Landscape Architecture Magazine LAM-2017-june

JUNE 2017 / VOL 107 NO 6 US $7 CAN $9

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

WORKS BOTH WAYS Business and leisure on Auckland’s waterfront

THE AUTOMATED WILD Machine intelligence in ecology

THE BELTLINE An asymmetrical start in Atlanta

LOGISTICAL GROUNDS The commercial determines the spatial

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

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The Future of Shade calls on architects, designers and students to imagine new possibilities as they explore the integral role of fabric in shade and building design.

F U T U R E O F S H A D E . C O M

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

12 INSIDE

Tame the Sun

14 LAND MATTERS

BY TRENT OKUMURA, ASLA, AND MICHAEL TODORAN

16 LETTERS

FOREGROUND 22 NOW A stormwater system doubles as public space in Minneapolis; Laguna Beach, California, wins historic landscape designation; start-ups look for water leaks; and more.

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

46 OFFICE

In Search Of Principals of four firms discuss their recruitment practices.

BY WENDY GILMARTIN

6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

56 MATERIALS The job of reducing urban heat adds layers to complex paving specifications.

66 PARKS

Yonkers Uncorked At Mill Street Courtyard, Edgewater Design oversees the daylighting of the Saw Mill River in downtown Yonkers, New York.

BY JANE MARGOLIES

78 GOODS

Sun or Shade Take cover under parasols, cabanas, and roof systems.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

ABI REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM ATLANTA BELTLINE, INC.

LAM

“ IT SHOULDN’T BE ABOUT WHETHER YOU HAD A LANTERN PARADE OR HOW MANY YOGA CLASSES.” —NATHANIEL SMITH, PARTNERSHIP FOR SOUTHERN EQUITY, P. 120

FEATURES 88 THE WHARF AT WORK At the North Wharf Promenade and Silo Park in Auckland, New Zealand, Wraight + Associates and Taylor Cullity Lethlean let industry carry on, with pleasure as its new companion.

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

106 ECOLOGY ON AUTOPILOT Bradley Cantrell, ASLA; Laura Martin; and Erle Ellis have recently explored ways that artificial intelligence could promote wildness.

In a roving conversation, Kristina Hill queries their assumptions.

120 A THOUSAND MOVING PARTS The public is embracing the Atlanta BeltLine, but the idea still has to prove it can tie the region’s communities together.

BY JONATHAN LERNER

THE BACK 138 CAN WE GET TO ZERO? If landscape architecture is to observe the terms of the Paris Agreement, it will have to survive on no carbon emissions. None.

BY STEVE AUSTIN, ASLA

144 BOOKS

Getting from Here to There A review of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment, by Jesse LeCavalier, and Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities, by Clare Lyster.

BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

172 ADVERTISER INDEX 173 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 184 BACKSTORY

The Peters Principle Boston’s public schools are projecting a more equitable way to look at the world.

BY MAGGIE ZACKOWITZ

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017 / 7

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

EDITOR Bradford McKee / bmckee@asla.org

The North Wharf Promenade and Silo Park in Auckland, New Zealand, by Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Wraight + Associates, page 88.

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BACK ISSUES 888-999-ASLA (2752) Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 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 STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Joni Emmons, Student ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Kay Williams, FASLA

8 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

SIMON DEVITT

NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Carlos Flores, Associate ASLA

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LAM

INSIDE

/

CONTRIBUTORS STEVE AUSTIN, ASLA, (“Can We Get

to Zero?” page 138) teaches landscape architecture, urban planning, and construction law at Washington State University. You can reach him at steve. bellacitta@gmail.com.

“If we are serious about maintaining a livable climate, we must quit burning fossil fuels now, even though our entire industrial civilization is completely dependent on it.

This reality is beyond radical.”

WENDY GILMARTIN (“In Search Of,” page 46)

is an architect and writer in Los Angeles.

She holds a master’s degree in architecture from Rice University and is a visiting lecturer at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona. You can reach her on Twitter @w_gilmartinez.

TRENT OKUMURA, ASLA, (“Tame the Sun,” page 56) is an associate and field specialist at SWA Group, Los Angeles.

You can reach him at TOkumura@ SWAGroup.com.

“Solar reflectance values can influence design in a substantial way, but this is given minimal weight in LEED point credits.”

MICHAEL TODORAN (“Tame the Sun,” page 56) is a landscape designer at SWA Group, Los Angeles, and hosts The Landscape Architecture Podcast.

You can reach him on Instagram @larchitect.podcast.

“What surprised me the most was the drastically varying lead times in obtaining solar reflectance reports for different materials.”

12 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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

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

Visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org.

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

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

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: MICHAEL SANCHEZ; ERIC OTTO; BILL TATHAM; RHODA LAZO

“Every office I spoke with starts the recruitment process from their personal connections. This is worth noting in an age of LinkedIn and platforms that seem to replace personal connections with virtual ones.”

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LAND MATTERS

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MONUMENTAL THREATS T

he short list of national monuments the Trump administration has called into question came out in late April, and it is rather long—27 sites. It amounts to roughly 230 million acres that have been designated as public lands since 1996 and now may be opened anew to exploration for oil, gas, and minerals. The list came out when President Trump signed an executive order to undo “this massive federal land grab” that took place under three previous presidents. “It’s gotten worse and worse and worse, and now we’re going to free it up,” he said.

Among the public lands the Trump team aims to free up for private interests are the Canyons of the Ancients, in Colorado, where civilization has been for 10,000 years, and the Giant Sequoia, a thin strip in California of the world’s largest trees. Both were protected in 2000. There is Vermilion Cliffs in Arizona, 280,000 acres containing amazing landforms; a 486,000-acre spread of the Sonoran Desert studded by saguaro cactus; the Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana, which holds parts of the Lewis and Clark and Nez Perce national historic trails; the Rose Atoll in the Samoan Pacific, home to fragile corals and rare clams; and the charismatic target of the moment, Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. Bears Ears is 1.4 million acres as wild as any in North America surrounding a pair of buttes considered sacred by Native Americans; it has about 100,000 sites of archaeological interest. President Obama designated the site a national monument in December, sealing efforts to protect it that have been ongoing since the 1930s.

Bears Ears has proved a flash point for the many politicians in the West who despise the idea of protecting public lands, particularly Republicans and particularly in Utah, where twothirds of the land is federally owned. They deeply resent what Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who is chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, called the “damn” Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that gives presidents unilateral authority to set aside lands for federal protection of their historical, cultural, or scientific significance (the first was Devils Tower, in Wyoming). And they have gotten Trump to focus early on their cause, though the president talks about these matters as he does much else, as if he were thinking of other things. Legal experts differ on whether the president can rescind or reduce a

14 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

national monument designation made by a previous president.

“The actual process for eliminating or rolling back national monuments is not straightforward,” William Rogers, Honorary ASLA, the president and CEO of the Trust for Public Land, told me. “It’s hard to imagine Congress as a whole would want to do that.” But you can be sure that if the extraction industry wants it, Trump is going to try to get it done.

While Trump talked about freeing up these and other protected lands, Ryan Zinke, the new secretary of the interior, made what seemed to be a listening tour to Bears Ears in advance of a report he is expected to deliver in early June about whether to continue its protection. Reports on 26 other monuments are due by the end of June. Zinke, who until recently was a member of Congress representing Montana, is not an easy read in his new context. He at times talks a pro-environment game, and has been a supporter of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, among other federal environmental programs, but gets a 4 percent score (that is low) from the League of Conservation Voters. On his visit to Bears Ears, he was a walking question of “whether the monument is the right vehicle or if it’s not,” without showing where his own convictions might lie.

For better or worse, the first-ever formal public comment period is open for people to tell the Interior Department their views on protecting these national monuments (go to www. doi.gov). In survey after survey, majorities of voters say they want these fragile public lands protected. At stake are not only history, culture, and science, but habitat—generous, uninterrupted stretches of land largely off limits to development. Sally Jewell, the former interior secretary, told the Salt Lake Tribune, “As we have learned more about habitat and the importance of connected habitat and landscapes more broadly, the area needed to protect these resources has also expanded.”

Industry is weighing in hard. To the extent the government is really listening, it needs to hear from people who want these lands saved.

BRADFORD MCKEE EDITOR

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LAM

LETTERS

/

NORTH WINDS

T

hanks for the article about Dirk Sijmons’s inspiring project for the North Sea wind power build-out.

What an impressive effort of visualization and coordination—such an effective way to chart a way forward on climate change. Have there been any similar efforts here in the United States to visualize a renewable power build-out to meet the Paris climate goals? That would be amazing to see.

Maybe it would be a solar-based plan, in our case. Who knows? It might even be visionary enough to get the attention of our nation’s leaders….

Oh, that’s right. (I have momentary lapses of forgetfulness about who won the election.)

MATT JOHNSTON, ASLA ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

CLARIFICATION

The site plan renderings in the May 2017 Palette article were done

by Jeffrey Charlesworth, ASLA, for Clinton & Associates.

I

am continually impressed by both the breadth of subjects and depth of reporting LAM has been featuring.

And I appreciate occasionally seeing features on unsung heroes of our profession like Jack Dangermond. But I’m disappointed by some aspects of the otherwise excellent piece “Power Play 2050” in your April issue.

1. Any sustainable energy program needs to include energy conservation and a range of centralized and decentralized energy sources. I’m a fan of decentralization, but the author, quoting Dutch specialist Maarten Hajer, states that the “small is beautiful” approach championed by E. F. Schumacher “...doesn’t add up” without explaining why.

2. What about the impact on wildlife, especially migratory birds and seabirds? The article mentions “10 million seabirds” living in the area, but doesn’t mention migratory birds. The American Bird Conservancy is leading the fight to ensure wind power towers are not sited in flyways and other areas where birds and bats must concentrate in the United States. There must be similar organizations mapping flyways and nesting and feeding areas in the North Sea. The article shows that by 2050, wind farms will dominate most near coastal areas including areas shown in green and labeled “Natura 2000.” Yet there is no mention of the impact of such massive development on birds, much less fish and marine mammals. Why not? Have I missed something here?

JON COE, FASLA HEALESVILLE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

YOUR LAND

C

ongratulations for producing YOUR LAND! I saw your announcement and I look forward to reading the publication. I am hoping that YOUR LAND not only leads to a greater interest and understanding of what we do as landscape architects, but also leads us, ASLA and practijust had the opportunity to review tioners, to provide continued supYOUR LAND, and it is a wonderful port and encouragement of landscape architecture and the environment in introduction for young people interested in learning more about the proK–12 education. fession. As a program of the National KURT VAN DEXTER, ASLA Park Service focused on cultural NORTH KINGSTOWN, RHODE ISLAND landscape preservation, we manage a number of youth programs each year, and this will be a terrific rehat an awesome resource! I hope source to share. you all will continue to do this, as the imagery and the tactile version ROBERT PAGE, FASLA of this information are fantastic. I’m BOSTON planning to share the profession and these resources with two groups of fifth graders at my son’s elementary school here in Tallahassee, Florida.

Thank you for putting this together.

I

W

MEGHAN MICK, ASLA TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

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

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www.asla.org/HALS

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CITÉ MÉMOIRE, LEMIEUX PILON 4D ART

FOREGROUND

CITÉ MÉMOIRE

This art installation tells the story of Montreal via video projections onto buildings and alleyways. Observers interact using apps and headphones in NOW, page 22.

FOREGROUND

/

NOW

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

PARK AND POND

IN MINNEAPOLIS, A DISTRICT-SCALE STORMWATER SYSTEM DOUBLES AS PUBLIC SPACE.

