Reed Hilderbrand
Landscape Architecture
2015 - 2020
Client: City of Boston
Collaborators: Agency Landscape and Planning and MASS Design Group
RH Team: Gary Hilderbrand, John Kett, Eric Kramer, Kristin Frederickson, Lydia Gikas Cook, Danica Liongson
My Role: Project Designer 2019 - 2021
Reed Hilderbrand led a master plan process to renew and guide future investment in Franklin Park, a 500 -acre park within Boston’s Emerald Necklace Park System. The core design team comprised two other design and planning firms and a supplementary team of 17 specialist sub-consultants across a range of disciplines from environmental scientists to economists and community engagement specialists.
My responsibilities as Project Designer included graphic production, project research, site analysis, concept development, assistance with design and sub-consultant team coordination, and participation in client meetings and community and stakeholder engagement events.
The neighborhoods surrounding the park are diverse and predominantly underrepresented or economically underserved. Extensive outreach and engagement demonstrated the critical value of building trust and understanding with the community organizations and indidviduals that have used and stewarded the park for decades.
Community Participation (right)
The project included five phases, with many points along the way where community members could share their feedback, ideas, and expertise. Engagement formats included pop-up events, neighborhood canvassing, and public meetings. When the pandemic began, we had to re-calibrate our approach to engagement. We shifted public meetings into a virtual format and developed a printed field guide for families to explore the Park’s history, ecology, and places.
Spatial Organization (left)
Olmsted’s General Plan for the Park didn’t include contour lines, which concealed the central role that the site’s drumlin topography played in structuring the spaces and circulation of the Park. When we overlaid the original circulation design onto an elevation model, we uncovered a crystal clear design intent. Olmsted organized major programmatic clusters according to three distinct topographic zones. Circulation paths and parkways wove the spaces together by tracing the edges of drumlins and slipping through valleys. These movements along the glacial grain are punctuated by overlooks, where visitors traverse hillsides to arrive at open panoramic views.
Over time, pieces of the park were sold away to different institutions, such as the Zoo, the Golf Course, and the Shattuck Hospital. Fences, walls, and barriers erected at the edges of these new uses interrupted the original spatial organization and severed major connections. As a result, the experience of the Park today is very segmented and disorienting. Reconnecting and re-orienting the park to its topography and context became a driving concept behind the design.
The Playstead
Ellicotdale
Peabody Circle
Circuit Drive Pedestrianization
Client: Boston Symphony Orchestra
Collaborator: Roll Baressi Associates
RH Team: Doug Reed, Adrian Nial, Geoff Fritz
My Role: Project Designer 2016 - 2019
Tanglewood is a 524-acre campus of outdoor concert halls, studios, and historic estate houses, situated on a ridge overlooking the serene Stockbridge Bowl and emerald ridges of surrounding Berkshire hills.
Despite this unique and beautiful context, deferred maintenance and incremental growth have impeded connections to the larger landscape and fragmented
the campus landscape experience. The Plan sets forth principles and actionable recommendations to restore the connectivity, continuity, and beauty of the campus landscape as a singular destination for visitors to experience music in nature.
As Project Designer, I collaborated with the team to advance the design of campus-wide systems of circulation, vegetation, character, and furnishings. I produced presentations and participated in six workshops with the BSO to communicate the design and solicit feedback. I then worked with the team to synthesize this two-year long process into a 125-page booklet of graphics and narrative detailing our recommendations.
Client: Boston Symphony Orchestra
Collaborators: William Rawn Associates
Architects
RH Team: Doug Reed, Adrian Nial, Geoff Fritz
My Role: Project Designer
2016 - 2019
The Linde Center opened in June 2019 as home to Tanglewood’s Learning Institute and the expanded array of programming opportunities made possible by this campus-first year-round facility. The landscape knits the new buildings into the campus experience and orchestrates visitor arrival through a
densely-planted woodland edge and onto the campus’ iconic canopied lawns.
I was involved from concept design to completion, which introduced me to to the complex process behind an institutional construction project. As the work progressed, I conducted nine site visits with the team and issued field reports to ensure that grading, planting, pathways, and concrete work were executed according to the design intent. I learned that great drawings and specifications alone do not guarantee outstanding execution of built projects. When faced with the various pressures of schedule, budget, and unpredictable site conditions, it took collaboration, diligence, precision, and persistence to guide the process toward success.
Hawthorne Road Entry Drive
Entry Path View East
Campus Path View East
A winding path leads from the Linde Center parking to the canopied lawns of the main campus.
Cafe Terrace and the Great Oak
The building volumes and covered walkway array around a heritage Red Oak, which provides the backdrop to performances in the main studio.
Woodland Threshold
A woodland pallete of Hayscented Fern, Viburnum, Rhododendron, and Whitespire Birch occupy slopes graded to nestle the entry drive and parking into the larger landscape.
Courtyard Garden
Whitespire Birch, Hakanachloa, Christmas Fern, Snakeroot, and European Ginger occupy a viewing garden between building volumes.
The project links Williamstown and North Adams, two historic Berkshire towns in the midst of a flourishing cultural revival. The developers are leading an effort to secure funding for a 3 1/4 mile-long multi-use bicycle and pedestrian trail in order to link communities and visitors with the surrounding abundance of open spaces and natural beauty.
