Landscape Architecture Magazine LAM-2017-july

JULY 2017 / VOL 107 NO 7 US $7 CAN $9

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

MARTHA

SCHWARTZ

Back in the U.S. and big in China

THE TROJAN BENCH Dark shades in public data harvesting

PODCASTING CALL Landscapes for your ears

ASLA’S NEW HOME The Center for Landscape Architecture opens in D.C.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

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OUTSIDE

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

LAM

54 MATERIALS

14 INSIDE

Concrete Minus Carbon

16 LAND MATTERS

BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA

New technologies could make concrete more sustainable.

66 TECH

18 LETTERS

FOREGROUND 24 NOW A resilient streetscape in Miami; tactile tools give GIS a hand; toaster-size weather satellites improve forecasts; rethinking Detroit’s east riverfront; and more.

Pictures in Sound Hyperlocal podcasts bring landscapes to life.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

74 GOODS

Home Swank Home It’s patio time. Live it up.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

48 NEW AT HQ

Reopened for Business Welcome to the Center for Landscape Architecture, ASLA’s newly renovated national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

FEI QI

BY BRADFORD MCKEE

6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

“ WE WERE WORKING ON CHINA TIME.” —MARTHA SCHWARTZ, FASLA, P. 92

FEATURES 84 DISRUPTING THE PARK BENCH As data collection technology comes to parks and other public spaces, the question becomes how to balance the need for privacy with the possibilities for public good.

BY BRIAN BARTH

92 MARTHA SCHWARTZ, RECONNECTING

THE BACK 132 THE COST OF THE COAST In Hawai‘i, surprisingly well-preserved traces of ancient culture persist among sybaritic resorts.

BY ADAM MANDELMAN

142 BOOKS

Off the Road: Learning to See, Trying to Remember

In China, “They just love Martha.” They’re not the only ones: a conversation with landscape legend Martha Schwartz, FASLA.

A review of Easy On, Easy Off: The Urban Pathology of America’s Small Towns,

by Jack Williams.

BY JAMES TRULOVE

BY JANE GILLETTE

116 CONTEXT CLUES Liz Sargent, FASLA, plumbs the culture of landscapes to “unify the understanding of the place.”

BY KEVAN WILLIAMS

166 ADVERTISER INDEX 167 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 180 BACKSTORY

Danger! for Kids The artist Julia Jacquette’s book recalls the brutally beautiful playgrounds of her New York City youth.

BY TOM STOELKER

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

EDITOR Bradford McKee / bmckee@asla.org

Martha Schwartz, FASLA, in New York City, photographed by Sahar Coston-Hardy, page 92.

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Adam Regn Arvidson, FASLA; Brian Barth; Jessica Bridger; Sahar Coston-Hardy; Ryan Deane, ASLA; Daniel Jost; Jonathan Lerner; Jane Margolies; Bill Marken, Honorary ASLA; Zach Mortice; Anne Raver; William S. Saunders; Timothy A. Schuler; Daniel Tal, ASLA; Alex Ulam; James R. Urban, FASLA; Lisa Owens Viani EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE Sara Hage, ASLA / Chair Michael S. Stanley, ASLA / Vice President, Communications Travis Beck, ASLA Kofi Boone, ASLA Joni Emmons, Student ASLA Diana Fernandez, ASLA Deb Guenther, FASLA Richard S. Hawks, FASLA Joan Honeyman, ASLA Eric Kramer, ASLA Falon Mihalic, Associate ASLA Heidi Bielenberg Pollman, ASLA Biff Sturgess, ASLA Marq Truscott, FASLA EDITORIAL Tel: 202-216-2366 / Fax: 202-898-0062

Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 2017 ASLA. Subscriptions: $59/year; international: $99/year; students: $50/year; digital: $44.25/year; single copies: $7.

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

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

10 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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INSIDE

/

CONTRIBUTORS JANE GILLETTE (“Off the Road: Learning to See, Trying to Remember,” page 142) was a writer for LAM and an editor for Spacemaker Press and Land Forum.

She now writes short fiction and will have a collection published this fall: The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories. You can reach her at janeg@pwpla.com.

“Jack Williams—the author of the book I reviewed, Easy On, Easy Off—should write an ecological/historical guidebook to American small towns. It would be a best seller.”

TOM STOELKER (“Danger! for Kids,” page 180) writes about art, architecture, urbanism, and academia. You can reach him on Twitter and Instagram @tomstoelker.

“Julia Jacquette’s new illustrated book celebrating 1960s New York City playgrounds is a much-needed swan song to the brutalist parks and plazas being leveled at a clipped rate.”

At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know.

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

Visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org.

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

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

14 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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LAND MATTERS

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WORKAROUNDS W

ere it not so consequential, Donald Trump’s pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement could be regarded as yet another of his ridiculous adolescent stunts.

It surely pleased most of the 38 percent of people who, four months in, said they approve of his performance. It is a gift to the ultranationalists working in the White House. But like so many of Trump’s Twitter howls and other forms of selfhumiliation, it will harm his administration and the country in ways he scarcely computes.

Individuals have numerous other ways to help counter the burlesque of self-interest that is fast unfolding in our government. There is the 2018 federal budget by the White House to watch—it would cut funding to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent. The Center for American Progress, the Wilderness Society, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others, have prepared detailed analyses of the radical cuts to programs that protect our air, water, and land at the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and the National THERE ARE NUMEROUS WAYS TO COUNTER Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These are useful for knowing the specifics THE BURLESQUE OF SELF-INTEREST summaries of the budget and how to act against them. The FAST UNFOLDING IN OUR GOVERNMENT. Ecological Society of America has set up a federal budget tracker (go to www.esa.org) to monitor the The rest of the world is moving on without him. Less than a status of various budget provisions as Congress attempts to week after the announcement, more than a dozen states, Puer- pass a budget later this year. The Natural Resources Defense to Rico, and the District of Columbia had rejected Trump’s Council is working up tallies by state of how EPA’s protecwithdrawal and formed the U.S. Climate Alliance, which tions benefit the public—there were 25 states outlined as of pledges to hold firm to the goal of cutting the 2005 levels of early June. greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025.

At least 200 mayors, including those of the biggest American Want more action? Look ahead 16 months to the midterm cities, formed a group called Climate Mayors, also to keep the elections. Insert yourself at any level to support candidates emissions reduction targets alive in their jurisdictions. Former still able to see around corners to what the gutting of federal New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Honorary ASLA, said environmental and health protections will wreak. Nobody his foundation would give $15 million to the United Nations to knows how long a presidency so incoherent and committed supplant funding that the UN climate secretariat can expect to to destabilization can keep itself in place. Trump’s supporters, lose after the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement. The not least the brother barons Charles and David Koch and their heads of 183 colleges and universities signed on to a “We Are willing instrument, the EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, are Still In” pledge to the UN that Bloomberg is leading, as did the moving fast. They are feeling urgent for good reason. More heads of more than 1,000 companies, among them a number evidence keeps surfacing to suggest efforts to manipulate of tech giants such as Apple and Lyft, a number of ski resorts, last year’s election. They surely sense that Trump’s tenure and the California Ski Industry Association (ask its members could prove quite temporary as grave allegations of collusion about direct impacts after several years of drought). There is and treachery bubble up from the underworld where he has also at least one landscape architecture firm on the list, Stream always lived to the real world of reason we have to fight hard Design Landscape Architecture of Denver. For individuals, to protect. there is an “I Am Still In” campaign online to pledge support for the Paris Agreement. Although it must be said that many people working against climate change have found the agreement’s terms insufficient to halt, much less reverse, current BRADFORD MCKEE EDITOR climate trends, they know it’s better than nothing.

16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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LAM

LETTERS

/

HARDWOOD SPECS

I

read with interest Meg Calkins’s Tropical hardwoods were introduced article “Hard Choices” in the April into the Atlantic City Boardwalk in issue.

1971. We have yet to replace a single board due to natural deterioration.

I found it unfortunate that the That’s 46 years. On the sunken U.S. Lacey Act was not mentioned. treasure ship Atocha, an ipe anchor Amended in 2008, it has completely stock was raised intact after huntransformed the tropical hardwood dreds of years of marine borer exindustry in the United States. The posure. The evidence confirms that concept of “due care” gives the U.S. these super-durable tropical hardDepartment of Justice a great deal of woods have a service life that will latitude when prosecuting compa- exceed their natural growth cycle. nies participating in the illegal trade of forest products. One only needs I am an environmentalist, and I am to do some research into the impact also a realist. Logging is responsible on Lumber Liquidators and Gibson for less than 2 percent of tropical Guitars to understand the risks of deforestation. Conversion to agriculnoncompliance. ture and expanding infrastructure associated with population growth Forest stewardship has been and re- are the primary agents of deforestamains the driving force behind the tion. Sustainability is a myth without business model of Timber Holdings. population management. So what While I appreciate that the article rec- can we do to improve sustainability ognizes some of the pitfalls associated in the face of population growth? with the alternative wood treatments Give renewable forest products or processes designed to improve the more value and support those comdurability of nondurable wood spe- panies which actively practice “due cies, I would argue that it is equally care” as evidenced by their policies, important to support the efforts com- procedures, and direct action. panies like ours make to source and deliver legal, well-managed, renewable, and sustainable forest products.

How does the landscape architecture community contribute? By writing comprehensive specification language that encourages the use of well-managed forest products in their projects.

And please do not support the use of recycled plastic. Plastic cannot be recycled. It can only be reconstituted for one cycle, ultimately ending up in a landfill.

As for Kebony and black locust: The jury is already in. These alternative treatments may have value in applications like cladding, but pine is pine no matter what you treat it with. Under direct horizontal (deck application) UV exposure, it just doesn’t hold up over time. This was recognized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when it issued its 2014 post-Hurricane Sandy boardwalk reconstruction memo.

BRIAN LOTZ TIMBER HOLDINGS USA BEDFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE

SUBMIT LAM welcomes letters from readers.

Letters may be edited and condensed.

Please e-mail comments to LAMletters @asla.org or send via U.S. mail to: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS 636 EYE STREET NW WASHINGTON, DC 20001–3736

18 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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LOCAL OFFICE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

FOREGROUND

CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA

A streetscape by Local Office Landscape Architecture in NOW, page 24.

FOREGROUND

/

NOW

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

MOVING THE DIAL

AN ARTFUL AND RESILIENT STREETSCAPE BECOMES PART OF MIAMI’S WAKE-UP CALL.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

espite being named one of the U.S. cities most vulnerable to rising sea levels, Miami has been slow to act. It wasn’t until 2015, for instance—three years after Hurricane Sandy— that the city formed a sea-level rise committee to begin studying the impacts of climate change. It was the same year Florida’s governor banned state employees from using the terms “climate change” and “global warming.”

Gables, LOLA designed an integrated green infrastructure system to reduce flooding and filter stormwater. Led by the architecture firm Cooper Robertson, the project entailed the revitalization of Giralda Avenue and Miracle Mile, a four-block length of Coral Way in downtown Coral Gables, just southwest of Miami. Unlike much of Miami, the area is nearly 12 feet above sea level and two miles inland. Still, flooding is increasingly an issue, caused in part by Miami’s almost daily down“Just now people [in Miami] are starting to talk pours, and the design team saw an opportunity about the interface between infrastructure and to help test local resilience strategies. landscape,” says Walter Meyer, a principal at New York City-based Local Office Landscape Architec- Inspired and challenged by these short, intense ture (LOLA). rainstorms, often called cloudbursts, Meyer worked with the architect Earl Jackson—then Built projects are beginning to come online. For with Cooper Robertson and now the principal a recent $20 million streetscape project in Coral of Earl Jackson Architecture Workshop—and

24 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

ABOVE

An eye-grabbing paving pattern draws attention to the relationship between street trees and Miami’s frequent rains.

LOCAL OFFICE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

STORMWATER DIAGRAM

Those cloudbursts are also reflected in the streets’ unique paving. Along Miracle Mile, an abstract, almost pixelated pattern of white, gray, and blue stone pavers is a reference to the brilliant blue of Miami’s morning sky juxtaposed with the towering white cumulonimbus clouds that arrive each afternoon. On Giralda Avenue, which is now closed to vehicular traffic, the paving pattern was inspired by the ripples made by raindrops; concentric rings emanate from the base of the newly planted live oaks, a nod to the trees’ role in capturing stormwater.

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

When the streets reopen this summer, however, only Giralda Avenue will feature the curbless drainage system as Meyer originally designed it. Miracle Mile employs a hybrid system that uses the trees to supplement a more typical stormwater system. “We didn’t get a home run,” Meyer says. “We got to second or third base with the resiliency in Miracle Mile.”

And yet since the project was initiated, Meyer says he has witnessed a swift awakening in South Florida, and once-skeptical local leaders are now touting Miracle Mile and Giralda Avenue as resilient streetscapes. “The whole region is realizing that you can’t have your head in the sand for too long because then your head’s underwater,” he says. “If we ran this project this year, we would probably have built out 100 percent of what we proposed.”

TIMOTHY A. SCHULER, EDITOR OF NOW, CAN BE REACHED AT TIMOTHYASCHULER@GMAIL.COM AND ON TWITTER @TIMOTHY_SCHULER.

ABOVE

The inner workings of Miracle Mile’s resilient streetscape.

LEFT

Aboveground, pavers abstract Miami’s ever-changing sky.

LOCAL OFFICE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

local engineers at Coastal Systems International to design a curbless street that uses tree trenches to manage stormwater. Rainwater is better for the trees anyway, Meyer says, since the city’s alkaline water requires additional fertilizer. A simple line drain runs down the center of the street, reducing clogging and simplifying maintenance.

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FOREGROUND

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HAND MODELS A NEW TOOL ALLOWS USERS TO MOLD GIS WITH THEIR HANDS.

LEFT

A researcher sculpts a pond as the contour, elevation, and water maps are scanned and computed in real time.

T

ime limitations and traditional landscape architecture tools have tended to make design a somewhat linear process, says Brendan Harmon, a landscape architect who teaches GIS at North Carolina State University. But Tangible Landscape, a type of simulated modeling environment, allows for creative thinking as a tactile, iterative process of continual experimentation, questioning, and critique. At least, that’s the idea.

“Landscape architects face challenges modeling and visualizing landscapes, understanding how sociocultural, ecological, and physical processes change landscapes,” Harmon says. Tangible Landscape, an open-source tool developed with the landscape architect Payam Tabrizian and geovisualization scientists Anna Petrasova, Ross Meentemeyer, Douglas Shoemaker, and Vaclav Petras, along with many others, is designed to make the visualization process easier, integrating scientific analysis and 3-D sketching that can give continual computational feedback.

28 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

The tool makes use of CNC-cut plastic models filled with polymerenriched sand, which are able to represent real-world locales. Projected on top of the model are aerial maps generated by Geographic Resources Analysis Support System GIS—maps that can show the flow of water through the area, the damage a wildfire might wreak, or the spread of disease, all with the click of a button.

sunlight, are simulated nearly instantaneously on screen.

To create the base model, a user can deploy a drone to take superhigh-resolution photographs of a landscape. These images in turn can be made into orthophotographs and digital surface models that can show a section of land. Once a computer-generated 3-D model has been made, a CNC-cut version out of resin can be produced. The data projected on top of this model can be changed to reflect different scenarios when pieces are moved across its surface. Things that most landscape architects need to keep in mind when designing, such as water flow, sediment transport, and

In time, Harmon hopes that Tangible Landscape will enable a dialogue between scientists and engineers who produce these models and simulations, the designers who will use them, and the public. “Perhaps the biggest challenge is balancing the need to understand the landscape in terms of science, engineering, and culture,” Harmon says, “while at the same time having the creative and artistic freedom to imagine and express something novel, something beautiful.”

“Tangible Landscape is about representing data that the user has already collected and prepared in a really intuitive way so that they can understand it more easily,” Harmon says.

“With this data, a landscape architect can reshape that topography to create a new landscape and change those simulations, generating new data.”

To learn more, go to tangible-landscape. github.io.

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

MAGGIE’S LANDSCAPE LEGACY NOW IN ITS THIRD DECADE, THE CANCER CARE ORGANIZATION IS WORKING TO PRIORITIZE ITS LANDSCAPES.

D

espite being founded by a garden designer and a landscape theorist, Maggie’s, the renowned group of drop-in cancer care centers, has been slow to see the full potential of landscape architecture in its mission. From the beginning—when in 1994 a dying Maggie Keswick Jencks, who was married to the landscape designer Charles Jencks, outlined her vision for a restorative, nonclinical environment open to anyone affected by cancer— gardens have been incorporated at the centers. But those early landscapes often consisted of simple English gardens or boldly conceptual landforms.

“We didn’t quite get the knitting together of the garden and the building,” says Laura Lee, the executive director at Maggie’s.

been gradual, but there seems to have been a turning point in 2011 with the near simultaneous opening of several Maggie’s centers.

In Glasgow, Scotland, OMA’s mostly glazed building is wrapped around a central courtyard, designed by Jencks’s daughter, the landscape architect Lily Jencks, giving visitors the sense of uninterrupted landscape. In Swansea, Wales, the landscape architect Kim Wilkie had been brought on after the death of the center’s architect, Kisho Kurokawa. Wilkie recommended reorienting the building to optimize views and create a private, contemplative garden in the back. “He spent a lot of time modeling, just to get the chemistry of the building working,” Lee says of Wilkie’s contributions. The center, she says, became “rooted in its landscape” in a way that previous centers were not.

As Maggie’s enters its third decade, however, with Wilkie was also the first to introduce a vegetable garden at 20 centers throughout the United Kingdom, a Maggie’s. Behind the swirling, galaxy-shaped building in Swansea, Wilkie worked with Terra Firma Consultancy Tokyo, and Hong Kong, it does so with a newfound focus on both the ecological and to create a patchwork of vegetables and herbs that are now used regularly by the center’s kitchen staff. therapeutic aspects of landscape Maggie’s has since encouraged the practice. At its design. The shift has Manchester center, opened in 2016, a Dan Pearsondesigned landscape includes planter beds that allow guests to become caretakers, not just the cared for.

RIGHT AND BELOW

Productive landscapes like the one at Maggie’s Swansea are being encouraged by the Scottish cancer care organization.

Some, however, question whether the Maggie’s model— which relies on securing big-name architects in order to raise funds—is as suited to sustaining a landscape. British garden designer Jinny Blom was hired to design the landscape at Maggie’s Oldham, currently under construction, but unforeseen site challenges ate away at the project’s budget. As a result, Blom scrapped plans for an immersive, naturalized hillside that would have emphasized the site’s topography. “Now, we’re going to plant some trees,” she says.

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32 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

Blom says the challenge lies in the disparate natures of architecture and landscape architecture. “They’ve created something exceptional with a global reputation,” she says, using a model that “works in architecture. But with the landscaping, it’s a subtler art.”

COURTESY TERRA FIRMA, LEFT; KIM WILKIE, RIGHT

Elevating the centers’ landscapes to the level of their architecture has required additional funding, both for construction and for long-term maintenance, and Lee says the organization has “become more assertive that the garden’s budget is as important as the building’s budget.”

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

RESEARCH WHERE IT BELONGS

THE DESIGNED WETLAND AT SERC’S MATHIAS LABORATORY IS AN EXTENSION OF ITS CORE MISSION.

BY KIM O’CONNELL

ABOVE

The wetland’s distinct pools support different kinds of vegetation, forming a living laboratory.

n a recent spring morning, the landscape architect Kathy Poole was leading a small group outside the Mathias Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, when a dark, oval shape caught her eye. The group stepped back so she could take a closer look at the creature: a young Eastern mud turtle barely three inches across. Gingerly, Poole picked up the turtle, placed it back among the marshy vegetation, and then continued her tour as if seeing this kind of wildlife was an everyday occurrence. Because of a new designed wetland at the facility, it turns out that it is.

