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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

PETER WALKER

Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, the design of a lifetime

TRAUMA RELIEF The military’s therapeutic landscape

LIVING SIGNPOSTS Trail trees that once marked the way

RUTH SHELLHORN A neglected legacy in California

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

LAM 14 INSIDE 16 LAND MATTERS

FOREGROUND 22 NOW Long Island’s Jones Beach State Park gets an update; a green alleys take on Dubuque’s stormwater; silt from an old dam makes new habitats; some trees store water better than others; and more.

58 HEALTH

The Road to Evidence Can the Green Road, a woodland trail on the grounds of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, help to heal the wounds of war?

BY JEFF LINK

70 GOODS

Pave the Way Don’t overlook what goes underfoot.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

46 MATERIALS

The Right Path Decomposed granite was used in the restoration of Kenyon College’s beloved Middle Path— but there were a few bumps along the way.

BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

BY NEIL BUDZINSKI AND MATTHEW GIRARD

6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

“ YOU’RE NOT COPYING NATURE; YOU’RE REPRESENTING IT.” PETER WALKER, FASLA, P. 78

SPECIAL FEATURE 78 PETER WALKER’S POINT Peter Walker, FASLA, and PWP Landscape Architecture have transformed a runway-sized shipping terminal in Sydney into the Barangaroo Reserve, a lush cascade of terraces and open space that resurrects a headland erased long ago.

More than 50 pages of photos, drawings, and details show the park’s many interlocking features—such as the stepped foreshore, sinuous paths through dense gardens, and a colossal public interior space—lodged atop an epic array of site-hewn sandstone that connects directly back to the city.

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

THE BACK 138 SEARCHING FOR A SIGN Many of the bent trees thought to have once served as trail markers to indigenous peoples in North America have disappeared—as have just about all of the people who knew exactly how and why they came into being.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

150 BOOKS

Her California A review of Ruth Shellhorn by Kelly Comras.

BY SONJA DÜMPELMANN

180 ADVERTISER INDEX

107 BARANGAROO’S SANDSTONE 111 A HYPERLOCAL SOIL RECIPE 115 SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND PLANTS

181 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 192 BACKSTORY

The Art of War An exhibit in San Francisco’s Presidio examines the impact of conflict.

BY MIMI ZEIGER

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 7

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

EDITOR Bradford McKee / bmckee@asla.org

Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, by PWP Landscape Architecture with Johnson Pilton Walker, page 78.

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BACK ISSUES 888-999-ASLA (2752) Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 2016 ASLA. Subscriptions: $59/year; international: $99/year; students: $50/year; digital: $44.25/year; single copies: $7.

Landscape Architecture Magazine seeks to support a healthy planet through environmentally conscious production and distribution of the magazine. This is printed on FSC® certified paper using vegetable inks, co-mailing, and recyclable polywrap to protect the magazine from damage during distribution, significantly reducing the number of copies printed each month. The magazine is also available in digital format through www.asla.org/lam/zinio or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.

ASLA BOARD OF TRUSTEES PRESIDENT Vaughn B. Rinner, FASLA PRESIDENT-ELECT Gregory A. Miller, FASLA IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Chad D. Danos, FASLA VICE PRESIDENTS David M. Cutter, ASLA Robin L. Gyorgyfalvy, FASLA Wendy Miller, FASLA Thomas Mroz Jr., ASLA Michael S. Stanley, ASLA Vanessa Warren, ASLA EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Nancy C. Somerville, Honorary ASLA SECRETARY Curtis A. Millay, ASLA TREASURER Michael D. O’Brien TRUSTEES Aaron A. Allan, ASLA Brian E. Bainnson, ASLA W. Phillips Barlow, ASLA Robert D. Berg, ASLA Shannon Blakeman, ASLA Gary A. Brown, FASLA Perry Cardoza, ASLA Matthew O. Carlile, ASLA David H. Contag, ASLA Scott V. Emmelkamp, ASLA William T. Eubanks III, FASLA Melissa M. Evans, ASLA David V. Ferris Jr., ASLA Robert E. Ford, ASLA David Gorden, ASLA David A. Harris, ASLA Lucy B. Joyce, ASLA Jennifer Judge, ASLA Ron M. Kagawa, ASLA Roger J. Kennedy, ASLA Mark M. Kimerer, ASLA Joel N. Kurokawa, ASLA Brian J. LaHaie, ASLA Lucille C. Lanier, FASLA Curtis LaPierre, ASLA Dalton M. LaVoie, ASLA Robert Loftis, ASLA Jeanne M. Lukenda, ASLA Timothy W. Maloney, ASLA Eugenia M. Martin, FASLA Timothy W. May, ASLA Bradley McCauley, ASLA Douglas C. McCord, ASLA Ann Milovsoroff, FASLA Jon M. Milstead, ASLA Cleve Larry Mizell, ASLA Dennis R. Nola, ASLA April Philips, FASLA Jeff Pugh, ASLA John D. Roters, ASLA John P. Royster, FASLA Stephen W. Schrader Jr., ASLA Adrian L. Smith, ASLA Susanne Smith Meyer, ASLA Ellen C. Stewart, ASLA Mark A. Steyaert Jr., ASLA Adam A. Supplee, ASLA John A. Swintosky, ASLA Nicholas Tufaro, ASLA LAF REPRESENTATIVES Barbara L. Deutsch, FASLA Kona A. Gray, ASLA NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Carlos Flores, Associate ASLA NATIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Joni Emmons, Student ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Kay Williams, FASLA

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CONTRIBUTORS SONJA DÜMPELMANN (“Her California,” page 150) is a landscape historian and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. You can reach her at sduempelmann@gsd.harvard.edu.

“The account of Ruth Shellhorn’s life and work is important for us today because women’s work and contributions in the field are still underrepresented, neglected, overlooked, and undervalued.”

GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA, (“Peter Walker’s

Point,” page 78) is a landscape architect and freelance writer based in Canberra, Australia. You can reach her at gweneth. leigh@gmail.com.

“Barangaroo Reserve is the kind of project that comes along once a generation, where a colossal location, a demanding dream, and an ambitious team result in the triumph of one of Sydney’s most monumental landscapes.”

page 58) is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Fast Co.Exist, Keep Growing, Newcity, and other publications. You can reach him at jefflink537@gmail.com.

“If researchers from the U.S. military and the National Institutes of Health can show that contact with nature helps alleviate the symptoms of PTSD, the effects could be felt across the country and far into the future.”

GOT A STORY? At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know.

If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an area of interest you’d like to see covered, tell us! Send it to lam@asla.org.

Visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org.

Follow us on Twitter @landarchmag and on Facebook, www.facebook.com/ landscapearchitecturemagazine.

LAM is available in digital format through landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/ subscribe or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.

14 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

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LAM

LAND MATTERS

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WALLED CITIES I

n the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., many residents really dislike the idea of having new short-term housing for homeless people nearby. The residents of this zip code, 20016, are 85 percent white, overwhelmingly registered as Democrats, and have a median household income of $122,087.

Earlier this year, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed seven sites around the city for new shelters, putting them in all but one of eight wards to avoid concentrating homeless residents in any one ward. These shelters would replace the city’s dreadful and dangerous shelter now operating at the old D.C. General Hospital, where as many as 270 families live in a place you might call humane only because it has a roof. There has been local opposition to the mayor’s plan in every ward, but the complaints around the shelter proposed for Cleveland Park were simply absurd, passive-aggressive attempts to exclude nonaffluent newcomers. Of all the procedural or practical problems neighbors itemized around the shelter idea, there wasn’t a single one they seemed to feel like trying to solve. Shame on them.

The mayor’s shelter plan is struggling, as are attempts to create more housing—affordable housing, especially—in cities around the country. D.C.’s problems can seem peculiar because the city has its longtime height limit on buildings that applies across the board to keep the city low-rise. This regulation limits height but also, directly, housing supply, and where supply is low, housing prices rise. That problem has become especially acute as the city has added more than 100,000 people since 1998, when the population was about 565,000. Many other cities are seeing housing prices surge mainly because of zoning and other landuse policies. Housing prices and rents are rising to levels that are disproportionately high in the context of construction costs alone, which have not risen dramatically in the past 35 years. The rents in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have become all but unattainably high for many working families.

Bloomberg reported recently that Nashville home prices have risen 58 percent since 2013, and that a quarter of renters there pay rent that exceeds half their income. Economic sclerosis threatens cities where middle- and lower-income people can’t afford to thrive. A city can’t get by on great wealth alone.

In September, the White House weighed in directly on housing scarcity with a “tool kit” for local leaders to address the many

16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

barriers to affordable housing development in cities. The barriers are crocheted deeply into local development rules. They include mandatory minimums for off-street parking, inflexible historic preservation requirements, rules against converting residential properties, frankly discriminatory laws that don’t allow multifamily housing, and the velvet bigotry of better-fed residents who plainly can’t stand living near people unlike themselves. In Los Angeles, as the urban planner Gregory D. Morrow has written, the 1960s push toward “grassroots” influence over planning turned general municipal planning into 35 community plans “without any meaningful framework or plan to guide the city’s overall growth.” As a result, a city zoned in 1960 for 10 million people now is zoned for 4.3 million. Morrow calls it “planning by resistance,” whereby “communities with time, money, and resources (including social capital) can resist change while those unable to mobilize bear the burden of future growth.” That phenomenon is currently written in bright lights by the obnoxious Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. This ballot measure, scheduled for March 2017, will ask Los Angeles voters to restrict high-density development in the city and “preserve” its essential suburban form across more than 500 square miles, where an estimated 44,000 people are homeless and countless more struggle to pay rent.

There is a broad tendency in design circles to think of cities’ sustainability in inanimate terms of the hardware—the streets, the buildings, the piped-in comforts—available to a composite of an idealized citizenry. As a tonic to this thinking, development specialists convened last month in Quito, Ecuador, for Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. The purpose was to affirm a “vision of cities for all,” grounded in the aims of human rights, which are secondary at best in the deeply unequal cities of the world that are growing the fastest. Local boosters and designers get rather carried away these days by notions of the gizmo-rich digital city in the “sharing” economy, but, if you look hard, the important stuff could be shared much more than it is.

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FOREGROUND

KENYON COLLEGE

Decomposed granite deямБnes a sylvan path on campus, in MATERIALS, page 46.

FOREGROUND

/

NOW

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

RIGHT

Studio RHLA has proposed sweeps of grasses and perennials for a parterre at Jones Beach State Park.

BOTTOM

standing on the boardwalk at Jones Beach State Park in KEEPING UP JONES I ’mWantagh, New York, with Faye Harwell, FASLA, a codirector of AN ICONIC ROBERT MOSES-DESIGNED PARK ON LONG ISLAND GETS A RESILIENT RETHINKING.

BY JANE MARGOLIES

Rhodeside & Harwell. Our backs to the Atlantic, we look out over a flat expanse that used to be covered by shuffleboard, ping-pong, and tennis courts. Now it’s a mountain of broken-up concrete.

By next summer, this will be a rolling naturalistic setting, dotted with a rock-climbing wall, zip line, splash pool, and, yes, a couple of shuffleboard courts, too. It will be the most visible of the many changes taking place at Jones Beach in a $65 million project undertaken by the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation and guided by a report from Harwell’s firm.

Changes are needed. Built by the urban planning czar Robert Moses in 1929 as part of an unprecedented network of parkways and public parks, Jones Beach once was a six-and-a-halfmile-long marvel along the south shore of Long Island. Moses had used dredged sand to connect several small barrier islands, on which he and the landscape architect Clarence Coombs laid out the park using a formal Beaux-Arts plan. Revolving around a water tower and a pedestrian mall, the 2,400-acre park featured fanciful art deco buildings and manicured lawns bordered by clipped hedges. In keeping with Moses’s legendary attention to detail, nautical touches abounded, including drinking fountains shaped like buoys. Park employees wore sailor suits. The park was an enormous success.

22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

RENDERING BY STUDIO RHLA, TOP; COURTESY NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF PARKS, RECREATION, AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION, BOTTOM

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ABOVE

A diagram shows how floodwater could flow over the terrain, through game surfaces, and into an interdunal swale.

BELOW

A mile-long boardwalk defines the park’s central core, the focus of the revitalization plan.

/NOW

But by 2013 annual visitation had dropped from 14 million, at its peak, to six million. One of the buildings had burned down. Play areas were deteriorating and prone to flooding. And original lighting and benches had been lost, replaced by a mishmash of designs. Capping it all off was the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy.

The state’s highest priority was preservation of the site’s historic fabric, parks commissioner Rose Harvey says. But she and her agency acknowledged that Jones Beach needed to adapt—offering recreation and food options in sync with how people

play and eat today, and preparing for a future of rising seas and more frequent storms. When the state, in partnership with the Open Space Institute, an organization dedicated to protecting significant landscapes, issued an RFP for a consultant to prepare a revitalization plan for Jones Beach, Harwell, a New York native who’d grown up coming here with her family, vowed to win it. “To us, it wasn’t ‘Jones Beach State Park,’” she says. “It was just ‘the beach.’”

The resulting plan, released in spring 2014, focuses on the core of the park, the most actively used area along the mile-long boardwalk. Beyer Blinder Belle is designing a new East Mall building to replace the original that burned. The construction of the building will restore balance to the central portion of the boardwalk. The updated play area will flank it.

Harwell and I poked our heads inside the West Bathhouse, where restoration is nearly complete. “Crispy,” she said as we inspected the close-cut grass in front of the building. Rhodeside & Harwell’s New York offshoot, Studio RHLA, is currently completing designs for parterres here and elsewhere. Thomas Rainer, ASLA, a principal at the firm, wants to retain the historic framework but employ looser shrub borders and replace “frilly” annuals with mosaics of grasses and perennials—all able to withstand flooding and thrive without the armies of laborers that were at Moses’s disposal but don’t exist today.

The proposed sweeps of Indiangrass, pink muhly, goldenrods, and asters promise to add soft coloring and lushness to the landscape, just as the reinvented games area will introduce more adventurous types of recreation. Seeing how the old and new merge as the plan is realized will merit a return visit.

24 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

STUDIO RHLA, TOP; COURTESY NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF PARKS, RECREATION, AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION, BOTTOM

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Green Alley Project Bee Branch Watershed Limits Completed 2016 2024–2041

I

GREEN ALLEYS LEAD DUBUQUE’S PROGRESSIVE APPROACH TO STORMWATER.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

The intermittent devastation of the past 17 years has driven Dubuque to adopt a progressive stormwater strategy. It is retrofitting its floodprone alleys downtown, converting impervious asphalt to red brick-like porous paving. Whereas many cities have just a handful of completed green alleys, Dubuque,

ABOVE

An impervious asphalt alley in Dubuque in 2013.

RIGHT

The alley is one of more than 60 that have been converted to a permeable surface.

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

a historic and cultural center of 60,000 people just across the border from Wisconsin, has installed more than 50 of these green alleys in the past two years alone. Twentytwo more will be completed by the end of 2016.

Led by the city, the alleys are part of a larger flood mitigation project that encompasses the entire Bee Branch watershed, which, until a few years ago, most Dubuque residents would have had a hard time identifying on a map. Sometime in the early 1900s, the creek was buried in a limestone block culvert. A hundred years later, the city hired a team of engineers and landscape architects to daylight a mile-long portion of the waterway. “It was a creek, then it was turned into a pipe, and now it’s going to be a creek again,” says Abbie Moilien, a landscape architect and the project manager at Ken Saiki Design, which has worked on Bee Branch alongside Strand Associates and IIW P.C. since 2008.

N

work District and access to the outdoors for neighboring residents.

In 2014, the green alleys began appearing with increasing frequency.

Between 2008 and 2013, the city built just one alley per year. Then it began a $65 million renovation of the city’s wastewater treatment plant and, through an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and the Iowa Finance Authority, was able to use the $9.4 million in interest for additional retrofits.

Currently, the network of alleys— which reference the city’s ubiquitous red brick—can handle the first 1.25 inches of stormwater, Dienst says, reducing both the volume of the subsequent runoff and the amount of pollutants that eventually get flushed into the Mississippi. Already, neighbors have reported decreases in loLower Bee Branch, a 2,500-foot sec- calized flooding, and Dienst has tion bordered by a multiuse trail, been inundated with inquiries. was completed in 2011. Upper Bee “You may not think they’re sexy,” he Branch, which will feature construct- says, “but there are a lot of people in ed fish habitats and floodable public Dubuque who love them.” spaces, including an amphitheater, is currently under construction. It’s a TIMOTHY A. SCHULER, EDITOR OF NOW, CAN marquee project, expected to increase BE REACHED AT TIMOTHYASCHULER@GMAIL. investment in the city’s Historic Mill- COM AND ON TWITTER @TIMOTHY_SCHULER.

COURTESY CITY OF DUBUQUE

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n 1999, a tornado warning sent residents of Dubuque, Iowa, seeking shelter belowground, only to find their basements flooding.

“It was evacuate the tornado shelter or drown,” one resident reportedly told the local newspaper. Since then, Dubuque, a scenic midwestern city perched on the Iowa banks of the Mississippi River, has seen five more floods severe enough to warrant presidential disaster declarations.

“It got to a point where people who lived here said, ‘That’s enough,’” says Jon Dienst, a civil engineer who works for the city.

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A Â

RIGHT

The Carmel River and San Clemente Creek now ow as one channel through the old dam site, with constructed habitats designed by Rana Creek Design.

A serendipitous solution came in the form of an adjacent tributary, San Clemente Creek. Officials came up with a design that rerouted the river into the creek and used the original river channel to store the sediment. A new channel would be cut to connect the Carmel to the creek. Last year, after the dam came down and the new, combined stream began to flow over its white scars, Rana Creek Design, a local landscape architecture and ecological restoration firm, restored the filled-in riverbed. The firm made a mosaic of upland habitats, adding riparian vegetation and wetlands along the enlarged tributary and planting new riparian habitat along the new connector channel.

30 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

CALIFORNIA AMERICAN WATER

s nearly 200 dams near the end of their functional life spans in California, one of the big questions is what to do with the sediment that has built up behind them. Until 2015, the 94-year-old San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River was a case in point, having almost completely silted in with 2.5 million cubic yards of sediment. As plans to remove the dam were made, regulatory agencies sought to prevent the sediment from being released into the river, even over time, but trucking it offsite would have been prohibitively expensive and have its own environmental consequences.

FOREGROUND

/NOW

All of those habitats are designed for two VIPs, says John Wandke, a project manager and senior restoration ecologist at Rana Creek: the California red-legged frog, which has been extirpated from 70 percent of its range in the state, and steelhead trout, which were down to just a few hundred fish from an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 fish 250 years ago.

Both species are federally listed as threatened. “Before they had a reservoir,” Wandke says. “Now they have 50 acres of habitat.”