Client: The Beyond Group LLC
RH Team: Doug Reed, Chris Moyles, Jeremy Martin
My Role: Project Designer 2016 - 2019
This 72-Acre site straddles the Hoosic River in the heart of Blackinton, a historic district of North Adams, MA. The owners are a consortium of developers with backgrounds in music, food, and hospitality. The team is united by a mission to bolster the region’s flourishing cultural tourism economy by connecting visitors and communities with the site’s unique post-industrial, cultural, and natural offerings.
Former industrial uses on the site, including the namesake Blackinton Textile Mill and the North Adams Sewage Treatment Plant, shaped the terrain with a heavy hand. The master plan reconceives what was once a barren site engineered for stasis and control into an evolving landscape where remediation, management, and adaptive re-use enable leisure, recreation, gathering, lodging, and nature exploration.
I collaborated with the project team to analyze the site and its context, create and advance design concepts, study the design and adaptation of site-wide circulation, program, vegetation, and hydrologic systems, and synthesize the plan into a booklet deliverable for the client.
CULTIVATE DIVERSITY INVASIVE SPECIES MANAGEMENT ENCOURAGES NATIVE SPECIES TO FLOURISH
Remediate and Steward the Land (Above)
A newly-connected open space network features the Hoosic River as the primary unifying element. Proposed woodland invasive species management, ecological restoration, and wetland regeneration renew the health and diversity of Blackinton’s natural systems.
Hoosic Flows (Right)
Engineered landforms shelter some areas from flooding, while others are subject to the dynamic and unpredictable force of the river. This topography guided siting and program.
CAP AND FILL
A MEADOW OVERLOOK AND NEW, HEALTHY SOILS COVER THE FORMER TANNERY WASTE DUMP MOUND
RENEW HYDROLOGY
REMEDIATE NON-FUNCTIONING BORROW PIT WETLANDS TO IMPROVE ECOLOGICAL HEALTH AND HYDROLOGY
TREAD LIGHTLY ELEVATED BOARDWALKS MINIMIZE FOOTPRINT IN ECOLOGICALLY SENSITIVE AREAS
PROTECTED AT RISK
VULNERABLE 100-YEAR FLOODPLAIN
REVEAL LEGACY PUBLIC PATH THROUGH THE MILL PIPES EXPOSES VISITORS TO ARTIFACTS OF THE PAST
The Mill, which was once the economic cornerstone of the surrounding neighborhood, is revitalized as a space for gathering, lodging, and community.
The plan connects visitors with the industrial heritage of the site and region through engagement with it’s post-industrial artifacts. A proposed trail along the historic Blackinton Mill Race makes the site’s legacy legible and accessible by taking visitors through the decomissioned mill’s 9’ diameter sluice pipes.
RE-PURPOSE INDUSTRIAL REMNANTS ADAPT HISTORIC STRUCTURES FOR CONTEMPORARY DINING, LEISURE, AND LODGINGClient: The Beyond Group LLC
RH Team: Doug Reed, Chris Moyles, Jeremy Martin
My Role: Project Designer 2016 - 2019
The first projected implemented as part of The Blackinton Framework Plan is Tourists, a 48-room hotel located on the site of a former dilapidated 1950’s motel. Re-shaped topography and plantings set a main courtyard and event lawn at a lower level within the riparian character of the river. What had once been a plateau of junk fill overlooking a stagnant mire, is now a series of lawn glades, swales, and rehabilitated wetlands. At the upper level, a domestic frontage of hedges and apple trees sets the rooms away from the busy street and a network of garden beds shape a meandering circulation of woodland and lawn paths leading to a suspension bridge across the Hoosic and the rest of the 72-acre property.
I was involved in the project from the outset, working closely with the project team to design from concept to completion across two separate phases of work. I conducted eight site visits with the project manager throughout construction to review decks, boardwalks, grading, paving, pool installation, and direct the composition and installation of trees, shrubs, and groundcovers in the garden beds.
PARKING SWALES
CATENARY LIGHTING
LODGE
1813 FARMHOUSE
HOTEL ROOMS
LODGE DECK OVERLOOK
WOODLAND GARDENS
SUNKEN EVENT LAWN
EXISTING RIVER BLUFF
RESTORED RIVER BLUFF
POOL
WETLAND SWALE
REHABILITATED WETLAND
WETLAND BOARDWALK
White Oak is the project’s defining material. Wood decks signify primary areas for gathering and circulation. I coordinated extensively with a structural engineer to detail all deck elements on the project including footings, piers, framing, decking, guardrails, and hardware for the lodge deck, pool deck, wetland boardwalk, and river overlook.
RIBBON RIDGE
Clients: Michael Etzel and Carey Critchlow
Collaborators: Linden, Brown Architects
RH Team: John Kett, Cammy Kuo
My Role: Project Manager 2019 - 2020
The Sequitur Vineyards sit atop the upper flats of Ribbon Ridge, a glacial uplift within the Willamette River Watershed. From the upper ridge, the property extends west through wooded slopes of Douglas Fir and Oregon White Oak, over a ravine, and across the broad Chehalem Valley Floor. An existing dilapidated dairy farm occupies this intersection between ridge, ravine, and valley floor. The project amplifies
this unique siting to renew the farm landscape and structures as a premier destination for making and tasting wine. The plan’s guiding principle was to engage visitors, family, and workers with the renewal of the working farm by revealing and displaying the process of growing and making wine.
