’ Here, we just had an engineering system.”

The broad concept of “living with water,” as opposed to repelling it, was one that Hampton Roads officials asked Waggonner and Morris to help them implement in Virginia.

“The Dutch are good at this,” Imburgia said. “They are not land rich like we are, so every stitch of land has to have multiple reasons for why it is the way it is. That’s one of the lessons we try to take from them.”

Construction of the Newmarket Creek project didn’t begin until late summer and fall, but O’Neill and his team shared the rationale for their decisions in a PowerPoint presentation and in visits to two points along the waterway: one at an existing promenade next to Hampton Coliseum, and another in a wooded area across a small lake from the arena.

Donald Whipple, the chief city planner with the City of Hampton, studied landscape architecture at Virginia Tech before getting his master’s degree in urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia. Standing in the shadow of the coliseum, he explained that a bike lane from a heavily traveled bridge in the distance would be routed through the promenade, which is shaded by trees but sits in the midst of roadways and parking lots.

Interpretive signage underscoring the coliseum’s historic significance—the band Phish loves the venue, long ago dubbing it the “Mothership”—will line a path to the edge of the lake, where town houses abut a wooded area surrounding the creek.

A house gets a lift in Myrtle Park. Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy.

“A lot of our community doesn’t realize the creek area over here even exists,” Whipple explained. We pushed through the brush to the edge of the creek. The area around the creek is largely ungroomed. The team’s goal, here and elsewhere along the planned Newmarket Creek park, is to accentuate the value of the natural environment currently unmoored from the community around it.

Across from the coliseum, the plan calls for running the trail through a linear park filled with native grasses and other plants, the deep root systems of which allow the land to hold more water. This in turn relieves pressure on the creek, a critical artery for both tidewater and storm runoff, which in turn reduces flooding. And the park will recast the creek as an urban amenity, filled with kayaks and paddleboards.

“One of the takeaways from the Dutch Dialogues was to layer on these public benefits,” O’Neill explained. “We want to enhance the real estate around [the creek]. Instead of an ugly ditch with some water, it becomes a place with environmental value, with recreational value. We have to pay for this stuff somehow. And by making this a much more attractive place to live, the value of the property on the water will probably go up, too.”

Mason Andrews knows what it’s like to live with water. The associate professor in Hampton University’s Department of Architecture grew up in Norfolk and moved into the city’s Hague neighborhood in 1999. Her Queen Anne style house, built in 1901, overlooks a creek, also called the Hague, in an area that has become notorious for recurrent flooding.

“That was on a day when we didn’t have a storm,” Andrews said, after handing me a photograph of kayakers paddling down Mowbray Arch, the street outside her house.

Andrews was enjoying an early evening bourbon next to her unlit marble fireplace last summer, along with Mujde Erten-Unal, an associate professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at ODU. Since 2014, the professors have been working together with their students to develop resilience adaptation plans for Norfolk neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to flooding and sea-level rise.

With support from Wetlands Watch, a statewide nonprofit organization that focuses on wetland conservation, the students started in Chesterfield Heights, a low- to moderate-income, largely African American neighborhood along the Elizabeth River. “I teach at an HBCU [Historically Black Colleges and Universities], and part of our department’s mission is to serve underserved communities,” Andrews explained. “This was not an area the city was looking to spend a lot of money on.”

The students interviewed Chesterfield Heights residents about how the floods affected their properties and then brainstormed ideas. Their goal was to design low-cost adaptations that wouldn’t disrupt what the residents regarded as the community’s essential character.

“We looked at raising (the houses) and ran away from that,” Andrews said, pointing out that the Heights has a strong “porch culture.” “That’s where the life of the community happens. When you raise those porches six feet higher, that puts the kibosh on porch culture.”

One of Erten-Unal’s students found a record of a soil boring from a public works stormwater project that indicated more water could be held underground, which, coupled with the discovery of the remains of brick streets, got them thinking about using the land as an asset.

“Any time you can get groundwater down is good,” Andrews said, echoing a key tenet the Dutch emphasized in New Orleans and Hampton Roads: that pumping water out of the ground is actually two errors disguised as a flood-control solution, as it causes subsidence while eliminating the benefit land provides as a kind of natural catch basin.