In the abandoned riverbed, the sediment was graded into hills and slopes, which are planted with oak woodland and scrub, with some elements of chaparral. Wandke personally collected all the acorns and seeds from within the Carmel River valley RIGHT or adjacent watersheds and develTrees that were oped the plant list based on which removed during the species would contribute to natural cutting of the connector succession. “We needed to have 70 channel were reused percent cover in five years [per state to provide habitat Department of Fish and Wildlife complexity in the floodplain. requirements],” he says.

32 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

N

Seth Gentzler, a vice president with AECOM and one of the hydraulic engineers who worked on the project, says the concepts developed here, including using an abandoned channel to store accumulated sediment, could be applied to future projects such as the Matilija Dam, farther down the coast. But the strategies used along the Carmel also depended greatly on topography. “Not many rivers,” he says, “have an adjacent creek valley to accommodate the rerouting of the river.”

RANA CREEK DESIGN, TOP; BRODIE HEGG, BOTTOM

More than 50 step pools were installed to help fish make their way upstream. White alder and three types of willow will provide shade and “create the massive root structures we need to create overhanging banks for the pools,” Wandke says.

Rana Creek planted the willows from live stakes and cuttings, which also stabilized the new banks, and added Juncus, vines, and California blackberry to get a quick understory going.

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INTERCEPTION!

WHEN IT COMES TO CAPTURING RAINFALL, NOT ALL TREES ARE EQUAL.

“T

rees are a strategy in the whole green infrastructure tool kit,” Greg McPherson says in his bright tenor over the phone, “but the science that underpins that is really in its infancy.” McPherson, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, is speaking from an outpost of the Pacific Southwest Research Station in Davis, California. He says although experts have known that surface storage—the amount of water temporarily stored on a tree’s leaves and branches—is dictated by a tree’s architecture and the physical characteristics of its leaves and stems, green infrastructure accounting tools often assume a surface water storage capacity of one millimeter, regardless of species.

RIGHT

Three of the species analyzed in the study (from top): holly oak, Canary Island pine, and Bradford pear.

The complexity of a tree’s leaf and stem surfaces affects its interception potential.

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

Using a rainfall simulator to test 20 tree species commonly found in Davis, McPherson and the water research scientist Qingfu Xiao found that some species can store nearly twice that amount while others store little more than half. In the experiment, which was published in the Journal of Environmental Quality this year, blue spruce (Picea pungens) held the most water, with a mean value of 1.81 mm. Crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) held the least, with a mean value of 0.59 mm. Although actual interception will vary by region,

foliation, the amount of rainfall, and the size of a tree’s canopy, generally speaking, the more complex a tree’s surfaces, the more rainfall it will trap.

The Chinese pistache, for instance, has rigid compound leaves and a rough stem and rachis. “The complexity of that surface is pretty high,” McPherson says. “As a result, you get a pretty efficient little storage device.”

Though small, these differences could be significant in stormwater management equations. If the average storm event produces a half inch of rainfall, a tenth of an inch—about what a blue spruce intercepts—is 20 percent of the volume for that area.

“That’s a meaningful number,” says James Urban, FASLA, a landscape architect and author who specializes in urban forests. “[But] our calculations for stormwater from the engineering community completely ignore this.” Urban says the study also highlights the need for better tree maintenance. “When we plant a tree, we need to do everything we can to make sure that tree will be a real replacement for the trees that are fading out,” he says. “That’s when the issue of water interception really takes on stature. When you’ve got a tree [whose canopy] is 50 feet in diameter, it becomes a huge factor.”

QINGFU XIAO

FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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BROWNFIELD REMEDIATION’S COLLABORATIVE NEW PARADIGM SETTLES IN.

BY KATHARINE LOGAN

TOP

NBBJ’s master plan for a waterfront brownfield site in Vancouver, Washington, is an example of redevelopment driven by market forces.

INSET

Industrial uses occupied much of the waterfront throughout the 20th century.

ike many other brownfields across the country—more than 450,000 of them, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—Vancouver, Washington’s moderately contaminated riverfront was never going to rise to the top of an environmental priority list. Fortytwo acres of former industrial lands on the Columbia River lay underused for almost two decades, with railroad tracks, a closed mill site, and a former shipping port separating the city from its riverfront. Beneath a cap of buildings and asphalt, possible soil contaminants from the site’s career in industry posed no immediate hazard, but any plan to redevelop the land would have to deal with them.

The cleanup and redevelopment now under way at Vancouver exemplify a new generation in brownfield remediation. After more than 40 years of environmental enforcement, “the worst of the worst have been cleaned up, and most cleanups are now being driven by market forces,” says James

36 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

Maul, president of Maul Foster & Alongi, environmental consultants to the Port of Vancouver. “We’re seeing a paradigm shift in which the development is the remedy.”

a range of carrots to entice remediation. “If we can give communities resources to help answer their questions, then we can foster redevelopment and start to empower change in those communities,” says Susan MoThe desirability of Vancouver’s rales, an EPA brownfield coordinator. brownfield location is typical; many brownfields occupy prime waterfront In Vancouver, an integrated planreal estate. For smaller communi- ning grant from Washington State’s ties, the impact of redevelopment can Department of Ecology kick-started be huge: revitalizing a community’s the community’s investigation of its identity, stimulating its economy, waterfront potential, and missionsaving green space from develop- over-margin thinking on the part of ment, and providing opportunities both the municipality and the port for community amenities, as well as authority has helped prioritize asresolving health and safety concerns pects that are of value to the comabout the site. But brownfields are munity, including civic spaces and notoriously uncertain things, and a seven-acre waterfront park. “We’re questions about hazards, liabilities, on a cusp,” Maul says. “In the precosts, and return can leave these op- vious century, factories, mills, and portunities lying in the ground. places where people took out the garbage were all part of the fabric In the new paradigm (new in brown- of the community. Now, as our ecofield years, that is), regulatory agen- nomic base and lifestyles shift, we’re cies recognize this tension. They’re repurposing [that] land for the next setting aside the big sticks of their century. Development is going to enforcement days and introducing drive a lot of cleanups.”

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

POSTGAME

REINVENTING AN OLYMPIC LANDSCAPE ONE SLICE AT A TIME.

LEFT

A play structure and volleyball court activate an underused space outside the Richmond Oval.

BOTTOM

During and after the 2010 Winter Olympics, the space was unprogrammed.

n August, while all eyes were on Brazil and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, residents of Richmond, British Columbia, were enjoying the latest addition to one of their own Olympic venues. (Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010.) Children clambered over what appeared to be a logjam while

men and women faced off in sand volleyball, cheered on by spectators in plastic Adirondack chairs. Designed by the landscape firm PWL Partnership and completed in 2015, this new urban beach and recreation area is an example of how the games continue to shape Vancouver and the surrounding communities, as well as how the facilities and their grounds are being incrementally reimagined.

The sand volleyball courts and naturalistic play structure (also built over sand) animate a 21,100-square-foot half-moon-shaped lawn area between the Richmond Oval, a massive timber and concrete structure that hosted speed skating in 2010, and the Fraser River, which separates the

40 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

city from Vancouver International Airport. Compared to the oval, which has been reconfigured for hockey, volleyball, and other sports and has become a popular venue for tournaments, the outdoor space was underused, despite being located directly alongside a popular riverfront trail, says Jamie Esko, Richmond’s manager of parks planning.

Guided by a series of community meetings, as well as a post-Olympics design brief, the city hoped to bring the energy and excitement of the oval’s athletics out into the public realm. PWL had recently completed a waterfront park in nearby New Westminster and had also designed many of the public spaces originally opened in conjunction with

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FOREGROUND

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the 2010 Winter Olympics. The city wanted something that would be respectful of PFS Studio’s existing landscape, including the famous red boardwalk that winds beneath a suspended sculpture by Janet Echelman and through a series of stormwater remediation ponds.

Complicating the redesign, which included new boulders, dune grasses, and additional boardwalks and cost just $250,000 (CAD), the semicircular lawn area was part of that stormwater system. Existing drain tile, as well as polystyrene block, which protects the subterranean parking garage in the case of a seismic event, dictated the placement of the volleyball nets.

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

“On a typical beach volleyball [court], you would put your posts anywhere, but these ones are permanently located,” says Margot Long, a principal at PWL. Compared to the cautionary tales offered by many other Olympic host cities, the experience in Vancouver has been largely positive, Esko says, especially for Richmond, which has been transformed from a bedroom community to a growing urban center. The area around the oval, constructed on the site of a former RV park built for the 1986 World Exposition, is rapidly being developed. “I just rode through there on my bike this morning, and it’s just a mad con-

struction zone everywhere,” she says.

As the area fills in, the outdoor recreation area will continue to evolve: Current plans include the conversion of a nearby building into a restaurant and café. Although this mini waterfront park, now known as the Olympic Riverside Plaza, has little of the grandeur of the architecture that it fronts, Esko and Long are as proud of it as they are of higher-profile projects. “Working with a client that really is committed to making a difference in their city and for their people, that’s a positive thing for us,” Long says. “It was a really tiny project, but for us, any project is an important one.”

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THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS NEW RESEARCH EXPLORES WHY BIORETENTION SOMETIMES FAILS.

B

ioretention is a way to manage stormwater and to scrub it clean, and in general, it is effective at both, especially when it comes to heavy metals and petroleum pollutants.

But as more cities invest in green infrastructure, researchers have been forced to examine whether or not rain gardens are performing when it comes to removing potentially harmful nutrients.

TOP AND RIGHT

A rain garden on Oahu uses a custom blend of native Hawaiian soils to limit nutrient export.

Several years ago, while at the University of Vermont’s Bioretention Laboratory, Amanda Cording began testing whether or not rain gardens were successful at removing nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen.

Using 30-square-foot test beds filled with a foot of a typical sand-compost mix, she measured the mass loads of nitrogen and phosphorus and found that the system resulted in an increase in nutrients rather than a decrease. In fact, the stormwater contributed just 5 percent of total phosphorus and 10 to 20 percent of total nitrogen. Contributing the

44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

most, she found, was the compost used in the planting media, which essentially functioned “like a teabag,” she says.

tom, high-calcium medium designed to increase phosphorus adsorption, tweaking the mix along the way to ensure proper drainage.

Scientists have been aware of this problem since at least 2007, when researchers at Utah State University identified troubling levels of phosphorus in the outflow of bioretention systems. In 2012, the city of Redmond, Washington, reported high levels of phosphorus, nitrates, and copper in the water leaving a rain garden constructed a year earlier.

That discovery became a catalyst for stormwater experts in Seattle, who began testing alternative soil blends in order to reduce nutrient exports.

“We have water quality criteria that we are not necessarily meeting,” says Shanti Colwell, the interim manager for the city’s green stormwater infrastructure program and one of the people leading the current research.

“If we have phosphorus-sensitive water, we don’t want to send effluent from these systems there.”

She and Colwell both are careful not to overstate the issue. Though nutrient pollution can contribute to harmful algal blooms, neither wants to scare cities away from bioretention.

Instead, Colwell says, as the technology evolves, “we’re trying to refine it for areas that need better removal of certain [pollutants].” She envisions site- or at least area-specific design standards in the future. “That’s all part of the work that we’re doing,” she says, “trying to identify sources that are cleaner so we’re not bringing in pollutants that we don’t want.”

Cording, now an affiliate faculty member at the University of Hawaii’s Water Resources Research Center and the Pacific director of EcoSolutions, an environmental consulting company, is experimenting with native Hawaiian soil blends. For a recent bioretention project on Oahu, she worked with Island Topsoil, a landscape consulting company, and the University of Hawaii to develop a cus-

AMANDA CORDING

FOREGROUND

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MATERIALS

THE RIGHT PATH

ABOVE

The southern end of Kenyon College’s Middle Path, one year after its renovation.

A FORENSIC APPROACH FOUND THE BEST DECOMPOSED GRANITE SOLUTION FOR KENYON COLLEGE.

BY NEIL BUDZINSKI AND MATTHEW GIRARD

D

ecomposed granite pavement (DG) is a textured and responsive paving material used on paths and plazas. Yet the quiet appearance of DG masks material and construction complexities that shape the outcome of the built work and belie what may appear to be a simple installation. In 2010, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), where we are senior associates, was hired to prepare a master plan for Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Over several years of our working with Kenyon to renovate its historic Middle Path, the challenges of this material were revealed and met through a program of design-phase

46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

mock-ups, manufacturer’s product development, and innovations in installation methods. We have learned several lessons regarding the product and the methods that change the way we specify and oversee the installation of this seemingly simple material.

Kenyon’s landscape is organized around Middle Path, a 3,600-footlong walk made from a local river stone. The material of Middle Path, cherished for its color, texture, looseness, and sound, was a large part of its charm, but also a significant contributor to its challenges. In fair weather, the existing path had

an active surface that shifted and crunched pleasingly underfoot. In foul weather, Middle Path became impassable, the river stone washing away to reveal potholes and soft, muddy spots that harbored puddles or ice depending on the season. The college recognized that the surface needed to be improved and made accessible in all types of weather and to all visitors, but few in the community could stomach the replacement of the historic material with a rigid pavement, such as exposed aggregate concrete. In the 2012 master plan for Kenyon College, MVVA recommended the renovation of Middle

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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A FAILED MOCK-UP OF DECOMPOSED GRANITE INVITED SKEPTICISM EARLY ON.

Path with DG pavement to address accessibility issues while preserving its feel and appearance.

ABOVE

Before renovation, puddles and muddy areas were common on the path, making travel difficult.

Replacing Kenyon’s Middle Path posed a problem that stabilized DG seems invented to solve. Unlike asphalt or concrete pavement, DG will not degrade over time. It does not fade, crumble, chip, crack, or stain. The dense surface releases a thin layer of aggregate that is tactile and audible underfoot and, with regular maintenance, the surface is consistent and endlessly repairable.

Replacing the river stone of Middle Path with DG provided continuity of texture and character while meeting the need for a firm surface. It was also possible to nearly replicate the hue of the existing stone, given the wide color range of native granites available.

48 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

To demonstrate these qualities to the campus community, a design-phase mock-up was undertaken during the summer of 2012. Two panels, each eight feet by 20 feet, were built to test the selection of a custom granite aggregate color blend. A third panel composed of regionally available crushed limestone was included to offer a lower-cost option. The work was performed by a single contractor over a two-day period. Thorough hydration throughout the DG profile is a key step in activating the stabilizer within the DG mix, and an early sign of trouble was the difficulty the contractor had in hydrating the mock-up panels with water.

The specification called for the DG to be wetted down after placement of every two-inch lift (before compaction), but the DG had become hydrophobic. Water would barely penetrate the surface before running

off. As a result, copious amounts of water were used and the panels took several weeks to firm up. They finally hardened off during the dry fall weather, but the freeze/thaw cycles of a mild winter made the paths soft and muddy, and the mock-ups were deemed to have failed, as their performance did not surpass that of the existing path. Intended in part to assuage the campus community about the forthcoming change to Middle Path, the failed mock-up fueled skepticism about the new material, and for some, the need for change in general.

We began the forensics, and the following factors were evaluated as possible contributors to the failure: Insufficient compaction of the subgrade or the base course: Density tests were performed and revealed compaction greater than 95 percent, an acceptable number. This was not a contributing factor.

Insufficient compaction of the DG: A water-filled sod roller was used.

This was approved by the manufacturer’s representative, but it was likely too light and was considered a contributing factor.

Insufficient activation of the stabilizer: The in situ DG resisted absorption of the water, prompting aggressive watering that may have caused the stabilizer to be washed out of the upper portion of the profile. This was considered a contributing factor.

MATTHEW GIRARD

Whereas the river stone had natural rounded edges and was clean-graded (i.e., without fines), DG is crushed, creating an angular stone with sharp edges that lock together when compacted. It includes a high percentage of fines to fill voids. DG can be installed as is, but a key component of the Kenyon project was the integration of a plant-based binding agent that reacts upon exposure to water to bond the aggregate together. Adding the “glue” makes this a stabilized DG. It remains somewhat permeable and regularly releases loose aggregate on the surface, but stays firm and dense.

FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS

RIGHT AND BELOW

A section drawing for the second round of mock-ups for Middle Path in 2013 (right).

Stabilizer application rates and aggregate gradation were evaluated in test panels (center). Hydration of the DG in situ was deemed unsuccessful in initial mock-ups in 2012 (bottom).

3 1

2 1 Kafka Kenyon Blend 3/8"—MVV spec. w/ EnviroCleen Stabilizer 2 Kafka Kenyon Blend 3/8"—MVV spec. w/ Organic Lock Stabilizer 3 Kafka Kenyon Blend 1/4"—Kafka spec. w/ Organic Lock Stabilizer

50 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

but they suspected that the problem lay with the stabilizer additive. To assist MVVA in developing a solution for the college, Kafka accelerated its testing of an alternate stabilizer manufactured by the Envirobond Insufficient drainage: The soil ad- company called Organic-Lock. Havjacent to the paths was compacted ing the manufacturer’s participation and did not drain well. This likely in testing and developing the stabicontributed to the failure. lized DG was critical to moving the process forward.

Generally poor installation technique: The stabilizer manufacturer claimed In the spring of 2013, Kafka Granite the installing contractor “just didn’t conducted its own trials at its facility, get it; some do, some don’t.” This making several test panels that varied claim may have provided us some the stabilizer type, quantity, and the solace, but was not actionable.

DG aggregate size. At the end of a two-week observation period, some During our investigation, we ex- panels were deemed successful. On amined past DG installations in the strength of this preliminary work, MVVA projects and contacted land- in the summer of 2013 two new test scape contractors who performed panels were installed at Kenyon Colthis work on other jobs with good lege using the new product. Each and bad results. We were unable to panel was installed by a different conpinpoint a consistent approach that tractor. The installation procedures would guarantee success, and there- of the two contractors were generally fore we had no obvious way forward. the same, but the increased participaThe inconsistent performance was tion of multiple parties fostered incorroborated by the aggregate manu- novations. The use of formwork, for facturer for the Kenyon mock-ups, example, was a direct outcome of this Kafka Granite in Wisconsin. Kafka process. The two panels held firm staff informed us that they knew through the difficult Ohio winter, of multiple failures, and that the and on the success of this demonstrafailures were not easily explainable, tion, the project proceeded.

MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES, INC. TOP; KAFKA GRANITE, CENTER; NEIL BUDZINSKI, BOTTOM

Insufficient stabilizer in the mix: A sample of leftover DG mix was lab tested by the stabilizer manufacturer and determined to meet the specification.

This was not a contributing factor.

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ABOVE

Preservation of the sugar maple allée was essential. Relatively few roots were disturbed during removal of the existing path.

RIGHT

A 10-inch-thick road base was installed in two lifts.

During the design-phase mock-ups and the subsequent installation of Phase I (10,500 square feet), Phase II (22,000 square feet), and Phase III (11,000 square feet), we learned the following lessons: The right stabilizer is critical: We now specify Envirobond OrganicLock as the stabilizer for all our DG installations. It is a Canadian company, but the mixing of the stabilizer into the aggregate is typically done at the aggregate supplier, which addresses concerns about buying American products and shipping the stabilizer long distances. Kafka Granite of Wisconsin and Read Custom Soils near Boston provide stabilized DG with Organic-Lock.