I ABOVE

Stormwater enters the basin at the southeast corner (foreground), where concrete weirs dissipate the water’s energy.

n the shadow of an abandoned grain elevator adorned with the words United Crushers, a serving-platter-shaped park in Minneapolis is the latest entrant in the effort to blend green infrastructure and public space. Opened in October 2016, the clunkily named Towerside District Stormwater System is the Twin Cities’ first privately owned district-scale system, serving four nearby properties. With a 206,575-gallon water storage tank, the system can handle 100 percent of a 10-year storm event.

of the Towerside Innovation District, 370 acres of industrialized hinterland at the periphery of the University of Minnesota. It was spearheaded by the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO), a government entity that oversees activities within its watershed. Marcy Bean, a landscape architect with the MWMO (which also kicked in $1.3 million in funding), says the project is “trying to get people to think about these spaces differently,” to transcend the notion that cities have to choose between an ugly, fenced-in stormwater pond and beautiful public Initiated in response to the city’s plan to repave open space. “It can be all of these things, all at 4th Street, the project was constructed as part one time.”

22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

MISSISSIPPI WATERSHED MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

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FOREGROUND

/NOW THE PROJECT TRANSCENDS THE NOTION THAT CITIES HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN AN UGLY STORMWATER POND AND OPEN SPACE. Designed by the landscape architects Bruce Jacobson, of Cuningham Group, and Ben Erickson, of BE Landscape Designs, the park space-cumcatchment basin is an asymmetrical garden of gray trap rock and water-loving native plants bisected by a curving flagstone path. Throughout, concentric circles formed by fieldstone boulders and perennial plantings represent ripples.

to the MWMO’s calculations, the developers will save between 15 and 20 percent when compared to building individual stormwater systems, not including reduced maintenance costs and the value of the park space.

RIGHT

The basin employs a palette of gray trap rock and lighter-colored Chilton flagstone, along with sedges and prairie grasses.

24 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

MISSISSIPPI WATERSHED MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION

The hope is that future developers will invest in similar district-scale systems. “We’re really one of the first projects to be constructed in the innovaBecause the surrounding parcels had yet to be tion district,” Bean says. “We’re hoping that the developed, sizing the stormwater system required innovation that was built into this small composome unorthodox calculus. “You’re forecasting nent will then infiltrate further into the district.” what everybody is going to do,” Bean says. Based on developers’ current plans, the MWMO calcu- TIMOTHY A. SCHULER, EDITOR OF NOW, CAN BE REACHED lated the total number of estimated impervious AT TIMOTHYASCHULER@GMAIL.COM AND ON TWITTER acres and sized the system appropriately. According @TIMOTHY_SCHULER.

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FOREGROUND

/NOW LEGEND D

A E

E estled between a long stretch of Pacific beach and a steep, mountainous ridge, the city of Laguna Beach, California, has a unique, C A A almost isolated setting. It’s a rarity in sprawling and suburban Orange County and a big part of why, in 2016, after a years-long campaign and documentation process, the entire city, which includes a 22,000-acre greenbelt, has earned inclusion in the National Park Service’s Historic AmerLaguna Beach’s long history as an ican Landscapes Survey (HALS). arts colony and scenic beach desLaguna Beach is a rare citywide en- tination is in large part owing to trant in HALS, a park service pro- its severe topography, which kept gram for which ASLA provides tech- it from being useful land for the nical and professional advice. The Mexican ranchos that were built here documentation of the city (popula- before California became a state. tion: a little more than 23,000) was Large stands of eucalyptus planted led by the local landscape architect by homesteaders added to its visual Ann Christoph, FASLA, and a group appeal, attracting plein air painters of designers, photographers, his- in the early 1900s who helped it torians, and conservationists, who blossom into a community of artworked for about two and a half years ists and designers. The homesteads to meticulously record the city’s coves, were then individually subdividcanyons, and characteristic architec- ed, giving the city a patchwork of ture, plantings, and open space using neighborhoods with winding streets large-format photography, measured shrouded by trees planted by comdrawings, and historical documenta- munity groups from the 1920s on. tion. As part of its inclusion in HALS, the documentation will be accessible Without these conditions, “the whole online through the Library of Con- history of Laguna Beach would have been different,” Christoph says. “The gress later this year.

N

THE LAGUNA EDGE ITS UNIQUE TOPOGRAPHY AND CULTURE EARN LAGUNA BEACH RECOGNITION AS A HISTORIC LANDSCAPE.

BY NATE BERG

TOP

The greenbelt that surrounds Laguna Beach was established over several decades.

BELOW

The extreme topography prevented the area from being overtaken by sprawl, preserving the natural beauty that first attracted artists.

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landscape, in a sense, protected us from development.”

So did the culture. Attracting artists, hippies, and academics from the nearby University of California, Irvine throughout the 20th century, residents developed a strong conservation and preservation ethic early on—Ian McHarg was invited to give a talk to a citizens’ planning group in the early 1970s—and were actively involved in protecting the landscape and coastline from development. The establishment of Laguna Beach’s greenbelt was a grassroots effort that gradually grew to include a combination of state parks, wildlife preserves, and publicly accessible open space. This green buffer (along with tight restrictions on siting and building heights beginning in the 1920s) helped limit growth and preserve Laguna Beach’s village-like character.

The city’s designation may help that preservation ethos live on, says Christopher Stevens, ASLA, a landscape architect who helps run the HALS program at the National Park Service. “Once people see that it’s appreciated and written about and rigorously documented,” he says, they hopefully understand “why it needs to be preserved.”

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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FOREGROUND

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few years, a number of nonprofits have improbably begun growing produce as an educational tool and a way to stock locals’ refrigerators in neighborhoods that lack fresh food for sale.

Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden is leading a consortium of art, health, and environmental nonprofits that operates 18 acres of farmland and community facilities.

Designed by the architect Quilian Riano’s Brooklyn-based firm, DSGN AGNC, the site is wedged between subdivisions, crisscrossed by paths, and studded with fruit trees. Farmers, including immigrants from Iraq, Lebanon, and Mexico, sell their harvests at market stalls on site.

This summer, construction will begin on a solar-powered barn and outbuilding complex with trellised shelters, performance spaces, food storage areas, and walls covered in murals.

MUSEUMS, LIBRARIES, AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS ARE DOING THEIR PART TO SHRINK FOOD DESERTS.

BY EVE M. KAHN

T

ABOVE

At a public library in Norcross, Georgia, an aeroponic garden educates and feeds users.

On the outskirts of Atlanta, each of the 15 public library branches in Gwinnett County has installed an aeroponic tower garden under grow lights. Meg Wilson, who manages the library system’s Norcross branch, says visitors “are surprised and delighted” to see the culturally diverse likes of bok choy, arugula, kale, basil, chives, lemon balm, cilantro, and Tokyo bekana mustard unfurling indoors.

he staff at the Goldsboro West Side Community Historical Association in Sanford, Florida, can now add farming to their résumés.

On a half acre adjoining the association’s museum complex—which tells the history of Goldsboro, an African American township incorporated in 1891—staff members are growing mustard greens, rutabaga, zucchini, okra, and cucumber. Greens from the vertical gardens are handed out during public programs and donated to food Schoolchildren and local youth help harvest the pantries and charities that deliver meals to the produce, which is partly given away to visitors elderly. Kim Phillips, the executive director of and local senior citizens and partly sold to nearby the North Gwinnett Cooperative, which distribrestaurants. Staff members have also planted cot- utes the library system’s produce, says many of ton and sugarcane to give history lessons about its clients live below the poverty line and cannot the antebellum sufferings of enslaved African always afford fresh produce. “It is a nice treat for Americans. Pasha Baker, the historical associa- our families,” she says. tion’s director, says that many visitors “have no idea the labor that was required” to harvest those In the next year or so, library staff members plan crops in brutal plantation conditions. to experiment with hand-pollinating tomatoes and peppers in the minigardens, and to focus some Goldsboro is not alone. Around the country, li- towers on particular geographic regions. Clusbrarians and curators are pruning and weed- ters of Asian, African, or Latin American greens, ing rows of edible plants during their workdays, Wilson says, could be used to explain culinary largely for the benefit of the public. In the past traditions and immigration patterns.

30 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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FACE TIME

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ABOVE

Footage is projected onto trees, streets, and building facades by 89 concealed projectors.

he face appears like an apparition. Ghostly white and mottled by leaves, it floats, disembodied, turning to look at viewers as they walk along the Old Port of Montreal toward the old clock tower, where a 30-foot-high woman floats as if in water. These giant video projections are two of 24 mesmerizing tableaux created as part of Cité Mémoire, conceptualized by the visual artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon and the playwright Michel Marc Bouchard for the 375th anniversary of the founding of the city.

seven-minute vignettes, each of which features an influential (if sometimes obscure) character from the city’s history. The filmed scenes are projected onto buildings, trees, and cobblestone alleyways, and viewers, armed with a mobile app and headphones, make their way through the city, listening to the characters’ thoughts and an original score. (Inspired by Chicago’s Crown Fountain, for which the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa projected the faces of some 1,000 residents onto twin glass block towers, the faces in the trees belong to 375 modern-day Montrealers.)

2016. (Funding has come from a variety of government grants and corporate sponsors.) This May, the city unveiled four new stories. Unlike so many video mapping installations, Cité Mémoire eschews frenetic and brightly colored lights and instead treats the often intimate, sometimes harrowing scenes more like “animated murals,” in Lemieux’s words, their palette carefully crafted to meld with the historic character of Old Montreal. “It’s a bit like their souls, their memories, still inhabit the walls, the stone, and the brick,” Lemieux says. “We Beginning each night at sundown, imagined those giant characters the installation tells the story of Developed over five years, the $18 going out of the wall to tell us a bit Montreal through a series of five- to million project debuted in spring of their story.”

32 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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ABOVE

The artists repurposed the physical character of some architecture, including the outline of a demolished building.

INSET

A scene inspired by the Leonard Cohen song“Suzanne.”

Each is truly in situ, he adds, in dialogue with the urban fabric. In a scene about Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a black slave who was tortured after being accused of setting her owner’s house on fire, the ghost outline of a former building is repurposed as a silhouette of a house engulfed in flames.

varied depending on the material of the facade, as well as whether or not it was wet from rain. “Your screen is alive,” Lemieux says. “You project on trees, and in the summertime, it’s beautiful, and then in the wintertime, when the leaves are gone, oh, it’s different. It’s still interesting, but it’s more mysterious. You still see the To make the characters feel three- face but in a more elusive way.” dimensional, Lemieux and Pilon lit each scene with sidelights to create Despite the high-tech production and a sharp contrast between the subject its reliance on users’ smartphones, and the background. They also spent Lemieux says the project encourages two months testing the tableaux in the viewers to explore the city on foot, streets, using color correction to mask and to do so together. “We walk lookunwanted tones and adjusting the ing at the sidewalk or looking at our placement of projectors when build- phone, with the head down,” he says. ing features interfered. The picture “The project is trying to put the head

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

up.” To that end, the app’s audio only works when users are within viewing distance of each scene. “You cannot see the scene in your home; you have to go out and you have to walk and maybe meet other people,” Lemieux says. “It becomes a kind of collective experience.”

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FOREGROUND

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LEAK DETECTION AMERICA’S WATER UTILITIES ARE NOTORIOUSLY DATA POOR. SEVERAL START-UPS HAVE SOLUTIONS.

TOP

Utilis’s satellite imagery detects potential water leaks. Color-coded circles indicate signal strength.

ABOVE

San Francisco installed remote monitoring devices

by Ayyeka, an Imagine H2O 2016 finalist.

I

n late 2014, the federal government released a report on water use in the United States, quantifying just how many millions of gallons were used and by whom. For Tom Ferguson, the report raised more questions than it answered.

To start, it listed data for a single year, 2010. “So we’re getting the data for one year, five years late,” Ferguson says. “That matters for a variety of reasons, but the most important one to us is that it is extremely hard to make good decisions without good data.”

to help determine where and how that money should be spent.