And Chesterfield Heights, with its outdated drainage system and flat topography, needs all of the help it can get. “The stormwater lines are actually acting as conduits for tidewater, backing up into the neighborhood,” Andrews said.

The team recommended a network of solutions, including bioretention cells, cisterns, living shorelines, a raised road, and a manual gate that would keep rainwater in wetlands during high tides. Some Norfolk city officials attended the students’ final presentation, in May of 2015. “Lightbulbs went off,” Andrews said.

The students’ work became the basis for Norfolk’s entry into the Hampton Roads Dutch Dialogues, which began that June. And student design ideas made it onto the proposal, drafted the same summer, that helped secure a grant of more than $120 million for Virginia from the HUD/Rockefeller resilience competition.

Image courtesy of Waggonner & Ball.

When I visited David Waggonner at his office in July, he and his staff were working on the beginning stages of a water management project, funded by the NDRC, that they’re designing for Chesterfield Heights, which is part of the larger Ohio Creek Watershed Project. Ramiro Diaz, an architectural designer, planner, and photographer at Waggonner & Ball, described the broader strategy to “slow” stormwater at higher elevations, using some of the same tools described by Andrews, as a way to mitigate flooding in low-lying areas.

“When the tide is high, there is nowhere for the water to go, because the catch basins are full already with seawater,” he said.

Diaz then cued up a graphic on a large computer monitor of Haynes Creek Stormwater Park, an area that is currently, in Waggonner’s words, “a scrubby wetland that people don’t even know is there because it’s all overgrown.” Waggonner & Ball’s plan calls for turning the area into a park that can hold large quantities of water during storms and high tides, an approach that underscores Waggonner’s belief that the community benefits when hydrology is emphasized over hydraulics.

“We want to minimize levees and minimize pumping,” Waggonner said. “Levees require maintenance; levees induce pumping; pumping induces subsidence.  None of those things are things you’d seek, to interrupt the natural system.”

SCAPE Landscape Architecture is partnering with Waggonner & Ball on the Chesterfield Heights project, which is being led by Arcadis, the design and engineering consultancy. Pippa Brashear, ASLA, SCAPE’s director of planning and resilience, said the park will work together with other solutions, including raised roadways, to create an integrated flood protection system that will help make the neighborhood “not just flood protected but resilient.”

SCAPE’s particular role in the larger Ohio Creek Watershed Project, Brashear explained, is to become expert in the area’s natural systems. “How much water is moving? How much water do we need to store? How does that work with the historic stream channels that are there?”

Andrews and Erten-Unal, for their part, have directed their students’ attention to other Norfolk neighborhoods. They’re particularly proud to have fostered communication between budding engineers and architects, something Andrews believes will be enhanced even more if her wish is realized to bring a landscape architect onto Hampton’s faculty.

“That’s the mediating field between architecture and engineering,” Andrews said, referring to landscape architecture.

A goal of many of the government-funded resiliency projects I visited last spring and summer in Hampton Roads is to set examples that citizens can follow on private property. Regionally unique expertise and deep community engagement are both required for that goal to be realized. The new Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification program aims to address these knowledge deficiencies by training both professionals and nonprofessionals in landscape practices specifically applicable to Hampton Roads.

“We wanted to come up with a certification that brought everyone up to an understanding of sustainable landscape practices,” explained Shereen Hughes, a landscape designer instrumental in developing the program for a consortium of ecological nonprofits and the University of Maryland Extension. Hughes, who is also an assistant director of Wetlands Watch, said the certification is meant to benefit landscape architects and designers as well as horticulturists and grounds maintenance employees.

Wetlands Watch has been trying to motivate private citizens with waterfront property to replace bulkheads with “soft” shorelines and to get all property owners to join in the effort to slow down runoff.

“The whole idea is to try and capture as much runoff [as possible] from all impervious surfaces on a site, including the roof and the pavement,” she said. The certification program “will train people to do that.”

Ann Stokes, ASLA, is designing living shorelines for waterfront properties and is redesigning a park to retain stormwater. Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Ann P. Stokes, ASLA, principal of Ann P. Stokes Landscape Architects in Norfolk, signed up for the certification program last year, even though she’s a licensed landscape architect who grew up in the area.