Prehydration needs to be done correctly: At Kenyon, the stabilized DG

52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

was prehydrated to 14 percent moisture content before it was spread, which is comparable to ambient conditions in much of the country (always check local conditions).

The mix will appear quite dry. The hydration was performed at Kenyon using a skid steer loader to turn over the material while it was being misted with water. The alternate “dry-soak” method of spreading the DG in two-inch lifts and then misting it with water in situ may not hydrate the aggregate thoroughly, or may excessively hydrate the top surface. Agitation of the media is required for a good blend, and this is hard to do for DG wetted in situ.

Contractors might think it is easier to spread the material dry and then hydrate, as it seems like fewer steps, but the Organic-Lock stabilizer repels water even more than the initial product.

Get the compaction right: A oneton roller (a Wacker Neuson RD 27) seems to hit the sweet spot for compaction of the DG. Heavier than that and the DG is pushed aside by the roller. A two-ton roller was periodically used at Kenyon, but had to be operated very slowly or “waves” were produced in the surface.

The use of formwork aids installation: At Kenyon, the contractor used two-by-six wood formwork to define the limit of the path. This gave a very clean edge and was useful for grade control as the DG was

NEIL BUDZINSKI

FOREGROUND

NEIL BUDZINSKI

leveled to the top of the formwork.

The formwork should be set roughly one-half inch above the desired grade to allow for the compaction of the material. The formwork should be removed as soon as possible, because having the formwork higher than the compacted DG will prevent water from draining off the surface.

When possible, have the manufacturer’s representative on site: Unless a contractor is very familiar with this installation, the DG manufacturer’s representative should be on site early in the installation. At Kenyon the representative played a significant role addressing questions of moisture content before compaction and repair techniques.

Well-designed drainage is a must: Good movement of water off and away from the DG is essential. A cross slope of 1.5 to 2 percent should be used, even when running slopes exceed these numbers. Low spots where water gathers adjacent to the DG should be avoided to allow water to shed beyond the path. Pay attention to micrograding at lawn edges so they are lower than the DG, because a thick lawn set high could trap water at the DG edge.

Work directly with the manufacturer on the mix ratio: Let the stabilizer manufacturer specify the mix ratio for stabilizer to aggregate. They will need a sample of the aggregate to do this. For Envirobond, expect to see 30 to 35 pounds of stabilizer per ton of aggregate. The key is that every stabilizer product is different; work directly with the manufacturer to find the best mix for a particular locale and condition.

Grain size affects bonding: Kafka Granite performed Kenyon’s mockups at its facility using 3/8-inch minus stone to get a coarser, grainier look, but based on these trials they observed that a quarter-inch maximum aggregate size bonded more firmly.

Minimize vehicles: Plows and trucks were driven over the mock-ups without incident during frozen months.

A truck could do some slight damage when the DG is saturated owing to wet conditions, as we’ve noted in the final installation.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Hydration of the DG was done in a separate area. Techniques borrowed from both concrete (formboards, hydrating, screeding) and asphalt placement (roller compaction) were used to install the DG. An electronic level verified that cross slopes extended into adjacent areas.

With Phase I and Phase II of Middle Path completed, we have had more than a year to observe the DG installations. The DG has held up well and the college is pleased with the results, but there are several postoccupancy comments to consider before specifying DG.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 53

FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS

the lower remains frozen, resulting in soft conditions. Also, though it was not an issue with the Kenyon project, DG near building entrances can track inside the building and damage floor finishes.

New LED lighting on 12-foot poles and custom black locust benches completed the renovation.

54 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

still be times when a perfect storm of significant precipitation coupled with impediments to drainage (such as snowbanks or frozen ground) will make mushy paths unavoidable.

The Kenyon grounds crew finds winter maintenance challenging.

Half-pipe PVC baffles or lifts are attached to plow blades to prevent gouging of the DG during snow removal, but the complaint is that this special blade leaves behind a thin layer of snow, which can lead to icy conditions, especially if students have already walked on and packed the snow. Spreading sand and gravel is not advisable because it is visually dissimilar to the DG surface. To address this, Kenyon keeps a stockpile of the original DG mix to use as winter grit, which has been effective but requires greater coordination and cost. Salting the DG is not recommended because the salt thaws the upper layers of DG while

Like all materials, DG has its challenges. It should never be represented as carefree in either installation or maintenance. Winter maintenance in temperate climates, for example, will always be a consideration. But its advantages are many, including the absence of distracting joints or color shifts and the rich experiential dimension in the sound of it underfoot. It is a unique material with a beguiling mix of casualness and sophistication that encourages a slightly slower pace, and it provides a special vantage from which people can appreciate their surroundings.

NEIL BUDZINSKI AND MATTHEW GIRARD ARE SENIOR ASSOCIATES AT MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES, INC.

NEIL BUDZINSKI

ABOVE

Even with shallow running slopes, erosion from heavy rain can occur anywhere water gets channeled.

This can occur at path edges if the adjacent grade prevents water from sheeting away. Kenyon uses a clay court broom/drag brush to regularly smooth these areas and redistribute DG. In very wet weather the path can be soft, but not muddy, underfoot; it will firm up again as it dries.

This has periodically been an issue at Kenyon. In the winter of 2015– 2016 they experienced a rapid, partial thaw coupled with heavy rains, which caused the top of the DG profile to become saturated while the lower portion remained frozen.

This created soft conditions on the path for a period of time. The situation remedied itself when the path dried out and then refroze. When the path stayed frozen, there were no problems. This issue reinforces the importance of proper slope for drainage, though there will likely

Climate and microclimate can also affect the performance of the material.

The DG installed under new trees (with small canopies) was exposed to full sunlight and firmed up more quickly than DG installed beneath the shade of the existing sugar maples.

The biggest difference is that the DG under the sugar maples feels less granular and has a whitish cast to it.

In general, the solar heat of a full-sun environment will result in DG that is easier to establish and maintain.

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FOREGROUND

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HEALTH

THE ROAD TO EVIDENCE THE MILITARY–MEDICAL COMPLEX IS LOOKING AT ENVIRONMENTAL APPROACHES TO TREATING TRAUMA.

BY JEFF LINK

his past summer, Fred Foote met me in front of Naval Support Activity Bethesda, the home of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. We set out for an early look at the Green Road, a half-mile path and a 1.7-acre woodland garden being built along the banks of a stream that winds through the sprawling campus.

ABOVE

The birch entry portal to the Green Road, a half-mile asphalt path on the base of Naval Support Activity Bethesda outside Washington, D.C.

sician on the hospital ship Comfort.

When the military decided in 2005 to move Walter Reed National Military Medical Center onto the naval campus to consolidate hospital operations, navy leadership recruited Foote, off duty at the time, to advise on new hospital construction. Part of the charge, which Foote took on under the banner of what he calls the Epidaurus Project, was to identify the Foote is a retired navy neurologist best ways to deliver patient-centered who is an adjunct assistant professor design and care. at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). He The Green Road Project, an Epidaualso has the title of scholar at an outfit rus Project initiative, is an attempt to in Baltimore called the Institute for marry holistic, or alternative, mediIntegrative Health. During the 2003 cine with a traditional approach to invasion of Iraq, he served as a phy- treat traumatic brain injury, post-

58 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other psychological conditions.

It signals an opening by the military to environmental therapies, for which hard science can be lacking, to address problems that medical science has shown to be stubborn to treat.

The Green Road, which opened in September, comprises a wooded garden and path meant as places of respite for service members and their families who live in the approximately 400 long-term housing units on the base. Between its two entry portals, the Green Road will trace a trail, accessible by wheelchair, through a woodland. But it is also a site from which researchers plan to gather data

LISA HELFERT

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/HEALTH

TOP

A visitor on a bench beside Stoney Creek.

INSET

Stoney Creek at daybreak.

on the effects of a natural with the root systems of the densely setting on brain health. gridded plantings, are helping to redraw and stabilize the water’s edge.

A longer trail follows “There is something about the rocks Stoney Creek diagonally and water together,” Foote said, as from the southwest to we paused at the shoreline to listen the northeastern border and observe. of the campus, linking residential units at the Fisher Houses and Sanc- You can already see the young sprouts tuary Hall. It is central to the navy’s of serviceberries, redbuds, American physical plan for the campus, which cranberries, and river birches comaims to improve walkability, make ing up in shadier areas. The built the grounds more accessible for works—a seven-foot-wide paved people on the base, and allow Walter path, dry-laid stone pavilions, and a Reed National Military Medical Cen- wooden bridge—sit humbly within ter and the USUHS to consolidate the natural environment. overlapping operations.

“We have reason to believe, and have At the gatehouse, an armed guard evidence to support, that if you bring waved us through. We parked at the a sick or injured person into a natusouthwest entrance to the Green ral environment it lowers stress and Road and went down a modest grade speeds up healing, and this is espeinto a canopy of beech, sycamore, cially true of the invisible wounds of hickory, and American holly. Within war brain injury and PTSD,” Foote a few hundred feet, the woods gave said. “This major research project, way to a sunlit glade looking onto with advanced math that we have Stoney Creek. Along the shoreline, developed, will demonstrate healing willow and dogwood saplings rose effects of nature, mathematically, for from coarse jute. Boulders, together probably the first time.”

60 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

It’s a bold claim. Studies have found that people who live near parks or green space have lower incidence of psychological illness than do city dwellers with limited access to green space. Yet, for the most part, says Esther Sternberg, the director of research at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (AzCIM) at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (and a co-investigator on the Green Road Project), such research has focused on isolated biomarkers, such as levels of the hormone cortisol in the blood, and favored selfreported subjective assessments over biological, quantitative ones. “Health benefits are generally not determined through hard biological measures.

Most is done by surveys,” Sternberg says. “Questionnaires are useful but less accurate and reliable than biological measures; they rely on individuals and memories. Our goal is to measure those, also, but to use quantitative measures of health outcomes.”

Sternberg’s published work focuses on the relationship between sweat biomarkers, such as cortisol and the neurotransmitter Neuropeptide Y, and the status of the immune and stress response systems. The Nano-Bio Manufacturing Consortium, a program of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, recently awarded AzCIM $200,000 for a project to assess

LISA HELFERT, TOP; ROBIN YASINOW, INSET

FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

/HEALTH 3

4

5

STON E Y C R E E K

THE GREEN ROAD 1 COMMUNAL PAVILION 2 COMMEMORATIVE PAVILION WITH WATER FEATURE

2

3 TKF BENCH WITH JOURNAL 4 COUNCIL RING

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different sweat collection methods and integrate these into real-time wearable devices (imagine militarygrade Fitbits and Apple Watches) for measuring stress biomarkers. “This kind of work is not easy. It requires enormous teams of engineers and chemists to process big data analytic systems,” Sternberg says.

BOTTOM RIGHT

A threshold bridge leads to hospital and residential facilities at Sanctuary Hall.

And biomarker analysis is expensive. A lack of funding has hampered earlier studies of nature’s potential healing effects, Foote says.

“If you want to make a new drug,

62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

it’s easy to get money for research.

If you want to measure the effects of nature, the money that flows into these types of research is much less.”

The projected $4 million cost of the Green Road Project is funded in part by $1.5 million from the private sector and a $1 million award from the TKF Foundation, a nonprofit run by the philanthropists Tom and Kitty Stoner that funds urban green space.

The project assembled a research team from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the USUHS, and

Herbert Benson, a director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mind Body Medicine Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, plans to oversee the project’s studies related to gene expression. Benson says that PTSD can alter the “on” or “off” signals of a person’s genes in a way that exposure to nature might correct.

“When the relaxation response is elicited, there is a decrease in the inflammatory response, leading to the stabilization of the immune system, stabilization of the energy metabolism of the body, and changes in insulin secretion,” he says.

CDM SMITH, TOP LEFT; LISA HELFERT, BOTTOM RIGHT

the University of Arizona. One team member, Patricia Deuster, is the principal investigator and director of the Department of Defense’s Consortium for Health and Military Performance.

Deuster says that initial investigations will compare the responses of 50 participants to traveling on two different routes across the military base: one through a high-traffic roadway, and the other along the Green Road.

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FOREGROUND

/HEALTH

RIGHT

Stoney Creek bank stabilization sketch.

BELOW

An arrangement of stones forms the Council Ring.

The prevalence of PTSD, which affects an estimated 8 percent of current and former service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Institute of Medicine brief, has increased significantly since the start of the two wars.

Though the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs invested some $3.3 billion in PTSD care for service members and veterans in 2012, the agencies lack clear standards and evaluation methods, and are only beginning to understand ways to treat it effectively.

different biological subgroups for PTSD and traumatic brain injury,” Foote says. “We need big data, a supercomputer that can analyze a big field of data that to a human looks random. Until we know the specific biological subtypes, it will be hard to say if nature helps.”

But that’s a long way off. For now, Foote says, research will focus on providing a whole body assessment of the stress response system using psycho-social-spiritual questionnaires, qualitative interviews, and regression analysis of stress biomarkers, such as hormone levels and autonomic nervous system activity.

The designs, Foote says, will include contributions from Kim Drake, ASLA, a project manager at CDM Smith in Boston; Jack Sullivan, FASLA, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park; David Kamp, FASLA, the president of the firm Dirtworks in New York; and Paul Alt, a principal at Alt Architecture + Research Associates in Chicago. They intend to leave the space largely rustic and undisturbed.

By contrast, another project, the Warrior and Family Support Center Ther“We need to determine what are the apeutic Garden at the Brooke Army clumps of patients that constitute Medical Center in San Antonio, is

64 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

JACK SULLIVAN, FASLA, TOP; LISA HELFERT, BOTTOM

The effects that natural settings may have on PTSD and traumatic brain injury are not well understood. A brief from the Institute of Medicine titled Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations defines PTSD as “a combination of mental health symptoms— such as reliving a traumatic event, avoiding trauma-associated stimuli, and experiencing mood swings and hyperarousal—that persist for at least 1 month and impair normal functioning.” Traumatic brain injury is also broad in its diagnostic picture, with symptoms including headaches, weakness in extremities, sleep disturbance, memory loss, inability to concentrate, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

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/HEALTH

FOREGROUND

LEFT

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more active. The 20,000-square-foot garden, designed by Brian Bainnson, ASLA, of Quatrefoil, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, features a parcourse, an amphitheater, a children’s playground, and a butterfly garden. Its constructed elements were created for both therapeutic and recreational purposes.

structure was primitive: There were no doors, no enclosures. As Foote observed, running his palms over the stacked stone, there is always “a wall at your back and clear lines of sight.”

The communal pavilion will have restrooms and a table that seats 10 people. The grading of the path carves “The Green Road is deliberately the out gently sloping access routes to opposite,” Foote says. “We’re not the water, laid with crushed stone building this garden to promote any and chipped wood. special agenda of medical therapy.

The only healing influence is the “These guys have been sitting in hosnatural elements themselves. We pital beds,” Drake says. “I remember, want to bring pure nature to bear on in one of our focus groups, a double PTSD, not in a highly constructed amputee with racing gloves and a landscape of medical treatment, but wheelchair with mountain bike tires, a deliberately blank canvas.” saying, ‘I want to get out and mow the lawn.’ These guys don’t want to The Green Road’s design was devel- be on an accessible path all the time. oped after planning meetings with They want to learn to get back to wounded veteran focus groups, NIH themselves, not be prisoners to their physicians, and Naval Facilities Engi- disabilities.” neering Command members. “You want to make sure anyone who en- The project’s aspiration, to meaters the space also sees a way out,” sure scientifically the healing effects Sullivan says. “You don’t want to of nature on PTSD and traumatic get the sense that you can’t turn and brain injury, faces obstacles. Of the walk away.” three metrics Foote has identified for research—biomarkers of the stress I got a better sense of what Sullivan response, analysis of stories and jourmeant as I stood on the flat, still- nals using natural language processearthen platform of the commemo- ing, and advanced genomics—only rative structure (which would be the first is fully funded. Foote says he paved in precast concrete), looking is looking for another $1 million for down at the stream and bridge. The further research.

JACK SULLIVAN, FASLA, TOP; LISA HELFERT, BOTTOM

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FOREGROUND

/HEALTH 24'-0"

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Then there’s the question of what can be demonstrated from an isolated study. A 2015 Stanford study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that people who walked for 90 minutes in a natural area of Stanford’s campus, rather than next to a multilane highway in Palo Alto, had less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with depression. But, as one researcher, Gregory Bratman, noted in the Stanford News, the result is far from conclusive.

“This finding is exciting because it demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation—something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better,” Bratman said.

ans into natural environments, they turn happy,” he says. “We bring different volunteer groups out to the woodland garden, clearing brush, taking vines off trees, and the veterans immediately perk up and start to sparkle. They’re having a happy Although data-driven science is at the day, and the suffering of PTSD gets center of the project, what is striking put aside.” at the Green Road site is how much the landscape seems to point toward JEFF LINK IS A GRADUATE OF THE IOWA WRITsomething beyond pure empiricism. ERS’ WORKSHOP. HIS WORK HAS APPEARED IN And, to Foote at least, intuition is a FAST CO.EXIST, KEEP GROWING, NEWCITY, AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS. powerful guide. “When we get veter-

TOP

Section through commemorative structure foundations and dry-stack stone wall.

A high-backed bench beneath the standing seam roof provides a sheltered place to sit.

68 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

JACK SULLIVAN, FASLA, TOP; LISA HELFERT, BOTTOM

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FOREGROUND

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GOODS

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FOREGROUND

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FEATURES

BARANGAROO RESERVE

An odyssey of materials and detailing by PWP Landscape Architecture, page 78.

BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY

78 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

PETER WALKER’S POINT THE BARANGAROO RESERVE TRANSFORMS SYDNEY HARBOUR’S OLD INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE.

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 79

W RIGHT

The Barangaroo Reserve site before construction began.

But what if we were to allow a landscape to break free from the confines of concrete curbs, smooth out its industrial wrinkles, and pluck off architectural blemishes in an effort to recapture a semblance of its younger, more picturesque self? Where injections of earth and rock serve as the Botox for an aging landscape, erasing the creases of human development in favor of a more natural topography. So begins the story of Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, Australia.

80 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

COURTESY JOHNSON PILTON WALKER

hen I was a child growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my understanding of landscape was one of changing purpose.

Cornfields were converted into housing subdivisions and office parks.

Old winding roads were straightened, thickened with extra lanes, and punctuated by traffic lights. It was the small discoveries—an arrowhead in the garden, a bullet lodged in a tree—that revealed the older stories of these fractured landscapes. The layers of roads, power lines, and strip malls made any trace of a site’s earlier history difficult to imagine.