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

SERC brought on Poole’s firm, Poole Design, to design a wetland that works in concert with the lab building and serves as a site for stormwater retention, landscape restoration and experimentation, and sculptural visual appeal. The wetland is arranged as a series of four experimental pools of various depths that support different collections of submergent, emergent, and floating plants, while cleansing and capturing runoff through sedimentation. Weirs divide the pools and give shape and structure to the wetland, acting as extensions of the architecture. Poole canted the weirs at different angles to inject a kinetic

quality to the site and add visual interest, especially when viewed from the lab above.

It is at grade level, however, that the diversity of each microenvironment becomes apparent. SERC scientists can adjust water depths through control structures at the center of each weir, allowing the wetland not only to manage stormwater but to see how different depths and plantings affect the site’s biota. On the day of the turtle sighting, a rock pile provided underwater habitat in one pool, while dozens of arrow arum plants popped their trowel-like leaves out of the water in another.

KATHY POOLE

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

PLAN 8

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1 MATHIAS LABORATORY 2 EXPERIMENTAL WETLAND POOLS AND SUSTAINABLE STORMWATER/ RECYCLED WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM

9

5

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36 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

but that achieves restoration of the The new facility, designed by Ewinglandscape and is biologically robust.” Cole Architects and Engineers, reuses 100 percent of its water, which helped For SERC scientists, the laboratory the project to earn a LEED Platinum and wetland represent both a signifi- certification. Poole hopes that the wetcant upgrade and an opportunity for land will become the focus of one of research. Situated on a 2,650-acre SERC’s ongoing “citizen scientist” campus, SERC is an environmental programs. Already, staff members research and educational facility that have conducted research and populaemploys scientists primarily focused tion surveys on the wetland’s amphibon coastal ecology. Despite its prox- ian and reptile ecosystems, says Steve imity to the Chesapeake Bay, SERC’s Groh, a SERC architect and project former facilities and landscape manager. Regular visitors to the site, were far from scenic or ecologically he says, include bald eagles, beavers, sound. Staff previously worked in deer, butterflies, and dragonflies— a series of rusting old trailers on not to mention busloads of schoolfallow farmland whose forests had children. “We wanted to show how been largely cleared. Area vegetation the environment can support the was crowded with invasive plant spe- building and how the building could cies, and long-compacted soils from support the environment,” Groh says. previous uses inhibited plant growth “The building would have failed withand contributed to erosion. out this wetland.”

KATHY POOLE

Mechanisms at the center of each weir allow site managers to control water depth.

“This wetland had to express the mission of the lab,” Poole says. “It wasn’t just a technical exercise. I wanted to show that you could do a built landscape that looks like a sculpture

N

BELOW

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/NOW

MORE DETAILED DATA HOLDS BUILDING BLOCKS FOR THE CLIMATE MODELS USED TO PREDICT SEA-LEVEL RISE.

SATELLITE SWARM WILL SMALLER, MORE ADVANCED WEATHER SATELLITES ENABLE MORE ACCURATE CLIMATE MODELS?

O

ABOVE

Commercial CubeSats like this one could provide the U.S. better climate data for less money.

BELOW

CubeSats being built

by Spire Global, one of two companies selling data to NOAA.

n June 19, 2014, a tiny satellite the size of a toaster hitched a ride to space on a converted Dnepr rocket, launched from the Yasny spaceport in southern Russia. The satellite, known as a CubeSat, belonged to Spire Global, one of two private companies recently contracted to supply highly detailed atmospheric data to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That data, many hope, will improve the quality of the climate models landscape architects and others use in coastal resilience planning.

Announced in September 2016, the $1.1 million contract—split between Spire and a company called GeoOptics —is a part of a new strategy devised to improve weather forecasting while saving taxpayer money. Historically, NOAA has owned and operated its own weather satellites, which, according to the Washington Post, cost billions of dollars and are the “size

40 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

of small buses.” CubeSats, on the other hand, cost a few hundred thousand dollars and can be upgraded continuously, says Nick Allain, the director of brand for Spire Global. (CubeSats are the mayflies of the satellite world; with a life span of as short as nine months, they are designed to gradually lose altitude and burn up in the atmosphere.)

generate a resiliency plan for the communities around New York’s Jamaica Bay. She says the benefit of more data would be the development of new and better models. “Some would like to see everything go into one model, but I’m of the view that, in fact, the more models, the better.

Because you start to see variations.

And you realize we really have to look at the differences; we’re not looking for one singular answer.”

Spire’s satellites use Global Navigation Satellite System occultation to produce up to 1,000 “vertical profiles” of global atmospheric temperature, pressure, and water vapor per day (with a goal of 100,000 profiles per day in the near future). That level of data makes it possible to continuously verify and update the “current state model”—what’s happening now—which in some regions is still an approximation, Allain says. “You take our data, you mix it in, and you’re able to come up with a forecast that’s far more accurate.”

NOAA has yet to issue a statement on the efficacy of the private-sector data, but in April 2017, Congress passed a bipartisan bill that authorizes the continued purchase of commercial satellite weather data.

Sandy MacDonald, formerly the director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, is one of Spire’s lead scientists. Last year, he told Inc. magazine that the data Spire’s satellites are collecting “should give us a much clearer understanding of how the planet’s climate is changing.”

Although the hope is that more detailed data will help improve weather forecasting, it also holds the building blocks for the climate models used to predict sea-level rise and other phenomena. For a project called Structures of Coastal Resilience, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, ASLA, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the City College of New York, used a variety of climate models to

Others, however, are skeptical of the commercialization of weather satellite data. Bill Kuo, a senior scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told the journal Nature he supports “getting more private companies to provide satellite information. But so far we have not seen that the private sector can provide this data with the same level of quality and accuracy.”

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

RETHINKING THE RIVER

ABOVE

Detroit’s Atwater Street today, looking southwest toward downtown.

LEFT

A rendering by SOM shows a more active, more porous streetscape.

THE CITY OF DETROIT RECENTLY PRESENTED A PLAN FOR ITS EAST RIVERFRONT. WHAT WILL IT MEAN FOR DETROITERS?

BY AARON MONDRY

etroit has a history of neglecting its most important natural resource: the Detroit River. In recent years, as development in the urban core has surged, the city has been accused of neglecting one of its other most important resources: Detroiters. The recently released Detroit East Riverfront Framework Plan, led by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) with the landscape architects Michel Desvigne and Inessa Hansch, is a sign that the city,

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

like others around the country, is finally beginning to recognize the value of its waterfront. Whether it successfully integrates residents into the planning process is less clear.

The plan to reshape the 3.5-mile stretch of land that runs roughly from downtown Detroit to the Belle Isle Bridge is built on four main planks: filling in pathway gaps to create contiguous parkland along the river, the establishment of two

The details are in flux, though Desvigne says the plan for the park space calls for wetlands, meadows, and open lawns. “We wanted it to be simple, not overdesigned,” he says. “When

SOM

D

new greenways, Jefferson Avenue streetscape improvements, and two major development projects. Three sites slated for development along the riverfront were traded for parcels north of Atwater Street, the northern border of the riverfront, to clear the way for a development-free, continuous promenade. “Residents were keen on the idea of the public space being one experience,” says Mark Wallace, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, which manages the city-owned lands on the riverfront.

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

ABOVE

The existing condition of the riverfront near the Belle Isle Bridge.

BELOW

This fall, construction will begin on the Beltline Greenway, which will run between Bellevue and Beaufait Streets. The greenway should improve access to the riverfront, allowing for a variety of entry points and modes of transit. As part of the

scape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Even so, some Detroiters say the city did not go far enough in making the process transparent and inclusive. Jennine Spencer, a lifelong Detroiter and president of the Charlevoix Village Association, which represents the Islandview neighborhood north of the Belle Isle Bridge, says the city only presented its plan and didn’t come to residents for input. “I don’t think they’re listening,” “So it was very important to increase Spencer says. access and have connections inland, into the neighborhood, so [resi- But Desvigne says his team is aware dents] could go directly to the river,” of residents’ concerns. “It’s not a adds Hansch, a principal of Inessa tabula rasa project,” he says. “It’s a Hansch Architecte and (along with place with ownership, constraints, Desvigne) a design critic in land- and necessities.”

SOM

Plans call for a continuous promenade from downtown to Belle Isle.

project, the designers and their civic partners, including the city planning department, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, attended or hosted several community meetings to determine how residents and stakeholders feel about the riverfront now and what they’d like pedestrians are along the river, we to see in the future. Access was a key hope they forget the built environ- concern. “People were scared that ment and can just be immersed in some part of the promenade would landscape.” become private,” Desvigne says.

44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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FOREGROUND

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NEW AT HQ

REOPENED FOR BUSINESS ASLA CHRISTENS ITS RENOVATED HOME, THE CENTER FOR LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BY BRADFORD MCKEE

ABOVE

ASLA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The canopy will hold a living roof.

fter nearly three years of planning, ASLA’s national headquarters officially reopened on May 17 as the new Center for Landscape Architecture. The reopening followed a yearlong renovation to upgrade the systems, work spaces, and street presence of the 12,000-square-foot headquarters building in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. An open house brought in members, supporters, donors to the project, and the public for a day of building tours and talks by the designers.

48 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

ASLA President Vaughn Rinner, FASLA, inaugurated the building at a gathering of donors the previous evening. “The profession now has a public face to help educate students, policy makers, related disciplines, and the public about what we do and why it’s important,” she said. “The center is doing exactly what we all set out to do. It is providing a focal point for our ongoing role as a convener.”

property, which it occupied in 1997 when the building was new. The architect, Gensler, led by Abram Goodrich, and the landscape architect, Oehme, van Sweden, led by Lisa Delplace, ASLA, were charged with redesigning the four-story structure and its landscape to embody the mission and vision of the society, with conservation and sustainability as the highest priorities. The general contractor, Coakley & Williams ConASLA began the project in 2014 af- struction, gutted the building to its ter paying off its mortgage on the floor plates and brick envelope to

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FOREGROUND

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RAINWATER HARVESTING

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The ASLA Green Roof during an open house in May.

remove warrens of sheetrock walls, wood doors, tile ceilings, and old mechanical systems. Most dramatiABOVE, CLOCKWISE cally, the renovation took out half of FROM LEFT an obtrusive double “scissor stair,” The lower garden the opening of which allows daylight under construction; to flood from new skylights deep the 1990s interior before construction; into the center and lower levels of workers remove half the building. A new stair tower was a double stair. added to the building’s rear for emergency egress, and a new stair also RIGHT Rainwater is harvested rises from the lower garden level to and carried to a cistern. the sidewalk on I Street NW.

50 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

At the entrance, the building gives the society a more prominent street identity. A new steel canopy, which will hold a living roof, spans the width of the facade, with the center’s name set in lighted letters of both the English and Chinese alphabets, which are required, alongside other ornamental exterior details, by the D.C. planning review board that oversees projects in Chinatown. Brick piers were removed from the street level of the facade to create an open

expanse of glass beneath the canopy, which gives passersby a clear view into a new public gallery and event space that seats about 90 people.

The project is aiming for a LEED Platinum certification, and also will be among the first in the District of Columbia to follow the WELL Building Standard. The WELL protocol, established in 2014, covers a wide range of building factors relating to the health of occupants, including

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air quality, water quality, nutrition, noise levels, lighting, comfort, fitness, and other aspects of physical and mental health. There is significant overlap between WELL criteria and those of LEED, particularly with respect to indoor air quality, discouraging toxic materials, and sensory comfort for occupants. The LEED requirements additionally focus on minimizing urban heat and light pollution, stormwater controls, rigorous energy efficiency, and speci-

fications of materials that are safe and, wherever possible, recycled or renewable. One early known result is that the building used one-third less electricity—all bought from renewable sources—in March 2017 compared to March 2015, owing to upgraded air-handling and lighting systems (the building was under construction in 2016).

Van Valkenburgh Associates with Conservation Design Forum, continues to thrive and attract hundreds of visitors a year. When the roof was completed in 2006, it was the second green roof in the city, which now has more than 300 green roofs that cover 2.7 million square feet.

The ASLA Green Roof typically captures the first inch of stormwater.

The renovation augmented its caOn the top of the building, the ASLA pacity with new stormwater capture Green Roof, designed by Michael conduits that flow to a 700-gallon

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT

The second- and third-floor offices draw daylight in from two sides; ASLA President Vaughn Rinner, FASLA, kicks off opening ceremonies; the street level holds a gallery and seating for 90 people.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017 / 51

FOREGROUND

/NEW AT HQ

LEFT

An open storefront and lighted signage give the building a stronger street presence.

BELOW

An opening exhibition details the sustainability goals of the building renovation.

cistern buried at the garden level.

The captured water will be used for irrigating the roof plantings as well as plantings in the lower garden and at street level.

Inside the building, the office interiors have completely transformed. What had been crowded-looking floors of opaque five-foot-high cubicles and offices are now clear spans of low-height workstations with glass-enclosed offices at the perimeters. The openness allows the banks of two-on-two windows to run nearly uninterrupted

52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

along the east walls of the building (to The opening events kicked off an the west is a party wall). exhibition in the storefront gallery about the performance goals for the “What’s remarkable is that the de- building and the green roof, as well signers enlarged our gathering space as a panel that covers the history of to an entire floor, and still managed ASLA and the landscape architecture to house the staff in spaces that are profession in the United States. The more open and comfortable than exhibition will remain in place for what we had,” said Nancy Somer- about a year. ville, Honorary ASLA, ASLA’s executive vice president and CEO, who To see a five-minute time-lapse video of the led the project’s programming. “It project, visit vimeo.com/218180102. will grow into a great place to have the public engage with the world of landscape architecture.”

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FOREGROUND

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MATERIALS CONCRETE MINUS CARBON NEW TECHNOLOGIES CAN REDUCE THE ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT OF THE MOST-USED CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL.

BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA

ABOVE

An installation of Unilock pavers with TX Active on the Pilsen Sustainable Street project along Cermak Road and Blue Island Avenue in Chicago.

oncrete in the 21st century promises to be a more sustainable material, and given the nine billion metric tons used globally each year, it must be.

Portland cement, the binding agent in ordinary concrete, has a very high carbon footprint, resulting in just under one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) released for every ton of cement produced. With 4.2 billion metric tons of the binder used each year worldwide, cement production is responsible for nearly 8 percent of total global carbon emissions. The high lime content of ordinary portland cement contributes about two-thirds of cement’s CO2 impact through the process of limestone calcination. The other one-third of CO2 released is from combustion of fossil fuels.

but some, including carbon sequestration in concrete and substantial reductions of cement using energetically modified cement, are now commercially available. Concrete surface products for paving and walls to scrub air pollution, as well as new selfhealing concrete products, are also worth investigating. We have heard about some of these innovations for a decade or more in the research community, but many are finally being brought to market—some more quickly than others. Europe is ahead of the United States in the adoption of these technologies, largely because of more rigorous clean air and carbon reduction initiatives.

New technologies in any field can take a long time to move from the laboratory to the marketplace, but recent Technologies to improve the carbon sustainable concrete technologies footprint of concrete are currently have experienced challenges in scalin the early stages of development, ing up to the global concrete trade,

54 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

and some companies with promising technologies have gone bankrupt before the market could embrace their products. Although specific products are discussed in this article, it is not an endorsement of these products over others. Few products in these areas are on the market, and the products that are discussed are those that provide the most online information to consumers.

Solidia Technologies, a company that produces a low-lime cement and uses CO2 instead of water to cure concrete, has marketed its products as better-performing and cheaper than ordinary portland cement concrete. Bo Boylan, Solidia’s chief commercial officer, said in a phone interview that Solidia products use the same production equipment, methods, and supply chains as ordinary portland cement concrete. This has helped the company gain a foothold

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with the Federal Highway Administration and some state transportation departments in a market that can be slow to change.

Sequestering carbon in concrete

Solidia is one of a handful of companies using concrete to sequester carbon. It has developed a nonhydraulic cement that is low lime, containing primarily calcium silicates. Carbon dioxide emissions from production of Solidia cement are reduced by about 30 percent, owing to its low lime content and an 18 percent lower firing temperature. Solidia cement

TOP

It is easier to achieve bright colors with carbon cement, which is whiter than ordinary portland cement.

RIGHT

Carbon cement, produced

by Solidia Technologies, cures concrete with CO2 instead of water, resulting in up to a 70 percent reduction in the carbon footprint of concrete products.

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cures with a carbonation process, not through the typical hydration activation process used with ordinary portland cement. Waste CO2 used for curing is injected into the concrete mix in amounts equal to about 5 percent of the mix weight. Combined, Solidia cement and concrete can reduce the carbon factor of concrete up to 70 percent, or about 550 kilograms per metric ton. To further “green” the Solidia products, ground fly ash or slag can be used as a replacement for Solidia cement in amounts up to 40 percent, depending on the concrete precast producer’s practices.

Because waste CO2 is more easily brought to the controlled factory environment of a precast plant, Solidia’s offerings are best used for producing precast concrete products such as pavers, blocks, and wall panels.

Poured-in-place concrete applications of Solidia concrete are challenged by the difficulty of moving waste CO2 gas into the field. Boylan estimates that poured-in-place Solidia concrete is still two years away from the market. Solidia precast concrete is expected to be available within months, at least in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, where several precast producers have been licensed to use the technologies.

Aggregates comprise about 67 percent of a concrete mix, and limestone is the most common stone used for aggregates. Carbon 8 is a British company that uses accelerated carbonation technology (ACT)

to produce carbon-negative lightweight aggregates. ACT uses carbon gas to treat thermal wastes, resulting in the production of stable carbonates that are blended with binders and fillers, then pelletized to form artificial limestone.

Blue Planet in California has developed another carbon capture and mineralization technology that produces aggregates and sack concrete.

Its biomimetic technology uses osmotic pressure between fresh- and saltwater to create a proprietary alkaline solution, which is then combined with CO2 from flue gas to form carbonates. This process is inspired by naturally occurring marine biomineralization. Blue Planet offers CO2 capture as an emissions control service, and the company is currently interviewing candidates for project demonstration. Its website states that potential sites include fossil fuelpowered electricity generating facilities, refineries, and cement plants.

Sequestering carbon in concrete or aggregate can be helpful environmentally, but the production of ordinary portland cement has huge carbon impacts of its own. When specifying these products, designers should be aware of their carbon footprint and make sure that the benefit of the carbon sequestration product outweighs the other impacts of using concrete. For example, a company that uses CO2 to cure concrete masonry units (CMUs) estimates that 100,000 CMUs absorb 3,000

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FOREGROUND

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LEFT

Accelerated carbonation technology (ACT) uses carbon gas to treat thermal wastes.

The result is the production of stable carbonates that are blended with binders and fillers then pelletized to form artificial limestone, such as this product from Carbon 8.

Energetically modified cement

Perhaps a more productive way to lower the environmental impact of concrete is to reduce the use of ordinary portland cement through high-volume substitution of waste materials such as fly ash (from coal combustion in power plants) and GGBFS (from iron blast furnaces) or natural pozzolans such as volcanic ash or calcined clays. Concrete com-

58 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

A Swedish company, EMC Cement, offers a product called CemPozzFA that uses this process with fly ash to achieve a product that is 70 percent fly ash and 30 percent portland cement. The company claims an approximate carbon footprint reduction of concrete made with CemPozzFA of up to 80 percent. Additionally, this concrete has been found to exhibit reduced cracking, improved long-term strength, and increased durability. A company white paper on the product in paving indicates that the Texas Department of Transportation has been using it for more than five years with success. For western states where fly ash can be scarce, EMC Cement offers CemPozzNP, containing natural

pozzolans such as volcanic ash and calcined clays. The company claims up to a 60 percent reduced carbon footprint with this product.

Human and environmental health concerns about heavy metals in fly ash have been raised in recent years.