That’s where Imagine H2O comes in. Last year’s finalists—a group of 10 start-ups offering everything from data analytics to spectral imaging— have raised $30 million in financing, working with utilities across the country to pilot their technologies. (Water, it’s worth noting, is remarkably cheap, forcing start-ups to base their business models on what Ferguson calls the “implied costs” of water. “You spring a leak, and the problem is Ferguson is the vice president of programming not the water that you’ve wasted; the problem is for Imagine H2O, a water technology accelera- the thousands of dollars you have in repair costs, tor based in San Francisco, which for the past the increased insurance premiums.”) two years has hosted the Water Data Challenge, a competition for start-ups This year’s challenge winner is the Israeli comfocusing on bringing more and better pany Utilis, which uses remote sensing to preempdata to water utilities. “Data is funda- tively identify water leaks from space, harnessing mental to the overall functioning of the same type of microwave technology used to the water system,” Ferguson says. And look for water on Mars. Utilis uses advanced algoyet, owing to a variety of factors— rithms to isolate the unique spectral signature of including an inherent lack of competition drinking water underground to pinpoint a poten—water utilities are “miles behind” their tial leak within roughly 150 feet. Utilities receive cousins in the energy sector, he says. a detailed list of potential leaks and can send field “We really don’t understand what is go- teams out for inspections and repairs. ing on in the water system.”

The disruption is long overdue, says James Perry, A firm grasp of our nation’s water infra- the company’s director of business development. structure is needed more than ever. In its latest re- Current leak detection systems consist of either port card, the American Society of Civil Engineers expensive monitoring equipment or handheld “lisgave the country’s drinking water system a D, tening” devices that require a person to physically reporting that nearly six billion gallons of treated walk above a pipe. (Arguably the most popular water are lost every day to leaks. Meanwhile, the form of leak detection is to wait for a pipe to burst, Environmental Protection Agency has calculated a reliable but costly method.) With some utilities that our drinking water system needs an infusion losing as much as 50 percent of their water, Perry of $384.2 billion over the next 20 years. Even if says it’s high time to digitize what has long been Congress coughed up the cash, there is little data an analog industry.

38 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

UTILIS, TOP; NICK OTTO, BOTTOM

FOREGROUND

FOREGROUND

/NOW

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS AVERTED FOR ALASKA’S ANAN WILDLIFE OBSERVATORY, SUZANNE JACKSON DESIGNS AROUND THE ATTRACTION: BEARS.

BY RACHEL DOVEY

uzanne Jackson spent nearly 30 years as a landscape architect at the Aspen, Colorado, office of Design Workshop, channeling her passion for backcountry hiking into habitat restoration and open space preservation. But it was when Jackson reconnected with her former colleague Barth Hamberg that things began to get, well, wild.

Hamberg manages the landscape architecture program for Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, the largest national forest in the nation. In 2014, he offered Jackson a two-year post.

only by boat or floatplane. It’s a steeply sloping temperate rain forest of spruce, hemlock, and huckleberries, and the pools and waterfalls of Anan Creek support one of the region’s largest pink salmon runs. That means a lot of hungry predators gathering to feast: black bears, grizzlies (called brown bears locally), eagles, and otters, to name just a few. That biodiversity has been a tourism magnet for decades, and helps support the economies of two small towns in the area: Wrangell and Ketchikan.

But access and safety both are issues, because many visitors aren’t particularly nimble. Jackson’s job was to employ her design background to both enhance their experience and keep them from falling off trails or coming nose to snout Jackson was charged with creating with bears. a master plan for the Anan Wildlife Observatory, which is located Among the problems were the raised wooden on a remote peninsula in Tongass’s boardwalks. Constant moisture made for slippery Wrangell district and accessible footing, which is a hazard as well as a distraction.

40 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

ABOVE

Brown bears approach an outhouse along a trail at the Anan Wildlife Observatory.

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FOREGROUND

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The region’s drastic tidal shift—a difference of up to 20 feet in some places—also complicated the arrival experience. If a boat or floatplane came in at high tide, visitors were greeted with stairs. If they arrived at mid- or low tide, they had to navigate jagged rocks. That “trailhead” area already was slated for improvements when Jackson began, but the plan points out that the changing water line even makes construction difficult, because materials and machinery can’t be easily off-loaded during low tide.

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

And then, of course, there were the bears. During Jackson’s tenure, the landscape architecture team had called in ecologists to map the animals’ routes and foraging areas in another part of Tongass, and the plan recommends a similar study at Anan.

One section was particularly worrisome; it grazed a tight corner that hikers couldn’t see around, which could lead to a person and a bear coming into sudden and startling contact.

“Line of view for approaching bears is very important,” Jackson says. Reconstruction of that so-called pinch point is listed as one of several critical projects to be completed between 2017 and 2030.

Besides creating safe passage, Jackson’s goal was to convey the value of nature and hopefully foster a sense of stewardship, as well as tourism. “In Alaska,” she says, “[tourism] is seen as a benefit to the economy, a way to move away from other things like taking down old-growth forests or mining.”

ABOVE

Forest Service staff locate the proposed new Salt Chuck Overlook structure.

SUZANNE JACKSON

As Jackson’s master plan points out, hikers often feel “unsteady and unable to focus on the surrounding environment.” Instead, Jackson recommended using crushed rock where the terrain is suitable, “to provide a firmer, safer walking experience,” she says.

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FOREGROUND

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OFFICE

IN SEARCH OF

RECRUITING TALENT IS NO LONGER AS SIMPLE AS POSTING A HELP WANTED AD.

BY WENDY GILMARTIN

search or reaching out via word of mouth to other colleagues in the field?

When we’ve made a decision to bring on new staff, we don’t do it on a projectby-project basis; we wait until we feel like there’s enough capacity overall for us to support a new position. But once we make the decision to bring on new staff, we will talk about it internally in a staff meeting, so everybody knows what we’re intending to do. That allows for us to get the word of mouth out to everybody who does currently work here. At the same time, we will then put out a notice.

We typically advertise statewide, not so much nationally, and we use the HBB LANDSCAPE Washington State ASLA chapter webARCHITECTURE SEATTLE site. That’s probably where we get JULIET VONG, ASLA, PRESIDENT most of our résumés and interest.

We also post with the state unemployDo you post ads for positions, and ment office. We do that because it’s where do you do that? Before that a requirement of a number of our even happens, is there an internal public contracts, but it also helps us

ood managers will have a sense of needs before the staffing crunch happens, but how a landscape design practice hires can be as crucial as who. Where to post advertisements, how to narrow the field and interview, and post-hire mentoring are only a few of many considerations. Principals at four landscape design practices explore the means and methods of recruiting new staff in their respective firms and onboarding them once they’ve been hired. Interviews have been edited and condensed.

ABOVE

Lyna Nget, Associate ASLA, and Gina Kim, Student ASLA, at HBB in Seattle.

46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

target some of the different types of populations that might not otherwise be looking on an ASLA website, like veterans, for example, and this gives a chance for anybody who might not be as active in the ASLA community to see a notice or a posting.

How is hiring different at entry, mid, and upper levels?

I think it’s definitely more of a challenge to bring in an upper-level person, especially into a smaller office. So our first step is generally to look within. The vast majority of our upper-level positions are promotions from internally in the firm. It really comes down to a mentorship culture in the office, and how we hire the lower and mid-level staff.

Most of the time when we’re hiring, we’re not really saying, “Oh, we need support in graphics,” or “we need support in this or that.”

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FOREGROUND

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“WE POST AT THE STATE UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICE— IT HELPS US TARGET DIFFERENT POPULATIONS.” — JULIET VONG, ASLA HBB LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE BELOW

The Civitas office in Denver.

What’s your interview process like?

We do one round of interviews, and the only time we do a second round is if we’re down to one or two people and we can’t make a decision, or if for whatever reason, as the president, I haven’t actually been part of the interviews. I want to meet the person before we hire them. Sometimes we’ll do a second round of interviews just so I can meet the two people who are at the top of the list. But I’ve heard of people doing three and four rounds of interviews, which seems kind of crazy.

CIVITAS, INC. DENVER CRAIG VICKERS, ASLA, PRINCIPAL

Is there a system for recruitment at Civitas?

We work within our own network and the network of universities and university chairs and that sort of thing. We try that first. You know,

48 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

a lot of people just find their way here. We’ve always valued the people who take the time to research us; we place a value on that, and it’s sort of unspoken. And then we definitely rely heavily on our network from the various programs that are ready to put talent out onto the street. And of course, here locally, we do have a lot of Colorado State students and University of Colorado Denver students on staff because of the proximity of those academic programs.

Are principals teaching at any of the universities?

Mark Johnson, FASLA, the founding principal of Civitas, often teaches at Harvard, and occasionally he’ll do guest-type spots at UC Denver and other places for lectures. Both Scott [Jordan, ASLA] and I will do lectures, portfolio reviews, and that sort of thing at the university.

What is the typical timeline for the hiring process?

We vet résumés first. We will go through those individually and then we rank them, based on portfolio, experience, and that sort of thing. The hiring committee gets together as a group and we talk about all our top choices and narrow the list. We conduct a few phone interviews and then narrow again, and we’ll fly them in. If they’re close by or if they’re here, we sort of work it out with their schedule,

and at that point we have a first faceto-face interview with the principals.

Often Mark Johnson is flying about the country, so he is either available for that or not, and if he’s not, sometimes that could lead to yet another interview with Mark as a final filter. I’ve seen it take as long as two months. It can be a month. I can tell you, though, we’ve tried never to be in a hurry.

Post-hire, what is the process of integrating new staff into the office?

We bring someone into the office, and we’re now trying to immediately train them on how we think as a group, how we approach design more explicitly and less organically.

How does that work?

We bring new hires immediately into design discussions, and we hit the ground running. It’s a constant stream of design dialogue—trying to diagnose the problem, coming up

CIVITAS, INC.

If we’re truly at the point where we’re growing so fast, or we’re just struggling in the short term in regard to managing larger projects or complex projects, that’s when we’ve had better success with bringing upperlevel people in on a short-term basis.

Sometimes the fit is great and they are interested and stick around for a while, but sometimes that fit works in the short term and it just doesn’t quite work as well in the long term.

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FOREGROUND

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“WE’VE GOTTEN WIND OF WHO MIGHT BE A GOOD FIT AND WE CULTIVATE THEM.” —CATHY GARRETT, ASLA PGADESIGN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

RIGHT

The PGADesign Landscape Architects office in Oakland, California.

50 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

very sort of clipped process, but I would say that that’s not all of the time, that’s not even a major part of the time, unless it’s something like admin or bookkeeping.

Have you ever used a recruiter or a recruiting service?

Yes, we have. We used one, one time.

When we’ve got something very specific in mind, I think that you can recruit at the high levels, and that’s a good place to apply that.

How does social media help with hiring?

We use Facebook, Twitter, and Land8Lounge. Probably like a number of firms, we use it to some extent, but not an enormous amount. LinkedIn is actually something we use quite a lot. We connected with our bookkeeper through LinkedIn. What’s the post-hire process like?

Usually one of us gives them a full tour of all of our systems that morning and hands them the office manual, but by and large, they’re sort of off and running. There’s a staff meeting every Monday morning, so that’s a good opportunity to see what jobs are in the office, what’s happening, who’s working with whom. They will be assigned to work with someone on a particular project, or perhaps two to start with, and that’s sort of the introduction. We check in with

KAREN KROLEWSKI, ASLA

with concepts or ideas about it, sift- And you know, we’ve gotten wind of ing and synthesizing those and then who might be a good fit in the long refining—all of it involves all of us. run, so we cultivate a relationship with them, and sometimes they end PGADESIGN LANDSCAPE up working here and sometimes ARCHITECTS they don’t, but they’re still good OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA friends and colleagues. And that’s CATHY GARRETT, ASLA, PRESIDENT true with junior people who may still be at university as well as people How do you let folks know you are who may have worked somewhere hiring at PGA? else or have maybe done an internWe do advertise and have adver- ship here and then they’re working tised both on Craigslist and through somewhere else, and so we stay in ASLA, but I would say that that’s not touch. It’s hard to put a timeline on necessarily our primary form of con- that process, but in terms of running nection. If we’re hiring a landscape an ad, if we have a very specific task, architect, we might first draw on who we’ll run an ad and interview people we know and how we’re connected. and then make a decision. That’s a

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FOREGROUND

/OFFICE

“I STARTED A TRADITION CALLED THE GAUNTLET—IT SOUNDS MORE INTIMIDATING THAN IT IS.” —DENNIS RUBBA, FASLA STUDIOINSITE

that I’m really excited about and my partners agree, I will have a conversation about expectations: What are your expectations for salary or for benefits and project type? And once we are both in the general ballpark, and I think this person would be a wonderful fit and they would fit a role and salary structure, then I ask the office staff to organize an event outside the office. We invite the person that I’m really interested in hiring, and they have just an evening of conversation—neither myself nor my partners attend. So, they go out and have a conversation, and often they don’t even talk about their work; they just talk about who they are and their culture. And the next day, I call the person up and I say, “Hey, are you still interested?” And hopefully they’re still yes, and then I go to the rest of the insiders and I ask them what they thought. And if they all give me a thumbs up, then I’ll go ahead and make a formal offer, because I feel when we hire someone, STUDIOINSITE we’re bringing them in as part of the DENVER AND OMAHA, NEBRASKA family and not as a surprise, and if DENNIS RUBBA, FASLA, FOUNDER we all agree this is the right person that we want to hire, we are sort of How have you changed or updated all accountable to each other, not the hiring process over the years? just to me.