2010

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 81

Barangaroo’s original headland evolved from being an important hunting and fishing area for the Aboriginal Cadigal people to becoming a hub for Sydney’s burgeoning shipping industry. Since the 1830s, successive development of the shoreline required land reclamation and the cutting back of the existing sandstone cliffs. However, as time passed, and the size of commercial ships grew, port facilities were focused elsewhere given the inability of the site to accommodate modern commercial ships. In 2003, the New South Wales government slated the area for redevelopment into parklands and commercial space; existing stevedoring companies were provided three years to relocate, leading to the site’s industrial demise by 2006.

RIGHT

The Barangaroo Reserve headland as completed in 2015.

Designed by Peter Walker, FASLA, of PWP Landscape Architecture, in association with the Australian design practice Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), Barangaroo Reserve is significant in how it knits an enormous piece of

82 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY

This new headland park, opened in August 2015, transformed 14 acres of a flat concrete shipping terminal into an approximate vision of Sydney’s Botany Bay circa 1788. It is the first stage of a $6 billion (AUD), 54-acre urban renewal development planned as a major extension of Sydney’s central business district to bring recreation, housing, shopping, and offices down to the water’s edge.

2015

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 83

RIGHT

Detail from an 1836 map showing the Millers Point headland in Sydney Harbour.

Keating has a reputation as one of Australia’s most cultured prime ministers. He is selfeducated in architecture, and has a passion for French Empire clocks and a euphoric appreciation of Gustav Mahler. However, his ability to craft words in ways that can both flog

84 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

↘

N

HISTORIC IMAGES/PUBLIC DOMAIN, TOP AND BOTTOM

neglected waterfront back into Sydney’s public realm. Standing along the generous outcrop of rocky foreshore, with the waves tickling your toes and fig trees framing the sky, you can almost imagine Captain Arthur Phillip sailing past on his way to establish Great Britain’s famous penal colony along Sydney’s modern shores. This vision is largely thanks to the cunning and uncompromising resolve of the project’s champion, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who left office in 1996, appointed himself the guardian of Sydney’s harbor, and battled his way toward Barangaroo’s delivery for more than a decade.

ABOVE

Major James Taylor’s panorama of Sydney Harbour dates from the early 1820s. Millers Point is the outcropping with two windmills at right center.

LEFT

Colonial-era wharves at Millers Point.

BELOW

HISTORIC IMAGES/PUBLIC DOMAIN

By the 1960s, the site was a busy container port.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 85

HAMILTON LUND /BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY

86 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

2015

BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, INSET

2012

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 87

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

BARANGAROO MASTER PLAN DETAIL

88 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

N

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 89

N

TOP LEFT

The natural angle of the local geological strike is visible in the shallows at Laings Point, near Sydney.

TOP RIGHT

Barangaroo’s tessellated sandstone blocks were oriented to match the angle of Sydney’s geological strike.

OPPOSITE

Downtown Sydney with the Barangaroo precinct shaded in red.

These areas had been largely inaccessible to the public.

tralia’s most feisty political warriors. When Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, was delivered a petition with the signatures of 11,000 concerned Sydney residents requesting an inquiry into Barangaroo’s development, she felt obligated to table the appeal in Parliament. In response, Keating ripped into her for bowing to “sandal-wearing, mueslichewing, bike-riding pedestrians without any idea of the metropolitan quality of the city or what Sydney would lose if Barangaroo were to fail.” When Keating refused to allow cruise ships to dock at Barangaroo, Carnival Australia’s executive chairman, Ann Sherry, told him: “Paul, the trouble with you is you don’t go on cruises.” To which he quickly replied, “Well, Ann, I don’t own a wheelchair.”

the job, and they weren’t. In 2008, Keating sent a letter to Morris Iemma, the premier of the New South Wales government, accompanied by a sketch drawn up by Keating himself, which stated the premier’s and the treasurer’s agreement to allow Keating to have political authority and provide the “broad guidance needed” for the design and delivery of the headland.

Keating’s resolve to shed the site’s industrial maritime heritage in favor of developing it as a natural domain and headland stirred the ire of many within the Sydney community. In 2011, the Australian Institute of Architects’ New South Wales Chapter put forward an alternative scheme they dubbed A Better Barangaroo, put together by a group of 57 independent architects and urban planners, which addressed several attributes of the 54-acre site—including a rethinking of Keating’s headland park. None of the critique fazed him. “Naturalism has a place in urban design; we don’t have to have parks which are squares, flat, or worse,” Keating says. “The whole profession was opposed to Barangaroo—the Institute of Architects in Sydney all signed up to oppose it. And they all now love it,” he chuckles. “I’ve taught them something about landscape—something they should have known.”

Like a terrier to a bone, Keating for years continued his pursuit of the headland by finessing his way from spectator to eventually becoming chairman of both the Public Domain and Design Review committees for the Barangaroo development. An international design ideas competition was arranged to ensure public consideration of the site, as many different agencies were vying to take ownership of it. However, there was never any guarantee that the winners of the design competition—the Sydney firms Hill Thalis, Paul Berkemeier Architect, and Jane Irwin Keating’s dogged pursuit of Barangaroo has Landscape Architecture—would be given been part of his broader ambition toward

90 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

↘

GOOGLE EARTH

→ and amuse has also made him one of Aus-

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

URBAN CONNECTIONS

N

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 91

2010

RIGHT

Hard edges and sharp angles: A long concrete slab dominated the Barangaroo site before construction.

OPPOSITE

Today a curving shoreline includes a new bay rimmed in local sandstone. The old slab is still faintly visible underwater, a ghost of the industrial past.

COURTESY JOHNSON PILTON WALKER, THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

2015

PETER WALKER SKETCH STONE PLAN

Peter Walker’s early sketch for sandstone design at Barangaroo Reserve.

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

ABOVE

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

BARANGAROO HEADLAND PARK STONE OUTCROP REFERENCE PLAN

RIGHT

Barangaroo Reserve sandstone drawing.

Most sandstone in the project was quarried and reused on site.

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ralistic headlands to emulate the way the harbor existed during European settlement.

At the center is Goat Island—also known as Memel, the aboriginal word for the pupil of the eye—which was the central place from which natives would canoe to the surrounding headlands of Ballast Point, Balls Head, and Barangaroo. “This was the intimate part of the harbor where the Aboriginal people lived,” Keating says. “For a city of five million people, to be able to recover that natural intimacy, which no other great city has, is a thing to do.”

TOP

Sandstone blocks— placed atop existing caissons—step down to the shoreline.

OPPOSITE, BOTTOM

Diagram of foreshore placement defines wet blocks, tidal blocks, and dry blocks.

Keating has been very aware of the negative impact that European settlement continues to wreak on Aboriginal peoples’ traditional way of life. During his administration in the 1990s, indigenous persons’ yearly income was half the national average, infant mortality was three times higher, and jails had 29 times more Aborigines than non-Aborigines in custody. These statistics have not lessened with time. Today, Australia’s indigenous populations have a life expectancy that’s a decade less than non-indigenous people; they represent only 2 percent of the population, yet compose more than a quarter (27 percent) of Australia’s prison population. Keating’s

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historic Redfern Park Speech, delivered in 1992, was a powerful reflection of the problems that modern society had inflicted on Australia’s indigenous people: It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol.

We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.

With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

When PWP and JPW were brought onto the project in 2010, Keating worked closely with the team members to ensure they understood the cultural and physical significance of the site. He took the design team onto his

LEND LEASE FORMERLY BAULDERSTONE

→ re-creating the constellation of Sydney’s natu-

LEND LEASE FORMERLY BAULDERSTONE

STONE FORESHORE GENERAL 3 D VIEW FROM NORTH

STONE FORESHORE BLOCK POSITION PLAN own boat for the better part of a day, looking at Barangaroo and the other headlands from the water. It was important to him that the team understood what had been lost at the site by comparing it to other headlands that were still intact, and he emphasized the need to reconnect Barangaroo back into the fabric of the city—all the way down to the water’s edge. Walker also understood Keating’s desire to create a design that didn’t focus on creating, as Walker says, “another big white building to make a statement about Aboriginal life.”

N

To fully understand what it was that the indigenous Australians once had—and what they had lost—required a monumental landscape intervention. So Walker set about to re-create the headland.

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LEND LEASE FORMERLY BAULDERSTONE

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RIGHT

Barangaroo’s foreshore promenade passes grassy “beach” areas that allow visitors access to the water.

M

Y FIRST VISIT TO THE SITE began early one Saturday during a morning full of intermittent rain, but this did not faze the many people who jogged, meandered, and even sang their way through the site (thank you, random mariachi band). I sat perched on one of the sandstone blocks along the foreshore and watched for hours, fascinated. There were painters and picnickers, clusters of mothers pushing strollers; there was a yoga group perched at the top of the headland in precarious positions, as well as occasional elderly visitors pulling themselves along with a walker or cane. Children accompanying their parents walked anywhere but on the path—most preferred to balance their steps along the meandering 1836 Wall (marking the original coastline of that year), while others darted off and scrambled over the rocks along the water’s edge. The site had been open for two months, and it was obvious how readily the public had embraced it.

I bemusedly watched a boy no older than five brandish a formidable plastic sword with one hand while another straightened his paper pirate’s hat. “No, Dad, you stand down here!” he shouted. The boy was insistent, perched atop a slab of sandstone along the upper edge of the foreshore. Hands raised in defeat, a weary-looking father stepped down to the lowest embankment of sandstone until

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

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HEADLAND PARK HERITAGE SEAWALL PLAN

OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE NOTCHES WHERE DAMAGE TO THE EXISTING WALL HAS OCCURRED

FILL IN NOTCHES WITH HALF HEIGHT BLOCKS TO MEET PROPOSED GRADE BEHIND HISTORIC WALL FOR AREAS WHERE HANGING PLANTS MOVE FORWARD AND HISTORIC BLOCKS MOVE BACK INTO THE PLANTING AREA AS SHOWN IN PLAN

FINISH GRADE BEYOND

NOTCH FOR PLANTING AT GRADE NOTCH WIDTH VARIES

PROPOSED WALL MODIFICATIONS

HEADLAND PARK HERITAGE SEAWALL ELEVATION

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

EXISTING WALL CONDITION

HEADLAND FORM STUDY PREFERRED OPTION BARANGAROO HEADLAND STONE MODEL A

MODEL A LOW TIDE

LEFT

Design models tested placement of sandstone blocks and their dynamics with the tide.

RIGHT

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

A three-dimensional design study of soil volume and headland geomorphology.

MODEL A HIGH TIDE

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→ the grade change leveled his gaze with that of

his young son, and they faced squarely eye to eye; a smile stretched across the father’s face.

Delighted, the boy jumped in place with excitement. “You’re Captain Hook!” he squealed.

Nestled within Darling Harbour, Barangaroo Reserve is a place of green curves, rock outcrops, and tidal pools—a stark contrast to the straight lines and sharp angles of the downtown high-rises that hover in the background. It’s a place where the connection to the water is made tangible through the slabs of sandstone that spill into the harbor rather than being set at a distance by an elevated seawall. This site once had strong industrial edges of its own, but most have been carefully cloaked through some 83,000 tons of rock set along the shoreline, each slab oriented 20 degrees northeast—the natural geological fault line of rocks located within Sydney Harbour. (Keating says, “When you go there, you know it feels right, although you don’t quite know why.”) Where the industrial edges remain, they are either highlighted as heritage features or discovered through sideways glances into the water that reveal the outline of caissons retained for structural integrity, a remnant of maritime days past.

One of Walker’s early observations was the way Sydney residents refused to be denied access to the water. “Everywhere

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BELOW

OPPOSITE

Some 48,000 cubic yards of Sydney’s Hawkesbury Sandstone was quarried on site. Extraction and placing of the stone took nearly two years.

More than 10,000 sandstone blocks were cut using 10-footdiameter blades, then categorized according to their color.

COURTESY JOHNSON PILTON WALKER, TOP; HAMILTON LUND/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, BOTTOM

EAST WEST HEADLAND SECTION

BARANGAROO’S SANDSTONE The vast array of stonework that defines Barangaroo Reserve was pulled directly from beneath a portion of the site. Its placement involved precision, intuition, and obsessiveness, as David Walker, FASLA, a partner at PWP Landscape Architecture, explains here.

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT; BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, TOP RIGHT INSET

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HE 48,000 CUBIC YARDS of Sydney’s iconic Hawkesbury Sandstone that created the new foreshore was excavated from massive slabs and cut with 10-foot-diameter blades to size specifications defined by a 3-D Revit model. All of the blocks were then barcoded and GPS located into their specific foreshore placements. The blocks measure roughly four feet wide by 16 feet long.

The quality of the sandstone extracted on site exceeds the required strength and is embedded with a huge variety of characteristic markings, such as veins of pure iron deposits, prehistoric shells, and other foreign stone deposits. This was a welcome surprise. When the first excavated blocks were inspected, we knew right away that we had something unique.

The coloration and unique markings of the sandstone represent the natural variation that occurs between veins located on site. These qualities would not have been possible if a commercial supplier simply purchased the blocks. Commercial suppliers generally regard these irregular characteristics of stone as undesirable and they discard them—they are trained to deliver consistency.

During the almost two-year process of extracting and placing the stone, there was an ongoing discussion during each of my construction visits between PWP and the chief stonemason, Troy Stratti, concerning the relative distribution of block colors. We

encouraged Troy to highlight the unique vein markings and le it up to his discretion. A er hundreds of discussions, we made a formal specification regarding the color variation in the sandstone. As the stones were cut out of the ground, they were categorized into three color ranges; white, yellow, and red.

The distribution of these colors was not to allow too many white stones to be placed next to each other—because they stood out the most—but rather to blend them into the other colors. During the months of installation, we had the opportunity to observe that the color variation was not important within the tidal zone, where the stones would become dark and covered with algae. So, the discussion of equal color distribution became focused closer to the foreshore promenade, where it would be visible to the majority of people in the park. The stones were cut for specific locations in the plan. Four sides were saw cut, and the top and the bottom were natural split surfaces. The only discretion le to the equipment operator was which split surface would face upward and whether to flip the stone direction. Limiting the aesthetic decisions by the equipment operators was important for the work to proceed quickly.

A er about a year of working with Troy, he knew our design intentions well, and we could shi our focus to stone selection for the most careful parts of the design: Nawi Cove, the grand staircases, and the 1836 Wall—the sandstone wall that aligns along the edge of what was the shoreline in that year. For the 1836 Wall, we needed to create a consistent color and finish for more than half a mile.

This is the only stone on the project that was acquired off-site, from a single quarry in Bundanoon, about an hour south of Sydney.

Even with a large sole source for the stone at Bundanoon, the sheer quantity of stone that had consistent character was enormous and began to disappear, and we needed to strategize how to complete the last 10 percent with a consistent color and finish.

Troy and I spent days on each of my monthly site visits walking the site at all possible hours of the day—sunrise, sunset, nighttime, and in rainy weather—to understand how the stone quality was perceived differently depending on the quality of light. These in-depth (bordering on obsessive) observations and discussions on our walks culminated when Troy and I worked with his equipment operators to direct placement of the sandstone rock outcroppings, which became perhaps the most challenging effort at the end of the construction schedule. The rock outcroppings could not be drawn, and therefore required the two of us to work out the criteria while moving them into place.

Troy and I had gradually developed full aesthetic control of the stonework for Barangaroo, because it was simply too hard for anyone else to take responsibility for the aesthetic outcome over the entire site. It was worked out by trial and error in the field. We corrected our mistakes as we progressed and allowed ourselves time to reflect and brainstorm about the possible solutions for constructability and superior aesthetic outcomes.

The sandstone story at Barangaroo is large because it follows the sandstone tradition of Sydney. The tradition was passed down to Troy Stratti, whose company—which he started with his father, Sam Stratti—invented the saw blades to cut the stone. They have a deep understanding of the extraction and fabrication process in Sydney. Troy once said to me that he felt he had been preparing his entire career for the opportunity and challenge of Barangaroo Reserve.

DAVID WALKER, FASLA

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ABOVE, TOP TO BOTTOM

A 3-D rendering of the foreshore; construction; and final stone placement at shoreline.

OPPOSITE

Construction of the Cutaway, Barangaroo’s cultural center, which has capacity for 5,500 people.

Because there were no surveys of the original headland, the design team studied historic maps and French landscape paintings of the area. From these, computer models were generated that layered the terrain into different shapes and gradients. Existing rock outcrops on the seabed floor were also roughly mapped and archaeologists consulted to better understand the geologic processes that had affected the headlands over time. Based on this research, the shape of the headlands approximately

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COURTESY JOHNSON PILTON WALKER, ABOVE LEFT; HAMILTON LUND/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, OPPOSITE

around the harbor where people attempted to fence off the waterfront, everybody just jumps over the fence and they fish. The kids go into the tidal pools. There’s a whole waterfront life of the modern Sydneysider,” Walker says. It was obvious that issues of waterfront access and movement around the periphery of the site needed to take priority. But understanding how to shape and reconstruct a new headland around which to choreograph this activity was another challenge.

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SANDSTONE TERRACE

Once the shape of the headland had been determined, the next challenge was to construct the steep 60-foot cliffs in a way that made them look like an approximation of nature without taking it to the level of Disneyland.

So Walker proposed to Keating that the site be designed using a naturalistic philosophy.

“I explained that naturalistic is a term which doesn’t describe nature, but it describes the nature of nature. You’re not copying nature; you’re representing it,” Walker says. “And for a long time Paul would say, ‘Let’s talk about that again . . . that was interesting.’” Keating jokes that Walker was taught naturalism at university, but in his decades of practice never found a client who wanted to use it— until Walker met him.

BOTTOM

Construction of the terraced hill.

It was important that the shape of the headland facilitated connections along the waterfront and Hickson Road (the original main road leading to the shipyard), but it also needed to be high enough to link back into the city grid. “The goal was to have a seamless connection, so no matter where you entered, you would form part of the city at that elevation,” Walker says. Of particular concern was to connect the broken streets of Millers Point, a residential community whose rugged ridgeline and high promontory were originally the site of wooden windmills, but were later sheared off during excavation of the headland in the late 1800s and replaced with terrace houses for workers employed at the docks below. For decades, residents in the town houses here—many of which were low-income government housing—only

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ADAM ROBILLIARD AND ADRIAN PILTON OF JOHNSON PILTON WALKER AND BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, TOP AND OPPOSITE TOP; HAMILTON LUND/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, BOTTOM

reflects the 1836 shoreline. This was affirmed when an old slipway from the 19th century was uncovered during construction.

A HYPERLOCAL SOIL RECIPE The soil formula for Barangaroo Reserve was designed to support the extensive plantings of native vegetation on the site. Simon Leake, the principal soil scientist at SESL Australia, which acted as the project’s main soil consultant, explains how his team developed the formula. This narrative originally appeared on the website of SESL and has been adapted and updated.