Fly ash can contain trace amounts of mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and lead, depending upon the coal source. The green building community and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have raised concerns about the use of fly ash in concrete and other building products. After a review of research literature, these parties continue to support use of fly ash as a cement substitute. Environmental Building News offers the criteria that fly ash use should be supported as long as it reduces greenhouse gas emissions in the materials stream and the fly ash is chemically or physically locked up so the risk of leaching is low.

Given that fly ash and GGBFS are by-products of coal combustion in power plants and iron processing, respectively, their supplies are not always abundant. As utilities and industry move toward cleaner energy, coal combustion is being reduced and new iron processing technologies are reducing the quantity of blast furnace slag. Natural pozzolans such as volcanic ash are still abundant and continue to be a reliable cement substitute, particularly for energetically modified cement.

CARBON 8 AGGREGATES LIMITED

pounds of CO2—the same amount sequestered by 67 full-grown trees.

It sounds pretty good; however, life cycle data from the University of Bath shows 100,000 CMUs to have a carbon footprint of about 165,000 pounds of CO2, so carbon absorption of 3,000 pounds is not a sufficient offsetting strategy. If concrete block producers can reduce the ordinary portland cement used by substituting fly ash, ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS), or carbon cement, then this particular carbon sequestration technology may make more sense.

panies regularly substituted these materials for low percentages of portland cement as a cost-saving strategy, but a recent technology, energetically modified cement (EMC), has allowed for substitution in much higher percentages. EMC activation is a process that modifies the surface of hydraulic materials such as fly ash, natural pozzolans (such as silica sands and metakaolin), and blast furnace slag. This process increases the surface area of the particles, rendering microcracks and dislocations of crystal structures at the nano scale. This results in greater reactivity with no significant increase in powder fineness, which allows for much higher substitutions for ordinary portland cement.

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FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS

Self-healing concrete

The most sustainable concrete structure is a durable one that lasts beyond its full design life. Unfortunately, studies indicate the actual service life of concrete pavements averages just 25 years, even though they are designed for longer use.

Self-healing concrete technologies, in the research phase for several years, hold promise to extend the life of concrete structures.

WITH 4.2 BILLION METRIC TONS OF CEMENT USED EACH YEAR WORLDWIDE, CEMENT PRODUCTION IS RESPONSIBLE FOR NEARLY 8 PERCENT OF TOTAL GLOBAL CARBON EMISSIONS. Many different self-healing concrete technologies are being tested using chemical, biological, and mineral constituents. Scientists in Belgium and the Netherlands are working on one such product that is close to commercialization. It uses limestoneproducing bacteria and calcium lactate encapsulated in clay pellets and mixed directly into the uncured concrete. When a fissure opens in the concrete, the pellets crack open and release the bacteria. Moisture in the air triggers the spores to germinate.

The bacteria feed on the calcium lac-

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tate and form limestone, sealing the ones. The TiO2 catalyst can be apcracks (up to 0.8 millimeters wide) plied on a structure’s surface as a within three weeks. coating, or it can be mixed into cement as a constituent of concrete.

Self-healing with mineral constit- Owing to the cost of photocatalytic uents is an unexpected benefit of cement, it is usually used in a 3/8EMC concrete using CemPozzNP. inch concrete topping layer rather Although all concrete is somewhat than through the entire section of a self-healing, as some re-cementing concrete structure. happens when moisture reaches the portland cement in cracks, the Photocatalytic concrete is capable reaction is too slow to prevent the of reducing air pollutants such as cracks from opening too wide before nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile healing takes place. Constituents organic compounds up to two and a of CemPozzNP, silicon dioxide and half meters from the surface. It has calcium oxide, react more quickly to been in use on building exteriors for re-cementing in the presence of wa- self-cleaning since 1996, though the ter, filling voids and cracks of widths technology has been slow to catch on up to 0.2 millimeters within two to as a pollution-reducing technique three months. because of varying conditions that may limit its effectiveness.

Photocatalytic concrete

In the United States, numerous metropolitan areas have air pollution levels higher than what the EPA deems safe for human health. There are many contributors to air pollution, but one of the main culprits is fossil fuel combustion by vehicles being driven on urban streets. So it seems fitting that streets, sidewalks, and parking areas should contribute to reduction of the pollution in some way.

Photocatalytic concrete, as its name suggests, contains a catalyst, titanium dioxide (TiO2), that interacts with sunlight to abate organic and inorganic air pollution through an oxidation process that converts noxious compounds to harmless

Photocatalytic surfaces on pavements and sound walls may someday be widespread enough to reduce some ground-level air pollution. Research, primarily in Europe and Japan, has shown concrete with a TiO2 surface layer to be a promising technology for reducing air pollutants, with reductions of NOx ranging from 15 percent to 70 percent. This wide range of results is owing to variables of wind, humidity, orientation, and urban configuration.

If humidity is too high, the photocatalytic reaction may not work or may even exacerbate pollutant intensities. An ideal setting for maximum pollutant removal by photocatalytic paving or walls is

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FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS

REACTION PROCESS OF NOx REDUCTION WITH TX ACTIVE

ABOVE

The titanium dioxide in concrete pavers with TX Active cement acts as a photocatalyst, converting nitrogen oxides and other urban pollutants into neutralized compounds.

Rain can wash the compounds away.

Other applications of photocatalytic paving use a coating agent that is applied after the concrete cures.

Lab tests show that these products may wear off over time, particularly with vehicular traffic, losing their effectiveness. Application on porous pavements can protect some of the coating from wear, as it is slightly below the surface.

TX Active, a product sold in the United States by Lehigh Hanson, Inc., is a photocatalytic cement that integrates TiO2 into a portland ce-

62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

ment mix. The company recommends that TX Active cement be used according to the same standards as portland, but that mix designs be verified with its technical staff. Unilock offers a custom paver that uses TX Active cement in its top centimeter.

Photocatalytic surfaces also have been slow to be adopted because of the challenges new technologies have getting from the lab to the marketplace. Very little research exists to show how photocatalytic pavers and other surfaces actually perform with respect to pollution removal. It is difficult to replicate lab conditions in Adoption of paving and sound walls the field, so it is still not certain that with photocatalytic surfaces has benefits will equal lab projections in been slow for several reasons. First, actual applications. nonmunicipal clients have no financial incentive to use this technology Lastly, there are some concerns about —and there is an added cost. Brad nanoscale TiO2 particles and their imSwanson, ASLA, the director of pacts on human health. The Healthy commercial sales with Unilock, es- Building Network points to studies timates that it adds about $3 per that have found TiO2 particles to be square foot to the pavers’ cost. Mu- carcinogenic at the nano scale. This nicipalities have some incentive to could be a concern for workers in take steps toward pollution reduc- manufacturing and construction and tion because of Clean Air Act regu- even in the use phase, when the parlations. The City of Chicago Depart- ticles may run off into water. ment of Transportation, working with Site Design Group, has used MEG CALKINS, FASLA, IS A PROFESSOR IN photocatalytic pavers from Unilock THE DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT BALL STATE UNIVERSITY. SHE IS THE and poured concrete benches with AUTHOR OF MATERIALS FOR SUSTAINABLE TX Active on its Cermak and Blue SITES AND THE EDITOR OF THE SUSTAINABLE SITES HANDBOOK. Island Streetscape projects.

HEIDELBERG CEMENT

one with low average humidity, low wind, and high ultraviolet intensity.

Concrete is an ideal material for photocatalytic surfaces, as the reaction products can be adsorbed at the surface then washed away with rain.

To date, photocatalytic site construction applications using TiO2 mixed into cement have primarily been in the top 3/8 inch of concrete pavers, as using TiO2 in a full depth, castin-place concrete structure would be quite expensive.

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FOREGROUND

/

TECH

EDITED BY RYAN DEANE, ASLA, AND DANIEL TAL, ASLA

PICTURES IN SOUND

PODCASTING OFFERS A NEW PLATFORM FOR TELLING LANDSCAPE STORIES.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

2016 episode of 99% Invisible, a long-running and popular podcast about design, examined the singular urban grid of Salt Lake City.

It looked at its history (laid out with respect to Temple Square), its size (city blocks here are nine times the size of those in Portland, Oregon), and its effect on pedestrians (dehumanizing). About three-quarters of the way through the episode, the team visits Regent Street, a narrow (relatively speaking) street in down-

66 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

town Salt Lake City that is being redesigned. It’s one of the few roadways that defies the city’s 660-foot grid and, thanks to recent efforts, is now the first truly pedestrian-oriented street in all of Salt Lake City. “Regent Street used to just be an access road for some downtown parking structures,” producer Sam Greenspan tells listeners. “Now it’s a pedestrian walkway that opens up into a plaza with a brand-new theater and new restaurant space.”

But Regent Street also has its own podcast, which quietly premiered roughly two years earlier, in February 2015. The Regent Street Podcast was created by Mark Morris, ASLA, a landscape architect and the founder of VODA Landscape + Planning, based in Salt Lake City. VODA is the firm behind the Regent Street redesign, which early on was branded as a “street of stories,” drawing on its history as a red light district and later the street where both the Salt

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT

A walking tour of Salt Lake City’s redesigned Regent Street; Mark Morris, ASLA, (at left) of VODA Landscape + Planning records an interview for the podcast; embedded details nod to the area’s history as a newspaper hub.

COURTESY MARK MORRIS, ASLA

A

FOREGROUND

/TECH

AUDIO AS A MEDIUM OFFERS UNIQUE WAYS OF BRINGING LANDSCAPES TO LIFE.

Physically, that story is told through a series of plaques designed in the style of press sheets, which are set into the sidewalk. But as a fan of podcasts, Morris thought it would be great to record some of the stories and release them to the public.

He wanted to capture not just what people hoped the street would be, but “people’s memories of what this street has been,” he says. With no prior experience in audio engineering, he bought a microphone, downloaded some audio editing software, and began recording interviews with historians and city officials, as well as with his collaborators.

Morris is one of several designers who have begun exploring podcasts

68 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

as a means of engaging the public. Although the conversation around new technologies in landscape architecture often focuses almost exclusively on the visual—3-D printing, drone photography, virtual reality, augmented reality, and advancements in mapping and GIS—as even a brief glimpse into the broader culture suggests, audio as a medium offers unique ways of bringing landscapes to life.

Jennifer Keesmaat’s Invisible City, Slate’s Placemakers, Strong Towns, Podcasts, at least in their current Third Wave Urbanism, and, of course, form, got their start in the early 99% Invisible all explore the built 2000s, enabled by the release of the environment in some fashion. LandApple iPod and the advent of cheap scape architecture even has a devoted audio production software. Since podcast: Larchitect, hosted by Michael then the medium, known briefly Todoran, a designer at SWA Group. as “audioblogging,” has exploded.

In 2013, Apple announced it had These are podcasts about design. surpassed one billion subscriptions But some firms are realizing that for the 250,000 podcasts offered podcasts can be part of a design. through the iTunes store. In recent Right about the time that Morris years, the number of podcasts about launched Regent Street, a group of design has followed the same trend. about 15 freshmen at the University Although still a niche market, pod- of Kentucky were working on their casts such as Toronto city planner own urban design-themed podcast.

The landscape architecture students had been charged with telling the history of Town Branch, a forgotten waterway in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. The long-buried creek was at the center of a linear park and downtown revitalization project known as Town Branch Commons.

SCAPE Landscape Architecture won the project in a 2013 design competition, and among the ideas proposed was an audio component.

ABOVE

Daniel Oates, a landscape architecture student at the University of Kentucky, maps out an episode of the Town Branch Water Walk podcast.

LEFT

Students learn audio recording basics at a local public-access television studio.

COURTESY RYAN HARGROVE, ASLA

Lake Tribune and Deseret News were printed. “Salt Lake gets one story.

We get the story of the Mormons, and that’s about it,” Morris says.

“Regent Street is really the story of everybody else.”

/TECH

It was something SCAPE had been exploring since at least 2009, when it produced Safari 7, an interactive and kid-friendly exploration of New York City’s urban wildlife, in which listeners downloaded audio files that had been timed to the stops of the number 7 train (which runs aboveground for several sections of its route). Although it differed from a typical podcast in that it was tethered to a simultaneous physical experience, Kate Orff, ASLA, SCAPE’s founder, saw that it also offered completely new forms of storytelling.

“The Photoshop perspective falls completely short because it is not a narrative-driven form,” she says.

a teenager be interested in a consent decree?” Students also had to transcend their own expectations: “For some of them, they didn’t immediately view this as design,” says Hargrove, who saw value in the storytelling process as a way to improve In Lexington, SCAPE wanted to students’ communication skills. do something similar and enlisted Ryan Hargrove, ASLA, an associate The students wrote scripts, drew up professor of landscape architecture storyboards, and experimented with at the University of Kentucky, to different audio techniques. They idenhelp produce it. (The design agency tified experts—and in some cases creMTWTF also collaborated.) Har- ated fictional characters—who could grove structured the project like help explain those subjects to the a typical design studio, assigning public. One group invented a noirgroups of two to three students to ish detective story, another a “live” an episode and providing each with newscast of the red-carpet opening of basic research on subjects such as the future Town Branch Commons. stormwater runoff or karst geology. The work was critiqued throughout The biggest challenge was to make the semester by faculty as well as the each episode both distinct and ac- SCAPE team. The task was twofold: cessible. SCAPE wanted to reach Make sure the information was accuas broad an audience as possible, rate, and find a way to communicate including kids. Hargrove says this it effectively. “You could have the mesforced the students to ask them- sage right, but not have the delivery selves questions like, “Why would right, or vice versa,” Hargrove says.

70 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

The finished product, Town Branch Water Walk, falls somewhere between a podcast and an audio tour. It’s a podcast in the sense that “episodes” can be listened to anywhere (downloaded or streamed using a smartphone or a tablet) and in that they employ narrative storytelling devices originally pioneered in radio. But it’s an audio tour in the sense that certain episodes, like “Swept Under the Streets,” do reference particular features within the landscape. And it lacks a continuous thread in its introductions of new characters and storytelling devices.

Regent Street, by contrast, follows a more typical interview format, with Morris as the host. Both, however, take advantage of existing and familiar infrastructure: smartphones, earbuds, and apps such as SoundCloud or Stitcher. (According to a 2016 survey conducted by Edison Research, approximately one-fifth of the country, or 57 million people, listen monthly to podcasts, a figure that

ABOVE

Episodes of the Town Branch Water Walk could be heard at this listening station or streamed online.

SCAPE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE DPC

FOREGROUND

FOREGROUND

/TECH

“WHEN IT COMES TO LANDSCAPE, IT’S HARD FOR IMAGES TO TELL THE STORY.” —JEFF FUGATE, LEXINGTON DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY

has generally trended upward since at least 2008.) Podcasts also have a low barrier to entry. Both Regent Street and the Water Walk were created for next to nothing. For Morris, who included the podcast in his initial proposal, it was as simple as buying a mic ($120), some intro music ($40), and paying his interviewees a visit. He used basic editing software (Adobe Audition) to remove uh’s and um’s and hit publish. “It’s a lot easier to record a conversation than to create a new rendering,” he says. (The podcast’s first few episodes were released in 2015; the rest are being released this summer in concert with the project’s opening.)

Hargrove had a similar experience.

Giving first-year students a crash course in audio recording was easier than teaching them a graphics program, he says. They borrowed microphones from a local TV station and used the app iSaidWhat?! for editing. (SCAPE also recommended the IK Multimedia iRig Pre for $39.95, a preamp that improves the quality of a recording.) Of course, there are trade-offs. Neither is as polished as a professional production, though Hargrove is genuinely fond of the quirky, offbeat episodes his students created for the Water Walk.

He says they made him laugh. “Design and things like this don’t always have to be stiff,” he says. “They can be lighthearted and humorous and

72 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

still share information in a meaning- all of that doesn’t necessarily transful way with people. And I found this late to the rendering that gets picked to be a really great way to do that.” up by the newspaper,” Fugate says.

In fact, he says, when renderings Gena Wirth, ASLA, a design principal of the project’s first phase—a twoat SCAPE, says the audio component mile greenway, expected to break of the Town Branch Commons proj- ground next year—were released ect was critical in building a constitu- this spring, the most common ency around the project and “help- question was, “Where’s the water?” ing people visualize the potential of “You find yourself trying to explain their urban infrastructure.” She adds the picture, and that’s not a great that landscape architects “have been situation to be in. The great thing about trained in this context of working audio is that it goes a step further.” with cities, working with community groups, to develop visions. But what Unlike a rendering, a podcast also we’ve learned in our practice, and re- retains its value after a landscape is ally try to advance in our practice, installed and may become more valuis that vision can be communicated able over time—a historic document many different ways.” as well as a snapshot of the project and its goals. All of the Water Walk Jeff Fugate, the president and COO episodes remain available to downof the Lexington Downtown Devel- load, and SCAPE’s portable listening opment Authority, puts a finer point station, a physical model of the Town on it: “Images are great, but particu- Branch watershed, is on display at the larly when it comes to landscape, it’s downtown branch of the Lexington hard for images to tell the story, or to Public Library. The city is also considtell the depth of design intelligence ering adding signage that would direct that is embedded in the proposal.” people to individual episodes, repurposing an early engagement tool as an It’s a refutation of the adage, “A pic- interpretative element. This longevity ture is worth a thousand words.” is “one of the reasons that we put a lot SCAPE’s design for Town Branch of time and effort into it,” Wirth says.

Commons reveals water in myriad “It’s a live tool that can continue to be ways, inspired by Kentucky’s karst used by anyone. I don’t think its mogeology. “So we have this proposal, ment is over.” which is layered and deep and calls upon the geology and the geogra- TIMOTHY A. SCHULER WRITES ABOUT LANDphy and the cultural heritage, yet SCAPE ARCHITECTURE, ECOLOGY, AND URBAN interprets it in a modern way. Well, DESIGN. HE LIVES IN HONOLULU.

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FOREGROUND

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GOODS HUMA

This dining-scaled armchair, designed by Mario Ruiz, is well suited for an old-world aesthetic. The frame is made from tinted natural rattan that comes in 11 different finishes, complementing the choice of either a natural leather or pure virgin wool cushion available in the color of choice.

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NINI LAMIRA, TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM; COURTESY SIGMADEK, TOP RIGHT

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FOREGROUND

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LOOP

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FOREGROUND

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MESH

The Mesh collection is designed by Patricia Urquiola for Kettal and includes sofas, chairs, and tables for the outdoors. Both the aluminum frame and terrain fabric cushions are available in several colors and are weather resistant.

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FOREGROUND

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RAY OUTDOOR FABRIC

B&B Italia’s new seating

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LINN COVE VIADUCT

Liz Sargent, FASLA, documented the Blue Ridge Parkway, page 116.

Walk past the basketball court down at Anita Stroud Park, toward the little creek below, and you might find a gaggle of teens clustered around a very modernlooking bench that would seem more at home outside a coffee shop in Soho than in a tiny neighborhood park next to I-77 on the north end of Charlotte, North Carolina.

84 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

A pair of USB ports on a console on the front of the bench provides juice from the solar panel mounted at lap level between the seats. Who wouldn’t want to hang out at a bench like this?

It certainly catches the eye of passersby. What these kids might not realize, however, is that this bench is watching them back.

Underneath that solar panel is a small Wi-Fi enabled sensor that sends data back to an office building in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anyone who passes within 150 feet of the bench with a Wi-Fi enabled mobile device in their pocket is picked up by the sensor and registered as a unique visitor to the park. The sensors can’t access personal information from your phone—rather, they’re designed to pick up the unique ID associated with any Wi-Fi enabled device—but still, if you come back the next day, it knows it’s you again, not a new visitor. It may make privacy advocates squirm, but such data is very handy for park planners.

MELISSA GASTON

“ OH, NO. MY PHONE IS DEAD. BETTER HEAD TO THE PARK.”

DISRUPTING THE PARK BENCH CITIES ARE GETTING “SMARTER.” BUT ARE THEY GETTING WISER?