I have actually started a tradition in ABOVE the office, and it goes back to my very It sounds like a good process that’s The founder of first employee. I call it the gauntlet, worked for you. studioINSITE, Dennis Rubba, FASLA, (center) and it sounds more intimidating It has. And you know, what’s really consults with staff. than it is. But, when there’s someone interesting is that by having that,

52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

people bond in these meetings, especially younger staff we’re hiring at entry level. Often they will help that person find an apartment, or they can stay with them and help them get set up, so when they walk into the office, they already know they’re welcomed. And when I send out an e-mail and say, hey, you know, Ben has accepted our offer, I include Ben on that e-mail, and then often people will just respond directly to Ben, congratulate him, ask if there is anything they can do to help so he feels welcome. It’s a family, and it’s part of the culture.

What’s different about higher-level hiring?

When I hire someone senior, I’m looking for someone who has an entrepreneurial spirit and wants to be a leader, who has relationships and is willing to take the firm and shape it. I’ve been doing this for years, and I tell you, one of the most surprising things I’ve encountered is how hard it is to find professionals who have an entrepreneurial spirit. They’re so risk averse that they wouldn’t step across the line and have their name on it.

For the firm to grow, it needs leaders, and it needs leaders who are willing to lead and take risks.

WENDY GILMARTIN IS AN ARCHITECT AND JOURNALIST IN LOS ANGELES.

COURTESY STUDIOINSITE

them on an informal but fairly regular basis, the principals particularly.

And usually the principal who gave them the tour checks in and asks, “Is there anything you need to have a recap of?” If something goes off the rails and there’s really a problem, then we speak with them privately and say, “You know, maybe this isn’t the best fit.” I can only think of one occasion where it occurred, and I think somebody had a very different expectation in a way of working and we agreed to part company, but that is by far the minority. In more than 20 years, it has happened once.

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FOREGROUND

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MATERIALS TAME THE SUN HOW TO SPECIFY COMPLEX PAVING PATTERNS TO DEFLECT URBAN HEAT FROM SOLAR EXPOSURE.

BY TRENT OKUMURA, ASLA, AND MICHAEL TODORAN

D

ABOVE

This variegated paving design by SWA Group has light-colored pavers that reflect sufficient amounts of solar heat under Los Angeles city code and dark-colored ones that don’t.

esigners are challenged by climate change as they attempt to mitigate urban heat, but among the biggest factors are the thermal properties of the very building materials they use in new developments, not least their paving surfaces. The material and color of paving make a critical difference in either contributing to or neutralizing heat gain brought by the sun (as do roofs, which typically involve simpler, monolithic mate-

56 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

The crucial metric is solar reflectance (SR), which is a measurement of the relative ability of a paving material to reject solar heat. This property is determined following ASTM standards, such as ASTM C1549.

The SITES rating system Credit 4.9 requires designers to use paving materials with an SR value of 0.33 at installation or a “three-year aged SR value” of 0.28. It also requires maintenance provisions to ensure the surfaces are cleaned every two years to keep their reflectivity. Solar reflectance is one of two properties that are combined to create the Solar Reflectance Index (SRI), another commonly used metric, which assigns materials a score between zero and 100. The LEED rating system has similar incentives using SRI, as does the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen), though its stipulations vary by jurisdiction.

Our office, SWA Group in Los Angeles, recently completed a CALGreen plan-check submission to the City of Los Angeles for a mixed-use project downtown. The city requires that we make sure 25 percent of any sunexposed paving material meets or exceeds an SR value greater than 0.29. The total area of exposed paving under consideration is 131,000 square feet; the area needed to qualify for the SRI requirement is about 33,000 square feet.

To design to such a requirement, you must identify the total square footage of paving surface that can be considered subject to SRI review (generally, any exposed surface not under architectural cover). Next, calculate the total paving square footage with a value of 0.29 or greater.

Divide that number by total paving square footage for the percentage of the paving that meets or exceeds a value of 0.29.

We began identifying the contributing spaces through the use of diagrams. Hatches on the diagrams identified areas that consisted of exposed paving. Minimum paving

COURTESY SWA GROUP

rial choices). Darker paving creates a hotter microclimate but lower glare, and lighter paving creates a cooler microclimate and higher glare. The sweet spot in specifying paving lies in brokering a balance between thermal and visual comfort.

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FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS FIGURE 2: TESTING AND EVALUATION RESULTS RESULTS AND OBSERVATIONS

FIGURE 1: HEMISPHERICAL SPECTRAL REFLECTANCE AND TOTAL EMITTANCE TEST REPORT

The average consists of the first three samples of each batch. The results are listed below:

REFLECTANCE AND SRI

EMITTANCE

ABOVE AND BELOW

Materials testing lab report excerpts provide SR values (Figures 1 and 2); takeoff legend (Figure 3) adds up net square footage needed to meet 25 percent goal.

Spreadsheet legend (Figure 4) guided paving composition to meet SR goal of 0.29 across 25 percent of exposed paving.

square footage required to meet the percentage was then derived from the quantification process. The diagrams included square footage of the qualifying paving material being used and its associated SR value, and were then used to demonstrate how we achieved our 25 percent throughout multiple levels of outdoor space.

The search for documented SR values for various paving materials can be tedious, so it’s important to consider lead times for obtaining results.

Because paving products are not all similar in content—with, for example, different aggregate colors, concrete pigments, or finishes—paving types will require individual testing (Figures 1 and 2). The initial approach is to contact the product supplier to ask what

testing or documentation is available.

On the whole, there is very little supporting documentation for SR value, but the supplier may have lab results on file or be willing to test the product and issue the results.

The paving schedule for our downtown project consisted largely of varying cool and warm grays. These could not be said to have passing SR values

FIGURE 4

COURTESY SWA GROUP

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FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS PODIUM L3 SRI & PAVING QUANTIFICATION PLAN

ABOVE

Colored areas indicate sun-exposed areas at the Level 3 podium.

by a simple visual test. This ambiguity was amplified with materials that had different combinations of integral colors and a variety of aggregates.

The next task was to determine which paving material within the identified exposed space could potentially meet or exceed the SR value of 0.29.

We developed a spreadsheet with all paving types inside the hatched areas (Figure 4). The spreadsheet includes the SR values, square foot quantity, material type, color, finish, applicable level, location within the level, and manufacturer. The spreadsheet helped us visualize the multiple levels as a whole and enabled us to understand the quantities and percentages we were working with.

tions that the medium to dark color paving material would not meet the requirements. We focused our attention on the material most likely to meet SRI requirements. The CALGreen plan-check process requires SRI test result documentation for each material contributing to the 25 percent. Consider having multiple paving types to meet your goal, in case test results are not available, can’t be obtained in a timely fashion, or come back with negative results.

that some materials (such as Raven Black granite) would obviously fall below a value of 0.29, so it was of little use to ask and pay for an SRI report for those items. Materials of an obviously passing value (such as Sierra White granite) allowed us to enter into the spreadsheet a passing value greater than or equal to 0.29.

But because the manufacturer did not have an existing SRI report and we are unable to prove its value, we assigned those spreadsheet cells’ background a pending color of yellow. The materials that were passing with documentation we assigned a color value of green, and of those failing, a value of red.

Because time was tight for completing our submission, we called each manufacturer to ask which materials on the paving legend they had existing SR values for. We entered the passing values into our mas- In general, we have found it easier Without having any test results in ter spreadsheet. By talking with the to locate SRI test results for integral hand, we made general assump- product representatives, we learned colored concrete pigments than for

60 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

COURTESY SWA GROUP

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FOREGROUND

/MATERIALS

NORTH PASEO PAVING ENLARGEMENT

when spread across a large space, it resulted in an amount that contributed to our 25 percent goal.

TOP LEFT

Discrete areas, such as this enlarged section of the North Paseo with a planter, are calculated individually and factored into the total area needed to meet the goal of 25 percent paving with a 0.29 SR value or above.

TOP RIGHT

An illustrative paving plan from the North Paseo.

Having multiple types of Lithocrete blend within the project, we requested a list of potential mixes to be tested. Shaw & Sons Concrete Contractors, in Costa Mesa, California, provided test results, which helped narrow down our approved material list. Because we were unable to obtain some test results owing to various factors, our selection of qualifying material was reduced.

This led us to look into isolating paving materials within a multicolor pattern.

In the South Paseo portion of our project, our paving pattern did have varying band sizes and two different materials. However, the materials repeated equally within each band,

62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

and the pass or fail values of the contrasting materials were obvious. We calculated the entire square footage of this area and then divided it by two to obtain the passing value.

In the North Paseo portion of our project, our paving pattern also had varying band sizes, but the pattern consisted of four materials. To identify what percentage was passing, we needed to determine when the pattern repeated itself, what percent of each material was within that pattern, and what the SR value of each material was within that pattern. We then determined the entire area of the North Paseo paving pattern but demonstrated only the percentage of the passing Sierra White.

Because only a percentage of the material can be accounted for, we had to determine how much of the isolated paver contributes to its pattern and subtract that amount from the total.

The resulting amount was small, but

We calculate that the process took three full days to complete. Coordination is complex and requires a lot of calls to suppliers. Suppliers are generally amenable to our research requests because they, of course, hope to make the sale. And the final project, particularly one of the scope we worked on, will not only meet the requirement but bring about the benefit of its intent to thwart the buildup of solar heat in the city.

TRENT OKUMURA, ASLA, IS AN ASSOCIATE AND FIELD SPECIALIST AT SWA GROUP IN LOS ANGELES. MICHAEL TODORAN IS A LANDSCAPE DESIGNER AT SWA GROUP, LOS ANGELES, AND HOSTS THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PODCAST.

COURTESY SWA GROUP

natural or custom paving materials containing various aggregates. Davis Colors provides an online color chart that provides SRI values for its pigments as well as those of some precast concrete manufacturers.

In the submission were drawings, the spreadsheet showing computation of the 25 percent, and the certified SRI reports. Also included was the diagram with hatches for all of the work within our scope, with the areas that passed highlighted. In the end, we were able to meet the requirements and provide supporting information.

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FOREGROUND

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PARKS

LEFT

Modeled on a woonerf, the Mill Street Courtyard is tucked into the interior of a city block.

BOTTOM

The project exposed historic arches and brick walls as well as the rushing water of the Saw Mill River.

YONKERS UNCORKED

EDGEWATER DESIGN MAKES A PUBLIC SPACE AROUND A DAYLIT WATERWAY DOWNTOWN.

BY JANE MARGOLIES

isten to that!” exclaims Jan Saltiel Rafel, ASLA, as we pause at the entrance to Mill Street Courtyard in the downtown of Yonkers, New York.

Yonkers, directly north of New York City, is the fourth most populous city in the state, and it’s no surprise that such a densely developed urban area would be rather noisy.

of sirens. It’s a natural sound—the splashing of water—and it’s coming from the Saw Mill River, a tributary of the Hudson. The Saw Mill has always coursed through town, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was heavily polluted with industrial waste—and smelly—the city channeled the waterway into flumes and built streets and structures on top.

