Robynne Heymans Landscape Design Portfolio 2018
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TABLE OF CONTENTS RESUME
pg 4
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE TEXAS TOWN HOUSE pg 8 Residential water management
GRADUATE WORK STUDIO: INTERSTITIAL Bike path through industrial buffer
pg 18
STATEN ISLAND MAPPING Synthesized analysis with GIS
pg 22 pg 23
WILIAMSBURG ROOFTOP Greening a concrete box
pg 10
RESILIENT BAY AREA Competiton mapping
COMMERCIAL PROJECTS Interior and exterior plants
pg 11
COMPETITION: ACROSS | CRUZAR pg 24 Reimagining the US MEXICO border
WILLIAMSBURG BACKYARD A meadow/woodland edge
pg 12
JACOB RIIS MASTERPLAN pg 14 Resilient National Park Service
ADVOCACY WORK ARCHITEXX Annual panel discussions
pg 28
ASLA NATIONAL ADVOCACY DAY pg 29 Sythesized analysis with GIS RISING URBANISTS pg 30 Annual student-produced conference
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Mapping NYC's green spaces as opportunity for connective corridors Published in PLOT 2015
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Robynne
Heymans 49 Sutton St #1 | Brooklyn, NY heymansr@gmail.com 512.922.4403
ABOUT ME I believe in the role of the landscape architect as advocate for environmental justice and sustainability in public and private spaces. I am particularly interested in green infrastructure for resilient urban design solutions. I enjoy running my own garden design business and leading the student chapter of the ASLA. Other loves include painting, gardening, baking and beaches. Born in South Africa, raised in Texas, living in Brooklyn.
EDUCATION BERNARD AND ANNE SPITZER SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE 2015-Present Masters of Landscape Architecture candidate 2018 Primary focus on the interactions of humans with the built environment; exploring the notion of built as it appears in the urban landscape including feral, abandoned sites reclaimed by flora, and the highly-engineered yet naturalistic-looking spaces such as Central Park. SOUTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 2005-2009 B.A. Communication Studies Primarily focused on event planning and project coordinating, sat on several executive boards of student planning committees and organzied campus wide events.
SKILLS EXPERIENCE Adobe Suite, Auto CAD, GIS, Rhino, 3DS Max, Aftereffects, Office suite, Sustainable landscape management practices, Project management, Time management, Organization, Leadership, Business operations
accomplishments ASLA +Student Chapter President 2017-2018 +National Student Advisory Committee Representative +Advocacy Day! Student Representative +Rising Urbanists Chair +2017 Scholarship Recipient ARCHSTORMING International Unbuild the Wall Competition Honorable Mention WX 2017 Internship Grant Winner WATERFRONT ALLIANCE 2018 Conference presenter 2016 Arcadis Waterfront Scholar PLOT- CCNY ANNUAL BOOK Student Editor Published LADYBIRD JOHNSON WILDFLOWER CENTER Sustainable Landscape Design Certificate
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE | queens, ny
May-August 2017
Summer 2017 Landscape Architecture Internship
Prepared a condition assessment and Post Hurricane Sandy Landscape treatment master plan to guide future landscape management with resilient strategies for the 220-acre Jacob Riis Park, Far Rockaway, Queens. MIRANDA BROOKS LANDSCAPE DESIGN | brooklyn, ny
March-May 2017
Spring 2017 Internship
I assisted with plant orders, construction documents, planting plans and general office support. High-profile clients and large-scale residential master planning. EMBARK LLC | austin, tx + brooklyn, ny Owner, Lead designer
2011-Present
Austin + Brooklyn-based indoor and outdoor garden design, maintenance and installation. I organize all aspects of day-to-day business operations and lead all design projects. I have experience designing and installing over 100 gardens as well as supervising staff. SPROUT HOME OF NEW YORK | brooklyn, ny Sr Designer
2013-15
Represented Sprout Home for 100 + residential and commercial garden projects from initial consultation to final billing. Responsiblilities included: • garden design and drafting • plant and materials ordering and • proposals and estimates delivery • project management • installation crew and transportation • communication with clients + scheduling contractors
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Professional Practice Seven years of professional landscape design/build experience with my own company, Embark, and landscape design/build firms in Brooklyn, Sprout Home and Miranda Brooks Landscape Design. Focus as a designer on building landscapes that speak to the client's aethetic while appropriately responding to site conditions and realities of ongoing maintenance. Experienced in planting design, material sourcing, leading crews, contractors and installation processes.