BY BRIAN BARTH

“The idea that we can learn about how many people are using the space, when they are there, and how long they are there, without having to literally send someone out there to count people, is very valuable,” says Monica Carney Holmes, the planning coordinator for Charlotte’s urban design office.

Since bolting the bench into place last October, Holmes’s office has learned that 85 percent of visitors to Anita Stroud are repeat visitors and that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights are the most hopping. Outdoor Zumba and Tai Chi classes were scheduled for Saturday mornings last summer, Holmes says, but this summer they’ll program more events for weeknights to capitalize on the higher traffic.

to Anita Stroud Park, has used the bench and seen its data—“I think it’s cool,” she says—but acknowledges that some residents are wary. “People think it’s Big Brother watching them, a 1984, George Orwell sort of thing. The city says [the bench] doesn’t identify individual people, though I’m sure they could use it for that at some point. So that has given some residents pause.”

The bench in Anita Stroud Park is manufactured by Soofa, a company founded in 2014 by three graduates of the MIT Media Lab. It is the first tangible sign of a plan to revitalize an area of Charlotte branded the North End Smart District, which includes Brightwalk, the Park at Oaklawn, and six other adjacent neighborhoods. The 3.6-square-mile district houses approximately 9,000 residents—primarily low-income and predominantly Melissa Gaston, the president of the homeowners association of African American—clustered around a dilapidated warehouse the Park at Oaklawn, an affordable housing community adjacent district between the University of North Carolina campus and

LEFT

Darryl Gaston, a thirdgeneration resident of Charlotte’s North End, charges his phone in Anita Stroud Park.

The bench contains a sensor that registers park users within a 150-foot radius.

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The intent is to redevelop the area with the sort of cutting-edge digital infrastructure that will attract new employers to set up TOP shop, particularly IT companies and other enterprises that tend A view toward Prospect to draw on a young, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy workforce.

Park, taken from a Exactly what technological infrastructure will end up in the hyperspectral camera North End Smart District is an open question at this early mounted atop the Urban Observatory stage, but these days most cities of any size are touting “smart in Brooklyn, part of city” technology, and this is Charlotte’s pilot effort. This term NYU’s Center for Urban of art encompasses things like gigabit public Wi-Fi, parking Science + Progress. apps instead of parking meters, streetlights that dim to save energy when no one is around, automated buildings that heat BOTTOM and cool each space only when in use, and trash and recycling Here the vegetation pixels have been bins that alert sanitation personnel when full.

Beyond benches, urban data collection is advancing rapidly. The Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at New York University, established in 2012 as one of the few research centers in the world with degree-granting programs in urban informatics, is home to the Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project, an initiative to map noise pollution—and ultimately to inform policies and design strategies to reduce it—through a network of sensors, augmented by information on noise conditions provided by citizens through an app. At the Urban Observatory, CUSP’s research facility in Brooklyn, specialized cameras and remote sensing equipment are mounted on top of the building to collect data on things like the heat island effect and sources of emissions that are invisible to the naked eye. A hyperspectral camera pointed toward the skyline around Prospect Park allows researchers to view the infrared light emitted by plants to analyze the health of tree plantings in different areas (plant stress is perceptible in the infrared spectrum long before it is visible to the human eye). This information is then cross-referenced with highly localized weather and air quality data to look for cause-and-effect relationships.

extracted from the image; researchers at CUSP are analyzing such images to determine levels of plant stress in different locales around the city.

Perhaps the most ambitious urban informatics project in the country is in Chicago, where the city has begun the installation of 500 nodes, each housing 16 different sensors, plus a microphone and a camera, on utility poles inside what looks like a rocket-powered backpack from The Jetsons. Known as the

the downtown core, and it is facing heavy development pressure, especially now that the city’s light rail network is being extended into the area.

Data-collecting street furniture (Soofa isn’t the only company making benches with sensors) is one of the first areas where the smart city concept has spilled over from buildings and infrastructure into green space, though one could argue that features such as free Wi-Fi in parks, GPS-guided interpretive walks,

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GREGORY DOBLER

interactive light and water installations, and computerized controls of lighting and irrigation systems— increasingly common in the urban environment—also fit the bill.

“IT IS INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO IMPLEMENT TRADITIONAL PRIVACY CONCEPTS LIKE NOTICE AND CONSENT...IN PUBLIC SPACE.” TIMOTHY YIM, STARTUP POLICY LAB

Array of Things, a joint initiative between the City of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Chicago, the sensors detect basic weather and air quality information, along with magnetic fields (useful for assessing traffic flow) and physical vibrations (from machinery and heavy trucks), among other measurements. The camera is connected to software that can parse vehicular, bike, and pedestrian traffic, giving an accurate count for each location. An early concept for the project included a sensor to detect wireless devices, similar to the Soofa benches, though the idea was abandoned owing to public opposition.

Some 42 nodes have been installed in Chicago so far, with the full rollout scheduled for completion by the end of 2018.

A small number of nodes will soon be delivered to nine other participating cities in the United States, Mexico, and Europe as well. (The first data sets will be available at www.plenar.io, a global hub for open data, this summer.)

Although the upshots of the so-called smart city movement are fairly clear—better data equals better and more transparent decision making—some people believe its potential pitfalls merit greater attention. Chris Speed, the chair of the design informatics program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, says a number of issues stem from the fact that “most of the smart city agenda is top down, and based on economics rather than social values.”

Speed is concerned that the smart city movement may contribute to the privatization of the public realm, rather than its democratization, citing the recent installation of a Nintendo gaming station in a prominent public plaza in Edinburgh as an example. By providing a venue for the company to promote its latest product, the city was able to extract revenue out of a space that ordinarily only consumes taxpayer dollars. But hanging a corporate logo over public space always brings up questions about whose interests are being represented. “Does the public even realize what sort of information is coming out of sensors in parks or lampposts, or from a video game kiosk?” Speed asks. “Where is the opportunity for their input?”

In Charlotte, Holmes says the city is planning more benches like the one in Anita Stroud Park—at bus stops, perhaps, and in civic plazas—as the North End Smart District is developed.

By amassing reams of data on urban life, the theory goes, future planning and design efforts should be more accountable One roadblock to such input is the public’s general lack to conditions on the ground. of understanding about mass-scale data collection and its impact on matters that are important to them. Most people “The bench is part of a much larger conversation,” says Ed have at least a vague notion that using the Internet means Krafcik, a former landscape architect who now works for surrendering personal information to the Googles and AmaSoofa. “By embedding technology into public infrastructure, a zons of the world—that’s what all those legal disclosures that city is better able to respond to the evolving needs of citizens. most of us click our agreement to without actually reading Companies like IBM and Cisco have been talking about this are about, right?—but at least we are asked for our consent, for years, but the technology comes full circle when the data even if we have only a foggy idea of what we’re agreeing to. gathered is actually used by a parks department, an economic We just hope that the government is somehow keeping these development agency, a planner, or a designer in a way that corporations in check, and not collaborating with them to responds to how citizens actually use the city.” snoop on citizens.

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WEATHER/ENVIRONMENT Sound Light

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may “share data with research organizations both for and not for profit…to advance our research platform.” Krafcik maintains that selling data is not part of Soofa’s business model, though it’s not hard to imagine that other companies in the growing industry of urban data providers would want to engage in such commerce.

City of Chicago workers prepare to install an Array of Things node on a utility pole.

RIGHT AND OPPOSITE

Each node contains 16 sensors, plus a microphone and camera, to monitor urban conditions including noise and pollution levels.

According to Soofa’s privacy policy, its sensors “observe the information being sent by mobile devices, including the device’s MAC address [media access control address, a unique identifier used to communicate with a wireless network, similar to an IP address], manufacturer, and signal strength. After receiving the nonidentifiable data sent by mobile devices, Soofa applies a cryptographic function to the MAC addresses to further anonymize them.

Soofa analyzes the data it observes and provides aggregate anonymous information to its customers.” The privacy policy does not address whether Soofa might sell the data, stating only that it

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Yim consults with local governments on the privacy implications of drone use and other smart city initiatives, and has followed the progress of the Array of Things closely. While the project has been well received in many circles, he says it has met with stiff pushback from some community members and data privacy experts. During the public comment period for the project, concerns were voiced about the surveillance capabili-

ROB MITCHUM

LEFT

Transfer the Internet privacy debate from cyberspace to public space, however, and another set of ethical implications arises.

For example, there are no signs marking a 150-foot perimeter around Soofa benches warning pedestrians to turn back if they don’t want their devices registered. There is no way to opt out of being photographed by the Array of Things or recorded by SONYC microphones. Even if one is to trust the individuals and organizations behind such projects, what happens down the road when they are acquired by a multinational tech corporation, which quietly changes the wording of the privacy policy to enable other, more lucrative types of data collection from the sensors?

As with any sexy new technology, the potential for mission drift is hard to forecast amid the glare of the initial hubris.

Digital privacy experts have long held that anonymous data, such as a cell phone’s identification number, is not as anonymous as one might think, even if encrypted. Timothy Yim, the director of data and privacy at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Startup Policy Lab, says “deidentification,” the process of stripping “personally identifiable information” (or “PII” in techspeak) from a data set does not necessarily prevent “reidentification” at a later date. “It is very hard to guarantee that any de-identification process is 100 percent foolproof,” he says. “And the more data that we have sitting in private repositories, like data aggregators and data brokers, the greater the likelihood that reidentification is possible.” Few people realize, he adds, that cell phone-detecting sensors are widely deployed by owners of large retail environments to analyze pedestrian activity. Spatial DNA, a Toronto-based firm that provides those services, is now using its PeopleFlow system to track consumer activity not just in malls, airports, and sports venues, but on public streetscapes as well.

AIR QUALITY Total Reducing Gases

Total Oxidizing Gases

Hydrogen sulfide Sulfur dioxide Ozone

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Air Particles

ties of the units, including how future changes to the software and privacy policy would be evaluated, who will have access to the sound recordings and images collected by the units, and what would happen if a subpoena were issued for access to images and recordings in the course of a criminal trial.

Responses to 80 questions from the public were posted on the project website, including to the question of how law enforcement requests would be handled, on which the project team demurred, saying only that “the University of Chicago, as copyright holder of the data, [will] be responsible for responding to law enforcement requests.”

ROB MITCHUM

Yim counsels his municipal clients to err on the side of extreme transparency when rolling out data collection initiatives, and to draft privacy policies with exhaustive detail, imagining every current and future scenario that might result in a breach of public trust. The Array of Things’s initial privacy policy was troublingly vague and thin on detail, he says, though it was beefed up considerably following a string of negative news stories—“Array of Things Sensor Policy Leaves Law-Enforcement Question Open,” exclaimed the Chicago Tribune—that chronicled a bout of public backlash last year.

“It is incredibly difficult to implement traditional privacy concepts like notice and consent in the context of drones or sensors in public space,” Yim says. Planners and landscape architects, he adds, can play a role in helping communities define “the balance between the benefits and the potential privacy risks, as well as how to mitigate some of that risk.”

The line between collecting data for a valid public purpose and the unreasonable surveillance of private citizens can be tough to tease out. Beyond clear dangers like hacking and data breaches, and underlying concerns about private corporations somehow benefiting from data collected on the taxpayer’s dime, are existential questions about privacy as a basic human right. Helen Nissenbaum, a fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute and a privacy rights activist, says she is “horrified” at the lack of government oversight regarding the so-called Internet of Things as it expands into public space.

“The notion of public space where people can walk around and not be surveilled, not be held accountable for what they do, is really a diminishing idea—unless we pursue the idea of smart cities with our eyes open and a great understanding of what we’re doing,” Nissenbaum says. “We need better policies that control how data flows from one party to another and who But he applauds the project for one privacy practice that he can get access to what data under what conditions. I personally says could have been better publicized in the initial rollout to believe that if someone has a bunch of information about me, help allay the public’s Big Brother fears: raw images and record- it’s like the sword of Damocles—they have power over you.” ings are processed within each node, so that only numerical data—such as ambient noise levels, pedestrian and traffic According to Yim, very few laws, at any level of government, adcounts, and the presence of standing water—is transmitted dress what sort of data may be collected in public space, though to the project server (the Array of Things privacy policy states he says this is likely to change as the legal system catches up that raw image and audio data will occasionally be collected with the technology. Reform at the political level notwithstandto improve instrument calibration, but will only be reviewed ing, both he and Nissenbaum encourage anyone in the position by select personnel under “strict confidentiality obligations”). of recommending or procuring such data collection systems to

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RIGHT

Friday Night Lights, a collaboration with the City of Charlotte, the Parsons School of Design, and IDEO, drew residents from the neighborhoods around Anita Stroud Park.

“People say things like, ‘I don’t care; I’ve got nothing to hide,’” Nissenbaum says. “But privacy is not about having some guilty secret that you don’t want other people to know. If people understood how the sharing, aggregating, and analysis of data works, it would throw a lot of those assumptions out the window. Hopefully it won’t be too late by the time we as a society realize this.”

Krafcik is well aware of the skepticism regarding “Big Data” and what corporations and governments might be doing with it. But he argues that Soofa benches are potentially a means to build public trust around urban data collection. “The goal is to humanize the Internet of Things in a civic context. When sensors are hidden in light poles and electrical boxes and other places that are not tangible for citizens, it can create a contentious relationship with the technology. Rather than thinking it’s all about creating a better experience for them in the city they live in, it’s like, why is the city spying on me? Taxpayers are financing a lot of these innovations, so it becomes hard to advance if it’s not in a form they can connect with.”

Whatever the merits of Soofa’s approach, it has drawn interest from scores of municipalities, along with a few technology giants. Verizon and Cisco signed on as partners for Soofa’s first pilot project, a dozen benches scattered about Boston. The

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benches have now been installed in 65 cities and five countries, and the company’s second product launch—solar-powered, Wi-Fi enabled E Ink signs (the same technology used in a Kindle) used for wayfinding and public service announcements— is under way in Boston. The signs, which do not include sensors at this time, are used to communicate everything from transit updates and job postings from nearby businesses to notices for town hall meetings and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s Twitter feed.

In Charlotte, the question of who benefits from smart city technology takes a social equity cast. Rachel Stark, ASLA, a landscape architect in the city’s urban design office who is spearheading community planning efforts for the North End Smart District, says it was quickly apparent that the latest whizbang technology is not exactly a high priority for many residents in this part of the city, where the median income is around $25,000, one in six properties is vacant, the violent crime rate is four times the Charlotte average, 28 percent of residents are unemployed, and 27 percent of households lack a car. The appeal of a phone-charging bench has its limits in a community where not everyone has a smartphone in their pocket.

“Is this going to be helpful, or is it just going to raise property values and drive people out?” Stark asks. “The most important question at this point is, how can we be smart about our community engagement? Language is so important. As landscape architects, it is very important to understand that, yeah, we may be the educated professional, but that doesn’t make us better.

It makes the situation worse if we don’t actually communicate in a way that the people we’re talking to can understand. So we’ve come to local community groups since the beginning to find out the best ways to get their constituents engaged in the discussion.”

CITY OF CHARLOTTE

delve into the ways the systems work and what the ramifications of their use are. Cell phones, for example, transmit several different signals, which have different security implications, says Nissenbaum, who suggests a few basic questions to ask: What happens to the data once it is registered? How long is the information going to be stored? Will it ever be shared with anybody else? Can the purchaser of the system conduct an audit to make sure it is working as the company claims it is?

“IS THIS GOING TO BE HELPFUL, OR IS IT JUST GOING TO RAISE PROPERTY TAXES AND DRIVE PEOPLE OUT?” RACHEL STARK, ASLA, CITY OF CHARLOTTE

Melissa Gaston and her husband, Darryl Gaston, were among the first community members consulted. “I embrace the smart city concept, but I cautioned the folks from the city that because of things we have experienced historically in Charlotte, residents here are a little apprehensive about the government coming in and telling us what they want to happen,” says Darryl, a third-generation resident of Druid Hills— one of the eight neighborhoods within the North End Smart District—and the president of its neighborhood association (the couple, who met at a community organizing workshop, maintain residences in their respective neighborhoods). “We are already experiencing all sorts of growth pains—predators knocking on our doors, saying, ‘I know that your taxes are in arrears, but if you sell me your house you don’t have to worry about the city taking it.’”

aging housing stock in the area. Another suggestion, which came up in discussions about impediments to mobility, is for the city to create a sort of banking app for residents who have a smartphone but not a bank account or credit cards. Uber and Lyft don’t accept cash, so the app would allow users to load money onto their account at a convenience store, for example, and then pay for ride share services or for municipal transit using a phone.

One Smart District project already under way is a workforce development program to train adults in technology skills to help bridge the digital divide, Stark says. A program for high school students will provide two weeks of training in a field of technology, followed by a four-week internship working in that particular industry. “The idea is that by having the training and providing localized jobs, people don’t have to travel as far, Based on this feedback, city staff is taking an incremental, their incomes are hopefully a little higher, and they have a few bottom-up approach with the Smart District plan. The instal- more options in life,” she says. lation of the Soofa bench last year was part of the No Barriers Project, a prelude to launching the Smart District that entailed The Gastons plan on holding them to it. They recently formed a six-month series of events in Anita Stroud Park put on by the North End Community Coalition to unite the various comthe tech-centered design firm IDEO, the Parsons School of munity groups in the area against the pitfalls of gentrification Design, and the Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation and ensure that the upcoming investments in technology are Department. Activities included whimsical evening events, harnessed for the interests of current residents. Consensus in like playing with “light boxes”—lightweight chair-size cubes the community is in support of the Smart District plan, says with an illuminated dry erase surface for people to write out Melissa Gaston, as long as it continues to be on the commutheir thoughts about the community (or whatever was on their nity’s terms. “There are some things that the city has come to mind)—along with barbecues and dance parties. us and said they wanted to do and we said, ‘No, we are not on board with that.’ But they’ve addressed some of our initial conStark says the social capital generated by the No Barriers Proj- cerns. We’ve been left out of a lot of good things going on in the ect is now feeding into a series of community input sessions city in the past, so I recognize the value of being part of this.” about how the Smart District plan could support the immediate needs of residents. One idea that’s arisen is to subsidize BRIAN BARTH IS A TORONTO-BASED JOURNALIST WITH A BACKGROUND IN weatherization improvements and smart thermostats for the URBAN PLANNING AND LANDSCAPE DESIGN.

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ,

RECONNECTING

BY JAMES TRULOVE / PORTRAIT BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY

BACK FROM A DOZEN YEARS IN LONDON, THE DESIGNER IS FOCUSING ON CLIMATE AND THE WORLD SHE HAS MADE HER HOME. PLUS: TWO WORKS IN BEIJING.

Martha Schwartz, FASLA, and her business partner and husband, Markus Jatsch, last year relocated from London to Brooklyn, though the London office remains the headquarters of their firm, Martha Schwartz Partners. Schwartz continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—though her projects have taken her firm just about everywhere but the United States. James Trulove, a former editor of LAM, who has known Schwartz for years, joined her and Jatsch, who is trained as an architect, for a conversation to find out what prompted the move and where Schwartz is directing her design and teaching now.

JAMES TRULOVE: You now have offices in New York, London, and Shanghai. I guess there are many opportunities for a landscape architect in China given the enormous amount of construction that is taking place.

What is it like to work there?

SCHWARTZ: Unfortunately the quality of much of the built work is poor,

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TRULOVE: Well, you go through China, and you see all these endless rows of new condominiums that are black at night. Nobody lives there.

SCHWARTZ: It’s because the local government officials are rewarded for how much they can get built, and this thing about them wanting whether it is needed or not. to build 400 cities in 20 years— unfortunately, it was very market- JATSCH: A lot of developers are now driven. There wasn’t any kind of top- actually using the landscape to create down city planning where instead of a public realm around them which just building high-rises, they said, has a higher quality, because the “Let’s build a city.” It was just build- buildings themselves don’t have it. ing high-rise towers. By zoning law, there had to be a little tutu of green TRULOVE: And the landscapes often are more traditional? around it.