“I’m interested in what direction the thinking is moving in,” Stokes said. “How do we deal with erosion control along shorelines and flood mitigation today, and how are we going to deal with it in the future?”

I met Stokes in Ghent Square, a shaded park with a semipublic swimming pool at the center of a neighborhood built in the 1970s, before flooding was a chronic problem. She had recently received a contract to redesign the park to help the surrounding neighborhood better absorb runoff.

As we walked along a street of tightly packed houses with a deficit of naturally pervious surfaces, Stokes pointed to a shallow, narrow gutter on the ground. “Almost all of the roof water from all these houses goes into this gutter and overwhelms the system,” she said. “It floods here all the time.”

For many residents who live along the many tidal rivers and creeks in Hampton Roads, a crisis greater than flooding is erosion. This was evident on the properties of two other Stokes clients. The first we visited was a two-story colonial on the Lafayette River. The property ended at a crumbling bulkhead where, on one stretch of shoreline, Stokes had created a sill with a riprap revetment made of granite.

“When the waves come in, the force of the waves is broken by the sill,” Stokes said. Native marsh grasses serve as an additional buffer between the water and the lawn.

On another stretch of shoreline, she’d installed what look like concrete blocks made of crushed oyster shells. As she described how she expected oyster beds to form around the blocks, providing protection similar to the sill while also filtering pollutants from the water, Stokes noticed a badly eroded wetland on the other side of the river.

“That marsh is half the size it was 10 years ago,” she said.

On another client’s property, Stokes planted a thick layer of Spartina and marsh marigold, abetted by coir logs made of coconut husks, inserted to combat river erosion that had already cost the owner a sizable chunk of his lawn.

As we drove to and from the job sites, Stokes, who grew up in Norfolk, became increasingly animated by the potential trouble she spotted around her: the hard surfaces, the eroding marsh, the crumbling seawalls, the houses built too close to the water’s edge. It reminded me of something she told me in an earlier conversation. “I would love it if more landscape architects were here,” she said. “There’s a lot going on.”

Brett Anderson is the restaurant critic and a features writer at Nola.com/The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

Landslide 2017

FROM THE DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

In a time of great upheaval for the United States, it is hard to keep track of the many risks to our national landscapes. Even our nationally recognized and federally protected sites are under threat from privatization or lax oversight, making them vulnerable to destructive practices that place monetary gain over equitable enjoyment of parkland. Open Season on Open Space, this year’s Landslide program from the Cultural Landscape Foundation, minces no words on this subject, calling out municipalities, states, and the federal government for undermining a century’s worth of progress for our public lands, parks, and national monuments.

The reclamation of urban parks for future development is a slippery slope. Appropriating parkland for a presidential library could be considered of exceptional merit. But once such land has been taken from Chicago’s Jackson Park, it could set a precedent for future development or change the criteria for what is considered exceptional and therefore worthy of erasing park space.

Landslide considers the monetization of open space and weakening of park equity as the biggest threats to Jackson Park. These, along with detrimental effects of shadows, resource extraction, and the devaluation of cultural lifeways, make up Landslide’s five central themes. And it is the last two that loom greatest over the Antiquities Act of 1906, an act pivotal in the protection of federally owned lands now under siege by the country’s current administration.

The threat to our open space may not necessarily be from land use. With recent rezoning of the neighborhood surrounding Greenacre Park in New York, the possibility of perpetual shadow could damage precious park space in an area almost completely dominated by hardscape and high-rises. Although the selected open spaces only begin to account for the landscapes in danger of erasure, they work to remind us of the long road ahead in the preservation and maintenance of America’s cultural landscapes for generations to come.

Bears Ears National Monument, Blanding, Utah, designated December 28, 2016. Photo © Josh Ewing, courtesy Friends of Cedar Mesa.

Bears Ears National Monument is one of 27 national monuments protected by the Antiquities Act of 1906 that has come under scrutiny by the current administration. The Department of the Interior claimed that these monuments were designated without adequate public outreach. This could allow for the rescinding of protection or redrawing of boundaries, potentially opening the sites to mining and drilling.

Fort Negley Park, Nashville, Tennessee, 1941, Works Progress Administration project. Photo © Gary Layda.