As the Project Manager, I collaborated with Principal John Kett to oversee, coordinate, and execute all aspects of design and project administration. This included concept development, design studies, graphic production, client and design team correspondence, billing, and contract negotiation.
Overlapping Experiences
The project promotes connections between family, visitors, and production through the working landscape of the farm.
Graphics and content I developed for Awards Submissions are frequently re-used in the firm’s promotional materials.
RH Team: Doug Reed, Gary Hilderbrand, Eric Kramer, Kristin Frederickson Scott Geiger, Geoff Fritz, Karolina Hac
My Role: Project Manager
Every year, an internal team comprising firm leadership, marketing staff, design staff, and interns gather to evaluate significant projects in the office and refine their content for submission to the American Society and Boston Society of Landscape Architects awards programs. The process was a yearly exercise in applying the firm’s characteristic analytical rigor and conceptual clarity to hone project narratives, refine drawings, and curate imagery in order to illustrate each project’s most compelling themes and stories.
As the Project Manager I organized weekly meetings with the Awards team, coordinated with project teams to compile and distill existing content, oversaw graphic production, wrote and edited text narratives, and formatted the submission materials. Throughout my four years in this role, the firm received 18 total awards from ASLA, BSLA, and SCUP, including the ASLA Award of excellence for Long Dock Park in 2015.
University of Pennsylvania
Landscape Architecture & City Planning, 2020 - 2023
Instructors: Sean Burkholder
Fall 2020 (Deep Pandemic)
This project explored Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philadelphia and its context through routine visits and sitebased experiments. The course prompted us with weekly themes around which to design our own experiments. The methodology emphasized direct experience, observation, and making over traditional research. In the isolation of COVID, starting out in a new city, and a virtual first year of graduate school, visiting the place became an act of meditation, experimentation, and quiet joy. Throughout the semester, my guiding question emerged: “How can I uncover the overlapping narratives between people, plants, objects, and place?”
My initial experiments focused on the contrasts between the garden, its context, and the edges between them. The garden is a manicured colonial remnant amidst the Bartram’s Village Public Housing complex, Sankofa Farm, and the surrounding grit of warehouses, railroad corridors, overpasses, salvage yards, vacant lots, and oil terminals. I explored these contrasts by observing, interacting, and tinkering with the plants and objects that inhabited those environments.
I also learned by engaging with the people - neighbors, families, urban cowboys, dog walkers, plein air painters, maintenance workers - that bring social life to these curious environments. Our masked conversations rarely lasted longer than a few minutes, but the connections became defining memories of the place.
Channeling John Bartram, I collected ruderal species from disturbed trailsides, fencelines, cracks in the sidewalk, and vacant industrial lots. I attempted to cultivate them at home in a variety of soil media. The cultivation was... Unsuccessful.
I also made routine visits to a specimen Franklin Tree in the garden and a Spotted Laternfly-infested Tree of Heaven growing in the fenceline of a storage warehouse for the Streets Department. Every week I recorded the light, weather, and seasonal change. While I sketched observations, many different people and animals passed by.
The land surrounding the gardens was unmistakably in a state of transition. Through later coursework and experience, I learned that swaths of this vacant industrial land were being remediated for industrial scale cell and gene therapy manufacturing labs. Now I wonder what effects they’ll have on the surrounding low-income neighborhoods of color. Will they become an agent of displacement, an economic development lifeline, or somewhere in between?
The cycle of waste and dumping at the edges of vacant industrial lots was ever changing. For seven weeks, I revisited 51st street between Grays Ave. I would descend the street on bike, making my way slowly past a shifting topography of sofas, matresses, old clothes, appliances, construction debris, party supplies, TVs, abandoned freight trucks, and many, many tires.
These kinetic debris piles were a mystery because the Streets Department operates a Citizens Sanitation Convenience Center (where anyone can drop off large trash) right across Grays Ave. The back of their sanitation truck depot also overlooked the street through thickets of Ailanthus, Knotweed, and Paper Mulberry. I decided to roll a tire into the Convenience Center, expecting to be turned away or told they were full. Instead a kind man nodded to an orderly bin of tires and gave me a thumbs up.
Each experiment opened a door into new unknowns.
Embracing the overlaps and unkowns, my final experiment drew contrasts and dichotomies of the site and beyond into diaglogue through projection collages.
Instructors: Ellen Neises, Colin Curley, Todd Montgomery
Community Partner: Philly Thrive
Partner: Allison Nkwocha Spring 2021
Environmental justice for the former PES Refinery site must include a transfer of productive land back to the South Philadelphia community that has long endured harm by the site’s operations. This productive space inverts the former refinery’s extractive economy by breaking down the monocultural scale of industrial land, ceding ownership to the community, and providing the infrastructural framework to support a variety of community-cultivated industries. This project defines and designs productive space by metrics of flexibility, scale, visibility, and connectivity. Flexible spaces support a variety of uses and
operations at scales appropriate to the neighborhood. Their intentional visibility and connectivity create a feedback loop of access, laying groundwork for overlaps, collaboration, and growth. By stitching formerly inaccessible urban land back into the neighborhood fabric, this project seeds restorative structures for local livelihoods and ecosystems. Drawing on the legacy of the site and its varying configurations of access and ownership over time, this project centers new frameworks for co-operative development and collective ownership to envision a future that counters the consuming void and harm created by the refinery.