JATSCH: No, not when they call us.

TRULOVE: Why did you come back to the United States to set up an TRULOVE: There’s got to be an enor- office again? You mentioned earlier mous amount of work and a lot of on that it was about reconnecting. competition.

Reconnecting with what?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah. There’s a lot of work. SCHWARTZ: My family.

But you know, the Chinese goal is to TRULOVE: Rather than to be recondo everything themselves. necting with the United States as a JATSCH: I think we are in a bit of place to do work? a fortunate position over there, because the companies that work in SCHWARTZ: I’m not sure I was treChina are usually too big and corpo- mendously attached to the United rate to really embrace landscape as a States in terms of work. I always design opportunity, so we don’t have think of myself as kind of too far too much tough competition in this out there, while the U.S. in many ways is very traditional. I’ve come field in China. to understand after I’ve lived here SCHWARTZ: Yeah, that’s true. for awhile, that [Americans] are real colonials. We long to kind of create JATSCH: And they just love Martha, this history that we don’t have, and when she goes there to lecture as so we look back to the mother ship this master hero, because she really and try to re-create that connection. I established a new understanding was in Mexico City for a colloquium, and approach for landscape. They re- and I hadn’t been there for a long ally seem still so unreformed, which time, but they embrace modernism. is fascinating.

We haven’t. We just kept on going with the colonialism, columns, and SCHWARTZ: Well, I think anybody this, that, and the other. who kind of does something unusual or steps out of line, especially TRULOVE: So, what sort of projects are you looking for here now? if you’re a woman, that seems to…

landscape as a contemporary kind of design art? I just don’t know.

JATSCH: I think the U.S. is slowly warming up to understanding the need to see landscape as being part of the infrastructure and thus also being a design opportunity. You know, because of global warming and other issues, these large-scale projects are starting to happen in these cities, especially on waterfronts. There are a lot of opportunities opening up for us as designers. And then you have more and more sophisticated clients in the center of the country. There’s a lot of interesting stuff suddenly happening in the built environment in these little towns, cities, in between the two coastlines. They were not on the radar 20 years ago.

TRULOVE: You are a tenured professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. What are you teaching your students now?

SCHWARTZ: Well, it’s funny you asked that one. I’m not even teaching a design studio. I’m teaching my students about climate change. It doesn’t seem to be a big topic at the GSD. TRULOVE: It does not?

TRULOVE: Well, that’s been your mo-

SCHWARTZ: Pretty much anything.

dus operandi from day one, right? One of my big worries is whether Stepping out of line? we will actually integrate into what is going on here. I know that there SCHWARTZ: Stepping out of line, are a lot of cities doing interesting exactly. It’s especially bad manners, things. New York has made a big being a woman. You’re not supposed effort in understanding how the to do that. landscape needs to function. But finding people who are interested in

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SCHWARTZ: No. Markus and I are co-teaching a studio, working in connection with Harvard Forest, which has basically mapped out all of Massachusetts and done a number of scenarios based on—let’s say—2060.

One scenario is: What happens when there are climate refugees trying to

What happens when there are climate refugees trying to get into Massachusetts because there are droughts in the Midwest?

MARTHA SCHWARTZ

get into Massachusetts because there are droughts in the Midwest? Massachusetts will have water. It’s been reforesting itself. How do you actually make trade-offs between planting trees in order to sequester carbon dioxide while you still need land to grow crops? Because there’s always a trade-off, right? One scenario is where you stop sprawl and create a boundary around Boston and other cities, so that you’re protecting the landscape in order to capture water.

[Massachusetts is] going to have like 6 to 8 percent more rain in the wintertime and no rain during the summertime. I’ve been obsessed with this whole issue of climate change and what it means for us as landscape architects. Because where we’re used to working site by site, we’re stewards of the landscape. We make sure that on every site, we collect the water. In order to create any kind of impact ecologically, you need scale, and you need connectivity. So, those things are usually determined during the planning process. It’s a bit frustrating knowing that this freight train is coming right at you, and what our role really is. We’re barely teaching ecology at all at the GSD. But instead of the traditional way of teaching ecology, which is plant associations and what’s going to grow where, we have to learn about what really is happening, because everybody knows that climate change is happening, but they don’t know how fast it’s happening, and they don’t know the ramifications.

as a main focus. The starting point was that they realized in the 1800s, 1900s, there was so much deforestation going on in New England and in Massachusetts. And in the 20th century, [the forests] regrouped to an unexpectedly high level, and this showed them that recovery is possible. But regrowing stalled recently, and due to current land policies, it’s starting to go down again. They were trying to figure out different scenarios, how this can be prevented, how the existing and remaining forest areas can be protected. And as part of these scenarios, they also looked at the carbon sequestration potential of these forest areas— which turned out to be quite a powerful element—and then of course, scenarios of industrial reforestation, agriculture, and becoming self-sufficient. These were outlined with different stakeholder groups.

Another one extended into the entire region of New England, actually.

SCHWARTZ: Except they haven’t tackled the cities, which is what we’re trying to do. That is the hard part, because of the city’s crazy emissions.

So, we’ll never really be able to kind of stuff it full enough with trees to really impact the carbon dioxide.

There is quite a lot that the planting of trees can do to modify the climate.

The soil actually is what sequesters carbon dioxide, but also it helps the water to infiltrate and bring down temperatures. All of Massachusetts actually is enough to sequester 10 JATSCH: The Harvard Forest Project percent of the emissions that Masactually did, with climate change sachusetts makes. This issue of how

we deal with the water inside the city is very important: how to take out a lot of the hardscape, how to bring down temperatures.

TRULOVE: And a lot of people are prepared to believe that it’s not happening because to do so has a negative impact on commerce.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, well, I mean, not at the GSD. Even people at the GSD who you would think would know, don’t know.

TRULOVE: That’s interesting you should be the one who teaches them, because you’re the one who rebelled against this at one time.

When Ian McHarg’s book, Design with Nature, came out, he was looking at landscape architecture from a completely different perspective from you, who wanted to have a big canvas on which to create a beautiful piece of landscape art.

SCHWARTZ: I never felt ecology was wrong or bad. The real problem is that everybody thought that ecology had to look like something, and it doesn’t have good design. You can be ecological and you can also make art.

There’s no real one or the other. People just took those stances: “It should be pastoral and natural.” Well, who made up these rules? If we were to go to a zero-carbon economy right now, we would still continue to heat up for hundreds of years—the oceans, thousands of years. So actually getting to a zero-carbon economy could take 50 years, which is too long. And

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You can be ecological and you can also make art.

There’s no real one or the other.

MARTHA SCHWARTZ

the oceans are warming up and the ice is melting, which actually kept a cap on methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide [as a greenhouse gas]. We read an article months ago that Europe could be looking at 100 million climate refugees because the Middle East is going to heat up to where it’s too hot to live.

There are going to be these huge demographic shifts. So, to me, it seems like it’s time to rethink our approach to ecology—what we as landscape architects should be doing, because we’re not scientists. There are lots of scientists working on all these incredible ideas, but our government hasn’t really seen fit to, first of all, recognize it’s happening, but second, to say that this is something that’s important enough that we should be spending our money on, like the Manhattan Project. Put $5 billion together with all these scientists and put them in the desert and put some razor wire around and tell them not to come out until they figure it out, because they could.

TRULOVE: But, that’s not going to happen now.

SCHWARTZ: Well, I mean, it may not happen at the federal level, but it still absolutely could be happening at a state and private level. There’s a lot of money to be made, so generating new ideas and technologies could really happen. There are also cities that are working to bring down their carbon footprint very quickly.

And, you know, there’s always China, which could move on it very quickly.

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JATSCH: China is capable of pulling it off, hopefully on a political level. I think the United States is extremely capable—more than any other country —to pull things off on a private level.

You don’t find this in Europe.

in the summer? These are all things that cities are going to need to figure out. And it isn’t just on a site-by-site basis. These have to be connected.

TRULOVE: Manhattan is another example. A few years ago the Museum SCHWARTZ: Look at Silicon Valley and of Modern Art had an exhibit on the all the ideas that came out of there. It’s impact of rising sea levels on New like an Industrial Revolution. There York City. are all these technologies out there being invented and being looked at— SCHWARTZ: Well, and Boston, too; ways of sequestering carbon dioxide it’s a sea-level change. Another proband the oceans, sucking up the at- lem is having heavy rainstorms that mosphere, new fuels, you know, for come down so quickly that if plants airplanes, new battery technologies. I aren’t holding down the soil, it washmean, all this stuff is being invented es away. All the topsoil goes, and then you have the desert. It can’t hold now, and it’s all over the place. the water, and it’s lost. And then you JATSCH: And the United States is need it later. Part of the interesting traditionally open to taking ideas. We thing is that along with this kind of just met with a scientist at Harvard, crazy shit that’s going to happen in David Keith, who is into solar engi- the climate, the technologies for cars neering. I was wondering whether, are going to change tremendously. especially with this new administration in Washington, whether he is TRULOVE: We’re seeing that happen still in the right location with his at an extraordinary speed at this point. work and his research, and whether in Europe would he be more sup- SCHWARTZ: The reason we need ported for what he’s doing. But at the size roads we have is for human the same time, the Europeans are error. A self-driving car only needs much more skeptical of any broad, six feet, so there’s the opportunity to harvest all this public space in large-scale solution. the streets to actually have linear, SCHWARTZ: Anyway, back to our connected systems. We’re looking Harvard studio: Our class is looking at all the different townships in and at how Boston in 2060 can integrate around Boston and how many roads meaningful ecologies into the city. there are. What happens if you don’t How to bring down the heat, how to need half of them? And what can take up a lot of the concrete and the you do that really affects the environasphalt and store the energy. How ment by planting forests, by taking do you actually deal with keeping the up the asphalt and creating retenfresh water that you’re going to need tion areas?

TRULOVE: That’s very interesting.

puter, whether it’s 3-D manufacturing, or parametric design, or whatSCHWARTZ: A city could do a lot ever. And none of them teach the better. The more trees you have, the basics anymore. more shade you have, the less need you have to cool it down, and you SCHWARTZ: I’m supposed to be don’t need as much energy. So, you teaching an advanced design studio can plant your roads; there are all at Harvard, and people just don’t sorts of things that cities can do to have tools. I have found it very make life a lot more livable and keep frustrating. I mean, the desks have us alive. The only reason we care gotten so small; they’ve been redeabout sustainability is our sustain- signed so that they’re about not even ability. So it’s a very strange studio. this wide. And then they have these backs that are made out of glass.

TRULOVE: Do you have a lot of You can’t pin up anything. They’re participation? not made for drawing. It’s all about computer stuff.

SCHWARTZ: No. Not very many peoJATSCH: Do you know what I was ple are interested in it. told the other day, last week? At one JATSCH: It’s not just Harvard; it’s studio’s desk, one half is occupied American schools nowadays. They with a computer and two monitors don’t really teach design anymore, and the other half was occupied whether it’s architectural or land- with a little 3-D printer. No space to scape. In the London office, we don’t sketch, with a physical model, to try have anyone from the United States. out, to experiment, nothing.

TRULOVE: Really?

JATSCH: No. Look at designers. The best designers come from Spain.

They have a solid basic design education. They don’t shy away from color theories and proportions and this kind of stuff, and yet, they then top it with a very solid teaching of architectural thinking. They combine these two very well. Even landscape architects—which is an official program in Spain—they are really solid people. In the States, every school is jumping on this newest fashion with whatever is based in the com-

SCHWARTZ: It’s pretty grim. And the idea of scale, people have no idea about scale. Like, I’m making a little path. How wide is the path?

One hundred meters, a little path.

No idea, right? No idea because it looks this big on there, right? So the school hasn’t really been run with, I think, a real commitment to what it takes to really teach design.

Then, I’m taking this advanced design studio. It’s like, well, “rise over run equals percent slope.” That is where I am. And so I often make the decision to stop talking about design. All I need you to do, want

you to do, is to try to grade this, so when you graduate from graduate school, you’ll have been able to say that you’ve graded something.

JATSCH: It’s a typical studio problem, I think, where the students love to dive into these analyses because the longer they do it, the less time they have to spend on actually putting a pencil down and designing something. And they shy away from it. Great analysis and making them pretty and beautiful is much easier, and it isn’t really something you can be criticized for, because it isn’t right or wrong.

SCHWARTZ: Every class, we’re getting incredible people from the engineering school who come in and talk to the students about the science behind global warming and the science behind ice melt. They’re all from Harvard. They’re coming in, and the students are learning what’s behind all of this stuff. And then they’re having to figure out what they’re going to do with each one of their townships in terms of inserting these ecologies. Now they’re going to have to measure the effect of it.

And they’re going to learn something about it. They’re going to know a lot more about climate change. They’re going to know a lot more about what they can do as landscape architects, what they can tell other people, what they can tell their clients, what they can tell the mayor about what needs to be done at a larger scale. We give them the future and not another halfassed design course.

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teach for two weeks, because Michigan’s out in the middle of nowhere.

I went to the Graham Foundation and got some money, so I spent the whole year doing this, not learning anything. And in the last year, I transferred to Harvard, and that was the year that Pete got there, and I just hung out in his class, and he just encouraged me to keep on doing what I was doing in the SWA office—which was to make art projects out of it. So, I never learned how to be a landscape architect, really.

TRULOVE: To this day.

SCHWARTZ: To this day. I’m better; I know more than I did, but for me, the idea of teaching, certainly at my age—I want to get something out of it. I want to see how this student turns out. It would be really great to be able to do something that can fit into this Harvard Forest research, to really show how cities can react at a geo level. This needs to be taught as part of the core, not as an optional studio. In other words, there’s enough information that all the students coming into landscape architecture should come out with the awareness of what’s going on in our world, on our planet, because we don’t have time, and we need all the help, all the advocacy, we can use.

JAMES TRULOVE IS A PUBLISHER AND EDITOR OF BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. HIS MOST RECENT ARTICLE WAS ABOUT THE METRO-FOREST PROJECT IN BANGKOK (MAY).

MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

TRULOVE: Are your students recep- Sasaki was actually in Watertown, tive, the ones that you have? and there was this guy named Peter Walker who was running it, and SCHWARTZ: Oh yeah, they’re great. I’m like, who is Peter Walker? Like, Absolutely, yeah. I mean they’re all ugh! I was like, where is Sasaki, not landscape architects; I’m not open- his flunky? But I didn’t really spend ing it up to everyone, [just] landscape a whole lot of effort trying to learn architect students who wanted to landscape architecture, because learn about it. there were 120 people there. There was not one woman. I mean, I just TRULOVE: You were very frustrated decided they would never hire me, because you came from an art back- obviously. I’m not a landscape archiground. You fell into landscape ar- tect. I don’t know anything about it. chitecture just because you thought I’m a girl. So, I just had a good time, it would give you more freedom to and I would take every project as I design, right? did, once a week, and I would just do whatever I wanted. Some of it was SCHWARTZ: Well, I thought I wanted kind of strange. But what happened to learn how to build big art, right? was that during the course of the But, that wasn’t really exactly what summer, Pete and a couple of other landscape architecture was about. people would always be worried what I was going to do, because it TRULOVE: A somewhat larger canvas. was weird, you know, weird. I didn’t care. We had a house project on a SCHWARTZ: Yeah, there was only hillside, and I don’t remember why one other person—this is when I I decided to do this, but I did the was at the University of Michigan— whole hillside, you know, the whole who was from an art background. thing, the driveway, the entrance, After that first year I was like, it’s the interior of the house, all the way not for me. This is really so boring… down, the hillside, all out of yellow I can’t do it. But, I happened to see broken tiles. And then kind of this this sign up on the bulletin board glass bubble house. You know, Pete that there was this summer pro- had a group of his buddy architects gram at the SWA Group out in Cali- on the jury, and there was this one fornia. I had never been to Califor- guy who really liked me a lot. He nia. It wasn’t like I put together a was really excited about it. It was portfolio. I rolled up my drawings, Frank Gehry. I just kept doing this stuck them in a tube, and sent them stuff, you know, because obviously out. I mean, it was really the most they liked me. And then the next half-assed thing. I sent it out, and year, I went back to Michigan, and they took me, and I mean, I’ll tell then I worked on pulling together you how wired I was. I found out a program where I invited five difthat [Hideo] Sasaki wasn’t there. ferent practitioners to come in and

ELEVATION

FANQI ROAD THE EIGHT SECOND LANDSCAPE.

By James Trulove

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

ANQI LAKE is a tranquil resort about 37 miles northeast of central Beijing where, to my surprise, the sky was blue when I visited. It is home to the newly built Yanqi Lake International Convention Center, the site in November 2014 of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Meeting, which brought heads of state from around the world, including President Obama.

Martha Schwartz Partners (MSP) was asked by a Chinese developer to produce, as Schwartz recalls, “the most beautiful roadscape” for Fanqi Road, which leads to the convention center. It would run outside what was to become a spa hotel designed by Tadao Ando and surround two residential communities. It was estimated that it would take approximately seven to eight seconds for any given motorcade to pass along

this section of road. Clearly an immediate, in-your-face design was required. MSP created a 340-meter-long diorama that would be a Chinese landscape painting brought to life. Schwartz says: “We had like about two weeks to design it and about three weeks to build it.”

Alternating rows of granite in black, gray, and white—both rough and polished—enclose stone boxes that “step up” the site to form a mountain slope. The boxes are planted with native trees, shrubs, and bamboo from all over China. Some of the granite boxes form plinths that hold massive rocks. One such rock at the apex of the “mountain” was taken from Mount Tai, a place of historical and cultural significance in Shandong Province. In sections of the wall, water cascades down the stone plinths and courses into the development.

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SCHWARTZ: We did not have a lot of time to think about the design of Fanqi

The client did give us some direction as to what he was looking for. He said that since the site was in a mountainous area (low mountains but very beautiful), he wanted the streetscape “to be like a mountain.� I told him we would try to accomplish this. The problem was how to possibly re-create a mountain within a site that is about two miles long and 30 feet wide.

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

Road. Our client told his construction crew, who had already begun to construct the streetscape, to stand down, giving us about two weeks to design the streetscape and produce design development drawings and mock-ups. This was super time sensitive, because his crew was standing idle as we designed, and it absolutely had to be built in time for the APEC opening. We were working on China time.

ELEVATION

SCHWARTZ: The fundamental

MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

strategy for creating an upward sense of verticality was to create a series of terraces or boxes that stepped up against the wall.

I felt that if we were able to create a striated surface for the boxes it would tie them together as one large piece and might suggest the process of layering and compression.

HARDSCAPE STRATEGY COR TEN STEEL PLANTER BOXES FOR BAMBOO GRAVEL CONCRETE PAVED PATH MATERIAL TO MATCH ADJACENT

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, TOP, CENTER RIGHT, AND BOTTOM; FEI QI, CENTER LEFT

TYPICAL SECTIONS THROUGH PLANTER WALLS

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SCHWARTZ: The giant bamboo was planted in a grid and at a regular stepping to create a visual contrast

to the more relaxed placement of the boxes and “forest-esque,” less structured planting. We wanted a rhythm or “backbeat” to the composition since most people would be experiencing this landscape driving a car, and we needed to create something that helped to measure or create a rhythm so the landscape didn’t just blur into one thing, which creates a cross section of geological time.

MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

TYPICAL TERRACE PLANTER DETAILS

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could sit in nooks and crannies and enjoy a little bit of nature along the way. We wanted to make a park. So, we planted lower and more decorative trees that people could sit under and enjoy, sited real rocks in niches, and included small waterfalls and pools in a few areas within the streetscape so people could enjoy themselves in a more articulated space than what a regular streetscape would oer.

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

SCHWARTZ: We attempted to make this a linear park where people

BEIQIJIA

A “MONSTER” LANDSCAPE WITH MANY NEEDS.