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Texas Town House Austin, TX 2012 | Embark In this garden we installed a functional dry creek bed and observation patio in the client’s side yard to slow several hundred gallons of stormwater that washed through the area every rain event. We installed terraces to further slow water and evoke a natural waterfall while gabions prevent erosion at the end of the creek bed. A semicircular bench and firepit, limestone and adapted plants are uniquely central Texan. For a Mediterranean influence we added Italian Cypress, plenty of roses and a traditional knot garden. $45,000.
Fire pit + limestone edging
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Small patio overlooking dry creek bed + terraces
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Planting plan
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Williamsburg rooftop Brooklyn, NY 2015 | Sprout Home This 7th floor Williamsburg waterfront terrace had full sun exposure most of the day. The client wanted the space to feel like her mum's English garden at home so we laid astroturf and decking on the floor, built the walls up with real and artificial english ivy trellising, layerd in grasses and purple perennials and covered the dining area with a pergola supporting wisteria vines. The result was a lush garden for the summer and a steadfast evergreen view for the winter. $22,000. Before
After
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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Commercial projects Brooklyn, NY 2016-2018 | Embark, LLC I work with a number of commercial clients in shops, bars and restaurants to manage interior and exterior plant design and maintenance. Commercial projects are unique in that they need an extra layer of durability to contend with the daily abuses of patrons as well as limitations of space, light and client expectations. The viability and health of the plantings represent the business, so it is important to me to mix a few staple all-season plants with seasonal updates and a regular maintenance contract to make my commercial projects a success.
> Vale Collective – Upscale European dress shop and cafÊ in Williamsburg needed a mix of faux plants for an instant diamond pattern trellis and privacy hedges. Valued at $15,000.
< Donna Cocktail Bar Brooklyn - Specialty cocktail bar and taco stand with a Havana vibe needed a mix of large floor plants for bright, filtered light as well as faux plant arrangements for top of the bar. 4 year maintenance contract valued at $5,000.
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Williamsburg BACKYARD Brooklyn, NY 2015 | Spout Home For this project I wanted to transform a small, walled garden into an open meadow planting. We built wood frames for raised beds on either side of the garden, one to hold birch trees and shade perennials in a woodland planting and one for a formal vegetable patch and Peony border. The final composition evokes the borders between woodland, field and farm, making the yard feel bigger. $20,000.
Before
Pespective East After
Meadow
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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Plan
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jacob riis master plan Jamaica Bay, Queens NY 2017 | National Park Service Developed during a summer internship at the National Park Service with one other intern, this master plan and Post-Sandy Cultural Landscape Treatment Report of Jacob Riis Beach in Far Rockaway, Queens develops a more holistic approach to resiliency on the barrier island. Recognized as a National Historic Site, designing for Jacob Riis Beach meant considering the cultural historic landscape of its past as well as the climate change and storm surge challenges of its future while maintaining an active space for New Yorkers to visit the beach. This project had a major focus on increasing accessiblity in response to the diversity of the beach patrons as well as implementing green infrastructure interventions and a resilient plant pallate to fortify the beach for future storm surge events.
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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Play areas with accessibility and green infrastructure improvements
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Graduate WORK MLA Candidate at City College in the Spitzer School of Architecture. My academic practice is primarily focused on the interactions of humans with the built environment; what it means to occupy space in an urban environment and the role of vegetation as a way to mitigate the negative aspects of a city.