But the sound that Rafel is calling to Now, however, in what’s been called my attention isn’t the honking of car the first major daylighting of a river horns, the roar of trucks, or the wail in New York State, portions of this

66 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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FOREGROUND

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and Development had in mind back in 2011 when it put out an RFP soliciting proposals for the site. The irregularly shaped parcel was almost completely enclosed by buildings, including a single-story former appliance store, and it contained a rundown parking area and a weedy, debris-filled lot. A narrow, dead-end road—Mill Street, likely named for the flour mill that once stood on the site—led into it. “It was a scary crack alley with illegal parking,” recalls Wilson Kimball, the commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development, speaking by phone. “You really didn’t want to go down there.”

AV E

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A mere half acre and modeled on the shared streets in the Netherlands known as woonerfs, this tightly orchestrated, multilevel site is tucked into the interior of a city block and functions as a through street for service and emergency vehicles as well as WA RBU R TO NA a public park. Beds are filled with VEN UE herbaceous perennials. Sculptures are generously scattered about. Pedeslong-hidden natural resource are be- trian bridges rise above it all, providing uncovered, bit by bit. And as the ing vantage points for looking down river is revealed, public spaces are at, and listening to, the coursing water. springing up around it, the latest being Mill Street Courtyard, designed Daylighting the river in this particuby Edgewater Design, Rafel’s New lar spot wasn’t necessarily what the Jersey-based firm.

Yonkers Department of Planning

UR RB WA

A park was built around the first daylit portion of the Saw Mill River, stretching perpendicular to the Hudson River.

TO N

ABOVE

RIGHT

CHRISTOPHER ST. LAWRENCE

Knocking down a single-story building (upper left) opened up the park’s edge to Mill Street Courtyard, pictured here under construction.

68 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

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FOREGROUND

/PARKS NORTH BROADWAY

PLAN

3

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2

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6 1

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ABOVE

A bridge leads into the site from the avenue bordering the park.

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UE

A powder-coated steel sign marks the entrance.

Edgewater had ideas for making the space safe and alluring. Selected for the project, the firm, with a team that included traffic engineers, began doing studies measuring the turning radius for garbage trucks and ambulances and pondering ways to green the gray space. But with a change in

RE

including the American eel. Yonkers, long derided, suddenly had a nice mayoral administrations, the brief welcome mat for train travelers for the Mill Street Courtyard began disembarking in town or simply to change. looking out the window while passing through. The project boosted the The site was just across a two-way city’s image—and quickly spurred street, Warburton Avenue, from development around the park. the town’s first daylighting project, completed in 2012. That project had “The mayor said, ‘we’ve had so much peeled away a parking lot in front of success with daylighting, why don’t Yonkers’s Beaux-Arts train station we keep at it?’” Kimball recalls. to reveal a portion of the river— cleaner than it once was, though by And that is how Mill Street Courtno means pristine—and created a yard became the locale for the secnew public space around it. Van der ond phase of daylighting. Once the Donck Park, as it came to be called, city succeeded in persuading the provided an appealing hangout for owner of the old appliance store to people as well as habitat for dozens sell the building so it could be deof species of amphibians and fish, molished, that opened up the site to M

TOP RIGHT

ST

/PARKS

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT

A view before construction of the then-overgrown site; the same view afterward. One of the many buildings with backs that face the site was painted with a mural by Eelco van den Berg.

BELOW

A pathway edged by plants now leads through the site.

Van der Donck Park—making it possible to walk from the eastern end of the park, cross Warburton, and enter Mill Street Courtyard. To underscore the connection between the two public spaces—and lure people from one to the other—Edgewater designed an arched powder-coated steel sign at the entrance to Mill Street Courtyard, which, at the city’s request, trumpets the “daylighting of the Saw Mill River.”

As for the Mill Street site itself, the challenges it posed were many: It was small, of course, and it was also sloping. Part of the flume enclosing the portion of the river that ran under the site was in disrepair, and the river corridor was deep—15 to 20 feet below ground level. Once the

water was uncovered, you had to be right next to it, or even lean over it, to see it. Then, too, there were the less-than-charming backs of buildings all around.

And there was so much to be accomplished on the site. To turn the dead-end street into a limited-access through street, a vehicular bridge was added to one side of the site, leading from the street that runs along its northern edge. However, to signal that the site was pedestrian-friendly— to make it look more like a plaza than a street—Edgewater laid hexagonal asphalt pavers (albeit heavy-duty, three-inch-thick ones) on top of the concrete base. To give people a place to hang out with a view of the river, the designers added amphitheater-

72 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

like stepped seating made of granite and ipe; trees (maple, American sycamore, and bald cypress) underplanted with ferns, grasses, and herbaceous perennials were planted in sloped beds on either side. To capture runoff—and beautify—bioswales were designed and filled with sedge, purple coneflower, and other watertolerant plants. To dress up the narrow, formerly forbidding Mill Street entrance to the site, green screens were installed alongside a building that flanks the alley to enable vertical planting of hydrangea vines.

The site’s centerpiece—and Rafel’s pride and joy—is a custom pedestrian bridge that is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act yet also elegantly slender, with stainless

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FOREGROUND

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/PARKS

ABOVE

Stepped seating provides a view of a newly exposed portion of the river.

steel webbing on the sides. “I wanted something light,” she says, “something you could see through and that would allow you to see the water.”

The bridge coils around, ending in a flourish: a circular paved area evocative of a millstone. Out of it rises a columnar sculpture decorated with broken shards of mirror. The artist of this mosaic piece, the Yonkers resident Haifa Bint-Kadi, was also responsible for a series of eight lasercut steel sculptures placed amid the plants depicting tomato packers, loom operators, and other industrial laborers who once worked in Yonkers. A millstone from the old flour mill, found during excavation and incorporated into the edging for a planting bed, is another evocative reference to the past.

74 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

Rafel’s one disappointment is the site’s other pedestrian bridge, the prefab one that leads into Mill Street Courtyard from Warburton Avenue.

It is eight feet wide—two feet wider than her custom design—and decidedly bulkier in feel. But it was also far less costly, and could be installed quickly—trucked to the site and dropped in place by crane—in time for the Mill Street Courtyard’s grand opening last July.

And, besides, if the excitement of the first phase of daylighting was seeing the river again, after decades during which it was hidden from view, the Mill Street Courtyard project is all about hearing it. The designers scattered boulders quarried in upstate New York in the riverbed, making

the fast-moving water even jumpier, and ramping up its sound.

Rafel checks in on the site itself when she’s back in Yonkers, and she’s there frequently—she’s currently refurbishing four small parks in town and redesigning the sidewalks along Main Street. Meanwhile, a couple blocks away, Yonkers’s third phase of daylighting the Saw Mill is in the works. Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects has been enlisted to create a new riverine park across from city hall. By bringing a natural resource to light, Yonkers is also bringing new public spaces to life.

JANE MARGOLIES, A NEW YORK-BASED JOURNALIST AND A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, LAST WROTE FOR LAM ABOUT THE CHICAGO RIVERWALK.

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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FEATURES

SIMON DEVITT

NORTH WHARF

Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Wraight + Associates have made the waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand, a place ďŹ t for both work and play, page 88.

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LEFT

North Wharf has evolved from an industrial port closed to the public into a popular waterfront destination for locals and tourists.

WRAIGHT + ASSOCIATES AND TAYLOR CULLITY LETHLEAN HAVE DOMESTICATED A WATERFRONT IN AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND THOUGH YOU CAN STILL SMELL THE FISH .

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

F SIMON DEVITT

or more than 30 years, shipping activity within historic ports has been in rapid decline. Facilities are often relocated to larger and more modernized harbors where the machinery is bigger, the roads are closer, and the waters are deeper. Left behind is a postindustrial waterfront that’s seen by the city as an opportunity for a glamorous maritime makeover. But in the effort to maximize development profits, these face-lifts often erase the industrial beauty marks that make these places unique. In their place, generic recipes are followed for creating comfortable waterfront living: one part cobblestone street, two parts pedestrian walkway, a healthy dose of waterside eateries, with a dash of history through a moored two-mast schooner. The experience may be clean and comfortable, but it’s also terribly bland.

The Wynyard Quarter waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand, is different. It’s a landscape that has been mopped, but not sterilized. Active maritime industries cling to the edges of the site and activate it with a purpose that isn’t sugar-coated.

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The atmosphere of this working waterfront is unapologetic about the day-to-day operations amid latte-drinking onlookers. It brings to mind how genius loci—the spirit of a place—relies not just on physical form, but also the way people engage with and validate the authenticity of its features.

This quality in particular captivated the jury for the 2014 Rosa Barba Prize in Barcelona, which chose the waterfront project from among 11 finalists for its top honor. “It’s not a fake, touristic, and commercial waterfront,” said the jury chair, Michael van Gessel. “The life, tradition, and essence of the harbor is kept intact.”

ABOVE

The project required extensive consultation with principal users in the marine, petrochemical, and fishing industries to accommodate the requirements of a working port while introducing the “friction” of public use.

SIMON DEVITT

The discord of a lunchtime stroll can include the smell of raw fish being loaded into delivery vans, the cacophony of passengers boarding a ferry to Devonport, the thunderclap of dump trucks towing loads of sand, or the shrill of an orbital sander against the hull of a private yacht worth more than my house. Old rusted rails splice through a patched concrete promenade and veer off to unobvious end points. Industrial silos stand as relics on the site and reinforce the scale and purpose of the surrounding machinery and equipment.

While there’s a smell and sound to the site that isn’t always pleasant, it’s anything but dull.

SIMON DEVITT, TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM RIGHT; GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA, TOP RIGHT

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Seating was inspired by storage crates on fishing vessels; from nearby cafés, trucks can be seen loading onto ships; although the main promenade was designed to accommodate fishing operations, most workers prefer the less congested dock next to the site.

Once known as the Tank Farm owing to the high number of petrol and liquid chemical storage facilities, the site was formerly heralded by many residents as one of the ugliest in Auckland. The area is part of the Wynyard Quarter—the city’s newest evolving waterfront neighborhood—and comprises about 86 acres of reclaimed land in Waitemata Harbour, along the western edge of Auckland’s waterfront. Nearly two miles of this is coastal frontage. From along the western edge of the site, one can see across the harbor to Westhaven Marina, one of the largest yacht marinas in the Southern Hemisphere.

The area has a long history, stretching back to the 1800s, when it was known as the Western Reclamation and was primarily made of builtout land for the port’s industries. Since then, the site has supported a diversity of commercial activities, including maritime supplies and services (such as diving and navigation equipment, motor refitting for boats, and fish processing facilities); terminals for oil storage and bulk liquids distribution, including ship-to-shore transfers of petroleum and other products; a bulk cement wharf; and storage of dredged sand for use in construction projects. Up until the late 2000s,

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HAMER STREET

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some 550,000 tons of liquids and cement were transported from Wynyard Wharf annually. However, recent changes in bulk liquid transportation, the introduction of a petroleum and gas pipeline in northern Auckland, and the expiration of site industrial leases made this a precinct in search of new purpose.

In the mid-2000s, the Auckland government converted the site into a mixed-use precinct of residential and commercial development, spurred by planning requirements for hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2011. The intention was to roll out

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the development over a 20-year time frame, with emphasis on increasing park and waterfront access. Critical to this focus was keeping the wharf edge open to fishing fleets and maritime industry as a way to retain an activated waterfront.

Directors Perry Lethlean, International ASLA, from Taylor Cullity Lethlean in Australia, and Megan Wraight, ASLA, from Wraight + Associates in New Zealand, were the landscape architects hired in 2008 to work in partnership on the strategic planning and design development for stage one of the revitalization. This first phase of

TAYLOR CULLITY LETHLEAN AND WRAIGHT + ASSOCIATES

JELLICOE STREET

PLAN 1 SILO MARINA/SUPERYACHT REFIT FACILITY 2 SILO PARK 3 NORTH WHARF PROMENADE 4 THE GANTRY 5 PLAYGROUND 6 WIND TREE SCULPTURE 7 SILO 7 8 WYNYARD WHARF FERRY TERMINAL 9 CAFÉS AND OUTDOOR DINING 10 FISHING INDUSTRY WATER SPACE 8

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BRIGHAM STREET

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JELLICOE STREET

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work was seen as a catalyst for activating the site and providing a design template for successive precinct projects. Opened in August 2011, the project area focused on the delivery of the public realm within the central harbor area including North Wharf Promenade, Jellicoe Street, and Silo Marina, encompassing a total of 8.4 acres of roads, waterfront, tank farms, and storage sites.