Nashville’s only remaining Civil War-era fort, Works Progress Administration amenities, and the foundations of an African American neighborhood developed after the Civil War all make up the rich historical fabric of Fort Negley Park. A now-abandoned stadium and parking lot built in the late 1970s were recently bid out for mixed-use development, despite the city’s promises that this space would return to parkland.

James River, Jamestown, Virginia. Photo by Barrett Doherty.

Sanctuary Woods, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, established in 1880, supervised by Moses White. Photo © Eddee Daniel.

 

 

Once a part of the Milwaukee County Asylum for the Insane grounds (the last building was demolished in 1994), Sanctuary Woods has recently come under threat from a proposed multifamily residential development and a linear scenic parkway that would cut through the middle of the site.

Boston Common, Boston, 1910–1913, Olmsted Brothers; 1920s, Arthur Shurcliff. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

 

 

One of Boston’s most notable open spaces and a preamble to the city’s park system, Boston Common has served as a place of respite for more than a century. In July 2017, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Barker signed an exemption to the city’s 1990 shadow law, allowing for a proposed 700-foot tower near the park. If built, the building would cast a significant shadow over the park for 264 days of the year.

State House Grounds, Providence, Rhode Island, 1904, Manning Brothers; 1913, Brinley and Holbrook. Photo © Kaity Ryan.

A new transportation hub proposal could seize land from the Rhode Island State House Grounds and park. It’s happened there before, and could very well again. With current state regulations, special approval would be needed for this mixed-use project, opening the way for potential future development.

 

 

Greenacre Park, New York, 1971, Sasaki, Dawson, and Demay. Photo courtesy of the Greenacre Foundation.

 

 

Opening just a few years after neighboring Paley Park in Manhattan, Greenacre Park makes up part of only 2 percent of green space in the neighborhood. Recent rezoning could lead to construction of taller buildings in the area, throwing the light-sensitive honey locusts and other plantings into shade.

Jackson Park, Chicago, 1871, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Photo © Steven Vance.

 

Audubon Park, New Orleans, 1898, Olmsted Brothers. Photo by Jeff Katz.

 

 

Audubon Park and City Park in New Orleans face an increased risk as slices have been carved out of them since the 1970s for clubhouses, golf courses, and other private development. While some proposed projects in these parks have been axed, a few still remain as a threat to the open, naturalistic setting.

Landscape Architecture Magazine is an official media sponsor of the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s Open Season on Open Space. For a complete description of each theme and project, go to www.tclf.org.

As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.

Click above for a full PDF of the translated text with English text available below.

BY ZACH MORTICE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY

FROM THE DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

New Yorkers avoid Times Square, and Chicagoans stay away from Navy Pier. It’s an ironclad rule. The public spaces that are most popular are there to attract tourists. Locals don’t go there.

In Chicago, going to Navy Pier had been something like a grudging civic responsibility you accept when you have out-of-town guests. It’s always been the most meta of Chicago’s architectural landmarks—essentially a large viewing platform, at more than half a mile long, for the city’s epic skyline, the finest way to see it all without a boat. But best to keep your eyes on the horizon, and not look at the motley collection of cotton candy vendors and garish signs that crowded the waterfront.

But today Navy Pier is looking and acting more like an authentic part of the city, for locals and tourists alike. A renovation by James Corner Field Operations has turned it from a tourist mall to a designed art walk. Cleared of consumerist refuse, South Dock (its main pedestrian corridor) is a refined stroll through an updated waterfront, framed by new performance spaces and an uproarious park.

Inside the pier’s halls, shoppers still weave among tchotchkes emblazoned with Chicago sports logos, and the airy Crystal Gardens atrium has more than a few plastic plants. But outside it’s a radically different place.

It’s clear from the additional green space and careful editing that this is the first time in the pier’s 101-year history that it’s considered itself a landscape first. Navy Pier—the crazy tourist trap, the 3,300-foot expanse that slides out into Lake Michigan like a cash register drawer opening—has grown up, and found a new civic vitality.

With lusher plantings and a more unified material and formal palette, the renovation of Navy Pier allows consideration of the site as a landscape above all. Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy for Navy Pier, Inc., and James Corner Field Operations.