FLEXIBILITY
Facilitate overlapping and shared uses. Allow spaces to be adapted over time (short term and long term) so the community can build and produce what they want.
VISIBILITY
Make industrial, ecological, and social networks and processes legible. Provide places for demonstration and participation. Signify connection across disparate spaces.
CONNECTIVITY
Use space to create new, strengthen existing, and re-activate old connections, infrastructurally and socially.
Spatial Organization Concepts
SCALE
Bridge the scale of industrial operations with the neighborhood fabric. Provide the infrastructure that allows community livelihoods to flourish at multiple scales.
Regenerative Production at 3 Sites and Scales
SIGNAL PIXELATE PATCH/STITCH
CONNECTIVITY SCALE
CONNECTIVITY SCALE
Social-Industrial Stitch
SOCIAL-INDUSTRIAL ZONES
FLEXIBILITY VISIBILITY
FLEXIBILITY
GRAYS FERRY CO-LAB
INDUSTRIAL VEHICLE ACCESS
PEDESTRIAN ACCESS
GREEN CORRIDORS + BUFFERS
EXISTING INDUSTRIAL ZONE
PEOPLE’S DEPOT EXPANSION
SIGNAL MIXED MANUFACTURING ZONE
PARKS + PUBLIC SPACES
SCHOOLS + TRAINING CENTERS
PUBLIC HOUSING
PROPAGATION STATION
PEOPLE’S DEPOT
Where community builds capacity.
Where co-operative ownership expands.
Grays Ferry Co-Lab
The People’s Depot
Instructors: Billy Fleming
Partners: Asha Bazil, Amy Liu-Pathak, Leeana Skuby
Fall 2021
The third iteration of the Designing a Green New Deal studio elucidates the histories and realities of land and labor exploitation in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, which serve as the bedrock of racial capitalism in the United States.
Architecture and City Planning students, we created field guides to each region, which analyze the built environment through three interconnected systems of exploitation: the carceral state, industrial agriculture,
and the fossil fuel industry. Secondly, a how-to manual details steps for dismantling the Plantation-to-Prison Pipeline in the Delta and the Coal Field-to-Prison Pipeline in Appalachia. Lastly, climate fiction stories envision the events preceding the passage of the Green New Deal, as well as daily life in these regions thereafter, through a lens of radical renewal and reparations. Throughout the process, we consulted with scholars, activists, policymakers, and movement leaders to build our research and frame our forecasts.
The impacts of incarceration reach far beyond the prison walls and into the daily lives of surrounding residents. Beyond the physical facilities of the prisons, there is a constructed system of relations that reinforce the carceral state as an engine for economic and political hegemony. Shown above is a delta community behind the levees of the Mississippi River.
In x-ray view, we see the regime of exploited labor that underlies daily life in the communities that prisons built. We see this legacy reflected in the infrastructures and industries that sustain the Delta region.
The legacy of forced labor reaches into the everyday spaces and objects in the community as well. Public parks, roads, schools, and churches all benefit from incarcerated labor, whether it is through the inmate work crews that maintain and build them directly or the goods and services that prison factories produce and distribute.
A series of publications for each region illustrate and narrate scenarios of climate justice and reparations for the communities most impacted by the economic and political domination of the carceral state. The concluding booklet is a work of climate fiction that imagines The Green New Deal as a vehicle for radical re-investment in structures of community-based care and liberation. Delta Uprising tells a an intergenerational story of social action, reclamation, and ecological renewal on the sites of the Delta’s three most exploitative prisons.
CLIMATE
HOWTO BLOW UPTHE COALFIELD TO PRISON PIPELINE
35PagesAppalachiaHow-ToManual EXTRACTION IN APPALACHIA: FIELD GUIDE
112 Pages Appalachia Field Guide
EXTRACTION IN APPALACHIA: CLIMATE FICTION
39 Pages Appalachia CliFi
DELTA UPRISING: A GREEN NEW DEAL STORY OF REBELLION, REMEDIATION, AND CELEBRATION
47 Pages
Delta CliFi HOW TO BLOW UP THE PLANTATION TO PRISON PIPELINE
28 DeltaPagesHow-To Manual
TOAFIELDGUIDETOTHEPLANTATION
PRISONPIPELINE88Pages DeltaFieldGuide
PLEIN AIR PAINTINGS
SITE IMPRESSIONS OF APPALACHIAN COAL FIELDS BY DANIEL FLINCHBAUGH
APPALACHIA CLIFI
APPALACHIA HOW-TO
FUTURE ARTIFACTS CLIMATE JUSTICE CURIOS
APPALACHIA FIELD GUIDE
REGIONAL ARTIFACTS OBJECTS AND PRODUCTS OF THE CARCERAL SYSTEM
LIGHT BOX DISPLAYS ILLUMINATE HIDDEN RELATIONSHIPS
DELTA CLIFI
DELTA HOW-TO
DELTA FIELD GUIDE
Instructors: Ellen Nieses, Ernel Martinez, Eduardo Rega, Abdallah Tabet, Akira Drake Rodriguez
Partners: Ziying Huang, Olivia Xu, Jamaica Reese-Julien, Pedro Medrano
Spring 2022
Studio+ is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary studio courses focused on community engaged design, planning, art, and preservation in Philadelphia. Our work built on that of previous students in Akira Drake Rodriguez’s seminar course, Public Schools as Equity Infrastructure. Our cohort included 17 students and 5 faculty across Architecture, Landscape, City Planning, and Fine Arts. In a city where Public School Facilities are toxic and crumbling, we aimed to support grassroots movements and build institutional partnerships to engage youth as the designers and makers of schoolyard spaces for community.