By James Trulove

T

HIS SPRAWLING PARK at the Beiqijia Technology Business District lies about an hour north of central Beijing in the Changping district, which is considered the city’s north gate. Martha Schwartz Partners’ design of this mixed-use development was completed last year. It presents 60,000 square meters of order amid otherwise chaotic suburban sprawl. The site weaves together three glass office buildings to the north with a string of uniform condominium towers on the south.

For China, the levels of quality and careful maintenance of this project are remarkable.

There are two gateways to the site, each marked by a portico made of double-walled, laser-cut stainless steel. At the west entrance, the gateway hovers like a windswept ribbon that folds down to provide seating and shade. A lime-green internal lighting system shines through a multitude of etched openings. Passing through this portico, you go down a wide promenade past the office towers and two sunken gardens. The first is a quiet viewing garden, flanked by low-rise offices and densely planted with bamboo. The second garden is surrounded by restaurants and retail shops and has a lot of seating areas. There is a gym at this level, cocooned within a one-story-high water wall.

considerably larger than the west gateway. It functions as a giant trellis to mark the entrance to people speeding down the busy highway, Qu Bei Road.

Like the west gateway, this one also has laser-cut openings that emit a green glow in the evening. It sits near one end of a promenade that runs along the northern edge of the site.

In the middle, at the main ground level, is the Central Park. Its paving along the promenade is interwoven with strips of turf, perennials, hedges, and ornamental grasses. From an aerial perspective— the view seen by many of the residents and workers in this complex—the design language becomes clear: an arrangement of cubes, rectangles, and stripes that responds to the geometry of the office buildings. Within these taut geometries, the most striking element is the scythe-like water feature that slices 150 meters from east to west, flowing with treated rainwater and studded with stone benches and planter boxes.

MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS

Amid the site’s many design moves, Schwartz made a play area in the residential zone that is reminiscent of her most artful landscapes. It has bold graphics and play spaces in brilliant colors, and is meant to appeal to a range of ages. This residential zone also has a series of intimate garden rooms defined by hedges or walls, with small The second gateway, located at the far north of the water features and seating elements that let people site along the main highway, is more formal and choose sun or shade.

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TERRENCE ZHANG

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SCHWARTZ: The ďŹ rst thing we felt was needed was to try

to calm down the visual busy-ness of the disparate architecture of the site by connecting the three repetitive lower-rise buildings, setting them on a continuous surface to calm the overall disparate composition.

TERRENCE ZHANG, TOP, INSET, AND BOTTOM RIGHT; MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, BOTTOM LEFT

GATEWAY STRUCTURE 1 DETAILS

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and characterized by the different conditions that it touches. It is generously planted with trees to provide needed shade and to create more privacy from the buildings that loom over the park.

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, TOP; TERRENCE ZHANG, BOTTOM

SCHWARTZ: The Central Park is, essentially, a green park. It is a simple plane of grass that is edged

MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM; TERRENCE ZHANG, RIGHT

SCHWARTZ: We decided that as people

walk into the building they would look into a very densely planted bamboo forest. This is interesting enough since the varying angles and movement of bamboo are inherently fascinating and beautiful.

It didn’t need more. We designed the plaza in an op art way that made the surface, when seen from above, seem as though it was rippled stone.

There are moments when the stone actually does become sculptural and can be seating for those who do make it into the courtyard.

BENCH AND PAVING DETAILS

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, TOP; TERRENCE ZHANG, BOTTOM

PLAY AREA 2 ELEVATIONS

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, LEFT; TERRENCE ZHANG, RIGHT

PLAY AREA 2 DETAILS

SCHWARTZ: It is an interesting rule in China—you can never have

enough playgrounds, even though people have small families.

The playground was located facing the Central Park so the kids could enjoy the “borrowed scenery” of the green background (these housing blocks are all gated). We wanted to do something that was sophisticated so it did not seem like a side event just for children to enjoy. At some level, since many people are looking at this area, we have given them something of sculptural beauty to enjoy as well.

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WATER FEATURE 5 DETAILS

in a tectonic plate that exhibits the “rock” (in this case concrete steps and walls) that underlies the thin layer of green.

The “rock” is expressed by a wall of sculptural concrete ledges that are both planted and in which water collects and falls, like a cracked rock.

The important motivation for the sculptural quality and dominance of the benches is to…offer different ways of using the space while at the same time not looking empty if there are not many people in the space. It has to be able to be empty without creating a lifeless hole.

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TERRENCE ZHANG, LEFT AND OPPOSITE; MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, RIGHT

SCHWARTZ: This stepped area is like a break

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MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS, LEFT; TERRENCE ZHANG, RIGHT

WATER FEATURE 4 LONGITUDINAL SECTION

SCHWARTZ: A linear creek runs down the middle of the southern

pathway, and that contains linear stones and planters.

Together, the low planters and creek create a horizontal “privacy” wall so the housing area has privacy from the people working and shopping in the northern area of the site.

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CONTEXT CLUES

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LIZ SARGENT APPLIES HER RESEARCH SKILLS TO UNCOVER HIDDEN AND COMPLEX LANDSCAPE NARRATIVES.

BY KEVAN WILLIAMS

LIZ SARGENT, FASLA

T

he heavily wooded picnic area at Humpback Rocks is a sometimes lonely space, and rarely used compared to the visitor center just a couple of miles north on the Blue Ridge Parkway. As a problem, an underused picnic glade can be approached many ways, but Liz Sargent, FASLA, who prepared a cultural landscape report for the Humpback Rocks area, based her recommendations on the history of the place. “The campgrounds and the picnic areas were designed at a time when people had different-sized cars, had different lifestyles, and wanted to use the landscape in different ways,” Sargent explains. She relied on historic plans for the parkway’s construction and landscape management and a knowledge of shifting alignments of the nearby Appalachian Trail to understand how this humble parking area had changed over time. She recommended selective clearing, not so much a change but a respectful

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EARTHWORKS AND TOPOGRAPHY

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ABOVE

The relationship between the landform and topography and Yorktown Battlefield earthworks.

OPPOSITE

Soils associated with the Yorktown Battlefield landscape.

The principal and sole employee of Liz Sargent HLA works from home in a cozy, light-filled studio fashioned from a single-car garage on a residential street in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her firm has no website or social media presence. Instead, Sargent relies on word of mouth among the network of collaborators she has built over 25 years in practice.

Her overhead and affect are modest, but Sargent is a prolific figure in the realm of cultural landscapes.

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She has worked on cultural and historic landscape projects all over the country, including more than 50 National Park Service sites and battlefields, campuses, cemeteries, and other historic sites—as well as dozens of National Historic Landmarks, the highest order of recognition a historic resource can receive in the United States. And there are other high-profile projects that bear her mark. Sargent also served as the lead landscape architect on the team that developed a conservation management plan for Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

She led an inventory of cultural landscapes at Yellowstone National Park

and developed a preservation master plan for the campus of Clemson University in South Carolina. Along the way, she has quietly reshaped the way historic and cultural landscapes are recognized.

Rob McGinnis, FASLA, principal of Robert McGinnis Landscape Architects, has collaborated with Sargent since the early 1990s. In describing her work, he emphasizes the breadth of Sargent’s portfolio and the strength of her research, which, he says, give her practice unusual authority on quite singular types of projects. “The ability to work with such wide and diverse landscapes—

JESÚS NAJAR

rediscovery of the space’s earlier, more open character, built on an appreciation of the details, large and small, that shape our landscapes.

SOIL PROFILE

YORKTOWN Soils Associated with the Earthworks and Environs at Yorktown 3: Axis very fine sandy loam 5: Bethera silt loam 7: Bojac sandy loam 11C: Craven-Uchee complex 15D: Emporia complex, 10%-15% slope 15E: Emporia complex, 15%-25% slope 15F: Emporia complex, 25%-50% slope 16: Izagora loam 17: Johnston complex 19B: Kempsville-Emporia fine sandy loams 21: Levy silty clay 26B: Pamunkey soils 29A: Slagle fine sandy loam, 0%-2% slope 29B: Slagle fine sandy loam, 2%-6% slope 31B: Suffolk fine sandy loam 34B: Uchee loamy fine sand 35: Udorthents, loamy 37: Urban land

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JESÚS NAJAR

geographically, time period, stylistic, vernacular, high design—it’s not just that she’s a generalist,” McGinnis says. “Part of it is—what gets you up in the morning—is the challenge of addressing these landscapes with a process and a perspective that is informed by working so broadly.”

Melnick, FASLA; Tim Keller, FASLA; and Genevieve Keller, Honorary ASLA, principals at the firm who shaped his generation of cultural landscape practitioners. The principals, he says, had a “less predetermined analytical approach” to cultural landscapes and were “more open-minded in allowing a fresh After receiving her master’s degree perspective on a resource.” in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia in 1991, Sar- Before pursuing her MLA, Sargent gent worked for Land and Commu- studied at Connecticut College, renity Associates, a firm that became ceiving a bachelor’s degree in both an early leader in the cultural land- botany and American history, an scape field. McGinnis also worked education that she has folded into at LCA, and attributes the focus on her practice of interpreting the relaprocess to the influence of Robert tionships among physical, ecological,

and social dynamics that have shaped cultural landscapes. For example, Sargent explains that Civil War battlefields “were places where something happened, and there doesn’t necessarily need to be anything there except the environmental conditions, the combination of natural and cultural conditions, that led armies to end up meeting in certain places, and there are certain landforms and landscape types that were used in battles in certain ways.” At Yorktown Battlefield, Sargent created an earthworks management plan that interpreted the successive layers of military activity and commemoration and interpretation at the site.

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MANAGEMENT PLAN YO

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YORKTOWN VISITOR CENTER

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The plan for managing the earthworks proposes an elevated walkway for viewing.

WAYSIDE

PROPOSED

WAYSIDE TRAIL ELEVATED WALK

She recommended the use of viewing platforms and careful clearing to reveal the spatial relationships that shaped the site’s settlement and fortification. Sargent also proposed illustrating the spatial effects of artillery by using vegetation of contrasting texture or color to mark the distances they could fire. These interpretive strategies were overlaid by recommendations for management and planting that preserved the earthworks through the use of low-maintenance native grasses that required less mowing.

PATH

ROAD

STONEWALL CANOPY

FENCE

EARTHWORK

BRIDGE

ARTILLERY

BUILDING

CLEARED VIEWSHED CANOPY

cultural landscape interpretation.

Standards for documenting and nominating places to the National Register of Historic Places are generally biased toward structures and designed landscapes (or collections thereof), emphasizing qualities like style when describing their historic integrity. Those who document landscapes that don’t fit neatly into that mold, like Sargent, have had to work creatively to adapt to changing conceptions of sites. “Those [standards] are our framework. We might start with [them]...but we have the skill level and the credibility to maSargent’s work illustrates an expand- nipulate that process,” McGinnis ed conception of the possibilities for says. McGinnis sees growth ahead

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GRASS

for the cultural landscape field, as it extends beyond the criteria established by the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior that have defined much of the field’s output to date. He cites the applications of cultural landscape research methods to assessments that increasingly look more like master plans than reports, or in his own work, that are incorporated into urban design.

Over the course of her career, Sargent has applied her knowledge as a researcher to increasingly large and complex sites. One of the most significant projects she’s completed

SONIA BRENNER

ABOVE

EXISTING

“ WE NEED TO PRESERVE THE MOST IMPORTANT OF OUR HISTORIC RESOURCES.”

LIZ SARGENT, FASLA, PHOTOGRAPHS; SONIA BRENNER, ILLUSTRATIONS

STEVEN KIDD, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

was the recent study of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s historic resources.

Although Sargent had worked previously preparing cultural landscape reports on some of the parkway’s individual sites, such as Humpback Rocks and Peaks of Otter, both in Virginia, the new study, the Blue Ridge Parkway Survey and Assessment, completed in 2016, encompassed the entire 469-mile-long scenic corridor that runs from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. It took four years and cataloged approximately 1,000 historic resources and grappled with the ephemeral

views and verges that define the parkway’s driving experience. It also accounted for the variety of strategies that have shaped its half century of development. One significant challenge was coordinating with federal and both Virginia and North Carolina state preservation agencies when developing the inventory of parkway features, which added complexity.

The report’s immediate benefit is that it aids in making decisions about park maintenance. Steven Kidd, who is a cultural resource specialist and archaeologist for the National Park Service, served as an

archaeologist for the Blue Ridge Parkway during the period of Sargent’s work. “We have a limited budget, and we need to preserve the most important of our historic resources,” Kidd explains. Even in draft form, the report was being used to prioritize work on structures that were defined as contributing to the parkway. But defining what constituted an essential structure was complicated by the park’s long development history, not least in its later phases, Sargent says. “Some people would say, ‘What’s that modernist aspect doing here?’ We were able to say it really was an essential part of the parkway,” she says.

TOP, LEFT AND RIGHT

Proposed overlooks move foot traffic off fragile earthworks and provide an overview of the battlefield’s spatial relationships.

BOTTOM, LEFT AND RIGHT

A model of the site’s terrain is proposed that provides visitors with an overview of the battlefield around them.

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ABOVE

Twenty-six tunnels were constructed as part of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

RIGHT

The parkway’s numerous overlooks are an important type of historical resource.

“My personal philosophy is we don’t often look at these sites as museum pieces,” Sargent says. “But we like to look at them as living landscapes, and there is a need to accommodate contemporary needs, but as well, to make sure that we preserve inherent values.” In the case of the parkway, Sargent addressed its history of development, from its rustic conceptions and the landscape architect Stanley W. Abbott’s original alignments and “plumbs,” illustrating the landscape character of the vegetation and openings along the parkway.

She also examined more contemporary elements such as midcentury modern visitor centers and lodging,

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and the dramatic Linn Cove Viaduct, a quarter-mile-long segment of roadway built in 1987 that floats above the slopes of Grandfather Mountain on only seven piers.

BLU

recognizing that identity within the conventions of historic structure and landscape documentation. “We have a blueprint in that Skyline [Drive] was listed as a National Historic Landmark,” Kidd explains. But Skyline, Describing this corridor as a cohe- in Shenandoah National Park, is only sive landscape is also bringing new 105 miles long—less than a quarter conceptual challenges in formally the length of the parkway—and was

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE. TOP AND BOTTOM LEFT; COMMONWEALTH HERITAGE GROUP, BOTTOM RIGHT

PARKWAY LAND USE MAP, 1943 1974

UE RIDGE PARKWAY begun and completed in the 1930s, unlike the successive eras of the LEFT parkway’s development, which don’t Kirsten Sparenborg Brinton’s drawings of appear at first to be harmonious.

“In addition to the complexity of the resource, one place people keep getting bogged down is in the layered aspect of the parkway’s history, since it was built in several stages over a 52-year period,” Sargent says.

She refers to the work of the landscape historian Ethan Carr, FASLA, in documenting the importance of Mission 66, a federal initiative to

contributing structures, such as Groundhog Mountain Lookout Tower (left) and Mabry Mill (right) help document the character of the parkway.

BELOW

The parkway was built in many phases over time, resulting in a multilayered landscape.

WISS, JANNEY, ELSTNER ASSOCIATES, INC., PHOTOGRAPHS; KIRSTEN SPARENBORG BRINTON, ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP

PARKWAY SEGMENT CONSTRUCTION

LEGEND CONSTRUCTION PERIOD OF PARKWAY SEGMENT 1935 1941 1942 1945 1946 1955 1956 1966 1967 1987

N

PARKWAY SEGMENTS NAMED, DIFFERENTIATED

BY CONSTRUCTION YEAR

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Careful management of vegetation to frame distant views is an essential part of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s design.

modernize the National Park System for its 50th anniversary that focused especially on visitor centers and other amenities supporting automobile tourism. “Trying to get management sold on some of the Mission 66 structures as historic and as character-defining for the parkway was a bit of a challenge, but I think we did it,” Kidd says. In this broader light, the parkway as it exists today isn’t simply an unfaithful realization of Abbott’s initial vision, but an evolving dialogue about recreation in America. The Blue Ridge Parkway’s Mission 66-era elements, Sargent says, “helped to take the idea of this recreational motorway to that

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next level, the supersonic motorway that brought people through the landscape and helped improve efficiency” in response to larger crowds and changing patterns of use. “[The parkway report] was just trying to unify everyone’s understanding of this place, because people hit these things from different angles, and something about the cultural landscape process synthesizes things in a way that no other study really does,” Sargent says.

Sargent’s report on the Blue Ridge Parkway describes the site as an evolving spatial dialogue that reveals changing attitudes toward

travel and recreation. “Because of my work with cultural landscapes, which are often palimpsests of layers of cultural use over time, I embrace the idea of articulating, interpreting, and revealing layers of history in the landscape,” she says.

In 2012, Sargent partnered with Heritage Strategies, LLC to develop a cultural landscape assessment for the 85,000-acre Michaux State Forest in Pennsylvania. The team had two broad goals: to support a future management plan for the state forest, and to document major historic and cultural themes in the 400,000acre South Mountain Conserva-

COMMONWEALTH HERITAGE GROUP

ABOVE

MICHAUX STATE FOREST

HISTORICAL THEMES AND FEATURES

EDUCATION CENTERS

OVERLOOKS

RECREATION ROUTE

FIRE TOWERS

APPALACHIAN TRAIL STATE TRAILS INDUSTRIAL ROUTE

LAKES AND RESERVOIRS

FORESTRY ROUTE

FURNACES + SUPPORT MECHANISMS

STATE PARKS FORMER FURNACES

FURNACE TRACE

GOLF COURSE

PICNIC AREAS

CCC CAMPS

N FOREST PRESERVE

FURNACES + SUPPORT MECHANISMS INDUSTRY ROUTE

FORESTRY ROUTE

RECREATION ROUTE

FIRE TOWERS

APPALACHIAN TRAIL

EDUCATION CENTERS

STATE TRAILS

CCC CAMPS

STATE PARKS LAKES / RESERVOIRS

FOREST PRESERVE

GOLF COURSE PICNIC AREAS

JENNIFER TROMPETTER

tion Landscape (see “The Greater Margins,” LAM, May 2016), which includes public and private lands.

South Mountain is one of seven regional conservation planning areas in Pennsylvania focused on natural resource stewardship, and Sargent and other team members analyzed historical patterns of development as well as ecological and geologic activities in the South Mountain region, the northernmost stretch of the Blue Ridge.

Rather than making specific recommendations or an inventory of specific features or properties, the assessment balances functioning

as a traditional planning report and telling the broader and more accessible environmental history. The assessment will aid the South Mountain Partnership, a public–private partnership between the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and numerous regional organizations with planning by developing a cohesive sense of place that derived directly from the region’s unique resources. Katie Hess, the director of the South Mountain Partnership, says one of the goals of the project is to “develop a societal culture of conservation” in the area. “That’s very

OVERLOOKS

difficult when people don’t like to be told what to do—not that anyone does,” Hess says. “This is simply another tool to reveal information to individuals and encourage them to be responsible stewards and empower them.”

Peter Benton, an architect with Heritage Strategies, led the Michaux State Forest team. “A lot of what we were trying to do was tease out the history of this place, and how it relates to the state and national context,” he says.

The mountain was an early location for iron mining and processing, and is covered by thousands of charcoal hearths, in addition to the railroads,

ABOVE

Driving trails that interpret the region’s major historic themes are being developed as part of the recommendations.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017 / 125

GEOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

FRUIT BELT METAVOLCANICS: Orchards

SOUTH MOUNTAIN SANDSTONE: Forestry

GREAT VALLEY LIMESTONE 1 Cultivation and Pasture

FURNACE

CHARCOAL HEARTH

ORE MINE

The South Mountain region’s underlying geology is a major factor in shaping the region’s agriculture and land use.

RIGHT

Remnants of iron mining and processing are found through Michaux State Forest.