Throughout its history Navy Pier has been a dock for freight and passenger ships and held a hospital, a prison for draft dodgers, and a university. George H. W. Bush learned how to fly there, and GIs taking classes dubbed it “Harvard on the Rocks.”

When Chicago was the Shenzhen of the early 20th century, the idea of a pier that served as both a public promenade and shipping infrastructure seemed so vital that it couldn’t just arise from one mind. Plans by the urban planner Daniel Burnham and the Chicago shipping magnate James A. Pugh both pitched proposals to combine commerce and culture on the pier, a key balance that has characterized its development ever since. Upon Burnham’s death in 1912, the city hired Charles Sumner Frost to design two massive freight warehouses in the center of the pier and more refined, classically proportioned buildings at its foot and head.

The pier was requisitioned for the navy’s use in World War II, and after the war many veterans stuck around to take classes at the branch campus of the University of Illinois. By the time the university moved to the mainland in 1965, convention activity had been funneled to the city’s main convention center, and a drop in shipping traffic made Navy Pier something of an old appendage. Its dilapidated headhouse was the exclamation point on six blocks of blight reaching into the lake. And its fate wasn’t far off from the city around it.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, Chicago bled money and people. Ten percent of its populace left between 1970 and 1980. In 1992, there were more than 900 murders. These dire trends forced leaders to ask: Could the city of Chicago itself support Navy Pier? And if not, who else could? A 1989 study by the Urban Land Institute hit upon a solution. Navy Pier would become a flamboyant “festival marketplace” to lure people to visit and spend their money on amusements.

Image © James Corner Field Operations, courtesy Navy Pier, Inc.

But again, the conflict between public space and commercial revenue dominated the run-up to the pier’s next iteration. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rhetoric that pier boosters used was centered on a parklike vision of the place. In 1986, the Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp wanted a pier for “strollers, joggers, bicyclists, picnickers, fishermen, and other lovers of simple pier pleasures.” Echoing Burnham’s ambitions, Mayor Harold Washington advocated for “total public use.”

That’s not what happened. As James M. Smith’s “Public Rhetoric, Private Development, and Urban Government in the Postindustrial City” (a 2005 University of Illinois at Chicago paper about the Navy Pier) detailed, Washington’s vision was subsumed by detractors who thought the only way to pay for the pier would be by installing more commercial programming. The Tribune urged Washington to drop his “dewy-eyed” vision, while “the plan’s critics saw it as a utopian ideal that would neither generate revenue for the city nor draw visitors,” Smith writes.

This festival marketplace method of keeping central cities afloat by restoring legacy infrastructure was gaining traction across the nation, as architecture firms such as Benjamin Thompson and Associates (BTA) applied it to Baltimore’s Harborplace and the South Street Seaport in New York. These developments had obvious merits. “The festival marketplace idea, even though it’s easily mocked today as being tacky and commercial, made a lot of sense in the ’80s in terms of how people were using cities and how they understood cities at that time,” says James Corner, ASLA. They could provide new money and energy for struggling cities. But because they focused on tourists, they didn’t offer much investment in the neighborhood infrastructure that Chicagoans used every day.

And when the new Navy Pier broke ground in 1992, it was with a plan by BTA, and its local partners VOA Associates, who left the pure civic focus of Mayor Washington behind. The exposition hall generated revenue by gobbling up much of the planned park space, and a boardwalk that would get people closer to the water was tossed out as carnival rides piled up on the pier’s roof, according to the Chicago Tribune. The initial budget for the pier was $92 million for one million square feet (though it eventually cost $200 million). That meant many of the landscape elements that would engender a parklike atmosphere were eliminated, says the architect Rick Fawell, who worked at BTA and then VOA as the project progressed. “There was always a desire to create as much landscaped public space as possible,” he says. “Like a lot of projects, the landscape got short shrift.”

The pier reopened in 1995, with millions in corporate sponsorships. The Tribune praised the renovation as “a bazaar of specialty shops, restaurants, art galleries, and museums.” But it was a visual cacophony with “too little to do, and too much going on,” as Chicago Magazine’s Whet Moser put it. Its beer gardens, outdoor cafés, and pushcarts, wrote the Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, lured visitors with “the sense of being on an urban street, albeit one that is squeaky clean and unthreatening.” The pier was a terrarium of simulated city life, not all that different from the suburban malls helping to drain Chicago of its tax base.