Coir Mesh 75mm Depth Mulch Segmental Retaining Wall System Topsoil Rear Profile Reduced to Provide Soil Volume Subsoil 500mm Min Depth of Soil Required at Base of Wall Mass Concrete Footing Topsoil 100mm Below Top of Wall Top Block to be Filled with Soil Mix Geotextile at Base to Retain Soil Select Fill Material (Crushed Sandstone) Drainage Material

Geogrid Network

T

HE BARANGAROO HEADLAND PARK landscape was planned to use almost completely recycled resources to make soils suitable for the sensitive Sydney sandstone flora and the public park turf areas. The concept was first used at Sydney’s Olympic Parklands, where crushed sandstone, an abundant natural recycled resource in Sydney, was successfully used to create soil profiles for bushland regeneration.

Building on that experience, our firm of soil scientists, SESL Australia, came up with a concept design for the completely reconstructed soils needed for the Headland Park at the early detailed design phase. This original concept is shown in Figure 1 (above right).

In this concept, the main materials to be used were crushed sandstone originating from building excavations in Barangaroo South commercial developments, recycled sand from building excavations, recycled green garden waste compost (produced from “green bin” and council drop-off garden waste collections), and composted wood mulch screened from green garden waste collections.

These commonly available recycled resources could be used to make the mulch layer or “O” (for organic) horizon, analogous to the forest litter layer; the topsoil, or A horizon, a well-drained sandy soil containing nutrients, organic matter, and biological life; and the subsoil, or B horizon, a well-drained, water-holding layer for root anchorage and moisture reserve.

The thing we did not know was how much compost and fertilizer to put into the A horizon, or topsoil layer. We knew that Sydney sandstone soils were so poor that the early settlers failed to grow adequate crops at the original Farm Cove gardens. We also know that if sandstone flora is fertilized or affected by nutrient-laden urban stormwater runoff, it suffers dieback and disease problems.

To answer this question, we did some field research in areas of intact sandstone flora to look at the natural Kandosol or “yellow earth” soil characteristic of sandstone country. We examined the profile and measured the levels of nutrients and general soil chemistry. We found strongly acidic pHs of 4.5 to 5.5, astoundingly low levels of phosphorus—around 25 mg/kg of total phosphorus in sandstone rock and around 60 to 80 mg/kg in the “biolayer” or topsoil horizon, some of the lowest levels in the world. Calculations showed that only around 10 percent by volume of green waste compost would be required to achieve this.

In a series of pot trials growing a range of sandstone flora, we determined that the best range was, by volume, 5 percent compost for the very sensitive sandstone heath areas, 10 percent for the eucalyptus and woodland areas, and 20 percent for the turf and fig trees in the recreational areas.

The compost provides all the nutrients needed, apart from nitrogen. Just 5 percent by volume of compost is sufficient to establish a sandstone heath and scrub with no other fertilizers needed. Subsoil needs no organic matter and is even lower in nutrients.

We now had the soil profile concept and had calibrated and measured how much nutrition each planting needed. All we now had to do was finalize the cross sections. An early diagram of the sandstone terrace facsimile (opposite) illustrates how this was done so contractors tendering on the project could see how it was to be constructed.

The landscape belowground, or the soil landscape, at Barangaroo was carefully worked out to mimic the natural soil profile and thus support a vegetation type with unique requirements for healthy growth. It does so by using almost 100 percent recycled material sourced from in and around Sydney from building sites, excavations, sand and glass recyclers (“glass sand,” made from crushed recycled glass, constituted some of the sand requirement), and, of course, the garden and green waste produced by Sydney households.

The concept was installed pretty much as designed, although it proved hard to get all the recycled materials needed. In the subsoils, we used recycled crushed glass sand, but in the topsoils we did have to use some quarried sand. All the crushed sandstone was recycled from both the Barangaroo excavations as well

FIGURE 1: THE BARANGAROO ANTHROPOSOL O Recycled Wood Mulch A1 50/50 Crushed Sandstone, Washed Sand, 10-20% Compost A2 50/50 Crushed Sandstone, Washed Sand B2 70/30 Crushed Sandstone Washed Sand

C Compacted Fill

as (and this is an advantage of working with the large construction companies) other sandstone from excavations all over Sydney, carefully screened and tested for compliance with the specifications. We achieved a level of about 80 percent recycled materials in the end—not bad.

The work has totally vindicated the extremely low nutrient requirements of this unique vegetation assemblage. Almost no fertilizer has been used since its establishment—a little urea to overcome nitrogen drawdown, some potassium to replace losses from heavy rainfall (it’s very soluble), some iron sulphate to acidify the pH, and some manganese on a couple of the very touchy species. Five percent compost provides all the nutrients the heath components require. It really stunned me and gave me a new respect for this incredibly tenacious vegetation. It is truly astounding, as a soil scientist, to know that a complex stratified forest community can develop on a geology (Hawkesbury Sandstone) with only 20 to 25 parts per million of phosphorus in it. This would have to be the lowest phosphorus parent material on Earth.

The research performed by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority and its contractors resulted in two published scientific papers on the nutrition of native plants, making the Headland Park very much a “Headland” project—not just producing a beautiful place and displaying our unique flora, but also extending the knowledge of how to restore and rebuild a vegetation type that is part of the character of Sydney and its harbor.

Simon Leake is managing director and principal consultant at SESL Australia.

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PLANTING PLAN UNDERSTORY

Acacia floribunda (White Sally wattle)

Exocarpos cupressiformis (Cypress cherry)

Acacia longifolia (Sallow wattle)

Glochidion ferdinandi (Cheese tree)

Grevillea buxifolia (Grey spider flower) Acacia myrtifolia (Red-stemmed wattle) Grevillea linearifolia (Linear-leaf grevillea) Grevillea sericea (Pink spider flower) Acacia terminalis (Sunshine wattle)

Hakea dactyloides (Finger hakea) Hakea teretifolia (Needlebush)

Acacia ulicifolia (Prickly Moses) Acmena smithii (Lilly pilly) Allocasuarina littoralis (Black she-oak)

Hibiscus tiliaceus (Cottonwood hibiscus)

Isopogon anemonifolius (Broad-leaf drumsticks) Lambertia formosa (Mountain devil)

Banksia marginata (Silver banksia) Leptospermum juniperinum (Prickly teatree) Banksia robur (Swamp banksia) Banksia serrata (Old man banksia) Banksia spinulosa (Hairpin banksia)

Macrozamia communis (Burrawang)

Bauera rubioides (River rose) Boronia ledifolia (Showy boronia) Callicoma serratifolia (Black wattle)

Melaleuca hypericifolia (Hillock bush) Melaleuca nodosa (Prickly-leaved paperbark) Notelaea longifolia (Large mock-olive) Olearia tomentosa (Toothed daisy bush)

Callistemon linearis (Narrow-leaved bottlebrush) Ceratopetalum gummiferum (New South Wales Christmas bush) Correa alba (White correa)

Omalanthus populifolius (Native bleeding heart) Persoonia levis (Broad-leaved geebung)

Correa reflexa (Common correa)

Cyathea australis (Rough tree fern)

Telopea speciosissima (Waratah)

Dillwynia retorta (Heathy parrot pea)

Tristaniopsis laurina (Water gum)

Dodonaea triquetra (Large-leaf hop bush) Doryanthes excelsa (Gymea lily) Elaeocarpus reticulatus (Blueberry ash) Eriostemon australasius (Pink wax flower)

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Westringia fruticosa (Coastal rosemary)

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

Pittosporum spp. (Cheesewood)

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→ had a small stairwell leading from the top of

the cliff face down 60 feet to the concrete apron of the former shipping dock. Now the residences have a stretch of open parkland spilling out from their front doors with magnificent ocean views, increasing not only their amenity but also their value: Many have marketed with a price of more than $4.5 million (AUD).

ABOVE

Grasses are among the native plants used at Barangaroo.

The existing harbor headlands had an underlying base of preexisting stone to support the sheer cliffs. Walker’s team did not have that to work with. They needed to achieve a vertical profile that provided structural stability without the benefit of existing geology. The solution was to establish a series of terraces made of hollow precast concrete units that were filled with aggregate and tied back into the hillside. The units were colored with a sepia finish to help them blend in as the plantings grew and provided greater coverage. Behind these walls, the intention had been to backfill using recycled fill from nearby development works—approximately 490,000 cubic yards’ worth. However, soil contamination issues significantly reduced the amount of dirt available for creating the mass of the headland. What resulted was the creation of the Cutaway, a 21,500-square-yard void within the belly of the headland to serve as Sydney’s largest function space and future cultural center.

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With walls extending 60 feet high, the Cutaway is built up around the original cliff face of the shipping yard, where ventilation openings in the roof structure allow natural light to spill onto its roughened surface with great effect. However, this is where the charm of the space ends, as the rest of the interior is boxy and clad in enormous swaths of drab concrete, giving it the feel of (ironically) a shipping container warehouse rather than a space to host cultural events like the Venice Biennale. There had been an original proposition for the Cutaway by JPW (a study separate from the work undertaken with PWP) that put forward a more sculptural and considered proposition toward the shape and function of the Cutaway. But it was a latecomer to the design brief, and a more conservative approach was taken toward its construction, which saved on cost, but sacrificed the creation of what could have been one of Australia’s largest and most inspiring interior spaces.

The design of Barangaroo Reserve’s waterfront was easily the most time-intensive part of the headland’s creation. Local Sydney stone yards were initially investigated to provide the sandstone, but that would have required carving by highly pressurized water jets to give the stones the desired naturalistic appearance. However, a fortuitous discovery was made when sandstone was found beneath the Barangaroo site, and plenty of it.

SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND PLANTS

BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

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HE PLANTINGS at Barangaroo Reserve include more than 75,000 native trees and shrubs. Of these plants, there are 84 species native to the Sydney Harbour area: 14 species of trees, palms, and tree ferns; 25 native ground covers, vines, grasses, and ferns; and 45 species of native shrubs, small trees, and cycads. The landscape architect and horticulturist Stuart Pittendrigh of Norcue led the planting regime for the site, working with PWP Landscape Architecture and the local firm of Johnson Pilton Walker.

RIGHT

A terrace planting.

Pittendrigh, who specializes in plants native to the Sydney region, mapped out seven different vegetation zones on the 14-acre site: ridge top woodland, heath and scrub, open dry forest, tall moist forest, damp gully forest, waterfront, and headland. He shared a few observations on the process with LAM. (This exchange has been edited.)

BELOW

The bush walk is defined by a Cor-Ten steel wall.

LAM: You are said to have researched which plants were growing in the area when the First Fleet arrived from England in 1788. How hard was that to do? Are sources of information readily available?

SP: History indicates that the early Europeans who arrived in Sydney included botanists. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and John White discovered and named many new plants that had never been seen before in England. Their findings were recorded, resulting in accurate records that are still retained today. The Sydney Royal Botanic Garden’s ecologists and botanists have continued research and recording of this fine work, which has resulted in many botanical reference documents that may be accessed.

LAM: How well do most of those plants or plant communities survive today? And how many of the species are endemic to a very small area around the harbor? Are any threatened or endangered?

SP: Remnants of the original plant discoveries remain in small, undisturbed pockets around the harbor foreshore and survive naturally despite the city’s changing climate and environment. A small percentage of these indigenous plantings are classified as threatened species, but none are considered exclusively endemic to Sydney Harbour and its estuarine environments.

LAM: It’s said that you had a list of 31 items to ensure quality control among the plants.

What are some of the tougher ones to satisfy?

SP: Self-supporting, good stem taper, crown symmetry, branch and stem inclusions, root direction, root ball occupancy, and height of the root crown.

LAM: So far you’ve seen a failure rate of about 1 percent of the plants—amazing. The norm, you say, is more like 10 percent to 15 percent. What will be the biggest maintenance challenges ahead as the park seasons and settles in?

SP: We will do annual soil testing that will determine the fertilizing program and the quantity and composition of fertilizer to suit the indigenous vegetation. There will be maintenance and irrigation from on-site retention storage for at least another 12 months, when consideration will be given to allowing the site to rely on natural rainfall events unless there are long or extensive periods of drought. We will control pests and disease, which at this stage of plant establishment are minimal. We’ll need to repair torn limbs from severe weather events and damage by park users. And there will be removal of invasive weed species.

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BARANGAROO RESERVE “CUTAWAY” REVEALED

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BELOW

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, OPPOSITE; BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, RIGHT

The entire existing cliff face forms the eastern wall of the Cutaway.

Over the span of one year, 10,000 blocks about four feet wide and up to 16 feet long were strategically hewn from beneath the space of the Cutaway with the extraction pit laid out in the shape of the site’s required parking garage. Because of Sydney Harbour’s geological fault line of 20 degrees northeast, the sandstone harvested from the site sheared naturally when hewn from this angle, providing a naturalistic rock face. No jet-spraying of the rocks would be needed.

Each of the extracted sandstone blocks was labeled, sized, and bar-coded to identify where it should go in the foreshore. This data was entered into a custom-made 12-D computer modeling program that mapped out the waterfront and ensured each individual block could be slotted into place like a giant 3-D puzzle, while also certifying that fall heights and joint widths met Australian safety standards. Initially, the blocks were limited to 75 different sizes, but this number was increased to more than 200 as it afforded

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RIGHT

The cliff face reveals openings that allow daylight into the cavernous space of the Cutaway.

OPPOSITE

Art installations are among the events held in the Cutaway.

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, TOP; BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, BOTTOM

BARANGAROO RESERVE SECTION

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, TOP; HAMILTON LUND/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, BOTTOM

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

BARANGAROO ELEVATIONS???

BARANGAROO STAIR SLOPE STABILIZATION SECTION

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TYPICAL BUSH WALK SECTION

BELOW

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE , TOP; RICK STEVENS/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, BOTTOM

Small staircases connect different levels of the bush landscape.

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RIGHT

A glass elevator and sandstone staircase define the café terrace at the bush walk entrance.

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PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, TOP LEFT AND OPPOSITE; BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, BOTTOM RIGHT

HEADLAND PARK CAFÉ STAIRS SECTION 5

HEADLAND PARK CAFÉ STAIRS SECTION KEY PLAN

BUSH LEVEL OR RESTAURANT ENTRANCE ELEVATION

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ABOVE

The Barangaroo Reserve foreshore and promenade trace the location of the site’s original 1836 shoreline.

OPPOSITE

Cor-Ten steel and sandstone detail.

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→ more flexibility in the foreshore design. Each

BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, OPPOSITE; BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, TOP RIGHT

was set upon a bed of gravel and basalt designed to accommodate tidal movement.

The design team faced a lot of unknowns when it came to the construction of the waterfront. “We asked a lot of bold questions and kept getting bolder answers in response,” Walker says. Troy Stratti, a Sydney sandstone extraction expert, was brought onto the project team to provide guidance on how to best use the extracted sandstone. The discussions between the design team and Stratti were like a tennis match that played along through the development of mock-ups for building the waterfront. Eventually, Stratti developed a 1:20 scale prototype to test the foreshore design and created unique tools for handling the 11- to 13ton blocks that allowed each one to be placed in close proximity to another. The variation in color and markings between the individual stones required an intensive amount of time and coordination between PWP and Stratti to determine the best way to distribute the sandstone blocks across the site.

While establishing the terraces and rocky foreshore was critical to the headland design, so was the need to incorporate a planting

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The foreshore promenade path winds between the sandstone shoreline and bush landscapes on the hill.

OPPOSITE TOP

Barangaroo’s western lawn.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM

The larger staircases are flanked by sandstone blocks.

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Pittendrigh met me on site early on a Monday morning after what had been a blazing weekend, with temperatures soaring over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He had been informed that a marine vessel had sprayed saltwater toward the northwest corner of the site in an effort to cool off visitors over the weekend; he wasn’t happy about it. “The water saturated all my plants,” he lamented. “Apparently the staff has been washing down the furniture and light poles, getting all the salt off.” When we made our way to the affected area, many of the Hardenbergia vines were already browning off. “I’ll have to speak to the BDA [Barangaroo Delivery Authority] about this,” Pittendrigh said, his brow furrowed.

As the lead horticultural consultant on the project, Pittendrigh has been deeply involved

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

ABOVE

strategy to shroud the headland with vegetation using a 200-year-old planting palette.

There was also heavy pressure to deliver a landscape that provided instant impact, particularly when it came to hiding the concrete terraces. An earlier headland park initially championed by Keating, Ballast Point Park, had been established using tubestock, resulting in a stark landscape during the park’s early years, which drew attention to the hard lines and extensive walls used throughout the site. The park still draws Keating’s ire. “It’s an archie park, done by an architect . . . terrible, all hard concrete design,” has been his most frequent critique. To avoid a similar outcome, Stuart Pittendrigh, a landscape architect and horticultural consultant who specializes in Sydney’s native botanic species, joined the design team in 2010 to help build the bush.

BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

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OPPOSITE

Tiers of bush plantings flag a large staircase that leads to the water’s edge.

RICK STEVENS/BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY

in the sourcing, design, production, and installation of plants across the site, but more in the capacity of watching over the works rather than superintending the job. Since Barangaroo’s completion, he has been commissioned to monitor the park over the next two years, spending time twice a month to observe maintenance contractors, address concerns, and report back to the BDA. After practicing for 47 years, it’s the first time he’s been tasked with undertaking such follow-up work on a project.

Walking through the site, Pittendrigh gestured to a cluster of grevilleas that were flowing over the rock walls and onto the rim of the paths. “Maintenance wanted to shear them off initially, said they were trip hazards,” he said, his eyes sparking. “I gave them a piece of my mind.” Farther along, he pointed out a fig that’s more compact and squatty in shape.

“You can tell that one was container grown from birth,” he commented, then paused by some of the larger fig trees at the water’s edge, their sprawling habit an indicator the trees were transplants from another site. To maximize visual impact by the opening date, 16 mature fig trees from southern Queensland and 89 cabbage palms had been relocated into the park. As a way to avoid breakage of the branches, particularly during transport, the trees were deprived of water for a few days before transport, which allowed the leaves to wilt and made them more flexible. The trees were then heavily soaked once planted as a way to help them recover.

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A sandstone block foreshore replaced the old concrete caissons.

RIGHT

Nawi Cove, at the southern edge of Barangaroo Reserve.

Although the site had been open for only three months, the vegetation was thriving thanks in part to the careful attention to

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BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

ABOVE

Plant losses at the site have been minimal, with just 1 percent of the plants failing—a success rate Pittendrigh is incredibly proud of. (“Not bad out of nearly 76,000 plants,” he says). Out of the 84 species integrated into the site, only five weren’t indigenous to Sydney Harbour. A total of seven plant communities were planted according to their edaphic position in the landscape with regard to topography, aspect, environment, and moisture requirements. The subtle variations of these plant communities are noticeable when walking through the site, from the rich undergrowth nestled within the steep terrain of the damp southeast slopes of the gully forest to the smaller, more spindly plants enduring the windy and exposed conditions of the ridgetop woodland 60 feet above at the promontory.

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A view of Nawi Cove from the top of a staircase.