Our work began with a collective look into West Philadelphia neighborhood assets and pressures, as well as mapping and illustrating the current movements for education justice citywide. We then designed engagement strategies to collaborate with West Philadelphia High Students in the Career Technical Education program taught by Jennifer McCullom. We ran workshops, classes, field sessions, and maker days where we drew, collaged, and mocked up site elements together to explore new design possibilities for the school’s main entry courtyard space.
We took what we generated and learned with the students to develop detailed designs and visualizations for the long-term future of the courtyard.
In particular, students and faculty were interested in a flexible outdoor space for gathering, growing, and learning. I worked within a smaller team to develop plans for the Possibilist Porch, a multi-purpose greenhouse classroom and gathering space overlooking the School’s main entry walkway.
The porch is reinterpretation of the surrounding neighborhood vernacular and drew inspiration from the writing of the late bell hooks. hooks conceptualized porches as powerful Black cultural spaces where intergenerationl exchanges occur and imagination expands.
The design combines spaces for learning and experimentation with comfortable and flexibile areas for gathering. We designed the greenhouse rooms and shading devices by recombining components taken from off-the-shelf greenhouse kits. The interior structure uses scaffolding components and connections to create a flexible frame for storage, seating, and staging.
Altogether, the Porch accommodates a wide variety of uses and programs from theater productions and celebrations to biology class with Mr. Thiebeau.
1 Multi-purpose Greenhouse
2 Outdoor Teaching Garden
3 Teaching and Production Garden
4 Porch
5 Courtyard Plantings
6 Stormwater Collection
Gymnasium
Main Entry Walkway
Year 1 - Hoop House Garden with Raised Beds
Possible Programs - Garden Club, Gardening Classes
Year 2 - Porch Addition
Possible Programs - Gathering, Outdoor Classroom, Production Greenhouse
Year 3 - Scaffolding Structure
Possible Programs - Student Art Display, Movie Night, WPHS Basketball Finals Screening
Year 4 - Climate Controlled Greenhouse
Possible Programs -Small performances, Year-round classroom space, Long-term science experiments, Flexibility to reconfigure interior structure to accommodate different programs as needed
Awarded Honorable Mention in Demonstration Projects Category
Community Partner: Eric Sherman, Sayre High School Nutrition Educator and Garden Manager Team: Corey Wills, Mrinalini Verma, Fall 2021
Sayre High School, located in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia, has many assets; an onsite health center, a small garden program, an adjacent recreation center, and beautiful student-created murals. However, the school sits within a Combined Sewer Overflow watershed and
food desert. Students and faculty also experience some of the hottest temperatures citywide due to the surrounding sea of asphalt parking lots and lack of tree canopy throughout the schoolyard and surrounding neighborhood.
The design re-imagines the schoolyard as an absorptive and shaded landscape for community gathering, sport, and stormwater management. An existing parking access drive, which aligns with Locust St., transforms into an active permeable promenade connecting existing sports fields with new cooling centers and rain gardens. The design also provides new infrastructure for the School’s urban farming, gardening, and community-based food initiatives. A new farm stand pavillion captures stormwater, while providing a focal point within the schoolyard for existing food relief programs and produce markets.
Community Partner: Carolyn Mosely, Eastwick United CDC
Team: Aminah McNulty, Allison Nkwocha, Celine Appolon, Nina Valentine, Ben Kalina Spring 2023
The Eastwick community in Southwest Philadelphia is home to organized, passionate, and resilient residents. They experience some of the most extreme and compounding environmental risks of any neighborhood in the city. Much of Eastwick is built on former wetlands within the low-lying confluence of Darby Creek and the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. The neighborhood experiences repeat destructive flooding during major storm events. It is also home to two EPA superfund sites, the Clearview and Folcroft Landfills. In 1950, the City began the nation’s largest Urban Renewal plan in Eastwick, using eminent domain to clear many properties to
build 45,000 new homes. Only one tenth of that goal was met, resulting in the displacement of many long-term residents.
Working closely with Carolyn Mosely of Eastwick United CDC, we developed a proposal for building capcity among Eastwick residents to organize and advocate for change. The proposal builds on EU’s existing community ambassador training program by envisioning the adaptive re-use of the vacant George Pepper Middle School as a new hub for environmental justice education, experimentation, community gathering, and economic development. This place-based strategy is accompanied by a curriculum proposal that centers capacity building around environmental justice as a lived experience and intergenerational practice among youth, families, and elders. We worked with documentary film professor Ben Kalina and his student Nina Valentine to film and produce a short video for the competition that features neighborhood narratives and community leaders in support of the vision.
Existing George Pepper Middle School
Community Partner: Philly Thrive, Friends of Stinger Square
PennPraxis Team: Ellen Nieses, Colin Curley, A McCullough, Tosin Omojola
My Role: Design Fellow Summer 2022
Stinger Square is a beloved neighborhood park, which plays a central role in the social life of the Grays Ferry neighborhood. It is home to many youth programs, cookouts, celebrations, sports practices, community organizing events, and a lively weekly Oldies Night on summer evenings. The pool is a popular destination for families in the hot summer months and a critical piece of neighborhood infrastructure.