126 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

cient geology of the place and its cultural evolution. “How the mountain has been used over time is inseparable from economies, landscape patterns, and the social issues related to the surrounding, larger landscape,” Benton says.

tion. “I think that cultural resources are a way to reach really rural, older populations here, because it represents what they feel they’re losing,” Hess says. “It represents a time that they feel disconnected from, and that perhaps no one younger than a certain age gets, and so I find that Telling the history of South Moun- being about railroad systems and the tain in this way illustrated that the iron ore industry really helps to open mountain is visually and ecologi- some doors.” cally prominent for the surrounding region, but also essential to the Interpretation was a major focus region’s cultural character, an impor- of their work with Michaux State tant way of connecting to the private Forest itself, which is a recreation landowners who own much of the destination and thus an economic region and will play critical roles in resource vital to the region. With developing a culture of conserva- the forming of a cohesive narrative,

STUDIOTEN15

LEFT

work camps, and logging roads that supported them. After it was cut over during the mining era, the area became an important site for the development of forestry practices in Pennsylvania, and ultimately a recreational destination. With Sargent, the team identified four major themes that describe the patterns of landscape history in the region— mineral extraction, forestry and conservation, recreation and health, and the impact of government—and the structures and landscape features that represent each theme. These themes point back to the resources of the mountain itself, illustrating deep connections between the an-

LEFT

At Caledonia State Park, an iron furnace has been preserved and used to interpret the region’s industrial history.

BELOW

LIZ SARGENT, FASLA, LEFT; PENNSYLVANIA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, RIGHT

Thousands of charcoal hearths are scattered throughout the South Mountain landscape.

the team hopes to make the region a more comprehensible destination, Sargent says. “We’re unifying the understanding of the place, and the interconnectedness of the stories, and then making recommendations about how to tell the stories, where to tell the stories, and how to connect things that comprise the stories.”

ing the way that they’ve always managed state forests, and looking at a more sustainable future that looks at the cultural landscape,” Sargent says.

She identifies issues such as controlled burns and invasive species removal that could affect cultural landscapes if those landscapes aren’t documented, as well as opportunities for alternative landscape strategies in light of new challenges such The project, which was funded by as climate change.

South Mountain Partnership, also helped to build dialogue with natural In 2017, Sargent started working on resource managers about how to a new project that offers a window account for historic resources. “We into the emerging directions for talked with one of the state foresters, interpreting and protecting cultural and he’s looking for guidance on tak- landscapes as historic resources:

the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. Sargent is working as a subconsultant to the multidisciplinary firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, helping to identify resources along this 3,000-mile network of waterways across five states plus the District of Columbia that might be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The trail will focus on interpreting the landscapes of Chesapeake Bay and numerous tributaries as Smith encountered them in the early 1600s. “One of the historic contexts that we are considering is about the interactions between John Smith and his

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CAPTAIN SMITH TRAIL

SARAH ROGERS, TOP; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, BOTTOM

TRAILS AND HISTORIC SITES DETAIL

128 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

LEFT

Sargent consults with a park ranger while doing field work at Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

OPPOSITE

A view from Marshy Point, along the northern section of the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

MELISSA DIRR GENGLER

party and the American Indians, and what effect that had on the landscape,” says Bethany Serafine, a National Register historian for the National Park Service.

The Captain John Smith Chesapeake trail is composed entirely of a network of water trails, presenting new challenges in determining important features and protecting them. “Bodies of water aren’t technically supposed to be something you nominate to the National Register,” Serafine says. The team’s task is to develop an approach to these sites that builds on the National Register’s framework, account-

ing for places that are historically significant, especially indigenous cultural landscapes, that may not contain the types of structures and features the program traditionally documents. “I think there are many people who are trying to figure out how to broaden our understanding of the value of landscape in cultural lifeways and how to establish metrics for evaluating significance,” Sargent says. One possible strategy Sargent is considering is comparing contemporary landscapes to understandings of local ecology and plant communities to determine how well these landscapes reflect 17th-century conditions.

“Working with indigenous cultural landscapes really forces you to question assumptions, change your mind-set, and consider other ways of looking at the interplay between people and the environment,” Sargent says. “This approach should extend to every cultural landscape project, such that we continue to ask questions, and try to get to the ‘why’ of things.”

KEVAN WILLIAMS IS PURSUING HIS PHD IN THE CONSTRUCTED ENVIRONMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017 / 129

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S U S TA I N A B L E E D G I N G S O L U T I O N S

© THE ISAMU NOGUCHI FOUNDATION AND GARDEN MUSEUM, NEW YORK/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY ARS , NEW YORK; PHOTO BY KEVIN NOBLE

THE BACK

NOGUCHI’S PLAYSCAPES

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art On view July 15–November 26, 2017 The sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed his first children’s playground in 1933. The proposal, Play Mountain, failed to please the famously orthodox urban czar Robert Moses, and it languished. Only partially daunted, Noguchi developed his playground designs off and on throughout his career, though he was o en thwarted by public bureaucracies and private tastes that did not embrace his pioneering ideas for children’s play. Noguchi’s blend of sculptural forms, earthworks, and playground equipment in jaunty, Calderesque forms are today reflected in playscapes such as Maggie Daley Park in Chicago and the Pod Playground in Canberra, Australia. This maquette for the Slide Mantra sculpture from 1986 represents one of just a handful of built play works over his 50-year career. It is included in the exhibition that brings together Noguchi’s multifarious playground designs, which he once referred to as his “best works.”

THE COST OF THE COAST

RIDING ALONG THE LAYERED LANDSCAPES OF HAWAI‘I’S KOHALA COAST.

BY ADAM MANDELMAN

ABOVE

Driving through lava desert on the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway, 2010.

Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway to any of the region’s resorts soon dispels those anxieties. The seemingly endless basalt yields to coconut palms and bougainvillea that, although sparse at first, anticipate the verdant golf courses and parklands ahead. The parched shrubs and wild goats that adorned the highway have been replaced with ropey banyan trees and groves of ginger, heliconia, and philodendron that shade sprawling water features alive with fish, turtles, and—at one resort hotel—even dolphins.

The extravagant oases that erupt from the lava promise tens of thousands of visitors each year That a tourist yearning for tropical paradise would a genuine Hawaiian vacation amid inhospitable find herself in the middle of a vast and arid volca- desert. As striking a contrast as this phenomnic plain seems like a cruel joke. But a turn off the enon presents, even more arresting are the well-

132 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

JOHN POST

F

or a first-time visitor flying into Kona International Airport on Hawai‘i’s Big Island, a view out the airplane window can trigger deep regret. Nowhere to be seen are the state’s trademark emerald ridges and lush valleys. A barren desert of lava spreads to the horizons.

Although this landscape, like most deserts, has its own otherworldly beauty, it’s not what most people expect from their Hawaiian vacation. Driving north from the airport to the island’s Kohala Coast resort region doesn’t improve the view, as sunburnt moonscape unfolds for mile after mile.

ADAM MANDELMAN

preserved traces of ancient Hawai‘i that persist throughout this landscape. Over more than 50 years, resort development along leeward Hawai‘i Island—as the Big Island is formally known—has steadily woven together shopping malls and petroglyph fields, towering water slides and crumbling Hawaiian temples, dolphin adventure pools and centuries-old fishponds. Simultaneously kitsch and extraordinary, this layered landscape of ancient and contemporary development embodies some of the deepest contradictions of tourism in Hawai‘i.

Despite the region’s “arid and dreadful aspect,” Kohala’s port village of Kawaihae had served in the 18th and 19th centuries as an important royal residence and trading post. But by the late 1950s, the coast was almost deserted. European diseases had decimated the Native Hawaiian population, and the coast’s paltry average rainfall—less than 10 inches a year—had repelled the sugarcane, cattle herds, and countless other newcomers arriving on Hawaiian shores. In 1960, the Kohala Coast was home to maybe a few dozen households in Kawaihae and nearby Puakō, and accessible only by foot, boat, or bruising jeep ride. Modernity had In 1819, the Frenchwoman Rose de Freycinet passed it by. passed by the Kohala Coast while on a scientific world tour with her husband. “Nobody can ever But what the area lacked in water resources, have seen a more arid and dreadful aspect than infrastructure, and population, it made up ABOVE this part of the island of Owighee,” she wrote in her in sunshine. A 1960 state planning report— An oasis amid the lava journal. “There is not a tree, not the smallest part of coming mere months after Hawai‘i had become at Waikoloa Beach a plant; one would say that fire had passed over it.” a state—suggested Kohala’s “dry, warm climate, Resort, 2007.

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Rockefeller told Governor Quinn seven months later that he would build a resort hotel at sunny, desolate Kauna‘oa Beach. Roger Harris, a planner with decades of experience on the Kohala Coast, remembers that Rockefeller’s announcement was

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greeted with disbelief: “Everybody in Honolulu said, ‘Let ’em have it. I can’t believe they’re gonna make it out there in the lava.’”

Rockefeller chose Belt, Collins & Associates to develop the project. The firm, which combined planning, engineering, and landscape architecture under one roof, executed Rockefeller’s vision for a luxury hotel and golf course at Kauna‘oa Bay. Bulldozers broke ground in 1962 and carved new roads from the lava, including a segment of the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway that would one day connect the Kohala Coast with a new international airport outside Kailua-Kona, 30 miles to the south.

Engineers built a sewage treatment plant, drilled water wells, and created a 650,000-gallon reservoir. Heavy machinery cleared scrub and broke up brittle lava rock, which, when blended with imported topsoil, became a fertile medium for turf, trees, and tropical flowering plants. Robert Trent

ADAM MANDELMAN/DATA COURTESY STATE OF HAWAI‘I AND U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, LEFT; COURTESY THE MAUNA KEA BEACH HOTEL ARCHIVE COLLECTION, RIGHT

outstanding beaches, and calm waters” might one day nurture a tourism boom. In July of that year, Laurance Rockefeller, the third son of the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, toured Hawai‘i at the invitation of Governor William Quinn. Rockefeller had earned a reputation for developing hotel properties in remote destinations such as the Grand Tetons and Virgin Islands. Quinn and his advisers hoped Rockefeller might do the same for the new state’s less-visited corners. The final stop of Rockefeller’s tour included a swim at Kohala’s Kauna‘oa Beach, a crescent of golden sand framed by black lava and a view of the 13,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea volcano.

LEFT

The Mauna Kea Beach Hotel at Kauna‘oa Beach, c. 1965. Note Mauna Kea volcano in the background.

BELOW

COURTESY BELT COLLINS HAWAI‘I, LLC, RIGHT

A detail from the 1967 Kohala Coast Resort Region plan by Belt, Collins & Associates— Pu‘ukoholā Heiau (circled) is in the bottom-left corner.

Jones laid out the golf course, while Skidmore, the Kohala Coast Resort Region, called for creating Owings & Merrill designed the hotel. “a series of oases” amid the lava. The plan laid out a comprehensive vision for infrastructure, After pumping immense quantities of water landscape, and architectural design, all modthrough the landscape—up to 700,000 gallons eled on the firm’s experience with the Mauna daily—the resort flourished into an oasis of tropi- Kea Beach Hotel. The document also proposed cal abundance surrounded by harsh desert. The historical parks devoted to the coast’s archaeoMauna Kea Beach Hotel opened in July 1965, logical heritage, much of which remained visible and an article in Holiday magazine the following in the landscape. In fact, Rockefeller had been March gushed (in a casually racist turn of phrase), instrumental in restoring the remains of King Ka“It is a Godforsaken landscape running from the mehameha’s Pu‘ukoholā Heiau, an 18th-century foot of Mauna Kea to the sea, and on this waste- temple platform next to the hotel that became a land the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel has been placed, National Historic Landmark in 1962. like a diamond tiara in the hair of a pygmy.”

The plan focused on just three miles of coastline, Soon after, Rockefeller commissioned Belt, Col- but it became a model for development all along lins & Associates to prepare a plan for more leeward Hawai‘i Island and served as the basis for development of Kohala’s arid coast. A lavish, 110- state and county land-use plans in the region. “We page land development plan published in 1967, had a lot of influence on what happened,” says Jim

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017 / 135

But the astonishing transformation of West Hawai‘i’s deserts into tropical resorts also materialized another set of contradictions for Hawaiian tourism development, one that has increasingly aroused cultural tensions. DeSoto Brown, a historian at Honolulu’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, observes that “anywhere it’s easy to dig in the ground, you will find people buried there.”

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That includes the tubes and caverns formed in Kohala’s lava rock. Despite its harsh ecology, the coast here has a long history of human settlement.

Kohala’s Native Hawaiian villages, though modest in size, left significant cultural remains in the landscape, often concentrated at the very sites chosen for resort development.

Long before the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway, long before Rose de Freycinet’s 1819 tour, travelers on the Kohala Coast took to centuries-old foot trails, segments of which still persist today.

Buffed smooth by the bare feet of pre-contact Hawaiians or marked by water-worn steppingstones in particularly jagged areas, these coastal paths were part of the ala loa, or “long trail,” a network that once connected settlements, sacred sites, and important natural resources all around Hawai‘i Island, including the Kohala Coast.

ABOVE

A segment of the Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail skirts a golf course at the Mauna Lani Resort.

ADAM MANDELMAN

Bell, FASLA, a planner with Belt, Collins & Associates since the early 1960s and a former director of the firm. “All the resorts—from Keauhou in the south, all the way up to Mauna Kea and Mauna Lani at the north end of the coast—we had all those people as clients for 20, 25, 30 years.” In the decades since its publication, the Kohala Coast Resort Region’s strategy for coaxing lush paradise from three miles of arid, rocky coast has come to define an entire district.

“ALL THE RESORTS—FROM KEAUHOU IN THE SOUTH ALL THE WAY TO MAUNA KEA AND MAUNA LANI AT THE NORTH END OF THE COAST— WE HAD ALL THOSE PEOPLE AS CLIENTS.” —JIM BELL, FASLA

In 2000, Congress recognized the significance of both the ala loa and its cultural sites by establishing the Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail. The Ala Kahakai, or “trail by the sea,” is dedicated to “the preservation, protection, and interpretation of traditional Native Hawaiian culture and natural resources,” and will eventually mark a 175-mile corridor from the island’s northern tip to its southeastern shore. For now, however, an early segment of the trail implemented as a high priority begins at Pu‘ukoholā Heiau, just next door to the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.

Beginning at Pu‘ukoholā’s looming temple platform, the trail guides hikers through a landscape of contrasts. Thorny scrub gives way to a public beach, followed by a dusty path through aged lava. The path becomes a maintenance road,

ADAM MANDELMAN

RIGHT

A banner draws attention to Hawai‘i’s unresolved colonial past at Spencer Beach Park on the Kohala Coast, 2007.

and then a brick walkway threading through the engineered oasis of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. Picking back up along the shore, the Ala Kahakai continues for another 15 miles, across lava fields and golf courses, through tropical gardens and petroglyph fields, past burial caves and infinity pools.

One of the most dramatic juxtapositions lies just a few miles down the Ala Kahakai from the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. At a place called Kalāhuipua‘a, fresh and brackish anchialine ponds have attracted settlement for around 800 years. Although in disrepair by the early 20th century, Native Hawaiians had converted these lava-formed ponds over centuries into a carefully managed aquaculture system producing Hawaiian mullet, milkfish, eels, and other delicacies.

Today, those fishponds are the centerpiece of Mauna Lani Resort, another Belt Collins project.

Developing the Mauna Lani involved transforming the landscape much as Rockefeller’s Mauna Kea had, including the addition of thousands of coconut palms and a new network of waterways that, connected to the ancient fishponds, extend right into the hotel lobby. In more than a dozen interviews conducted by Mauna Lani staff in 2001, engineers, advertising consultants, and other former employees at the resort frequently remarked on the phenomenal work of transforming near-barren lava into a world-renowned oasis.

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TO MANY PEOPLE WITH NATIVE ANCESTRY, TOURISM IS INEXTRICABLY LINKED WITH HAWAI‘I’S COLONIAL PAST.

Within a decade of its opening in 1983, the Mauna Lani was ranked by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the top four tropical resorts in the world.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen archaeological investigations conducted at Kalāhuipua‘a since the 1950s have revealed numerous traces besides the fishponds of the area’s deep human history, including cave and surface dwellings, burials, and petroglyphs.

This proximity suggests the harmonious coexistence of contemporary and ancient Hawai‘i.

The resort, on its website, in staff interviews, and throughout its print publications, announces its “enlightened stewardship” of the landscape.

The Mauna Lani was one of the few—if not the only—developments that, before the passage of a state historic preservation law in 1976, voluntarily conducted an archaeological survey and preservation plan. In 1984, the resort received the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation’s historic preservation award for management of the fishponds.

The Mauna Lani’s relationship to Kalāhuipua‘a is part of a tradition that began with both Rockefeller’s restoration of Pu‘ukoholā Heiau and the Kohala Coast Resort Region’s plans for developing historical parks. Leilani Hino, a former director of community affairs at Mauna Lani Resort, described this in an e-mail as having emerged from a “commonality of good, practical resource management among powerful international friends and businessmen.”

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But those commitments to heritage management notwithstanding, the mingling of past and present in Hawai‘i’s tourism landscapes is not always as comfortable as it appears. To many people with native ancestry, tourism is inextricably linked with Hawai‘i’s colonial past. In 1892, American business interests overthrew Queen Lili‘uokalani, the Hawaiian Kingdom’s last monarch. That coup, which led to annexation and ultimately statehood, terminated Hawaiian sovereignty and left a deep scar on Hawai‘i’s indigenous community.

Even when a resort has the best intentions of stewardship, the incorporation of Native Hawaiian archaeology into landscapes that serve almost exclusively nonnative tourists can be alarming, to say nothing of developers much less mindful of indigenous heritage.

Peter Mills is an anthropologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, where he chairs a master’s program in heritage management. The curriculum serves predominantly Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students, in the hope of correcting the underrepresentation of indigenous communities in cultural resources management throughout the Pacific. Mills has described the program as “decolonizing heritage management.” He says that in developed places such as Kohala’s resort landscapes, an ideal approach to managing cultural resources would involve consulting with descendant communities on matters of stewardship, access, and interpretation.

COURTESY OF THE MAUNA LANI BAY HOTEL & BUNGALOWS & MAUNA LANI RESORT

ABOVE

The preserved fishponds at the Mauna Lani Resort at Kalāhuipua‘a, 2016.

Kamu Plunkett is one of Mills’s Native Hawaiian graduate students. A former construction worker, Plunkett is developing a community-based GIS inventory of cultural resources that he hopes will help negotiate better heritage management plans from developers before the first bulldozers arrive.

Plunkett believes that Kohala’s resort landscapes are among the many reasons heritage management in Hawai‘i needs to involve grassroots indigenous communities more directly.

opers, planners, and state officials, Hawaiian tourism has been accompanied by the enclosure and even erasure of indigenous cultural resources.

But for as much as Hawai‘i’s layered landscapes embody some of the state’s most painful contradictions, they have also inspired a new generation of heritage managers. Describing Kohala’s layered landscape of resorts and Native Hawaiian archaeology, Plunkett says, “I see the old and the new right up against each other. I also see it as cultural heritage and development right up against each For Native Hawaiian communities, the juxtapo- other. It’s a reminder of the times that I live in, sitions revealed by a walk down the Ala Kahakai and the choices that I make.”

National Historic Trail represent more than mere irony. The kinds of development that have trans- ADAM MANDELMAN IS A GEOGRAPHER AND ENVIRONMENTAL formed the Kohala Coast from lava desert into HISTORIAN. HE IS COMPLETING A BOOK ON THE ENCOUNTERS tropical oases are not unique to Hawai‘i Island, BETWEEN PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA. but are rather a feature of everyday life all across the archipelago. More often than not, and even despite the best intentions of well-meaning devel-

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BOOKS OFF THE ROAD: LEARNING TO SEE, TRYING TO REMEMBER EASY ON, EASY OFF: THE URBAN PATHOLOGY OF AMERICA’S SMALL TOWNS

BY JACK WILLIAMS; CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS, 2016; 329 PAGES, $35.