OPPOSITE TOP

At the park’s northern entrance, the 1836 Wall marks the site’s original shoreline from that year.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM

Nawi Cove provides space for waterside events.

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In addition to careful soil planning, Pittendrigh also took great effort in establishing the trees by developing them with a very shallow—but broad—root plate. Some of the planting containers were eight to 10 feet in diameter, with root tips at a maximum depth of 18 to 32 inches. The technique has been highly successful, as the root plate allowed the trees to establish quickly and withstand gale-force winds off the ocean. Pittendrigh prides himself on an encounter he had with two engineers visiting the site who were astounded to learn that the trees didn’t have any additional anchoring keeping them rigid; so far, there haven’t been any blow downs.

Toward the end of our walk, Pittendrigh meandered down to a fig tree close to the water’s edge where a main branch dangled

BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

ABOVE

the soil substrate of the plantings. As a way to overcome common interface problems (“plant shock”), great effort was made to grow the nursery plants in the same soil as was present on the site. A soil scientist, Simon Leake, developed a mix that simulated the weathered Hawkesbury Sandstone soils commonly found in Sydney by taking the waste sandstone from the site excavations and crushing it into a fine aggregate. Added to this was glass from recycled bottles, with fragments reduced to the size of a match head to add silica content.

Organic material and nutrients were limited to between 4 percent and 10 percent of the mixture, while phosphorus was excluded completely, as Australian plants tend to resent it, and Leake figured it would build up naturally over time.

PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

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S

OPPOSITE

Barangaroo’s sandstone joins the harbor to the shoreline—and the site’s preindustrial past to the present.

OME WITHIN THE AUSTRALIAN design community are still unconvinced that a design that discarded the site’s industrial heritage was the best possible outcome. But the success of Barangaroo Reserve is a testament to the talent and dedication of its many midwives—and a budget in excess of $250 million (AUD).

And without a Keating counterpart to drive an alternative option, movements against the headland design failed to gain traction. “The aspirations of the designers are important,” Pittendrigh says, “but the main function of a park is to meet people’s needs, and this place does that. People feel relaxed in this space; no one’s in a hurry, and they’re strolling around and taking it in.”

For Walker, the success of a project is like a work of art, where the idea needs to catch people’s attention—and their imagination.

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“The most important thing you have to do,” he says, “is make it good enough so people love it.” Based on the constant use of the headland so far, the park is doing its job. It’s a place where visitors can take cultural tours to explore the site’s Aboriginal history. It’s where Sydneysiders can go to stretch their legs, touch the tides, and taste the salt air.

And, perhaps most important, it’s where a weary father can take his young son to play pirates by the water—and be awakened by the vision it reveals.

GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND FREELANCE WRITER BASED IN CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA. CONTACT HER AT GWENETH.LEIGH@GMAIL.COM.

Project Credits CLIENT BARANGAROO DELIVERY AUTHORITY, SYDNEY. LEAD DESIGNER PWP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT OF RECORD JOHNSON PILTON WALKER, SYDNEY. ARCHITECT WMK ARCHITECTURE, SYDNEY. ACCESSIBILITY CONSULTANT MORRIS GODING, SYDNEY. ARBORIST AND HORTICULTURIST NORCUE, SYDNEY. CHIEF STONEMASON AND QUARRY OPERATIONS MANAGER TROY STRATTI, SYDNEY. CIVIL AND STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS ROBERT BIRD GROUP, SYDNEY, AND AURECON, SYDNEY. CONSTRUCTION MANAGER ADVISIAN, SYDNEY. GENERAL CONTRACTOR BAULDERSTONE (NOW LEND LEASE), SYDNEY. GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEER DOUGLAS PARTNERS, SYDNEY. GRAPHICS, SIGNAGE, AND WAYFINDING DESIGNER EMERY STUDIO, MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA. HISTORIC INTERPRETATION CONSULTANT JUDITH RINTOUL, SYDNEY. HISTORY AND ARTS CONSULTANT PETER EMMETT, SYDNEY. HYDRAULIC ENGINEER WARREN SMITH & PARTNERS, SYDNEY. LANDSCAPE CONSTRUCTION OBSERVATION MANAGER TRACT CONSULTANTS, NORTH SYDNEY. LANDSCAPE CONTRACTOR REGAL INNOVATIONS, ANNANGROVE, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA. LIGHTING ENGINEER WEBB AUSTRALIA GROUP, SYDNEY. MARINE ENGINEER HYDER CONSULTING (NOW ARCADIS NV), NORTH SYDNEY. PLANT PROCUREMENT NURSERY ANDREASENS GREEN, MANGROVE MOUNTAIN, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA. SOIL SCIENTIST SESL AUSTRALIA, THORNLEIGH, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA. TRANSPORTATION ENGINEER HALCROW, SYDNEY.

BRETT BOARDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, OPPOSITE

unnaturally at a sharp angle. “This is the first tree we planted,” he mentioned while gingerly inspecting a break halfway down the limb. “Every time I come here, there’s another badly damaged branch. Kids play on it—a crying shame.” Looking at the surface around his feet, he noticed some tendrils of green emerging. “Ground covers—like an edible spinach. Dies out in winter.” I couldn’t help but smile. Keating may have been the champion of Barangaroo’s headland, but Pittendrigh was certainly its protector.

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The Best Pavements Are Invisible

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THE BACK

CREATIVE INFIDELITIES: ON THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OF TOPOTEK 1

© HANNS JOOSTEN

Edited by Barbara Steiner; Berlin: Jovis, 2016; 432 pages, $65.

Occasionally, a design firm turns a monograph into an opportunity to approach its past projects with candor and offer points of departure for future work.

Topotek 1’s recent release, Creative Infidelities, collects 10 major works from the German landscape architecture firm, including the Superkilen project, which was recently awarded the 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture (with Bjarke Ingels Group and Superflex).

Interviews with the firm’s principals and architect collaborators that accompany each project reveal the nuances of alliance and translation that have influenced Topotek 1’s work over the past 20 years

(the title Creative Infidelities comes from Jorge Luis Borges). At Lorsch Abbey, an 8th-century monastery compound in Germany that is a UNESCO World Heritage site, Topotek 1 referenced the archaeologically present but physically absent monastery complex through shadow, projection, and reversal. The design manages to be arresting even as it redirects attention to the extant buildings. “We like to challenge situations,” Martin Rein-Cano, International ASLA, says. “This could mean amplifying what is already there, or stepping back into silence, absence, and void.”

COURTESY LAKES REGION HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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SEARCHING FOR A SIGN THE BATTLE TO DOCUMENT AND SAVE OLD TREES THAT MAY HAVE ONCE MARKED NATIVE AMERICAN TRAILS.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

COURTESY WINNETKA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

S

IX MONTHS before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression, Richard Gloede, a landscape architect and the owner of a nursery in Evanston, Illinois, wrote a letter to General Abel Davis, the chair of the Cook County Forest Preserve’s advisory committee. He implored Davis for help in protecting the “old Indian trail trees” along the shores of Lake Michigan. “I have located on the North Shore alone over one hundred and have photographed, measured them according to size, condition, which way they point by compass, etc.,” Gloede wrote in a letter dated March 22, 1929. “It seems to me that these trees should be put in the best of care and kept so.”

The trees in question, often referred to as trail marker trees, would not have been hard to find. Each made two roughly 90-degree bends so that

a portion of the trunk grew horizontally, parallel to the ground, forming a shape that can best be described as one half of a field goal post. Today, thousands of trees with this distinctive double bend have been documented in the United States, and there is evidence that at least some of them were manipulated on purpose, shaped by indigenous peoples to provide landmarks where others did not exist.

Like us, North America’s early civilizations needed navigational tools, and in heavily wooded areas like the Southeast or the Great Lakes regions, natural landmarks like mountain peaks were few and far between, and rock cairns, unlike in Utah and Nevada, would have been difficult to make and impossible to see from a great distance. That left trees. A shaped tree could serve as an early road sign, a way to navigate the landscape.

ABOVE

The landscape architect Richard Gloede in front of the Fuller Lane Tree in Winnetka, Illinois.

OPPOSITE

This photo of a bent tree outside Lake Forest, Illinois, was taken sometime in the 1890s.

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There is no indication that the Cook County Forest Preserve ever acquired Gloede’s photographs or mapped the locations of any of the trail marker trees. Time passed.

Many of the individuals with knowledge of these trees died or moved away. Most of the trees in Illinois slowly disappeared, but interest in them never fully died out.

In a 1941 article for the Scientific Monthly, for instance, the geologist

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COURTESY WILMETTE HISTORICAL MUSEUM

In Gloede’s day, this was, if not common knowledge, mostly undisputed.

Trail marker trees appeared in newspapers and scholarly journals and were seen by many ordinary citizens as living landmarks, “reminders of old Indian days,” according to a 1920 article in the Chicago Daily News, which included a photograph of a young woman sitting sidesaddle on the horizontal trunk of a bent tree, reading a magazine. Gloede and other landscape architects believed that Illinois’s trail marker trees had educational value and should be used to teach children about the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region. But little ever came of his letter. In 1940, after Gloede’s death, Robert Kingery, a member of the forest preserve’s advisory council, wrote to Davis’s successor, inquiring as to whether or not the matter should be reopened and these trees “properly charted and . . . given special care.”

COURTESY DENNIS DOWNES, TOP; TIMOTHY SCHULER, BOTTOM

Raymond Janssen wrote about trail marker trees, asserting that “trees were sometimes bent by the Indians to mark trails through the forest” because they “were the most accessible and most easily adaptable materials at hand.” They could be manipulated to varying levels of conspicuousness and therefore “made ideal guide-posts,” he wrote. The topic was newsworthy enough—and the evidence credible—that Time magazine ran an article inspired by Janssen’s research later that same year.

Half a century later, these trees are no longer fixtures of our cultural imagination. They do not appear in our journals or adorn our maps.

The last known trail marker tree in Winnetka, Illinois, a double-trunked white oak known as the Fuller Lane Tree, died and was removed in 1984, along with a bronze plaque stating that “this ancient white oak, one of many originally found on the North Shore, was presumably bent by the Indians about 1700, marking a trail to Lake Michigan.”

Dennis Downes has picked up where Gloede and Janssen left off. In 2013, more than 80 years after his initial letter, Gloede’s family auctioned off hundreds of the landscape architect’s photographs. They were bought by Downes, a painter and sculptor who grew up on the North Shore, a string of affluent suburbs that includes Evanston, Winnetka, and Highland Park. Over the past 30 years, Downes, who, with a white handlebar mustache and white shirt under a black leather vest, looks plucked from the pages of a history book, has driven hundreds of thousands miles across the United States and Canada to find and photograph these bent trees, visiting some states more than two dozen times and amassing a trove of photos and documents that suggest that some indigenous tribes did, in fact, bend trees for use as trail markers. In the early 1990s, Downes formed the Great Lakes Trail Marker Tree Society and eventually published a book, Native American Trail Marker Trees: Marking Paths Through the Wilderness.

The trees that have survived are reaching the end of their natural life span, and many are worried that, without sufficient education, these important and underappreciated artifacts of early North American culture will soon be gone, taking with them a clue into how indigenous peoples navigated their world.

Of course, nature can also bend trees—into Ls and Zs and every shape in between—and this has led to skepticism. Some argue that these trees are not part of some vast navigational network but the result of natural causes, bent by animals, windstorms, or other trees, which could have fallen and pinned the bent

tree to the ground as a young sapling.

Don Wells, a retired civil engineer and one of the founders of a group called Mountain Stewards, which has built a database of more than 2,000 trail marker trees, has encountered significant resistance, particularly within the academic community.

“They say, ‘Look, none of our fellow PhDs wrote anything about this.

Therefore it doesn’t exist,’” he says.

Downes and others have continued to gather evidence, searching for any reference to these trees in old newspapers and journal articles. It was

TOP

A 1928 photo shows a trail marker tree in Glencoe, Illinois, being blessed and given its name, “Leading Boy.” BELOW

A bearing tree in northwest Arkansas, a modern use of trees as markers.

OPPOSITE

A 1947 map depicting life in Wilmette, Illinois, in 1847 includes the location of trail marker trees.

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“When I held that up to the light, I was extremely happy,” Downes says.

The man in the photo, he says, was Chief Evergreen Tree, a tribal leader associated with the Ho-Chunks in Wisconsin. The photograph had been taken at a commemoration hosted in 1928 by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and attended by all manner of dignitaries, including Anne Ickes, the wife of Harold L. Ickes, who later became the Secretary of the

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Interior. Downes had written about the event in his book, “but I had no physical evidence” of the chief’s presence, he says. “Now, I have the chief standing on the tree, giving the tree its name, ‘Leading Boy.’”

I

T’S TEMPTING to see trees as ephemeral, and therefore lousy, landmarks. For one, they’re living things. They have a life span— a beginning and, inevitably, an end. They’re susceptible to storms, wildfires, disease, pests. But before large-scale industry came to North America, before logging and modern development and the introduction of invasive species, hardwoods like oaks and beeches would have seemed practically invincible to indigenous peoples, outliving multiple generations and representing strength and longevity.

We actually still use trees to mark the landscape. In northwest Arkansas, not far from one of the hundreds of trail marker trees that have been documented in the area, is a white oak with a canary yellow sign nailed to its trunk. “Bearing Tree,” the sign reads in big, blocky type, followed by a series of numbers scratched into the metal in a childlike scrawl. Bearing trees, or witness trees, as they’re sometimes called, are used by surveyors to provide the bearing and distance from what’s known as a corner monument, which marks a property corner. If a corner monument has been disturbed or moved, the bearing tree can be used to identify the property boundary. Like road signs—but unlike trail marker trees—they are legally protected. Tampering with a bearing tree is a federal offense.

COURTESY THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM

shortly after his book was published that Downes acquired Gloede’s photographs. Among the hundreds of old glass slides was something he had only ever dreamt of seeing. It was a fuzzy, black-and-white image that seemed to show a tribal leader standing atop a bent tree, smudging stick in hand, mid-blessing.

OPPOSITE

Part of Jens Jensen’s plan for Henry Ford’s 1,300-acre Rouge River estate. Jensen wove existing trails into this and other designs.

Our use of bearing trees is an echo of indigenous peoples’ understanding of trees as worthy wayfinding devices, monuments that often outlive man-made markers. But it also was the beginning of the end for indigenous peoples, whose way of life would be forever affected by the acquisition, division, and subsequent sale of lands they once inhabited.

The Public Land Survey System, originated by Thomas Jefferson and officially created by the Land Ordinance of 1785, overlaid onto the landscape a grid of 36-square-mile townships and square-mile sections, laying the groundwork for the system of private land ownership we have today.

We can’t do much about actions taken 250 years ago, but Andrew Johnson, a member of the Cherokee Nation and the executive director of Chicago’s American Indian Center from 2013 to 2015, says that renewed interest in trail marker trees has played a significant part in the reclamation of his people’s history and helping to assert a counternarrative.

The fact that trail marker trees have been identified throughout the United States, and not just in a particular region, means that tree shaping was a practice of multiple tribes, he says, providing additional evidence for a sophistication and scale in navigation that he believes was denied early North American societies.

The trees also bolster recent studies that put indigenous populations well above earlier estimates, a subject explored in Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. “As science advances, it’s catching up to what the true numbers are,” Johnson says. “The depth of trade and travel, to sustain that on a macro level, is quite remarkable.”

G

University of Michigan and the author of Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens. “He felt there was a rich history [there]—that these trees had dated from pre-European settlement periods.”

Grese says there’s also evidence that Jensen wove old Indian trails into landscape projects for clients such as Henry Ford. At Fair Lane, Ford’s estate outside Dearborn, Michigan, Jensen believed the existing road followed a former footpath. “He was very insistent on keeping that as part of the overall landscape,” Grese says. “That was pretty common.” He says Jensen was known to scour historic maps so that he could incorporate indigenous trails as garden paths.

LOEDE WASN’T the only landscape architect to recognize the existence of trail marker trees. Jens Jensen, who lived and worked in Highland Park on the North Shore, was fascinated by these living road signs. He wrote about the importance of indigenous marker trees in journals such as American Forestry and spoke at a variety of events, including the dedication of a Downes believes Jensen likely bronze plaque that was placed near a knew of the living council circles trail marker tree in Glencoe in 1911. that once existed throughout the Great Lakes. He shows me photoIt’s well documented that Jensen graphs of a council circle that still was heavily influenced by tribal stands, outside a tiny town called practices, specifically the use of Charlevoix near Michigan’s Upper council circles, an element that Peninsula. The maple trees, which appears in dozens of Jensen’s own are evenly spaced and form a nearly projects. “He certainly had a fasci- perfect circle, look to be hundreds nation with Native Americans and of years old. Their canopies have their history in the landscape, and intertwined, forming a leafy green I think he also was struck by sto- parapet around a large swath of ries of places in the Midwest where grass. There’s something else disthere were these council groves,” tinct about these trees, something says Robert Grese, ASLA, a profes- you can’t see in any of the aerial sor of landscape architecture at the photos: All their trunks are bent.

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T

O DETERMINE whether a tree is a historic marker or simply an accident of nature is a complex and messy process. Even now, there is little agreement as to what criteria should be used. The most basic requirement, one that everyone agrees on, is age. “It has to be old enough,” says Steve Houser, an arborist in Dallas and a cofounder of the Texas Historic Tree Coalition, which helps document and preserve potential marker trees as well as other notable specimens. “I have people send me 10-inch trees, and it’s like, no, they have to be at least 144 years old. It’s been 144 years since the last free-roaming Comanche was in the state of Texas.”

The second is shape. Most have the double bend, which, according to several theories, was created by bending a sapling down toward the ground, often pointing toward or parallel to whatever was being marked, and tying the tree with rawhide or cord. Over time, the top of the tree, no longer able to get enough sunlight, would begin to die, and the tree would send up new vertical limbs. The top would rot or be cut off, as would any unwanted sucker branches, leaving the tree with a shape that, once the tree was old enough, could not be altered. In northern regions, the bend often appears higher up the trunk, possibly to ensure visibility even after heavy

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snows. Houser says trail marker trees show signs of being contorted at an early age, and he looks for other signs, too: “thong marks or scars” from where a tree was tied down.

But the real key, Houser says—and this is the messy part—is to establish a linkage between the tree and either a known cultural site or a topographic feature that would have been useful to indigenous peoples: a stream crossing, for instance, or a natural shelter that might have been used as a campsite. “I have to find that connection between the Comanches, in my case, and a site at a particular time near the age of the tree,” Houser says, a process he describes as reading the landscape.

“I look at early trail maps and their association to the tree: Is it pointing the way of an early trail? We look at topo maps: What was the topography like back then? What would they likely have been pointing toward?”

Opinions also vary on who can make the ultimate designation. Houser believes that only tribal members should be allowed to make the call, and the Texas Historic Tree Coalition won’t recognize a trail marker tree unless it’s verified by the Comanche.

But he admits that he’s lucky, living in Texas. “The Comanches are much more open about it,” he says.