Since the pool was added in the 1970s, the park has yet to receive any major reinvestment, even though other parks across the neighborhood have received substantial funding for rennovations and capital projects through the City’s Rebuild program. The Park lacks adequate basic infrastructure for visitor safety and comfort. Maintenance, stewardship, and programming responsibilities fall on a small but dedicated group of community volunteers and a single Parks Department staff member.
In partnership with neighborhood grassroots organizations, we carried out a robust summer of community engagement, analysis, and visioning. We channeled this collective process into a set of concept plans, visualizations, and materials for cost estimation. PennPraxis and Philly Thrive are using the materials in ongoing discussions with the City, the Parks and Rec. Department, and funders in order to bring the community’s vision to fruition.
Community Partner: Iris Brown, Norris Square Neighborhood Project
Instructor: Domenic Vitiello
Team: Makalyah Davis, Simon Gutkin, and Leeana Skuby Spring 2022
In the 1960s and 70s, the neighborhood fabric around Norris Square in West Kensington, Philadelphia was unraveling. Residents experienced the compounding effects of racialized disinvestment, white flight, and an uprecedented drug crisis. Federal drug raids throughout the 1960s incaracerated more than 60 community members, leaving families across the neighborhood torn apart.
In response, Iris Brown, Tomasita Romero, and several first generation Puerto Rican immigrant mothers established Grupo Motivos, a grassroots organization dedicated to building alternative spaces for care, healing, and cultural preservation amidst the landscape of vacancy in the surrounding neighborhood. Over decades, they built and tended six unique community gardens over nearly 40 lots of vacant land.
The gardens are a sensory immersion into the histories, landscapes, folk art, agriculture, food, and music of the African Diaspora and Indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico. Today, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project continues a legacy of intergenerational cultural exchange through many youth development, urban farming, and project-based learning programs in the gardens.
1 in 3 active community gardens across Philadelphia are located in areas with a high intensity of new residential construction. Under the city’s current policies of vacant land acquisition and disposition for private development, these important cultural spaces are at a great risk of erasure.
In the Winter of 2022, a private developer began construction on new rowhome adjacent to El Batey, NSNP’s demonstration garden for Indigenous Taíno agrulcutural practices. During the first day of foundation excavation, the builders destroyed the eastern third of the garden.
We worked closely with Iris Brown to document and illustrate her vision for the garden’s renewal. The layout of new beds draws on the symbolism of the Taíno sol, a frequent motif found in indigenous petroglyphs. NSNP staff, volunteers, and local carpenters have nearly completed the reconstruction. Planting will take place this spring.
5 Vegetable Beds
6 Taíno Sol
7 Community Table
8 Batey Petroglyph Stones
1 Bohío 2 Greenhouse 3 Cunocos (Taíno Crop Mounds) 4 Interpretive Mural Panels
Designed Urban Ecologies Studio
Instructor: Brad Goetz
Spring 2013
Sea-level rise and climate change present unprecedented risks to the diverse populations that inhabit cities around the world. This is an undeniable fact of our time and one that, to quote Jeff Gooddell in The Water Will Come, “will reshape our world in ways that most of us can only dimly imagine.” However, in this time of uncertainty, aren’t we obligated to imagine? I believe we are, and not only in a catastrophic sense, but with a speculative hope and measured optimism for the future as well. In order to imagine a more just and resilient future for the built environment, we must first understand our current predicament.
These issues certainly demand swift action, yet the circumstances that have led to our coastal vulnerability accrued over the course of centuries. So where do we begin when the cornerstones of so many economic, social, and political systems are built on coastlines and atop soggy marshes? Clearly, the problem stems deeper than the physical location where land, water, and city meet. The analysis phase of this studio investigated the complexity of this problem on a global and systemic scale through data visualization, which informed later investigations into the project site, the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, New York.
FEEDBACK LOOP
Over half the world’s population now lives in urban environments. The causes of climate change and urbanization are inexorably linked into a continuous feedback loop.
Even as coastlines and infrastructure become more threatened by sea-level rise, populations continue to grow significantly within 10 meters of elevation from sea-level.
FLOOD OF 1998
GOWANUS CANAL BROOKLYN, NY
Cities often develop on filled land, thereby subsuming coastal ecosystems that could otherwise mitigate flooding. This trend exists in both developing and developed contexts around the world. In some developing nations, such as Bangladesh (above), rapid growth manifests as informal settlements, which lack basic infrastructure for living, not to mention flood protection. Developing nations and economically underserved urban populations will be disproportionately affected by climate change and sea-level rise.
Advisor: Jane Amidon
Fall 2015 - Spring 2016
Infrastructural networks extend across vast regional landscapes but converge in urban areas where their scale and function threaten to disrupt and disconnect the local communities they serve. How can urban infrastructure be more carefully planned, designed, and integrated with the public realm in order to foster social equity and make our cities more resilient? This research project explores the question through historical analysis and contemporary evaluations of the of six public infrastructural landscapes in Boston.
These sites, which are connected by complex legacies of environmental degradation and displaced people, are emblematic of the city’s development over time. Over the course of a century, the impetus behind infrastructure planning shifted wildly from public spaces for social and environmental reform, to transportation infrastructures as divisive instruments for urban renewal, to the current reclamation of the city’s environment and public realm.