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Studio: interstitial North Shore, Staten Island 2016 Once a meandering stream, this native system was channelized and wedged between concrete platforms for intermodal container trade, leaving behind debris and toxic runoff that litters the stream bed. In this program, part of the container terminal will be allocated as stream bed, doubling the size of the channel and softening the slope to allow the stream to meander again. The entire area will receive green infrastructure storm water treatment measures complete with phytoremedating plantings. Boardwalks for bike and pedestrian traffic run in a plaited pattern along the stream bed, meandering like the eventual stream will, provide access in this interstitial zone for first-hand accounts of the consumer cycle.
photoshop illustrator inDesign autoCAD GIS
View of stormwater strategies
View of pathway through phragmites
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ACADEMIC WORK
NY Container Terminal, Staten Island
Viewing platform
Stormwater processing structure
Plan: site inside intermodal terminal
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Midpoint section study
South entrance section study
Grading
Path Height
Stormwater Flow
Path typology and access
4' Inundation
6' Inundation
Phytoremediation and water access zones
Synthesis of site elements
Site analysis
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GRADUATE WORK
North entrance
Midpoint: interaction with terminal bridge
South entrace
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staten island mapping Staten Island, 2016 This map represents a synthesis of the physical, social and political attributes of Staten Island as mapped through GIS data. The coloration resembles an oil slick, illustrating the imperfect social, political and environmental situation represented in the data. This map was left without a key as an interpretive piece. The user can observe similarities in regional attributes through confluences in shade and opacity of overlapping data layers.
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This mapping project uses the Resilient By Design – Bay Area Challenge competition as a framework for developing applied geospatial methods and modeling in fortifying coastal resiliency.The project focuses on strategies for mitigating impacts from coastal disasters such as sea level rise, storm surges and seismic shocks, which all disproportionately affect low-lying areas and areas with socio-economic instability. Under the direction of Michael Tantala, this independent study course was designed to shadow the greater BIONIC team composed of Bionic Landscape, WXY, PennDesign and many others. This project will contribute to the spatial analytics and risk analysis component of the greater interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach to accelerating coastal resiliency adaptation in the Bay Area’s most vulnerable areas. The final product was a series of maps and analysis resulting in a 61 page book- all work my own.
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GRADUATE WORK
COMPETITION: Across/cruzar Unbuild The Wall | Archstorming international design competition Awarded First Honorable Mention Developed in conjunction with 3 fellow students on an interdisciplinary team of landscape architects and architects, our design intervention reimagined the border wall in Nogales along the US/Mexico Border. Our idea recycles and repurposes the existing wall into a modular structure that creates a binational space and cultivates a cross-pollination of culture, economy and ideas between the two states.
Personally responsible for developing site programming and rendering plan
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ACADEMIC PRACTICE
ACROSS CRUZAR
VIEW ACROSS|CRUZAR is a proposal to reprogram and repurpose the US-Mexico border wall. Serving before as only a separator and a threshold, ACROSS|CRUZAR transforms the wall into a social and cultural hub and stretches the footprint of the border into a formal, bi-national territory for Ambos Nogales, where people sharing the same culture from either side of the frontera can exchange ideas, goods, and community. Our criteria for border architecture reimagines the frontera to be transparent, welcoming, public, organic, flexible, adaptive, porous, and even ethereal for the residents of this region. Perimeter immigration checkpoints allow residents from one side of the geopolitical border wishing to visit those from the other side do so easily, without officially crossing borders. The modular structure - flexible in all three dimensions - repurposes steel in a sustainable and economical process from the existing wall deconstructed. The construction system is scalable, assembling into different spatial configurations and a spectrum of more-open to more-dense spaces in the wall. The skeleton of the structure allows visitors to either occupy, climb, or rest on it while giving the interior ample space to overcome legal barriers with community programming that responds to and enhances the local economies and rich shared culture in the sister border towns of Nogales.
500 m. Open space Cultural programs Services Immigration/Border Control
FRONTERA REIMAGINADA
Community programming punctuates the border offering services to both sides of the frontera, including cafes, libraries, legal clinics, family services, meeting spaces, offices and parks
SECTION PERSPECTIVE MEXICO
100 m.