The Wave Wall stairs act as a social space as well as a visual centerpiece. Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy for Navy Pier, Inc., and James Corner Field Operations.

Given the pier’s setting, Fawell thought its success was assured. All he had to do was set up programming that would support people’s natural attraction to water. “From day one, I told Ben Thompson, ‘Think of this as the common man’s boat.’”

Fawell was right. It drew 9.3 million people in 2016, and had dwarfed the attendance of downtown Chicago’s other civic front yard, Millennium Park, until that year. So why the urgency to renovate after only 20 years and a record of consistent success? Steve Haemmerle, Navy Pier’s executive vice president of design and construction, says he wanted the pier to chart a new course from a position of strength, and that 20 years is a long time in the life of any blockbuster amenity. “Public places are living, breathing things, and in order to remain relevant throughout time, they need to adapt and be flexible,” he says.

In Chicago and elsewhere today, there are many amenity-rich neighborhoods catering effectively to the young professionals that cities crave; they aren’t interested in the novelty of urban simulacra because they have the real thing outside their doorstep. So to draw in more locals and a wider range of age and income groups, the pier’s managers looked toward offering new social activity in exactingly designed landscape environments.

“Landscape architecture was not seen as as much of an agent of revitalization as architecture,” says Mimi Hoang of nArchitects, a member of the Field Operations design team. “And I think that’s an amazing thing that’s happened in the last 15 to 20 years.”

The plan is the product of careful decluttering as much as it’s a showcase for new space. Before Field Operations’s plan, the South Dock promenade was crammed with poles, kiosks, stages, carts, and ramps. Pavilions were hokey, gable-roofed affairs, and decorative entrance gates were fire engine red. The carnival often made it hard to see the lake.

The pier’s leadership wanted less: a narrower palette of materials, signage, and color. “Our initial approach to the project was to strip this away and simplify the space,” says Field Operations principal Sarah Weidner Astheimer, ASLA.

South Dock is the glue that holds the pier together. It’s an intensely linear experience by the designer who defined the urban restoration art walk at the High Line in New York. This path is framed by an allée of trees: a red maple cultivar near the entrance and a sycamore cultivar with brilliant white bark in the middle. Along the way, sharp, asymmetrical planters as well as benches and deck furniture in rich, red ipe are ideal for a contemplative gaze at the water, drink in hand.

The new centerpiece is the Wave Wall, by Hoang’s nArchitects. Its two parametric steel ribbons converge at a wide stair that frames the famous Navy Pier Ferris wheel, crafting a perfect spot for selfies. The multilayered lighting here apes the county fair midway in a way that’s familiar to the old Navy Pier, though now it’s straightened and abstracted into topographic lines of light. The uplighting on the trees and the planting beds with goldenrods and grasses on the upper level amusement park temper the carnival atmosphere and soften the space.

Commercial vendors on the dock are cleverly consolidated. A series of pavilions (designed by nArchitects) runs the length of the promenade, which supports high ceilings with two stout legs that each house a vendor. On the underside of these flat roofs are reflective panels woven together a bit like a pattern of interlocking teeth, which give the surface texture. They reflect views of the lake if you face south, and views of pedestrians if you face north. It’s an entirely new depth of inquiry into materials, structure, and setting than was here before. “We wanted to collapse the views of the boat activity coming in on the water with views of people walking on the promenade,” Hoang says.

“It’s less about trying to create a representation of Chicago and more to do with just creating a place that Chicagoans can get a kick out of, and feel that it’s an authentic part of their city,” Corner says. Today, that means less commercial emphasis. “It’s more about social interaction,” Haemmerle says.

But in terms of raw square footage, there’s no less commercial space. This consolidation only makes it seem so. “If there’s the illusion of less,” Astheimer says, “that’s sort of what we were going for.”

It’s a return to the Burnham dictum that the lakefront should be “forever open, clear, and free.” But the gravity with which Chicagoans regard Burnham’s edict has spawned new lakeside landscapes that have irrevocably improved downtown Chicago’s suite of parks since Navy Pier’s last reinvestment. Millennium Park and the Chicago Riverwalk already offer large plots of high-quality public space with top-shelf design in the area. Did Navy Pier’s renaissance come too late?