The site design is organized around three primary movements. The waterfront promenade along North Wharf allows people to engage with the harbor edge and its active marine industries.

Jellicoe Street sets up a conventional shared street character with dense verge plantings that provide a sheltered contrast to the open sea and sky of North Wharf. The waterfront promenade and Jellicoe Street both lead to Silo Park, a green wedge of open space consisting of a generous lawn and seating area and punctuated by a remnant industrial silo. According to Lethlean, the design team intentionally referred to the space as Silo Park early on to prevent removing the park’s namesake, Silo 7, a concrete tower that previously held substantial amounts of cement.

The tactic worked.

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Along the northwest edge of Silo Park, one can climb three stories to the top of the Gantry, a 320-foot-long, 30-foot-high elevated walkway (and enter “Gantryland,” as Wraight puts it). From here, visitors are provided a view of the site from the height of the nearby industrial tanks.

The Gantry creates an edge that marks the boundary of the petrochemical industry beyond toward Wynyard Point, a site that is scheduled to change drastically in the next decade into what is termed “premier waterfront living.” As this new development takes shape, the intention is for the Gantry to stay in place, marking the edge between these evolving landscapes. “It becomes quite a good filter,” Wraight says, “and I don’t think we envisaged it quite like that. More as a folly and a bit of constructed infrastructure.”

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TAYLOR CULLITY LETHLEAN AND WRAIGHT + ASSOCIATES, TOP; SIMON DEVITT, BOTTOM

NORTH WHARF PROMENADE SECTIONS

ABOVE

Jellicoe Street (at right) was lushly planted to provide the space with a more intimate feel in contrast to the openness of the North Wharf promenade.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM

SIMON DEVITT

Benches follow the edge of the waterfront promenade, marking the line of the original seawall.

During initial site investigations, the design team took a forensic approach that carefully identified and mapped existing features. Artifacts were discovered from the site’s maritime and industrial histories that weren’t picked up in the initial master plan, including rail grooves, massive precast block walls, and nautical furnishings such as mooring bollards and cast iron tying rings for fishing vessels. “[The client] probably thought they would be erasing most of these qualities to transform it into a bright and shiny new contemporary city,” Lethlean says. “Our first impression was to say, ‘Hang on, this is an incredible site with such rich layers to it.’” The design team recognized the uniqueness of this found landscape and focused on ways to embrace rather than remove it. While the council was receptive to the idea of retaining this character,

it required a shift to understand how this would inform future development. “There are not a lot of precedents that are close to the Auckland experience,” Lethlean says. “We said this was a rare opportunity for them.”

The morning that I arrived at the site, a bright yellow fishing vessel was moored to the harbor while another in more neutral colors of navy and rust shuddered in the waves nearby. Two men were stacking crates inside the boat, while a hefty man outfitted in a bright yellow vest hauled an empty dolly into the back of a small delivery truck and closed its doors.

The contrast of maritime uses bookending the site—the juxtaposition of the “slick and the grit,” as Wraight calls it—provides two very different

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SIMON DEVITT, THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

BETWEEN “THE SLICK AND THE GRIT” YOU GET TWO VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES.

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ABOVE

Lighting was designed to emulate ship masts.

RIGHT

Consultation with local Maori inspired plantings recalling the site’s origins as a lush coastal inlet.

OPPOSITE

Trusses of the stainless steel Wind Tree by Michio Ihara swing in the breeze.

ers, and the luxury yacht servicers was important to account for the practicalities such as the turning radiuses for wharf vehicles, the requirements for loading and unloading cargo from fishing vessels, and understanding necessary level changes between boats and the wharf. Added to this was the challenge of keeping the as-found conditions while introducing the friction of pedestrians and cyclists into the mix of daily maritime tasks.

waterfront experiences. At the eastern end you have the docking point for rusty commercial fishing vessels to undertake the smelly day-to-day operations of loading provisions and off-loading catches of fish, many of which are taken to a processing facility and fish market along Jellicoe Street. Along the western end of the site you have the gloss and glamour of Silo Marina, a The result is an interactive experience of navisought-after anchorage for superyachts in the gating around operational vehicles delivering South Pacific. anything from ice to electrical goods; watching workers go about their jobs with determined purRetaining—and supporting—these different indus- pose, whether on boats or from the back of vans tries required careful understanding of how they outfitted with supplies; and meandering with jogworked and operated. Close consultation with the gers, families, retired seniors, and lunching office fishing industry, the offshore ferry service provid- workers in taking a lap down North Wharf to see

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT

Sketch from design workshops; free films are screened on Silo 7; silo bases serve as exhibition space; to persuade the client to retain Silo 7, the team proposed many public uses for the structure.

TAYLOR CULLITY LETHLEAN AND WRAIGHT + ASSOCIATES, TOP LEFT AND RIGHT; JON BAXTER, BOTTOM LEFT; JONNY DAVIS, BOTTOM RIGHT

the sights. Issues of safety are put back upon the users. As the wharf is predominantly open with only a few points barricaded off, it’s up to pedestrians to be mindful where they walk. (One fisherman was keen to forewarn the risks of the site, having witnessed people falling in and for fishermen, such as proximity of delivery trucks struggling to get out owing to few access points to ships (the gap is too big) or the disruption of near the fishing dock.) illegally parked cars, the fishermen I spoke with weren’t terribly fussed. “We just need to load and Although efforts were made to design North unload, then we’re off for six weeks,” one said Wharf as the primary docking point for fishing with a shrug. A sandy-haired fisherman wearing a vessels, most of the ships have opted to use an Sanford shirt was more positive. “Gives us a place area of the dock running perpendicular to the to get a beer after work,” he grinned. site, where delivery vans and trucks can do their job with fewer interactions with passersby. While The approach to intertwining the old and the the design has posed some logistical challenges new extended to the use of materials. Existing

ABOVE

THINK PHOTOGRAPHY/JEFF BRASS

The Gantry was constructed as a landscape folly that will stay in place as new development unfolds in the industrial area beyond it.

elements distinctive to the site—such as the silos, precast industrial blocks, and old navigation buoys—were either kept in situ or repurposed.

New materials were designed in a way that reinforced the existing material qualities, but didn’t replicate the older elements; there would be a clear distinction between what was new and old.

“This was identified as a real strategy at the beginning, which drove our thinking, our design work, and detailed design,” Lethlean says.

The outcome is a wharf that reveals different histories. Approximately a quarter of a mile of old rail buried beneath layers of asphalt was uncovered, cleaned up, and fixed down to prevent tripping hazards. Concrete pavement was patched in areas and intentionally kept looking weathered.

Industrial concrete blocks were repurposed to

form waterfront steps near the superyachts, as well as converted into seats. Polished wooden benches align the southern edge of the Silo Park wetland, revealing the wall of the original wharf prior to reclamation. Brightly colored crates are clustered in front of the dining areas along North Wharf to create informal seating, inspired by the containers used for hauling supplies and catches off the fishing boats.

Jellicoe Street provides a more intimate environment where a series of rainwater gardens and wide pedestrian paths indicate the car is tolerated, but not prioritized. A series of cafés and restaurants align the street, punctuated by the strong fishy odor of Sanford’s fish market at the western end. The ambitious planting strategy was inspired by its history as a coastal inlet.

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its previous use storing oil and petrol. Self-seeding of the plantings in the swales has been promoted as evidence of ecological clout.

Although the revitalized waterfront quickly gained a popular following, the site experienced growing pains during the first few months of opening.

Auckland has some of the highest vehicle ownership in the world—a fact that the city is actively trying to change. The introduction of a shared waterfront environment that prioritized people over cars presented a different paradigm. “In the first month, we had vehicles landing in garden

ABOVE

There was initially a lack of community interest in the site during design consultation, though it has now become a popular destination for residents.

THINK PHOTOGRAPHY/JEFF BRASS

Turning away from the more European-modeled streetscapes that dominate Auckland, the design team took inspiration from places like Singapore (a similar Pacific subtropical environment) and incorporated a diverse palette of trees, shrubs, and ground covers planted at high densities.

Tree species—including karaka, pohutukawa, puriri, taraire, and nikau—were selected to indicate the verdant forests that once came down to Auckland’s shores. The gardens were also designed to be oversized for purposes of filtering and cleansing stormwater, necessary as the ground throughout the site is contaminated from

LEFT

Views from the Gantry provide an elevated perspective on an otherwise flat site.

BELOW

Because of site contamination issues, all surface runoff is cleansed through stormwater gardens along the street and within the wetlands at Silo Park.

THINK PHOTOGRAPHY/JEFF BRASS, TOP; SIMON DEVITT, BOTTOM

beds, poking over waterfront edges, crashing into things—not in a dangerous way, but it was an environment they weren’t used to. And I think it was a very challenging time for the client, as they try to figure out what have we got here,” Lethlean says. It took people a while to realize that to truly experience the waterfront, they needed to get out of their cars. Traffic management devices such as additional line markings and bollards provided solutions in the short term.

Six years on, it’s apparent how the careful planning and activation of Jellicoe Street, North Wharf, and Silo Park have helped spur additional development within the Wynyard Quarter. Amid the construction sites are newly finished fragments of public realm that float like jetsam in this transitioning precinct: an industrial-themed play structure, large pieces of machinery repurposed as sculpture, raised beds of a community garden, a piano tucked inside a shipping container. They are the interior pieces of a larger urban puzzle, slotted into approximate locations and inviting use while waiting to be joined at the edges.

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SIMON DEVITT

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ABOVE

Color and material palettes were informed by the industrial nature of the site.

RIGHT

Stainless steel sculptures along the waterfront promenade are inspired by the ventilation funnels and speaking tubes used on ships.

SIMON DEVITT

OPPOSITE

Adjacent to the Silo Marina, an outlet constructed from found materials provides small crafts and rowboats a place for accessing the water.

The city isn’t afraid to experiment within its public spaces. Walking through the broader precinct reveals frequent patches of fake grass, deck chairs, and shipping containers filled with movable parts in an effort to engage and appeal. These trial interventions are recorded by time-lapse cameras to test design principles and understand what works, what doesn’t, and what needs changing to become more user-friendly. Panuku, the quasipublic agency charged with developing the project, is also measuring, monitoring, and sharing data through its website, Wynyard Quarter Smart (wynyard-quarter.co.nz/wqsmart), which measures sustainability outcomes for the precinct on topics such as building performance, resource efficiency, environmental quality, and transport.

By this time next year, 600 new dwellings are expected to be finished and ready for occupants.

What’s currently a large excavated pit at the eastern end of Jellicoe Street will become a 200-room

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SIMON DEVITT

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LEFT

As part of the lighting strategy, low-level lux was used to limit light pollution on the night sky.

Hyatt hotel. The office of Auckland Tourism has taken a head lease to put some 500,000 square feet of commercial space in what will become the Wynyard Quarter Innovation Precinct.

Because it’s a working waterfront, the council is honest about the realities of the site, smelly fish and all. Residential investors are required to sign disclosure agreements, which confirm there’s no objection to any of the activities that are happening in the quarter.

Toward the end of my site visit, I passed beneath the Gantry at Silo Park into the untouched industrial area of Wynyard Wharf. The landscape here was a stark contrast to the buzz of activity along the waterfront promenade. There were few footpaths, and even fewer people. Tall chain-link fences followed property lines with signs warning of site hazards. As leases expire for the bulk liquid industries that operate here, it’s expected that the area will be empty of industrial activity by 2026.

What’s left behind will be the Wynyard Quarter’s next highly contested space for development— and the next chapter in the story of its waterfront, from the slick to the grit and beyond.

GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND FREELANCE WRITER BASED IN CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA. SHE CAN BE REACHED AT GWENETH.LEIGH@GMAIL.COM.