US AMBOS NOGALES
The structure sits in the valley of the Nogales Wash, blurring the border and creating a bi-national space reminicent of a time before the wall
PROGRAMMING PLAN PLAN DE PROGRAMACIÓN
Pedestrian Circulation Vehicular Circulation
Using the existing border wall structure, thin strips of steel are assembled to form various sizes of modules. The modules allow for programmatic flexibility. In its elementary form, the modules form a three-dimensional wall where migrants can rest, climb, or play on.
MODULAR FLEXIBILITY FLEXIBILIDAD MODULAR
REPURPOSING THE BORDER REUTILIZACIÓN LA FRONTERA
REST/PLAY/CLIMB SALUD/JUGAR/ESCALADA
MIST EMPAÑAR
Recycled rain water sprays out of the structure to cool park-goers and blur the transition between park and the structure
PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE PUENTE PEATONAL
RAINWATER COLLECTION
Bridges span the submerged vehicular road to connect the park with the main structure
Irrigation for indoor garden REUSABLE-WATER STORAGE
POLLINATOR GARDENS JARDÍN POLINIZADOR Desert pollinator gardens connect a corridor along the border. Pollinators support local farming and the gardens are irrigated with recycled rain water.
Irrigation for the Park
PASSIVE DESIGN STRATEGIES ESTRATEGIAS de DISENO PASIVO
NOGALES
TOTAL = 11,000,000 Cruzar la Frontera Every year hundreds of thousands cross the US/ Mexico border by foot, car, bus and truck. These ports of entry, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico are vital thresholds for the flow of people, commerce, ideas, and cultural exchanges.
By recycling the materiality of the current border wall, new construction becomes a practical, economical, and sustainable method. The intricate and delicate network of steel modules provides migrants refuge from harsh climate conditions by creating a microclimate of lush greenery and shade from the summer sun in large public outdoor spaces.
Group developed board UTW0517083
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advocacy work I believe in the role of the landscape architect as advocate for environmental justice and sustainability in public and private spaces. I am particularly interested in green infrastructure for resilient urban design solutions.
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Architexx BROWNBAG LUNCH LECTURE City College of New York, 2016, 2017, 2018 ArchiteXX is a platform to elevate women in architecture through events, publications and mentorships. Each year City College is asked to host a brown bag lunch panel discussion featuring local female architects, urban planners and landscape architects engaging in discourse surrounding advocacy, intersectionality and diversity in the practice of architecture. I have been a main organizer with two or three other students since 2016. This annual event is particularly important to me because of the focus on practicing architecture through the lens of successful women balancing family, career and personal beliefs.
2017 panel on race and diversity in architecture
2017 panel on activism and advocacy in architecture 28
ADVOCACY WORK
ASLA NATIONAL ADVOCACY DAY! Washington DC, 2016 + 2017 ASLA National Advocacy Day is an annual event organized to lend the voices of professionals in landscape architecture to policy makers in DC. The goal is to provide a set of talking points to local and state representatives that advocate for environmentally sound policies as well as landscape architecture as a profession. I think engaging with policy makers directly is an invaluable tool for making meaningful change.
Advocating at Senator Chuck Schumer's office with the New York representatives
Discussing green infrastructure with Representative Caroline Mahoney
RISING URBANISTS CONFERENCE City College of New York, 2017 + 2018 I co-founded Rising Urbanists, an annual student-produced conference addressing green infrastructure in urban environments, in 2017 and acted as director in 2018. I led a team of 15 students and coordinated with the City College of New York and Hunter Sustainable Cities Institute representatives to produce the day-long interdisciplinary conference featuring 21 speakers, 7 break out sessions, 2 plenary sessions, a community art exhibit, tech fair and student work showcase as well as community-led site tours. Our featured speakers included Brad McKee, Ashley Dawson and Catherine SeavittNordenson. This event is important to me because it affords an opportunity to bridge the gap between academic theory and practice across disciplines with landscape architects leading the discussion.
Panel Featuring Brad McKee, Josh Cerra, Dr. Marcha Johnson and Andrew Lavallee
Break out session on wetland restoration
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ADVOCACY WORK
Community art exhibition
Tech fair featuring AR video game and student work
Interactive mapping exersize
Sponsored happy hour