Astheimer says she’s not concerned about too much of a good thing. If anything, these forerunners prepared Chicago for this Navy Pier. Chicagoans are “already believers in design,” she says.

But because Navy Pier is a train and a bus ride away for most Chicagoans, unlike Millennium Park, an extra hurdle it has to deal with is transit links that lead to a welcoming front door. For that, there’s Polk Bros. Park and its circular water feature by Fluidity Design Consultants. From the outset, this water feature puts Navy Pier’s emphasis on engaging and interactive social spaces. It’s 100 feet in circumference, outlined by a set of 3-D modeled concrete berms worth scrambling over, with 147 water jets that create parabolic arcs that expand and contract. These concentric arcs are nearly architectural expressions themselves: tunnels that are the perfect size for children to run through in cloaks of mist emitted from the fountain’s center.

Closer to the water, a two-sided amphitheater provides informal performance venues. Paths lead from these venues to the pier, a contrast to ruler-crisp South Dock. They are planted with native flora such as milkweed and asters. “As it grows in, there’s going to be a color gradient, from yellow to purple plantings,” Astheimer says.

On the top amusement park level, plant beds help soften the space. Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy for Navy Pier, Inc., and James Corner Field Operations.

Now that Navy Pier has settled on a coherent design identity, it can answer some questions it had largely avoided—namely, is Navy Pier built for today or tomorrow?

There’s an arty, curated vibe (easily recognizable from Corner’s High Line, and any other infrastructure turnaround that cities now build their brands on) that had been totally absent. And the pier is nothing if not consistent. It’s awash in parallelograms: Benches, bike racks, and planters are shaped like sharp and squashed rectangles. There are functional reasons for this. It’s derived from the herringbone pavers along South Dock, and also creates the illusion of more slender-looking geometry in a way that reinforces the linear nature of the experience, with plenty of asymmetry. But it calls attention to itself in a way that’s undeniably contemporary, bordering on trendy. The endless subway tiles and Edison bulbs in the food hall (which neither nArchitects nor Field Operations designed) echo this. Even the food hall exhaust fan situated amid the theme park rides is an art object: a silvery, monolithic oval that pumps out French fry fumes. This clean and geometric presentation of landscape refers only to its own artifice.

The mix of new stuff and carnival ride nostalgia might take a while to persuade the natives it wants. On a warm August night, a Chicago native, Susan Cable, says she likes the added open space, but points to the Wave Wall that twists like melting taffy and says, “It’s too futuristic. It seems a little cold.”

To her, Navy Pier is a nostalgic place, a quality the pier—with its wild litany of past uses—has had little time for. Astheimer says her version of the pier could last as few as 25 years. And given its intense traffic and flexibility brought on by the decline of its industrial use, a “timeless” approach for a longer-lasting plan would likely be folly.

Corner’s landscape has moved the pier across a continuum of commerce to culture that addresses a fundamental landscape equity issue—that anything geared to commercial consumption is going to be inherently unequal. Today, that’s an issue public space is asked to combat.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @zachmortice.

Project Credits

Client Navy Pier, Inc., Chicago. Project Lead/Landscape Architect James Corner Field Operations, New York. Local Landscape Architect Terry Guen Design Associates, Chicago. Landscape Architect (Irrigation, Soils, Stormwater Cistern) Jeffrey L. Bruce & Company LLC, Kansas City, Missouri. Water Feature Consultant Fluidity Design Consultants, Los Angeles. Lighting Design L’Observatoire International, New York. Graphic Design Pentagram, New York. Architect nArchitects, Brooklyn, New York. Local Architect Gensler, Chicago. Sites® Consultant Re:Vision Architecture, Philadelphia. Structural Engineer (Phase 1) Buro Happold, Chicago. Structural Engineer (Phase 2) Thornton Tomasetti, Chicago. MEP Engineer Environmental Systems Design, Chicago. MEP and Civil Engineer (Phase 1) Primera, Chicago. Civil Engineer (Phase 2) Milhouse, Chicago. Transportation Engineer Kimley-Horn, Chicago. Geotechnical Engineer Wang Engineering, Chicago. Industrial Design Billings Jackson, New York. Project and Cost Management CCS, Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. Permit Coordination D’Escoto, Chicago.