Project Credits LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT/URBAN DESIGNER TAYLOR CULLITY LETHLEAN, MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, AND WRAIGHT + ASSOCIATES, WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND. PROJECT MANAGEMENT MPM PROJECTS, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND. ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING DESIGNFLOW, ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA. LIGHTING ECUBED BUILDING WORKSHOP, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND. STRUCTURAL/CIVIL ENGINEERING BECA, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND.

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ECOLOGY ON AUTOPILOT

A CONVERSATION WITH BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA; ERLE ELLIS; KRISTINA HILL; AND LAURA MARTIN.

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BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA

CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEDIATE THE HUMAN MANAGEMENT OF LANDSCAPES?

HILL

LEFT TO RIGHT: MIRANDA MAUPIN; BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA; EZRA FELDMAN; MICHAEL CHIARETTA

T

CANTRELL

he Anthropocene age has delivered the Earth’s populations to a state in which humans exert the greatest impact over the condition of global climate and the environment. Among professionals in the life sciences, this reality, which leaves no place on the planet unaffected, has focused awareness on ways to control human impacts as well as ways to safeguard the integrity of nonhuman species and systems. Questions of how to achieve these ends without direct, ongoing human management were explored in a paper that appeared in the March 2017 issue of the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, “Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene.” The authors are Bradley Cantrell, ASLA, currently the director of the master of landscape architecture degree program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and soon to become chair of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia; Laura Martin, a historian of the environment and ecology at the Harvard University Center for the Environment; and Erle Ellis, a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

MARTIN

ELLIS

The paper elaborates scenarios in which autonomous or “deep learning” systems relying on forms of artificial intelligence are set in motion to create and conserve wildness in various environments. Some of these approaches to “designing wildness” are existing, such as the introduction of large mammals to Oostvaardersplassen, a nature preserve in the Netherlands, to reset the equilibrium of the food chain and thus the general ecology. Others are speculative. They all point to ways humans can achieve a type of arm’s-length influence over wild places, even if those places are close to areas of human habitation.

To explore the ideas contained in “Designing Autonomy,” we asked Kristina Hill, an associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the basic precepts of injecting deep-learning methods into landscapes to promote wildness.

Hill first sought qualifications from the authors about the importance of wildness as a goal and about how the Anthropocene is defined before proceeding to questions about the mechanics of the imagined approaches,

OPPOSITE

Wildness creator is a conceptual design for an autonomous landscape infrastructure system that creates and sustains wildness by enhancing nonhuman influences while countering all forms of human influence.

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“HOW DO YOU SEE THE ROLE OF AUTONOMY, AND WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY AUTONOMY IN DEFINING WILDNESS?” KRISTINA HILL

the respective roles of human and “machine” in this context, and the ethics and responsibility incumbent on humans in the pursuit of autonomously regenerating landscapes.

KRISTINA HILL: First, I want to look at some questions that I hope frame the conversation—about definition and purpose—and start with this idea about whether wildness, the word the article uses the most, is an important goal in the Anthropocene and the way we will live in this age.

Is wildness an important goal, and why in this age?

BRADLEY CANTRELL: There’s a relationship with natural systems biology or ecology that says wildness, not wilderness, poses another entity that is outside of human control, and we perceive it as something not necessarily under our purview. The form of wildness we’re talking about is happening outside our cognition and has its own logic, and we’re forced to confront that. That logic comes from some other relationship with another entity, such as machine intelligence or artificial intelligence.

ERLE ELLIS: Working in the Anthropocene, one of the fundamental principles is that human societies are becoming entangled in every other creature’s business. It’s hard to find a space where humans aren’t interfering. Where wildness is an important feature of the Anthropo-

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cene, the classic example is you’ve got a wildlife preserve, not a zoo, and yet, we’re controlling the breeding of the most endangered species in processes where we’re starting to domesticate them. Even when trying to leave a wild place alone, we’re still shaping nature. What if we can find a way to disentangle ourselves from other species’ lives?

It’s almost impossible to do it intentionally because we do it anyway, so having a referee that has its own playbook might be able to change that relationship. It’s imaginable that this wildness creation at some level might enable wild places to exist even where there are humans all around.

LAURA MARTIN: Many public conversations about the Anthropocene frame it as the loss of wildness at a global scale. Part of our collaborative work has been to challenge that idea—to make space for the wild in the Anthropocene. There doesn’t have to necessarily be a trade-off between wildness and human habitation of the globe. Could we design or co-curate nonhuman systems that are partly or fully self-actualizing?

HILL: I have a question about defining autonomy. How do you see the role of autonomy, and what do you mean by autonomy in defining what wildness is? This is the crux of whether autonomous machines can create wildness. How do you see HILL: The Anthropocene as a greater the role? human urbanization? Or as global ELLIS: This also is defining wilderclimate change? ness versus wildness.

ELLIS: Climate change is one of the most pervasive, because there isn’t MARTIN: There have historically been many definitions of wilderness, and any place that isn’t affected. in thinking through this project, we CANTRELL: In terms of landscape looked at different definitions of wilarchitecture, urbanism is at the derness and wildness and came to forefront for us—how we confront focus on the autonomy of the things continual urban expansion, and how themselves we are seeking to prothis interfaces with other biological mote. Wildness is defined typically systems. It’s more than just urbanism in terms of lack of control—a thing or climate change. that is not controlled or a thing that does not bear evidence of human HILL: What is the importance of influence on it. We were looking to wildness, and is the Anthropocene untangle the different attributes of defined by climate or urbanism, one wildness and think through how or the other? the questions of autonomy raised

by machine learning are akin to the to that set of algorithms and the conquestions asked about wildness and text in which it sits. wilderness.

HILL: What is it that humans would CANTRELL: I find the autonomy com- design in this environment that you ponent interesting in landscape and imagine? When you say, “design the design. We’ve had this discussion learning environment,” [you mean] about how we curate or choreograph changing proportions of species that processes and, in some situations, you’re trying to address? What are take this hands-off role. If we think we trying to design? of the technological version of that and how the technologies are form- CANTRELL: The actual processing ing, an approach that we might de- space, the computational learning sign is the learning environment for environment. Not the physical envithat machine and the management ronment. The design in that aspect of ecological systems and what that is particularly around the design of autonomy produces—the produc- the machine intelligence. tion of autonomous places, where succession would take place or we HILL: One of the commonsense would allow species to find their own questions in reading your piece is, places. In our paper, we go to the are you asking the reader to believe farther end of that and find devices that the designed machine is an exthat would let that occur. Autonomy tension of human agency, but that it plays a big role in that. The actions is not an extension of human agency are being learned through the intel- once it “learns” independently? ligence we’ve created; their actions ELLIS: I would go with a real example are autonomous themselves. of one of these deep learning systems, HILL: The learning environment the automatic translation systems, is for the machine, the processing and how they are able to produce system through which the machine behavior that humans do not undergains autonomy—not the environ- stand or control but they ask for it. ment, the ecology.

They translate German into English and translate Japanese into English.

CANTRELL: The two become inter- These systems have then been able twined. The algorithms can be gener- to translate German to Japanese. alized and the actions and reinforce- They have a system for producing ment are based on the environment behaviors that are not put in by the they’re in or the data that they’re fed. designer. They can do things the deThe management scheme is specific signer didn’t know how to do. It’s a

system that produces its own rules.

That’s the fundamental idea here; you’re producing a system where you’ve got software and hardware, and the objective is to help the other species without any clear instructions of what that is to be. The deep learning system has to figure that out. It doesn’t have programmed rules.

HILL: Like neural network processing.

ELLIS: It starts to be very difficult for humans even to understand what the machine is doing.

CANTRELL: And we’re not necessarily asking you to suspend disbelief, but even through our own human agency we end up with a series of conditions in the human environment that are outside a human understanding of the environment.

What we end up with is a disconnection between how humans would manage the environment and the way we perceive the results and the way this machine intelligence would manage the environment. It begins to be disconnected with how our logics might be systematically managed.

It is tricky and peels away from our understanding of management. It doesn’t make complete sense to us, when we see wild places—the logic of the biological and hydrological.

The human hand might not be there.

In some ways, we’re trying to make the case that the product is wild and would be perceived as wild.

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OPPOSITE

Konik ponies graze in the wetlands of the Oostvaardersplassen, a Dutch nature reserve.

MARTIN: I do agree with Kristina’s characterization. The paper asks us to think of machine intelligence as separate from human agency, as something beyond human agencies.

This is happening in all aspects of machine learning technology. Selfdriving cars make it more clear. One of the things that terrifies people about self-driving cars is the question of responsibility in case of an accident. It’s unclear whether the responsible party would be the car itself, the programmers, the company paying the programmers, the driver who is in the driver seat but not driving, or society for allowing self-driving cars to exist. Who is liable?

HILL: That’s a useful example. We have developed a body of law to think of how humans are responsible. I drink; I drive; I cause an injury.

Am I responsible for the injury? Is the bartender? The designer of the street? My parents? Who is responsible? We have a body of law that has developed to clarify that when we think of responsibility as a human property. But if we apply it to a machine, would we say that when the machine’s perception becomes different from the human’s perception of the process, that’s autonomy?

Would that be the point where it becomes the machine’s responsibility?

In some countries, responsibility is defined differently, and it could be the bartender who goes to jail. In the United States, that’s less likely. In

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defining machine responsibility, we can see the hand of the people who would have to think about autonomy thought of it, the human influence. across culture, human group to huMARTIN: One of the things Brad man group. brought to this paper is a literature CANTRELL: We talked about this on distanced authorship. This litquite a bit and where we were taking erature seems to be in dialogue with that definition from, and how that these same distinctions. How do you might very strictly lead to a Western design something that is, or appears, definition of wildness. But there is less designed? a range of other ways of defining it.

ELLIS: That was one of the coolest HILL: We also have a history of think- things theoretically that came in ing about whether some humans are from the design world. wild, while others are not. I’m not clear who humans are as a group CANTRELL: We’d be setting processes and how different they are from the in place and allowing them to take machine. Maybe we’re talking about form over time. The author’s hand is defining autonomy as “difference.” not always so apparent. It’s based on That makes me wonder whether eco- catalyzing events as opposed to forsystems managed by self-learning malizing the results. That approach devices would be “novel” in a dif- to landscape 15, 16 years ago in grad ferent way than we currently define school was really what we were all talking about, and over the past 15 novel ecosystems. years, we’ve been creating represenELLIS: Novel ecosystems are so tations of what those things could broad a definition that it could in- be but haven’t explored what the acclude everything on Earth right now, tual tools and methods are for conincluding novel conditions brought structing those kinds of landscapes. by climate change. Another term: I wouldn’t say we’re explaining how Would this be a designer ecosystem? those landscapes get built, but thinkThat distinction would be interest- ing about ideas of wildness and ecoing. The design is not to have hu- logical management and applied man interference? technologies that are coming online.

What is the outcome of that logiHILL: How would you define a de- cally? A series of landscapes, novel signer ecosystem? or not, in which there are ecological relationships we may not have seen ELLIS: A designer ecosystem is not so before, so novel ecologies, landscapes different. It’s a product in which you that are highly managed, but highly

T. W. VAN URK/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

managed to seem unmanaged. In some sense, that is what we’re doing in restoration or conservation—this technological model around conservation. We get to a very strange place.

For us, it’s a thought experiment, and extremely interesting because it lays bare the issues we have in design, these formations of these ecologies and how design might play a role in that. The active component is a series of relationships that might not have a baseline to compare to and an ecology that is not completely new, but not possible to compare to a baseline that existed in the past.

HILL: That would parallel the way [Richard] Hobbs has written about novel ecosystems as different from emergent or persistent ecosystems.