REVIEWED BY JANE GILLETTE

T

o use a couple of the author Jack Williams’s favorite adjectives, Easy On, Easy Off is a beautiful book filled with evocative drawings, maps, and photographs. Though the graphics appeal immediately, it takes some time to come to terms with the text. At first Williams seems almost curmudgeonly. He continuously gripes about the Interstate Highway System—by 1990 it accounted for more than 20 percent of all travel by automobiles and some 50 percent by trucks. He rants in particular against the uniform boredom of the many food/ fuel/rest off-ramp stops. He blames the interstate for the destruction of America’s small towns—a central topic of the book.

While it does seem undeniable that the interstate encourages dispersion of services from the small town to the convenient “Off-Rampia,” does this really mean that the interstate is the cause of small-town abandonment? Most of Easy On, Easy Off logically credits another dynamic: the loss of the regions’ major industries and the disappearance of jobs.

of history. How do we make ourselves see the past? How do we make ourselves understand what we see—especially when what we see is evidence of a past it is tempting to forget? Do we restore what is decayed to a former splendor? Or do we keep decay visible, front and center? Indeed, as the book progresses, what Williams seems to mean about the destructive power of the interstate is its ability to hide small towns and let us ignore what once took place in them: “The fault lies not in our quest for more speed and shorter distances, but in our failure to recognize the innumerable, invisible strands of shared histories and intentions and our inability to persist in our attachments to landscapes and to respect places that tie us to each other and tell us who we are.”

By the end of his book we share Williams’s grief. It occurs to us that one truly effective way to make us recognize, understand, and acknowledge the past is to read a book about its physical remnants. Easy On, Easy Off made this reader want to head out for five particular regions of the United States, pull off the interstate, whizz through Off-Rampia, and see with my very own Williams, who is an emeritus professor of landscape architecture eyes the ruins—and the beauty—of these small American towns. at Auburn University, castigates the interstate system throughout the book, but as we read along, these castigations morph into a Part of the transformation of his text from curmudgeonly to poetic expression of our own ambivalence to changing times. tragic comes from Williams’s careful explanations of his methAnd we begin to recognize in Williams’s distress the dilemmas odology. After visiting hundreds of towns, he concentrated on

142 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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WILLIAMS DESCRIBES CHANGES THAT BROUGHT ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCES— AND EXPOSED THE DANGERS—OF SINGLE-RESOURCE ECONOMIES.

TOP LEFT

Small-town origins: Southern Georgia longleaf pine forests were cleared to grow cotton along the coastal plain.

TOP RIGHT

Georgia’s geology defined its early town planning.

five regional examples of heterogeneity that stand in contrast to “the homogenization of contemporary American culture”: mill towns in southern New England, courthouse seats in southern Georgia, farm villages on the Great Plains, mining towns in the Southwest, and Chinese settlements in California’s Central Valley. In each case he carefully locates a few towns in relation to the interstate and other highway systems, then explains the towns in terms of the natural history that created the regional ecosystem. Significantly, this ecosystem created the job opportunities that lie at the base of each specific culture, which in turn determined the human history of the region and the physical forms of the towns. Finally he addresses specific urban decay, which generally had something to do with a changing economy. The result is a clear vision of what was lost in the “fundamental shifts in our rural settlement patterns from regionally distinctive small towns to auto-dependent extruded commercial centers.” This loss is symbolically expressed, but only in a small way caused, by the Interstate Highway System.

The way Williams organizes his information intensifies our feelings of loss. The ancient, vast workings of nature that brought about a stream system that facilitated the building of textile mills in New England, various soil types that

144 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

encouraged the growth of longleaf pines, the perfect soil for agriculture, the near-surface exposure of copper in the Southwest, and the river systems in California make the resulting economic engines seem all the more miraculous and all the more susceptible to decay. Especially since another “natural” factor seems to be the human proclivity to advance ourselves economically despite the cost to the environment and other human beings. The technical details of industries change, labor markets move, and the cultures that depend on the human need to make a living fail.

Williams describes changes that brought about the disappearances—and exposed the dangers—of single-resource economies. Mills are run by steam instead of falling water, and labor shifts from New England to the South. Pines are overforested and the boll weevil destroys subsequent cotton farming. Midwestern crops are shipped by trucks rather than railroads, and, more important, pumped irrigation water threatens ecological disaster. Mining is automated and copper mining shifts to Chile. An extensive drainage and levee system is constructed in an area that many now see as headed toward environmental collapse. Williams even predicts the destruction of the interstate system by the rising cost of oil. Whatever

FOREST HISTORY SOCIETY, DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA FHS 3411 , LEFT; AUBURN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MAP COLLECTION, AUBURN, ALABAMA, RIGHT

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the specific cause of the economic disaster, we humans seek to save ourselves, moving on to the next labor market and leaving our small towns to decay. It seems natural. Only when pushed do we ask ourselves how we can so easily squander what took so much time and effort to create.

TOP

Figure-ground studies of six representative Georgia county seats show prominence of the courthouse square.

BOTTOM

Williams visited 85 Georgia county courthouses, including the Colquitt County Courthouse and Confederate Monument in Moultrie, Georgia.

The physical towns, which Williams characterizes as “works of art,” are carefully described as they emerged from the complicated cultural patterns that evolved from the land itself: “The more entangled and intricate the past, the greater the opportunity for a perfect amalgamation of form and meaning.” Williams explains this convergence by concentrating on town plans and distinguishing buildings—always explaining how they relate to the ways people make a living. For example, Williams visited 85 of Georgia’s county courthouses—beautiful buildings that were created to store the records of sales and ownership of agricultural land (much of which he explains as initially stolen from Native American tribes). The very number of courthouses attests to the gerrymandered voting system, which was one means of controlling the African American

146 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

population. Throughout his studies of the towns, Williams points out the patterns of racism as well as ecological and economic exploitation that enabled and now haunt their beauty: child labor in New England, racism in Georgia and California, extraction and exploitation of natural resources everywhere. And as we read, we begin to understand not only the creation of towns but also why we take advantage of such things as the Interstate Highway System to help us ignore history.

Williams also makes sure that we understand where he got his information—old photographs, aerial surveys, geological and historic maps, including a number from the 700,000 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps in the collection of the Library of Congress. He gives us intelligent analyses of paintings like Edward Hopper’s Portrait of Orleans and George Henri Durrie’s 1853 Old Grist Mill in Winter, the labels on canned fruit and vegetables, and the covers of road maps. He discusses his personal methods for coming to terms with the forms of the small towns: drawing and the creation of figure-ground studies. All of his examples add physical beauty to the book, but in

MATT STANTON, TOP; JACK WILLIAMS, BOTTOM

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TOP LEFT

Composite Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Moultrie, Georgia, 1912.

TOP RIGHT

An abandoned sharecropper’s house in Colquitt County, Georgia.

/BOOKS

the end, it may be Williams’s photography that moves us most, concentrating on the poignant decay and the historical implications we would like to ignore. Among my favorites are shots of the boiler house of the Slater Mill in Webster, Massachusetts; the Georgia courthouse; an abandoned bank and some grain elevators in Kenesaw, Nebraska; motels and signs on old Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona; and a side street in Miami, Arizona.

I was also particularly moved by the historic photographs of Chinese workers and communities in chapter 7.

Throughout, Williams indicts the deceptive promise of the open road: “Excitement and the future lie beyond the next horizon” so that “by driving on, we can detach ourselves from our past.” Still, we have to ask ourselves why we opt for that promise rather than take the time to drive 10 miles from Off-Rampia to pay a visit to decayed towns. And once we learn the promise is false, why don’t we set up residence in these beautiful places?

148 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

After all, with the Internet many of us can work from home, no matter the actual location of our bill-paying employment. Why don’t we return?

One thing Williams never mentions is flight for survival—the escape from a certain type of limitation. And yet we have only to look at those plans for towns of 2,000 or so and we think back to our own relatives and how we ended up, for the most part, in larger towns and big cities. The diversity he lauds is largely a matter of different geographical regions and customs. He implies—and the buildings confirm—that within each small town homogeneity once ruled. Any differences of race and class were clearly demarcated, frequently by the railroad tracks. Reading along, I thought of my mother’s aunts and uncles, who fled from a farm near Tennyson, Indiana, a small town featuring one bar and an Independent Order of Odd Fellows hall. First they escaped to Boonville, which at least had a variety of churches, more than one bar, and a high school that employed women. Then they moved on to towns across the state, including Evansville, which had an airplane factory and even more churches and bars. And then beyond.

I was even forced to remember the life of my gay great uncle and think how much he would have enjoyed the anonymity of a rest stop. In the end, maybe it wasn’t just job opportunity and the desire to ignore the past that put us on the road. It is also the desire to survive, the freedom to be what we really are, that still drives us down the interstate.

JANE GILLETTE IS THE FORMER EDITOR OF SPACEMAKER PRESS AND LAND FORUM MAGAZINE.

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THE MAGIC OF CHILDREN’S GARDENS: INSPIRING THROUGH CREATIVE DESIGN

THIRTYFOUR CAMPGROUNDS

BY MARTIN HOGUE; CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: THE MIT PRESS, 2016; 265 PAGES, $34.95.

BY LOLLY TAI; PHILADELPHIA: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017; 375 PAGES, $75.

“Creating children’s outdoor environments is critical in today’s society as more and more children grow up in cities,” notes Lolly Tai, FASLA, whose book covers 19 gardens designed specifically for kids.

She breaks down each garden’s goal, concept, and design, providing plant lists and showing sketches and photographs of completed projects around the United States. Beauty and educational value are given their due (water features and food gardens are perennial favorites), but for kids, whimsy always wins. At the Luci and Ian Family Garden at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas, nothing beats a woven-twig bird’s nest so big it makes a toddler seem the size of a baby robin.

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WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE: CREATING LIVABLE COMMUNITIES FOR ALL

BY PHILIP LANGDON; WASHINGTON, D.C.: ISLAND PRESS, 2017; 280 PAGES, $40.

Langdon tells the stories of six communities trying to create themselves on a more human scale. The “walking” of the title isn’t the only factor in the mix for livability; the book offers case studies of Vermonters who mobilize against big-box stores to protect local businesses, and residents of a Philadelphia neighborhood creating a park in a rubble-strewn lot.

Bike-friendliness, youth programs, gentrification, and affordability are additional concerns. “The capacity to build a richly satisfying, socially responsible community grows as it is nurtured,” Langdon says. This book is for the nurturers.

In a nod to the artist Ed Ruscha’s 1967 work Thirtyfour Parking Lots, this book by Martin Hogue, ASLA, features images from 34 national park campgrounds. Grids of campsite photos are cataloged and arrayed like sheets of postage stamps—a format that somehow simultaneously emphasizes facilities’ similarities and differences. “I was interested in pushing Ruscha’s impersonal approach,” Hogue writes, “…in seeing how these landscapes were being experienced from the perspective of the camper/shopper.” The book (from Hogue’s exhibit at the University of Southern California, 925,000 Campsites, covered in LAM’s February 2016 issue) also serves as a scrapbook of vintage camping ephemera: A 1970– 1971 KOA Kampground brochure includes a profoundly unappetizing recipe for creamed beef. “Serve on bread (toast is best),” it suggests, “with onion and tomato slices.”

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PAGE # 178-179 13, 171 27 156 5 158 9 82 C2-1, 175 69, 169 163 153 143, 172 37 163 55 155 164 169 151, 169 159 157 171 45, 169 173 77, 174 168 61, 170 11, 168 174 12 64, 171 141, 174 152 173 160 19, 170 53, 173 160 65 159 8 43 168 30 145, 172 140, 168 38, 168 39, 172 67 171 29, 169 177 2-3, 17, 31, 59, 169 25, 165 173 73 156 155 163 20 21 149 22 C4 130, 171 164 81, 172 157 158 152 15 4 170 161 163 57 170 46 164 63 153 41, 171 175 35 165 164 165 47, 170 172 33, 173 174 176 154, 168 170, C3 162 79 162 49, 174 154 147, 172 165 71 173

THE BACK

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Carl Stahl DecorCable Innovations, Inc.

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Whitacre Greer

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PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS 171

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017 / 167

BUYER’S GUIDE

TRANSFORM YOUR ENVIRONMENT

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170 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

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BUYER’S GUIDE

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ASLA EXPO 2017.... the place landscape architects go to experience new products and services ASLA EXPO 2017: YOU CAN TOUCH AND YOU CAN TWEET

By Russ Klettke

Exhibitors at the 2016 ASLA EXPO in New Orleans said it again and again: This is the one EXPO where they can meet design-driven specifiers and landscape architecture firm principals.

That’s not really new, and yet in a multi-segmented marketing world – where so much of marketing and sales is conducted in digital channels – meeting with the people who could best champion your product is more important than ever. Particularly in a world as visual and tactile as landscape architecture, the strongest and most meaningful connections are made in person.

Here are some of the comments gathered from exhibitors at the 2016 EXPO: • “ASLA is an influencer EXPO.”

– Tyler Gompf, Slot Drain, www.slotdrainsystems.com • “Attendees here have a more creative design focus; our Premium Infinity Euro fencing is ideal for this show because landscape architects broaden our customer base and it exposes us to this very important channel of specifiers.” – Nunie Salinas, Jewett-Cameron Companies, www. jewettcameron.com/store/home • “The ASLA EXPO is tops with us because it allows us to engage personally with our clients (manufacturers), as well as demonstrate our high quality CAD drawings, BIM models & SketchUp files to landscape professionals who use our files in their design projects.” – Chris Saddler, CADdetails.com, www.caddetails.com • “In recent years landscape lighting has grown significantly in popularity and now often falls under the scope

of landscape architecture. Good education and information will be important going forward for landscape architecture firms expanding into this arena.” – Mike Joye, Auroralight, Inc., www.auroralight.com • “It’s important for landscape architects to actually experience the products, to see the coatings and to touch the surfaces.” – Andrew Pudwill, CPSI Ultimate Playgrounds/ Kompan, www.ultimateplaygrounds.com • “This is an opportunity to see principals of firms and to reestablish relationships and catch up on what landscape architects are doing.

– Larry Jackson, Hanover Architectural Products, www.hanoverpavers.com • “The ASLA EXPO allows customers, and potential customers, to experience our playground equipment and hear our musical instruments. It’s great for them to see our unique colors and the quality

ASLA LA2017

Annual Meeting and EXPO October 20-23 Los Angeles

Common Ground

#ASLA2017

of our materials firsthand.” – Megan Andrada, Landscape Structures, www. playlsi.com And while the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO are certainly unique – bringing together close to 6,000 working design professionals – the question has to be asked: How is it rational to transport people, materials, and sometimes very large products – an expensive tactic to be sure – when Twitter and Instagram cost so little, and where email campaigns, direct mail and direct sales yield results at a relatively low cost?

EPNAC PHOTOGRAPHY ©2016

The point is each of these tools works in important ways while each performs differently – and ideally, all should work together. The interaction that happens with trade shows cannot be replicated with other tactics.

How can you optimize your EXPO investment? Exhibition industry analysts provide several tips: Know you’re welcome: Designers are here to meet you. The ASLA EXPO is a place where landscape architects learn about new products and services. ˊ*/, #3"/%*/(G Given how connect-

ing with landscape architecture firm principals is a strong point of the ASLA EXPO, keep in mind how attendees are by definition committed to the profession. Make your connection with them impactful, and be a resource to them over many projects in years to come. &5 .&"463"#-& 0#+&$5*7&4G Know why you’re going and design your exhibition program to strategically get you there. If it’s a new product introduction, think of specific show attendees and other exhibitors who absolutely should see and touch it – then set about finding them. Perhaps the goal is to maximize exposure, so engage resources to pull as many exposition visitors you can – and have your staff give every visitor one-on-one attention. Press coverage might also be important, so be sure to use your mediacontact capabilities and those of the ASLA EXPO to achieve that goal. $5 #&:0/% 0/& 03 580 %":4G Your exhibition should be promoted in advance, and your follow-up should include everything from building a database to establishing long-term, one-on-one relationships. ASLA provides tools to enable this, such as lead retrieval units to simplify gathering contact information.

Want to know more about what the 2017 ASLA EXPO can do for your business and brand? Call ASLA’s Tradeshow Manager, Lauren Kramer, at 202-2162336. &95 *446&G ˝& &44&/5*"- /"563& 0' 506$) "/% $0/5"$5 */ -"/%4$"1& "3$)*5&$563&F

How ASLA Exhibitors Used Social Media in 2016 Social media is about more than posting fun pictures of people and products. It’s a way to reach a broader audience and to illustrate your support for and connection to the industry. Here are the portions of exhibitors at the 2016 ASLA EXPO who used one or more of these platforms:

70%

61% 60%

50%

41% 40%

30%

29%

28% 25%

20%

10%

0% Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Instagram Did not use social media

THE BACK

/

BACKSTORY DANGER! FOR KIDS ARTIST JULIA JACQUETTE CELEBRATES CONCRETE AND RISK IN BRUTALIST PLAYGROUNDS.

BY TOM STOELKER

A

ABOVE

The Columbus Park Towers playground by M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, loomed large in Julia Jacquette’s imagination.

BELOW

Photos from the 1970s like this one of Discovery Play Park served as the book’s source material.

180 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2017

natural color of the materials lets imagination play a bit more. The underlying theme is undictated play that has an element of risk, and the kid is driving it.”

With so many brutalist plazas slated to be redesigned or scrapped entirely, Jacquette says she is concerned that many of the playgrounds of her youth will suffer the same fate, prompted by poor maintenance of the crumbling concrete. The playground at Columbus Park Towers by Friedberg is long gone. The Adventure Playground

by Dattner in Central Park has been greatly altered. But Discovery Play Park, also in Central Park, retains many of her father’s designs, like a concrete “volcano” with slides. Kids still jump from the volcano, though Americans with Disabilities Act compliance dictates that they now fall on rubber matting instead of sand, a change Jacquette applauds.

“I remember responding to that idea of this field of anchored structures that I could jump through, over, and on, and thinking, ‘Oh, I gotta go home for dinner now, but it’ll be here when I come back.’”

TOM STOELKER WRITES ABOUT ART, URBANISM, AND ACADEMIA IN NEW YORK CITY.

WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART , TOP; WILLIAM JACQUETTE, BOTTOM

usually a middle tone and a dark tone. Jacquette’s source materials were a combination of contemporary and archival photos from the 1970s.

Today, Jacquette is an assistant professor of fine arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she n illustration in the artist Julia teaches painting, drawing, and twoJacquette’s new book, Playground dimensional design. of My Mind (DelMonico Books/Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), depicts two Jacquette views the brutalist playchildren perched high atop concrete grounds depicted in the book as incolumns made from a series of tegral not just to her aesthetic, but stacked squares. Their teetering, from her view of life. “These playgrounds the ground perspective, makes one were about prompting play; they want to yell “Get down from there, were not dictating play,” she says. kid! You’re gonna get hurt!” The im- Through concrete aggregate formed age depicts Columbus Park Towers into right angular squares, circles, playground in New York, designed and dangerous perches, Jacquette

by M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, in the says that the playgrounds taught mid-1960s, an early example of an ad- her and her playmates to take risks, venture playground, now demolished. albeit surrounded by a soft “sea of sand” on which to land.

Riffing on the graphic novel, Jacquette’s artworks depict the adventure The playgrounds mimicked the playground designs commissioned by cityscape around them, with park New York City in the 1960s, and fea- circulation replicating the street grid, ture the work of Friedberg, the archi- water features acting as rivers, small tect Richard Dattner, and Jacquette’s bridges becoming highways, and the father, the architect William Jacquette. square columns acting as buildings.

Their palette, too, was decidedly acThe artworks that comprise the book cepting of the urban landscape. are gouache on paper and intentionally mimic early 20th century “There’s this assumption that kids illustration using a limited palette, want bright colors, but keeping the

Canada

153909.

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