Despite progress, challenges lie ahead. Lessons drawn from these sites can inform efforts to adapt Boston for the looming effects of climate change and sea-level rise.
SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR CHARLES RIVER ESPLANADE ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY BACK BAY FENSSHAWMUT PENINSULA (1630)
RAILROADS AND STAGNANT MILL PONDS (1850)
PARK NETWORKS (1915)
PUBLIC SPACES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL REFORM
BACK BAY FENS SANITARY INFRASTRUCTURE AS PUBLIC SPACE (1878)
CHARLES RIVER DAM ESTUARY BECOMES FRESHWATER RECREATIONAL BASIN (1910)
HIGHWAYS AND EXPRESSWAYS (1950)
MULTI-MODAL TRANSIT (1980)
WATERFRONT AND BEYOND (2008)
URBAN RENEWAL AND TRANSPORTATION PLANNING RECLAIMING THE PUBLIC REALM
CENTRAL ARTERY EXPRESSWAY (1950)
STORROW DRIVE DIVIDES ESPLANADE AND BACK BAY
MDPW MASTER HIGHWAY PLAN (1948)
HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION MORATORIUM DECLARED BY GOV. FRANCIS SARGENT (1970)
BACK BAY FENS
WATER TRANSPORTATION
CHARLES RIVER ESPLANADE
TURNING POINT
SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR COMPLETE (1987)
BIG DIG INFRASTRUCTURE MEGAPROJECT CONSTRUCTION BEGINS (1991)
ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY BIG DIG COMPLETE (2008)
SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY
WASTE
DEER ISLAND SPECTACLE ISLAND
CHARLESBANK CITY’S FIRST RIVERFRONT PARK (1888)
CHARLES RIVER EMBANKMENT CHARLESBANK EXPANDS (1910)
CHARLES RIVER ESPLANADE EMBANKMENT EXPANDS (1928)
SPECTACLE ISLAND LANDFILL (20th CENTURY)
SOUTHWEST EXPRESSWAY CITY CLAIMS AND CLEARS 100 ACRES IN ROXBURY AND JAMAICA PLAIN (1966)
SPECTACLE ISLAND HORSE RENDERING PLANT (19th CENTURY)
DEER ISLAND INTERNMENT CAMP COLONISTS INTER 500 NATIVE
BOSTON HARBOR ISLANDS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA NATIONAL AND STATE PARK
DEER ISLAND PENITENTIARY (20th CENTURY)
FEDERAL CLEAN WATER ACT COURT RULING INITIATES BOSTON HARBOR PROJECT (1972)
MASSACUSETTS WATER RESOURCES AUTHORITY ESTABLISHED TO OVERSEE BOSTON HARBOR CLEANUP
SPECTACLE ISLAND LANDFILL RECLAMATION COMPLETE (2006)
DEER ISLAND SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT HARBOR CLEANUP COMPLETE (2000)
CONSTRUCTED HYDROLOGY OF THE STONY BROOK AND MUDDY RIVER
BACK BAY FENS
MUDDY RIVER AND JAMAICA POND FILLED LAND
MIDDLESEX FELLS RESERVATION
CHARLES RIVER REGIONAL WATERSHED
CHARLES RIVER ESPLANADE FILLED LAND
BACK BAY
EMERALD NECKLACE
NEPONSET RIVER
WARD STREET HEADWORKS
COLUMBUS PARK HEADWORKS
10 MI. OUTFALL TUNNEL
CHELSEA CREEK HEADWORKS
BLUE HILLS RESERVATION
GREATER BOSTON REGIONAL OPEN SPACE NETWORK
SPECTACLE ISLAND
GREATER METROPOLITAN PARK SYSTEM CITY PARK SYSTEM
HARBOR ISLANDS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA PARKWAYS AND FERRY ROUTES
COLLECTION AND DILUTIONGREATER BOSTON WASTEWATER NETWORK
NUT ISLAND HEADWORKS
ANNUAL INCOME DISTRIBUTION ALONG THE SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR
ROXBURY
SOUTH END JAMAICA PLAIN
SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR MBTA NETWORK
$10 - 30K
$30 - 53K
$53 - 72K $72 - 100K
$100 - 176K
DOWNTOWN’S SUBTERRANEAN EXPRESSWAYS
ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY FILLED LAND (VULNERABLE)
STONY BROOK CONDUIT HISTORIC STONY BROOK MUDDY RIVERMODEL FOR REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE WITH INVASIVE SPECIES
Collaborators: Jean-Piero Arguello and Jamaica
Reese-Julien
Instructors: Scott Bishop and Michelle Laboy Spring 2016
This project challenges cultural notions surrounding invasive species by utilizing their productive potential. The Neponset River Estuary, south of Boston, is dominated by the invasive reed Phragmites Australis, which continues to grow beyond control. The infestation is the result of human disturbance, which began in the1960’s, when the Army Corps of Engineers constructed diked basins in the native marsh flats to dispose of dredged sediments from the upper reaches of the river. This project adapts the
Phragmites-infested basins as living infrastructure, which collect and bioremediate sediments during flood events. Through cycles of growth, sedimentation, harvest, and excavation, the basins also generate biomass for energy production and fill material to construct multi-purpose flood control infrastructures, which service and protect communities. A new mixed-use greenhouse building typology also utilizes constructed Phragmites wetland trays to filter and treat wastewater.