In other parts of the country, he says, “if the elders still exist with the tribe, the next question is, do they share that information? A lot of them don’t want to, and for good reason.”

Centuries of exploitation have made many tribal elders reluctant to share what they know with outsiders, says Don Wells, of Mountain Stewards, whose group has released a book and a documentary film about trail marker trees. “For a long time, they didn’t want to talk to anybody about [these trees] because people were going and destroying them,” he says.

Sometimes the acts were racially moIndigenous peoples probably used tivated, other times by the belief that naturally deformed trees as wayfind- the trees pointed to buried treasure. ing devices, too, Houser says, so just because a tree is bent, and is located Indigenous knowledge also is fading near a known cultural site, doesn’t out. Some nations have no record mean it was shaped. Conversely, just of shaping trees. Johnson says this because a tree wasn’t shaped doesn’t could mean that those tribes never mean it wasn’t used as a marker. did it, or it could just mean that, at Which makes it all the more diffi- some point, the practice was not cult to decide whether or not a tree passed on. “Natives have an oral should be considered historically or tradition,” he says. “If you break that culturally significant. tradition by one, two, three genera-

COURTESY DENNIS DOWNES

tions, then it’s impossible to get [the These two perspectives are slowly knowledge] back.” aligning. The National Park Service has begun to acknowledge the exisIn areas where tribes can’t or won’t tence of what it calls “culturally modiacknowledge these trees, how can a fied trees,” which includes bent trees tree’s authenticity be verified? Some but also burial trees and arborglyphs, have tried scientific methods. A few a number of which have been idenyears ago, Wells collaborated with tified at the Florissant Fossil Beds dendrochronologists from the Uni- National Monument in Colorado. versity of West Georgia to core and However, it’s thought that these bent date several potential trail marker trees may have been ceremonial in trees, in order to confirm that they nature, rather than navigational. fall within the proper age range. But More recently, Houser coauthored some felt that this desecrated the Comanche Marker Trees of Texas with tree, and he was asked to stop. John- the anthropologist Linda Pelon and son sees little need for conclusive the Comanche historic preservation evidence, which he says is a product officer Jimmy Arterberry. Houser’s of Western thinking. “From a native book, which was released in Septemstandpoint, we don’t feel that we need ber, is the first on trail marker trees a scientific verification,” he says. to be published by a university press.

Houser says his goal with the book was to preserve, at least on paper, these marker trees, which may be one of the last remaining windows into a culture that has never fully been appreciated. “We can’t preserve what we haven’t taken the time to find and recognize,” he says, adding that it’s now or never for these rapidly decaying landmarks. “We can’t wait 20 years to catch up on this work.

We’re losing ’em as fast as we can look at ’em sometimes.”

ABOVE

Dennis Downes at a council circle near Charlevoix, Michigan.

Unlike some living council circles, these maples appear to have been shaped.

TIMOTHY A. SCHULER WRITES ABOUT DESIGN, ECOLOGY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT. HE LIVES IN HONOLULU.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 145

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CONTINUING EDUC ATION L E A R N I N G O B J EC T I V E S Upon completion of this course, Þ Õ Ü Li >L i Ì \

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HEALING

1. Recall the inception of healing gardens and the studies that led to their creation. Ó° ÃÌ Li iwÌÃ v > i> } garden to patients, families, healthcare workers and the environment.

3. Describe the goals of a successful healing garden and some of the garden elements that support these goals.

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5. Identify the fabric selection considerations for both shade and seating elements. i>À Ài >L ÕÌ Ì i À i v fabric for shade and seating in healing gardens by completing this continuing education course and passing the free test at ÃÕ LÀi >°V É i> } This course is has been designed to «À Û `i > ÛiÀÛ iÜ v Ì i Li iwÌÃ v incorporating performance fabrics into outdoor healing spaces in healthcare settings, with discussions on the importance of seating and shade in healing gardens and fabric selection considerations.

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Healing gardens are best designed to improve mental, physical and social well-being when they facilitate a sense of control and access to privacy, encourage social support and exercise and give users a means to spend time in nature. Performance fabric shade structures and seating offer many options in how gardens are used and the level of privacy they provide.

Group interaction, private conversation or quiet observation can all be accommodated in comfort when appropriate fabric shade structures and seating are selected.

N AT U R E I S H E A L I N G

The idea of nature as restorative is a concept that spans cultures and is more than a thousand years old. Contact with nature has long been seen >Ã Li iwV > v À i> Ì > ` Üi Li }° / i 7 À ` i> Ì "À}> â>Ì v À > âi` > `iw Ì v i> Ì Ài Ì > 65 years ago in the Preamble to its Constitution as, “a complete state of physical, mental and social Üi Li }] > ` Ì iÀi Þ Ì i >LÃi Vi v ` Ãi>Ãi À wÀ ÌÞ°»

iw } i> Ì Ü Ì Ì Ã LÀ >` `iw Ì i V «>ÃÃiÃ Ì i Õ `iÀÃÌ> ` } that there are many dimensions of wellness—and wellness is compromised when one or more dimensions is out of balance. The human connection with nature is a bond that can foster healing to restore the balance; early medical practitioners understood this.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, monastery wÀ >À ià V Õ`i` }>À`i Ã] often elaborate, to distract the ill. In the 1800s in both Europe and America, pavilion-style hospitals were commonly designed with gardens for the patients to use.

Florence Nightingale, nurse and public health reformer, wrote in 1898 that patients should be able to see out of windows from their beds, “to see sky and sunlight at least, if you can show them nothing else…I assert [this] to Li] v Ì v Ì i ÛiÀÞ wÀÃÌ « ÀÌ> Vi v À ÀiV ÛiÀÞ] >Ì i>ÃÌ Ã iÌ } ÛiÀÞ i>À Ì°» ­ Ìià ÕÀà }\ 7 >Ì Ì Ã] > ` 7 >Ì Ì Ã Ì® / Ãi Û Ûi` in caring for the sick intuitively understood that views and access to nature were therapeutic, even though they did not understand why.

2 0 T H C E N T U R Y T H EO R Y & D E S I G N

The 20th century leaps in medical knowledge and technology sidelined a connection with nature. The need to accommodate modern technologies i> Ì V>Ài v>V Ì iÃ] Ì «À Ûi ivwV i VÞ > ` Ì «ÀiÛi Ì viVÌ ] overshadowed the importance of therapeutic elements such as gardens. / i ÀiÃÕ Ì Ü>à ÃÌ>À Þ ÃÌ ÌÕÌ > ë Ì> Ã Ì >Ì i` i vwVi LÕ ` }Ã] exteriors dominated by parking lots, and interiors closed off with air conditioning. This design, combined with an environment in which patients have little choice or control, led to a setting that did nothing to calm patients, reduce stress or meet the emotional needs of not only patients, but also families and staff.

PAT I E N T- C E N T E R E D D E S I G N

The patient-centered care movement of the early 1990s began a renewed awareness of the negative effects of institutional settings. Economic factors pushed this movement forward as competition between healthcare providers grew, and patients had more choices among hospitals and assisted Û } v>V Ì ið i> Ì V>Ài À}> â>Ì Ã >Ài Ü Û } Ì Ü>À` > ÃÌ V approach to treating the patient, taking the needs of family members and staff into consideration as well. The growing body of research on the Li iwÌà v >ÌÕÀi Ì i Ì> ] « Þà V> > ` à V > Üi Li } >à i> Ì Ì >Ì many healthcare facilities are returning to the concept of healing gardens, Ì Ã Ì i Ü Ì ÃV i Ì wV iÛ `i Vi > ` Õ `iÀÃÌ> ` } v Ü > ` Ü Þ Ì iÞ are therapeutic.

Rediscovery of Nature explores the beauty of shadows on fabric to provide patients Ü Ì > à >`i` ë>Vi Ì ÀiyiVÌ > ` i> °

HE ALING GARDEN RESE ARCH

Mounting evidence shows that gardens are one way to measurably reduce ÃÌÀiÃÃ v À «>Ì i ÌÃ i> Ì V>Ài ÃiÌÌ }Ã > ` V> Li iwÌ v> Þ i LiÀÃ > ` healthcare staff.

In a 1984 study in Science, environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich was the wÀÃÌ Ì ÕÃi `iÀ i` V> ÀiÃi>ÀV ÃÌ> `>À`à ­ÃÌÀ VÌ iÝ«iÀ i Ì> V ÌÀ Ã] µÕ> Ì wi` i> Ì ÕÌV iî Ì `i ÃÌÀ>Ìi Ì >Ì ÀiV ÛiÀÞ Ì ià à ÀÌi i` with a view of nature. Gallbladder surgery patients with a view of trees i> i` >ÛiÀ>}i > `>Þ v>ÃÌiÀ] ii`i` à } wV> Ì Þ iÃà «> i` V>Ì ] and had fewer postsurgical complications than those with a view of a wall.

Even pictures of landscapes can soothe. Another study by Ulrich at Uppsala University Hospital in Sweden provided heart surgery patients with either a simulated window view showing a photo of a stream or a forest; abstract paintings; a white panel; or a blank wall. Patients who viewed the trees or ÃÌÀi> « Ì ii`i` viÜiÀ ` Ãià v «> i` V i > ` ÜiÀi à } wV> Ì Þ less anxious during the post-operative period than the other patients.

Since these studies, many more have shown that exposure to healing gardens reduces patient levels of pain and stress. This may in turn boost the immune system and allow the body and other treatments to help.

A well-designed healing garden can help to restore the balance of physical, mental and social well-being, and in this sense it can facilitate healing in anyone who uses it, not just patients.

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THE BACK

/

BOOKS HER CALIFORNIA RUTH SHELLHORN

BY KELLY COMRAS; ATHENS, GEORGIA: THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS IN ASSOCIATION WITH LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE HISTORY, 2016; 240 PAGES, $26.95.

REVIEWED BY SONJA DÜMPELMANN

T

his neat and richly illustrated book offers the reader a concise introduction to Ruth Shellhorn, an important but so far largely overlooked American landscape architect. Ruth Shellhorn is the first book-length account of this woman’s life and work, providing a descriptive account of her career and 12 selected designs. Shellhorn contributed to shaping the commercial, public, and private Southern California landscape through designs that unconsciously codified what has been described as “the California style.” Born into a well-to-do California family in 1909, she designed some 400 landscapes in her home state during a career that spanned nearly six decades until her death in 2006.

tions were supported by both her parents and her neighbor, Yoch—never completed a degree. Yet, once she returned to Los Angeles, she managed to set up a small practice, forge alliances with some of the region’s architects, and finally, through the acclaim of her designs, achieve the recognition that would bring her commissions from many wealthy property owners, including some Hollywood film stars. Comras paints a refreshing picture of a landscape designer with great personal integrity who was deeply and ingeniously dedicated to her profession but who, in contrast to some of her male Californian colleagues like Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo, and Lawrence Halprin, was rather reserved and shy about publicizing her own work.

Rather than identifying with a particular style or seeking to define her own, Shellhorn developed site-specific designs on the basis of sensitive site analyses and the users’ and clients’ desires, always seeking to instill “a sense of physical wellbeing” in her landscapes. She was no friend of the “egoism characterizing much of modern design” and “disapproved of experimental landscape designs and modernist exercises devoid of site or client.”

Kelly Comras, ASLA, introduces Shellhorn as a figure of transition between tradition and modernism who excelled in planting design and who, during the Depression, established her own practice as one of the second-generation pioneering female landscape architects in California, succeeding Beatrix Farrand, Katherine Bashford, and her own next-door neighbor, Florence Yoch. An overview of Shellhorn’s career is followed by 12 chronologically ordered case studies that show the breadth and depth of her work in the private and public realm, on small and large scales.

While this may be one of the reasons Shellhorn’s work has stood in the shadow of her male California peers for so long, the case Having begun her studies in the School of Landscape Architec- studies Comras has selected reveal a design sensitivity that easily ture at Oregon State Agricultural College before transferring stands on par with their work. Shellhorn developed her most to Cornell University, Shellhorn—whose professional aspira- complex and intricately subtle designs for the gardens of some of

150 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

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THE BACK

/BOOKS

ABOVE

A 1936 pencil sketch of the Fine Arts building of South Pasadena High School. The landscape design for the school— from which she’d graduated in 1927— was Shellhorn’s first public commission.

her private clients—for example, the Pasadena sculpture garden of Alexander and Adelaide Hixon—but her landscapes for Disneyland and Bullock’s Pasadena department store and Fashion Square shopping centers are perhaps the most interesting in terms of their program, history, and cultural and social context.

immediate living environments. Her landscapes inspired shoppers to re-create similar planting designs in their home gardens. Ultimately they also won her the American Association of Nurserymen’s National Industrial Landscaping Award, conferred in 1966 by Lady Bird Johnson.

In 1946, through her earlier work on the Los Angeles Shoreline Development Study, Shellhorn was brought on board the design and planning team for Bullock’s department store in Pasadena. She quickly became the lead landscape architect.

Using drought-tolerant yet “tropical-looking” plant species, some of which took tree scouts almost a year to locate, she designed a landscape that enveloped the suburban department store and turned it into a parklike oasis. Her 1950s and 1960s projects for Bullock’s Fashion Square shopping centers in Santa Ana, Sherman Oaks, Torrance, and La Habra took this landscape development even further, tackling what became an ever-increasing land use at the time: parking lots. She created park landscapes that people would seek out during, but also outside of, store hours. If rural cemeteries were used by 19th-century urbanites as the first public urban parks, Shellhorn’s Fashion Square landscapes became similar spaces for 20th-century suburbanites who lacked public parks in their

A decade earlier, Shellhorn was called to tackle some difficult landscape design questions at Disneyland. While the different immersive landscapes of the park needed to convey a distinct character, they also had to merge into a coherent whole.

Designing more in the field than at the drawing board, she worked alongside Disney’s art directors to develop a comprehensive pedestrian plan for the park, planting details for the front entrance, and a planting scheme for the central Plaza Hub. The latter design diminished the sense of an oversized space, created more intimate areas for restful retreats, and connected the dissimilar dusty western frontier landscape with a tropical jungle, a childhood fantasy landscape, and a glimpse into the future.

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Shellhorn came to these projects through connections with the architects in charge, with whom she had collaborated on earlier projects and who in some cases also became mentors.

COURTESY KELLY COMRAS

IN SHOPPING CENTER PARKING LOTS, SHELLHORN MADE PARK LANDSCAPES THAT PEOPLE SOUGHT OUT EVEN AFTER STORE HOURS.

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THE BACK

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LEFT

Comras’s introduction to Shellhorn reveals familiar traits of pioneering female landscape architects. Like many of her leading female peers, during her early career she published articles in journals and profited from the mentoring, encouragement, and generosity of many male professionals; she assumed leadership positions and stood her ground directing construction work.

Like many women of her generation, she received acclaim in particular for her planting designs. In fact, as Early in her career she took every opportunity that was given portrayed by Comras—a landscape architect practicing in to her, publishing articles in magazines and collaborating on Southern California—Shellhorn’s use of plants was among projects with already established architects and landscape the defining characteristics of her landscapes. architects. But she wavered on accepting the repeated offers of the landscape architect Ralph Dalton Cornell to partner Shellhorn never publicly admitted that her gender may have with him. This decision ultimately paid off when she began made things more difficult for her. Like many of her female peers to receive commissions for Bullock’s department stores, she seized the opportunities that the Second World War offered which enabled her to stake out her path to full independence. women when men were serving in the war. But Shellhorn’s Serving as the president of California’s ASLA chapter from partnership with Harry A. Kueser—who was 11 years her senior, 1946 to 1948 probably also helped her in this process. As and whom she married at 31—was unconventional. After he had Comras shows in this book, Shellhorn worked on a variety left his job as a midlevel bank manager at the Bank of America, of different projects that included campus designs, regional Kueser began to supervise the construction work of her projects. plans, and urban planning projects, as well as commercial He also supported her by taking on the practice’s accounting work landscapes and private house gardens. She was one of the few and becoming a draftsman. Although she had already established landscape architects who despite being on her own (with the herself by the time Kueser decided to quit his job, the couple’s later support of her husband) in the decades after the Second business model allowed Shellhorn to take on larger commissions World War managed to work on projects that went beyond and concentrate on the creative part of her work. the residential scale. She was also often able to work alongside architects, developing the landscape while the buildings Thus, Ruth Shellhorn also makes a valuable contribution to were being designed. The better known she became, the the female record in landscape architecture, adding a rare more influence she could bring to the larger site design and type of business model to the ones often used by women in architectural decisions as well. the profession. While the book is a first foray into Shellhorn’s

154 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIUS SHULMAN. COURTESY © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES 2004.R.10 .

Bullock’s Pasadena landscapes were guided by the department store owner’s request that “nothing ‘Eastern’ looking” be used.

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/BOOKS

of Bullock’s department stores and shopping centers? Was she really empowering and satisfying the desires of housewives by creating homey environments that promoted spending, as she seems to have believed? How did Shellhorn “set the standard for the shopping mall of future generations,” as the book suggests? It suffices to say that many of today’s malls look very different and only seem to encourage the empowerment of retailers’ global capitalist aspirations.

ABOVE

Shellhorn visited as work continued on the Sleeping Beauty Castle six weeks before Disneyland’s opening day on June 6, 1955.

RIGHT

In 1950, a glass screen protected the Knapp Garden patio from canyon winds.

Southern California career and a fine compilation of new materials, it lacks broader relevant insights. This is largely owing to its descriptive nature and the lack of further analysis, interpretation, and contextualization—something that a more scholarly account and investigation can offer. Rather than being taken as a critique, however, this comment should be read To be clear, though diligently researched, this small volume (an as an encouragement. There is much opportunity for further easy and light read) does not intend to be a scholarly account work on Shellhorn, postwar urban of Shellhorn’s life and work. Rather, and suburban landscape design, and it is an introduction to this importhe history of landscapes in general. tant designer’s oeuvre. It is also the first of the new Masters of Modern One may ask further, then, what Landscape Design series organized exactly the regional aesthetic that by the Library of American Landis so often invoked in this volume scape History. The format recalls implied. What exactly made up the the earlier Landscape Design Trust “California Atmosphere,” and how monograph series promoted by the did Shellhorn develop it? How did British Landscape Institute on some it correspond with the work of reEuropean landscape designers— gionalist architects in the area? Were including Geoffrey Jellicoe, Peter there any further ideological impliShepheard, and Sylvia Crowe. But cations of this aesthetic? For Shellin contrast to the British series of horn, the “California Atmosphere” four edited volumes that include difwas “contemporary, yet reminiscent ferent voices and perspectives on of an earlier, quieter, more romanone designer, this first volume of tic era.” But what nostalgia and the Masters of Modern Landscape romanticism were implied in this Design series offers a more compact comment? What were Shellhorn’s and concise single-author account of personal goals when working on the Shellhorn. As much as it comes as a suburban commercial landscapes relief to see that books on landscape

156 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY KUESER. COURTESY RSP, TOP; PHOTOGRAPH BY RUTH SHELLHORN. COURTESY KELLY COMRAS, BOTTOM

THE BACK

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THE BACK

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CAREERS SUCH AS SHELLHORN’S NEED TO BE ADDRESSED CRITICALLY AND CONTEXTUALIZED MORE BROADLY.