The plan deploys these multi-purpose landscapes and buildings across the Estuary to link existing parklands and greenways into a continuous open space and infrastructural corridor.
EXISTING RIVERWALK/GREENWAY CORRIDOR BERM NETWORK BUILDING INTERVENTIONS BUILDING WASTE WATERSHED
The site processes of bioremediation and production extend into a multi-purpose building. The building volumes straddle the main circulation system atop the berm and frame pedestrian connections from the neighborhood to the River beyond. Phragmites wetland trays within the building filter and treat wastewater from the surrounding neighborhoods. Operations for processing harvested Phragmites into biomass, producing bioengery, and conveyance for clean water and energy back to the neighborhood are integrated into the core of the berm and basement of the building.
Though the land for the site was created for the South Boston Naval Annex, it has been in a perpetual state of change ever since. Today there is a mix of industrial and commercial uses operating there. In the site’s vacant parcels, emergent ecologies of vernal pools and suspended wetlands demonstrate a compelling co-existence of industry and ecology.
A variety of paths lead from a central spine of bicycle and pedestrian circulation to a continuous waterfront promenade. Clearings, docks, and a main plaza provide areas for gathering.
New and adapted stormwater infrastructure allow future development to be tied to a comprehensive network for directing and retaining surface flows.
Instructors: James Royce and Lynne Geisecke Fall 2015
The Marine Industrial Park is one of South Boston’s last dedicated industrial districts. The Massachusetts Port Authority owns and operates this peninsula of made land, which carries a special zoning designation as a reserve for the maritime industry. Despite this designation, a variety of commercial tenants have come to the site in recent years. Furthermore, the city and Massport are facing enormous pressure from private developers looking to expand the mixed-use development of the growing Seaport District eastward. The city seeks to to preserve the
A series of plinths, softened shorelines, and breakwaters make room for water on the site to accommodate coastal flooding and sealevel rise.
maritime industry, however the site is mostly occupied by vacant land, freight shipping terminals, and fish processing operations. These uses represent a narrow interpretation of what the maritime industry can encompass.
This project outlines a framework to expand the current stifling designation of the maritime industry to balance new uses and development with thoughtful planning for imminent sea-level rise and coastal flooding. By prioritizing the public realm and using landscape as a resilient growth medium, the project explores new ways to create a valuable and vibrant waterfront today that is also equipped to meet the needs of an uncertain future.
SIMULTANEOUS SUCCESSION OF LANDSCAPE AND MARITIME USES
YEAR 10
PLANTINGS AND EARTHWORK INITIATE RENEWED COASTAL ECOLOGY
YEAR 20
ADAPTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE ACCOMMODATES NEW INDUSTRIAL USES
SWALES
NURSERY PLINTH BREAKWATERS
BIKE LANE
PEDESTRIAN PROMENADE ELEVATED WATERFRONT BOARDWALK INTERTIDAL ZONE
EXISTING GRADE
SHAPING A RESILIENT AND ACCESSIBLE WATERFRONT
Instructor: Pablo Perez-Ramos Spring 2015
There is something bewildering about atolls. Their existence seems improbable amidst the vast reaches of surrounding ocean. Despite this perplexing appearance, atolls are shaped by defined, yet dynamic sets of geologic, coastal, and ecological processes. Patterns in morphology and vegetation reveal the ways which an atoll develops into a self-contained ecosystem.
The project draws on the morphology and ecology of atolls to envision a new constructed breakwater typology. Breakwater Atolls offer coastal protection for communities while bolstering habitats for fish, birds, and aquatic species and improving recreational and economic opportunities for people.
SEA-GRASS BED OR MARSHY INTERIOR DUNE EDGE (PEOPLE AND BIRD SPECIES)
DUNE CREST
POROUS GABION ARMATURE
KELP BED INTERIOR (FISH HABITAT)
INTERTIDAL REEF
RIP RAP ARMATURE
SHELLFISH REEF (BIRDS, FISH, SHELLFISH, REEF DWELLERS)
BREAKWATER ATOLLS AS HABITAT STEPPING STONES
MODULAR REEF (FISH AND REEF DWELLERS)
SUBMERGED REEF
PRE-CAST CONCRETE MODULAR REEF UNITS
BREAKWATER ATOLLS / ACADEMIC
Instructor: Ian Scherling Fall 2015
Nestled in a low-lying area amongst oil terminals, parking lots, and a stone’s throw away from Logan Airport, the neighborhood surrounding the former Maverick Mills building in East Boston is starved for open space and highly vulnerable to coastal flooding. The Mill’s site occupies the lowest topographic point within the surrounding watershed.
The project capitalizes on this topography by calibrating the land for drainage, inundation, and public access. The new landscape is a series of interlocking landforms, which step down in elevation to meet the
Chelsea River. This sculpted tributary directs and slows down stormwater in order to improve infiltration and water quality before out letting into the Chelsea River. The project also raises the edges of the site by to mitigate sea-level rise and coastal flooding impacts on surrounding neighborhoods.
The Mill building is re-purposed as a community destination for recreation, and mixed-use development. Critical program is re-allocated to the upper floors, allowing flexibility at the ground floor to connect the neighborhood with the tributary’s open spaces.