A seating area at Bullock’s Fashion Square Del Amo in Torrance, California, in 1969.

Nevertheless, the author has provided a valuable addition to the increasing number of monographs that cover the oeuvre of 20th-century landscape architects in the United States and elsewhere. She has done so with an accessible volume that should interest professionals and garden and landscape lovers alike. We need more forays like this one that offer information on the basis of basic research. It is the nature of these types of publications that they leave us with more questions than answers. While we need to uncover people like Shellhorn in the profession, their contributions warrant analysis, reflection, and interpretation. How do landscape architects work?

How do they come up with and develop designs? How are their designs built, and how are their designs received and used? A rigorous application of the art historian Michael Baxandall’s “period eye” to landscape architecture, i.e., a critical investigation of the cultural, social, and political conditions under which landscape designs were created, viewed, used, and understood—and of how they are seen today—can be a path to achieve this goal.

Although Shellhorn has not gone completely unnoticed by authors, Comras needs to be credited for bringing her back to light, and also for encouraging Shellhorn to give her papers to the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. There the papers are now kept for future scholarship and research, for which, as this volume attests, there is ample opportunity. To stop where this book ends would be detrimental to the profession, its history, and discourse.

SONJA DÜMPELMANN IS A LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN.

158 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY DARROW M. WATT. COURTESY SUNSET PUBLISHING.

BELOW

architecture can still be produced in high quality with color photographs—many of which in this case are works of art themselves, taken by notable California photographers such as Ansel Adams, Julius Shulman, and Douglas M. Simmonds— this book also offers a provocation. Providing little more than a first insight into Shellhorn’s life and work and ending rather abruptly with the description of the last of the dozen case studies of her work, it shows how much we still need to do to elevate the discourse about landscape design. Further work and scholarship that critically assess Shellhorn’s work, and position it more broadly into a national and even international context, can help to further substantiate, elaborate, complement, and even revise our current landscape histories.

THE BACK

/BOOKS

BOOKS OF INTEREST “THE SIMPLEST ACT OF DESIGN MIGHT JUST BE TO SEE ANEW WHAT LIES BEFORE US.”

GARDEN REVOLUTION: HOW OUR LANDSCAPES CAN BE A SOURCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

URBAN FORESTS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF TREES AND PEOPLE IN THE AMERICAN CITYSCAPE

BY JILL JONNES; NEW YORK: VIKING PRESS, 2016; 416 PAGES, $32.

BY LARRY WEANER AND THOMAS CHRISTOPHER; PORTLAND, OREGON: TIMBER PRESS, 2016; 328 PAGES, $39.95.

Maintaining a garden, according to the authors, often involves “a relentless struggle with the site’s attempts to express itself.” They advocate, instead, letting the landscape, its native plants and animals, and the passage of time inform design. Though sections of the book explain how to plant meadows and prairies, shrublands, and woodlands, how-tos for home spaces are not excluded. The final chapter features the home garden of the coauthor Larry Weaner, Affiliate ASLA, outside Philadelphia: proof that he plants what he preaches.

160 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

AUSTERE GARDENS: THOUGHTS ON LANDSCAPE, RESTRAINT, & ATTENDING

BY MARC TREIB; NEW YORK: ORO EDITIONS, 2016; 107 PAGES, $19.95.

Abundance isn’t everything. In this beautifully illustrated little book, Treib—a professor of architecture emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley—makes a case for designs apart from the lush “edenic model.” Of Japan’s dry gardens, for example, he says, “There are aesthetic, and one might add even philosophical, pleasures to be gained should one make the effort to understand and appreciate these seemingly dull fields.” He notes: “The simplest act of design might just be to see anew what lies before us with no additional intervention.”

People have championed trees in American cities for more than two centuries now. This book shines a light on quite a few, including Eliza Scidmore, the woman behind Washington, D.C.’s flowering cherry trees, and Illinois Congressman Sidney Yates, who kept putting money for urban trees back into the federal budget after cuts by the Reagan White House. Also mentioned are heroes in the hunt against threats such as Dutch elm disease, the Asian long-horned beetle, and the emerald ash borer. We owe many of the trees we have left to their vigilance.

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The ASLA Heritage Circle: Sustaining a legacy of stewardship of our natural and built environments Please help sustain ASLA’s legacy of stewardship by becoming a founding member of the ASLA Heritage Circle. To do so, simply add the ASLA Fund* to the list of beneficiaries of your will, trust, life insurance policy or financial asset such as an IRA or 401K. Once you have added the ASLA Fund to your list of beneficiaries, please then notify Ron Sears, Director of Stakeholder Relations and Resource Development, and he will add your name to our online Heritage Circle Honor Roll. It’s that easy.

To learn more, please contact Ron Sears, Director, Stakeholder Relations and Resource Development, at rsears@asla.org or (202) 216-2369. For language you can share with your attorney or financial advisor, please see asla.org/heritagecircle

*The ASLA Fund is the charitable 501(c)(3) foundation of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

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166 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

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Among those posts, ASLA has selected Stantec’s Sacramento Office, and the West Virginia University Student Society of Landscape Architects, as professional and student winners of ASLA’s social media contest for their impressive installations!

Stantec’s Sacramento Office’s (top) parklet, “Water Play,” artistically places water-saving-themed games and infographics on display to promote living a water-conscious lifestyle in the community.

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THE BACK

/ADVERTISER INDEX ADVERTISER

ADVERTISING SALES 636 Eye Street NW Washington, DC 20001-3736 202-216-2335 202-478-2190 Fax advertising@asla.org PRODUCTION MANAGER Sarah Berger 202-216-2341 202-898-0062 Fax sberger@asla.org

Abbotsford Concrete Products, Inc. Acker-Stone Industries Inc. Ameristar Fence Products ANOVA Aquatic Recreation Company (ARC) ASLA Heritage Circle ASLA Online Learning ASLA Parking Day Atomizing Systems, Inc. Bison Innovative Products by UCP BROAN-NUTONE LLC Calpipe Industries Inc. Campania International, Inc. Canaan Site Furnishings Canterbury International/The Verdin Company Chicago Botanic Garden Classic Recreation Systems, Inc. Columbia Cascade Company Country Casual David Harber Ltd. DeepRoot Green Infrastructure, LLC DeepStream Designs DOGIPOT Doty & Sons Concrete Products DuMor, Inc. Easi-Set Buildings EJ emuamericas, llc Envirospec, Inc. Equiparc Ernst Conservation Seeds Eurocobble FairWeather Site Furnishings, Subsidiary of Leader FermobUSA Forms+Surfaces Fountain People, Inc. GAF - Streetbond Goodwin International Goric Marketing Group Inc. Gothic Arch Greenhouses Greenfields Outdoor Fitness Greenform LLC greenscreen HADDONSTONE Hanover Architectural Products, Inc. Huntco Supply, LLC IAP Illusions Vinyl Fence Infratech International Pool I Spa I Patio Expo International Society of Arboriculture Invisible Structures, Inc. Iron Age Designs Ironsmith, Inc. Keyso Solutions Inc. Kichler Landscape Lighting Kornegay Design LA CES Landscape Forms Landscape Structures, Inc. Madrax Maglin Site Furniture Inc. Most Dependable Fountains Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc. Nichols Venture Group Ohio Gratings Inc. Oly-Ola Edgings, Inc. Paloform Paris Equipment Manufacturing Ltd. Pavestone Company Permaloc Aluminum Edging Petersen Concrete Leisure Products Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc. Pine River Group - Kebony Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

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180 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

WEBSITE

www.pavingstones.com www.ackerstone.com www.ameristarfence.com www.anovafurnishings.com www.arc4waterplay.com www.asla.org/heritagecircle.aspx www.asla.org/onlinelearning www.asla.org www.coldfog.com www.bisonip.com www.nutone.com www.calpipebollards.com www.campaniainternational.com www.canaansf.com www.canterburyintl.com www.chicagobotanic.org www.classicrecreation.com www.timberform.com www.countrycasual.com www.davidharber.co.uk www.deeproot.com www.deepstreamdesigns.com www.dogipot.com www.dotyconcrete.com www.dumor.com www.easisetbuildings.com www.ejco.com www.emuamericas.com www.envirospecinc.com www.equiparc.com www.ernstseed.com www.eurocobble.com www.fairweathersf.com www.fermobusa.com www.forms-surfaces.com www.fountainpeople.com www.gaf.com www.goodwininternational.com www.goric.com www.gothicarchgreenhouses.com www.greenfieldsfitness.com www.green-form.com www.greenscreen.com www.haddonstone.com www.hanoverpavers.com www.huntco.com www.iapsf.com www.illusionsfence.com www.infratech-usa.com www.poolspapatio.com www.isa-arbor.com www.invisiblestructures.com www.ironagegates.com www.ironsmith.biz www.keyso solutions.com www.kichler.com www.kornegaydesign.com www.laces.asla.org www.landscapeforms.com www.playlsi.com www.madrax.com www.maglin.com www.mostdependable.com www.vectorworks.net www.nicholsventuregroup.net www.ohiogratings.com www.olyola.com www.paloform.com www.peml.com www.pavestone.com www.permaloc.com www.petersenmfg.com www.americaspremierpaver.com www.pinerivergroup.com www.hooksandlattice.com www.poligon.com www.quickcrete.com www.landscapespecifications.com www.romanfountains.com www.rooflite.us www.mailboxes.com www.site-cra .com www.sitescapesonline.com www.soilretention.com www.provenwinners.com www.sternberglighting.com www.structureworksfab.com www.sunbrella.com www.surelocedging.com www.theplantium.com www.therma-hexx.com www.thomas-steele.com www.tournesolsiteworks.com www.trellisstructures.com www.carderock.com www.unilock.com www.upcparks.com www.versa-lok.com www.victorstanley.com www.superthrive.com www.vortex-intl.com www.walpolewoodworkers.com www.waterodyssey.com www.wausautile.com www.westedgedesignfair.com www.wishboneltd.com

PHONE

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PAGE #

4-5 55, 187 182 25 189 162 178 179 165 167 43 168, 183 C2-1, 189 177 39 169 165 57, 76, 183 67 33 188, 189 166 176 184 159, 184 189 63 171, 183 186 20, 183 188 153, 188 155 41, 184 11, 185 189 59 170 161, 186 189 187 164 15, 185 37, 188 167 171 184 183 47 163 28 136, 182 173, 182 65, 182 173 61, 176 27, 185 38 2-3, 17, 69, 170, 186 23, 176 19, 184 29 177 56 9 164, 182 175 13 12 C4 186 176 169, 187 51 168 190 175 182 35 185 184 8 186 174 151 175, 186 190 146-147, 148-149 177 174 187 75, 185 31, 188 177 188 157 73, 187 166, 183 187, C3 173 18, 190 174 190 45 191 172, 185

THE BACK

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ASSOCIATION/FOUNDATION

DOGIPOT

800-364-7681

ASLA Heritage Circle

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Goric Marketing Group Inc.

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ASLA Online Learning

202-216-2376

178

Greenfields Outdoor Fitness

888-315-9037

187

ASLA Parking Day

202-216-2345

179

Landscape Structures, Inc.

800-328-0035

23, 176

International Society of Arboriculture

217-355-9411

28

UPC Parks

530-605-2664

73, 187

PAVING/SURFACING/MASONRY STONE/METALS

BUSINESS SERVICES Nichols Venture Group

303-539-5439

9

Rico Associates

508-842-4948

182

DESIGN CONSULTANTS WestEdge Design Fair

176

917-822-0350

191

DRAINAGE AND EROSION 182

Equiparc

800-363-9264

20, 183

FairWeather Site Furnishings,

800-323-1798

155

FermobUSA

678-884-3000

41, 184

Forms+Surfaces

800-451-0410

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Goodwin International

714-241-0942

170

Huntco Supply, LLC

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IAP

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Infratech

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Abbotsford Concrete Products, Inc.

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4-5

Acker-Stone Industries Inc.

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55, 187

Eurocobble

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Kornegay Design

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GAF - Streetbond

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Hanover Architectural Products, Inc.

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167

Invisible Structures, Inc.

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Pavestone Company

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Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc.

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Maglin Site Furniture Inc.

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Paris Equipment Manufacturing Ltd.

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Invisible Structures, Inc.

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Pine River Group - Kebony

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Ironsmith, Inc.

800-338-4766

Soil Retention Products

760-966-6090

174

QCP

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175

Ohio Gratings Inc.

330-447-6707 164, 182

Therma-HEXX Corporation

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Salsbury Industries

323-846-6700

184

65, 182

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LA CES

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157

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186

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45

Sunbrella

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75, 185

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187, C3

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Ameristar Fence Products

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182

Campania International, Inc.

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Illusions Vinyl Fence

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183

David Harber Ltd.

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33

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Greenform LLC

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168

Tournesol Siteworks/Planter Technology

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GREEN ROOFS/LIVING WALLS greenscreen

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Rooflite, A Division of Skyland USA

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LIGHTING BROAN-NUTONE LLC

414-227-3447

43

Kichler Landscape Lighting

800-659-9000

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Sternberg Lighting

847-588-3400 175, 186

STRUCTURES Classic Recreation Systems, Inc.

928-775-3307

165

Easi-Set Buildings

866-252-8210

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Gothic Arch Greenhouses

251-471-5238

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Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

616-399-1963

190

Structureworks Fabrication

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190

PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS

Trellis Structures

888-285-4624

177

DeepRoot Green Infrastructure, LLC

415-746-1555 188, 189

Walpole Outdoors LLC

508-668-2800

174

Ernst Conservation Seeds

800-873-3321

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Spring Meadow Nursery Inc.

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151

818-503-1950

173

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TECHNOLOGY Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc.

443-542-0294

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The Plantium Company

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LUMBER/DECKING/EDGING Bison Innovative Products by UCP

888-412-4766

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SOFTWARE

Envirospec, Inc.

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Keyso Solutions Inc.

Oly-Ola Edgings, Inc.

630-833-3033

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Permaloc Aluminum Edging

800-356-9660

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Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging

800-787-3562

1776

OUTDOOR FURNITURE Country Casual

800-284-8325

67

emuamericas, llc

303-733-3385 171, 183

Paloform

888-823-8883

Sunbrella

336-227-6211 148-149

13

PARKS AND RECREATION Columbia Cascade Company

800-547-1940

57

WATER MANAGEMENT AND AMENITIES

STREET FURNISHINGS AND SITE AMENITIES 25

Aquatic Recreation Company (ARC)

877-632-0503

189

Atomizing Systems, Inc.

888-265-3364

165

Fountain People, Inc.

512-392-1155

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International Pool I Spa I Patio Expo

972-536-6329

163 177

ANOVA

888-535-5005

Calpipe Industries Inc.

561-859-7522 168, 183

Most Dependable Fountains

800-552-6331

Canaan Site Furnishings

877-305-6638

177

Roman Fountains

877-794-1802

35

Canterbury International/The Verdin

513-241-4010

39

Vortex Aquatics Structures International

514-694-3868

18, 190

Water Odyssey

512-392-1155

190

800-547-1940

76, 183

Company Columbia Cascade Company DeepStream Designs

305-857-0466

166

Doty & Sons Concrete Products

800-233-3907

184

DuMor, Inc.

800-598-4018 159, 184

EJ

231-536-4465

63

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016 / 181

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THE BACK

/

BACKSTORY THE ART OF WAR FORMER MILITARY SITES PROVIDE SPACE FOR ART ABOUT CONFLICT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

ABOVE

exhibition was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the NPS. It’s also part of Art in the Parks, an NPS initiative that draws on a long history of photographers, painters, musicians, and writers interpreting ecurity, immigration, and defense public lands for a greater audience. dominated our political rhetoric this presidential election season. But The curator, Cheryl Haines, placed while Donald Trump argued for a each of the 25 works by 18 artists. Two wall between the United States and commissioned works by the artist and Mexico, an art exhibition installed at cultural geographer Trevor Paglen, the Presidio, a former military post Operation Onymous (FBI Investigain San Francisco, calls attention to tion of the Silk Road) and Code Names historic defensive landscapes and the of the Surveillance State, are installed impact of contemporary conflicts on in a vault that once housed classified individuals. documents of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group.

Titled Home Land Security, the exhibition (on view through December 18, Exodus, a video by the Iranian artist 2016) takes place in three decommis- Mandana Moghaddam, depicts a flosioned batteries—concrete structures tilla of suitcases adrift on the ocean. dug into bluffs overlooking the Pacific Displayed in the more than 100-yearOcean that served as part of the U.S. old Battery Boutelle, which once Army’s Coastal Defense System—as housed guns protecting San Franwell as a Cold War-era administration cisco Bay, the artwork underscores building used as the control head- the plight facing refugees. “I wanted quarters for Nike surface-to-air mis- to draw a connection between the siles, and the Fort Scott Chapel. The coastal bluff and the crashing waves,” Golden Gate National Recreation Area Haines explains. “[Exodus] is about manages the sites. the dispersal of the diaspora.”

The Presidio’s Battery Boutelle is one of several former military sites in San Francisco exhibiting artworks, including the video Exodus by the Iranian artist Mandana Moghaddam.

Organized by the nonprofit FORSITE Foundation in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and the Presidio Trust, the

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192 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE NOV 2016

ity, through the lens of their creative expression, to think about place, history, and culture in a new way,” she says.

In 2014, the organization mounted @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Howard Levitt, the director of communications and partnerships for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, says this site-specific installation increased local attendance to what is normally a tourist destination by 50 percent.

He adds that guidelines ensure that these preserved landscapes don’t suffer from the additional impact produced by art exhibitions. In fact, out at the batteries, conservation efforts are already in place. As visitors walk between sites they’ll see signs for protected areas and didactic material that calls out the plants that have adapted to the serpentine soils along the coast: Presidio clarkia, Franciscan thistle, and wallflowers. There’s a surprising resonance between the artworks— many of which speak to the resilience of immigrants—and the windblown terrain. This excites Levitt. “People can explore what took place here and our contemporary efforts to restore habitat in the western bluffs,” he says.

“Art in the Parks is a tool for them to Haines is the director of the FOR-SITE go deeper and understand the meanFoundation, which was founded in ing of the place.”

2003 with a mission to use public art to deepen understanding of particular MIMI ZEIGER IS A CRITIC, EDITOR, AND CUlocales. “Artists have the unique abil- RATOR BASED IN LOS ANGELES.

MANDANA MOGHADDAM, EXODUS, 2012; SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND AARAN GALLERY, TEHRAN; © MANDANA MOGHADDAM; PHOTO: ROBERT DIVERS HERRICK

BY MIMI ZEIGER

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