The problem has been that there is no threshold in persistence—that there’s no way to define the length of time required before it’s considered a novel ecosystem. You might be thinking of these machine-managed systems persisting according to the life span of

the machines. I don’t know whether HILL: Maybe an example would help. the machines can self-regenerate, or Let’s talk about a place. I was going to bring up the Dutch example, Oosthave a defined life and then stop. vaardersplassen. Why did that seem CANTRELL: We weren’t thinking of like a good example for the paper? an actual temporal component of the management and the machines ELLIS: We’re talking about this idea within that management. The ma- of giving other creatures autonomy to chine intelligence is always evolv- shape their lives. By bringing back a ing and growing. The machines are relatively powerful shaper of the encoming online and off-line during vironment, a megaherbivore—wild that time. And the intensity of man- horses and cattle that resemble the agement there is not necessarily in cattle that lived wild in those regions the paper, but it’s another part that before humans killed them off. By needs to be explored as a further bringing them back and letting them run wild, and letting them die off thought experiment. in the winter, you are giving back a MARTIN: By the end of the project, certain level of autonomy to the enwe realized it’s a different kind of vironment. In Oostvaardersplassen, process to think what the hardware during die-offs there are a lot of dead would look like. animals around, and people complain a lot, but this is the distanced CANTRELL: It’s one of those things authorship. You have to let that hapwe struggled with, to imagine what pen. It’s giving autonomy back. the machine is. We never really say that in the paper. It’s this mysteri- CANTRELL: There are certain speous thing that we never really see. cies that are stand-ins for a specific condition. You’re letting them run It’s foggy.

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LEFT

The COTSbot, developed by roboticists at the University of Queensland, scans for crown-ofthorns starfish and injects them with lethal bile salts.

BELOW

wild, but you’re curating that with self-driving car where you do not tell surrogates with similar behavior. it where you want it to go. It figures it out itself. It’s another level of auELLIS: You’re bringing in the animals, tonomy that we’re trying to address. introducing them, but part of the design of such a wilderness area like MARTIN: The contrast between [the Oostvaardersplassen is that you’re two sites] captures the spectrum of creating human institutions that en- actions that are already taken in resforce a hands-off approach. That’s toration, from adding things to a part of a process. That’s part of the landscape to removing things from design. The design is the creation of a landscape. Increasingly these processes are being automated, whether a social institution not to interfere. it’s the COTSbot robots that kill or CANTRELL: The other end is the remove species or drones that would COTSbot example; it is directed reseed a difficult-to-access area. The and behaving in a way that solves examples we review in the paper are an upstream issue of nutrients com- examples of semiautomatic labor ing into the Great Barrier Reef, so of introducing or removing species essentially developing a predator for from a landscape. We’re taking that a that, killing off the crown-of-thorns step further and asking: What would starfish—finding the starfish, inject- it mean to automate the decisioning it with a bile solution, and mov- making process—or to cede that ing on to the next. process to algorithms?

ELLIS: It’s the same deal with selfdriving cars. There’s not a crisp dividing line between artificial intelligence and a machine. With a self-driving car, that’s one of the higher levels of machine autonomy.

What are the levels that produce design and engineering? You just tell it where you want to go. Imagine a

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HILL: It seems like the bot in the Great Barrier Reef is an example of a transitional strategy. Their goal is to stop the nutrients from coming in. They’re trying to figure out how to use the bots to manage a process in the water temporarily, but the ultimate goal is to stop the nutrients from coming in the first place, by

acting on the land. A lot of these autonomous technologies would be transitional strategies. For example, I don’t know how long Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands is going to be around, with sea-level rise, but other Dutch areas will certainly be protected. Are these machinemanaged systems transitional strategies, or permanent?

CANTRELL: I think they’re transitional. In some ways, I’m not thinking of these methods of management as being totalizing. What is interesting is when we take a step back when there’s a COTSbot, and we are standing back and letting it take an action.

The idea is that it is transitional, keeping crown-of-thorns starfish at bay while we figure out a way to clean up the nutrient runoff, but it allows us to continue the runoff. As the COTSbot has this layer of machine learning in its interactions in the world and begins to learn what it’s

RICHARD FITZPATRICK FOR QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, TOP; GREAT BARRIER REEF MARINE PARK, INSET

Rampant overpopulation of crown-of-thorns starfish contributes to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

“THERE’S NOT A CRISP DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A MACHINE.” ERLE ELLIS

doing, it may find strategies that are outside our cognition to solve that problem. We may be able to interact; we could learn something about how that ecological system is functioning and how a more advanced version of that COTSbot might produce a more complex solution we were unaware of. The other idea is that the technologies are possibly more directed, in urban areas, toward finding ways to manage more complex ecological relationships in an urban environment. Plant material and oil might be managed in a way that might be more complex than it is today. There’s this feedback that creates a heuristic about how these ecosystems are being managed. How we give back becomes really interesting. As we begin to move in this direction where we are managing ecological systems through machine intelligence, we are setting up new relationships between ourselves and the machine intelligence.

HILL: It’s interesting to go back to your example of the way that AlphaGo allowed people to see new strategies in the game of Go that a human wouldn’t have played. So that seems like an interesting option.

How can we use a machine-learning context to gain insight about how rules play out in systems?

CANTRELL: I don’t have the answer to this, but it’s one of the more interesting aspects and where the opportunity lies in how we deploy these systems.

We’ve learned to expand the scope of management and prediction. Even if we’re overmanaging, we’ve been able to iterate and test more quickly.

In some ways, it doesn’t require us to develop the highly complex and accurate simulations that we’ve been talking about for the past 50 years.

Instead it allows us to develop a more incremental approach into how these relationships form, and each time we interact with the environment, we’re learning from it.

HILL: I’m wondering why you didn’t choose an example for your paper from North America, such as a designated wilderness area? Did you deliberately try not to think of a place people would find very familiar? Did you choose unfamiliar or underwater sites for a reason?

MARTIN: We were thinking of deextinction cases where those in charge of land management have specifically thought to prioritize the wildness of the place as defined by the autonomy of nonhuman species.

HILL: We’re talking here about the core of the 19th-century concept of what wilderness is—that wilderness is defined in part by the presence of charismatic nonhuman species. In spite of the conceptual problems of those older definitions, we’ve learned a lot from the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, for example. Wolves turned out to produce a different landscape, acting as top predators, than 20th-century humans did when they tried to manage the landscape without the wolves.

ELLIS: I argued against including deextinction of the woolly mammoth tional. These seemed like good ex- as an example of designed autonoamples at the time, but in the global my. But the more I think about it, context, it wasn’t something we had as a powerful shaper of the environa discussion about. ment, it’s very much like bringing in a wildness creator.

MARTIN: We were trying to capture examples in different places. A few CANTRELL: You were very much are happening on a prototype scale against that, Erle. in North America, including drone reseeding in California. A lot of the ELLIS: Well, I guess I was wrong. examples are not going to be familiar to readers, and they are right now HILL: This is an interesting point, thinking about wildness creators. In small-scale projects. a linguistic and conceptual sense, HILL: The Dutch example involves a humans are the original wildness clone, not a species. creators, because we designate these CANTRELL: I don’t think it was inten-

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LEFT

Relative human and nonhuman influences on ecosystem patterns and processes.

The y axis depicts increasing degrees of nonhuman biological influence, defined here as “wildness,” from sterile environments to late successional wilderness. The x axis highlights increasing intensities of human influence, from controlled burning to the development of dense cities.

BELOW

Processes of ecosystem change in relation to human and nonhuman influences.

The axes are the same as in the image at left.

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machine. Are you really interested in the spectrum of wildness creation, or the spectrum of things that are not human? Your paper defines the machine as different and autonomous from the human. Why not look at the wider range of wildness creation that includes humans, animals, and machines built by humans?

CANTRELL: I think in the paper, there’s a focus on the machine intelligence components and the advances in robotics that we believe would allow these things to happen.

The examples we’re picking, the range of them go from wild horses to the bots as wildness creators, but writing about that range was outside the scope of what we were trying to accomplish. It required real focus because of how broad things started to get. In some sense, we’re thinking of the creation of wildness as outside of human intention. And that we might be able to design a device that can create an environment

BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA

areas and create the idea that nonhu- tion and biodiversity conservation man species are wild. In that sense, movements aligned. rewilding will always be a human act.

HILL: We may disagree about ELLIS: Creation and perception— whether humans recently created you’re making them the same. Peo- the concept of wildness or whether ple have started to treat wildness as ancient humans had that concept. a valuable thing. But the notion of When an indigenous people has wildness has always been around. been confronted by a colonizer, the The interpretation is new. People indigenous people are often thought always knew about wild things. of by the colonizer as wild. But those same indigenous people may not see HILL: I’m talking about humans as the animals in their environment as having always acted as the origina- wild. Maybe wildness has something tors of concepts, as long as we have to do with control and colonization. had language and art.

ELLIS: Perhaps, but in using autonELLIS: The perception of wildness is omy here, we’re thinking of whether not the same as the effort to create it. an actor can be designed to behave independently of what you control.

MARTIN: I would agree and say that wilderness preservation, in the HILL: The idea of a wilderness creU.S. context, began with efforts to ator has a range—from breeding preserve scenic views and efforts animals, in the Dutch example, to to control where people could and building bots. I wonder why you could not live. It was not until the are defining this range of so-called 1970s that the wilderness preserva- wilderness creators to include the

LEFT

BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA

Eight recent projects employing transformative semiautonomous strategies to eliminate, counter, or mitigate human interventions in ecosystem management.

(The tables on this spread appeared in the March 2017 Trends in Ecology & Evolution.)

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“TO LET US GET OUTSIDE OF OURSELVES THAT MIGHT REQUIRE SOME OTHER MEDIATOR, WHICH COULD BE MACHINE INTELLIGENCE.” BRADLEY CANTRELL, ASLA

outside human intention is new to these forms of machine intelligence.

The lack of human intention has been a by-product of what we didn’t design, and what we’re designing now is the intelligence. We might have to remediate the environment, but we’re releasing control of that.

We’re saying the intelligence is good enough to take on these tasks. Is this what we want? That question is certainly up for debate. We’re going to move in that direction faster than we think. These machine abilities will be embedded in smaller and smaller devices. We could have autonomous bots managing agricultural systems that we can imagine right now. This does ask us to redefine what wildness is, particularly in North America, but in terms of landscape architecture, it asks us to consider the environmental stewardship we hold dear as landscape architects—as a discipline, there is a new way we are defining this. But the idea of a wildness creator, it alters our role in protecting or being environmental stewards.

HILL: In a way, you’re in the genre of science fiction, since a lot of these ideas have not yet been implemented in the way you’re envisioning. I’d like to bring up some fictional examples, such as William Gibson’s book Neuromancer. I remember a particular review by Sandy Stone, which noted that science fiction includes a repeating trope of people trying to escape an embodied condition. I

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wonder if in thinking about drones, for military or for visualizations, in ways that create an autonomy, are we expressing a desire for disembodied existence, a desire for redefining what it means to be human as we enter the Anthropocene?

other mediator, which could be machine intelligence—to get away from our own biases and allow a broader range of solutions and interactions with the world. Erle and I share the idea that to have a more complex relationship with other species may require a way of mediating that relationship. Our relationship with the environment may be more distant than in the past, through technology, simulation, or other methods.

Our understanding of that interaction with the environment has become more complex. We cannot act on that particularly well just yet, but it is important to our understanding of the world to evolve that relationship and deal with the remediation that has to come with it.

ELLIS: One of the remarkable facts is that most animals are not afraid of vehicles. So, in a vehicle, you can drive up to a wild animal and they’re not so concerned. Yet when a person gets out of the car, they’re concerned.

But they’re ambivalent about these other entities. An effort to build an interface between humans and wild species is a form of being in sympathy with them, to let them go about their lives without having to interact with us. For animals, it’s not good to have us around. They don’t benefit MARTIN: The point on remediation is interesting. I summarize the paper from having us around. as an effort to reorient the focus of CANTRELL: In some ways, when we technologists from human health, think of conservation and restoration, satisfaction, and wellness to ask how there is an underlying health and hu- technology could be used to promote man welfare component but also a the flourishing of nonhuman spelevel of guilt in those practices. In my cies. I’d agree with Kristina’s obsermind, one of the things would be a vation that changing technologies redefinition of humanity’s role on the are changing how we think of huplanet. Instead of interfacing nature man social systems and humans as in a way that is predicated on human individuals. Technological change is wants, desires, and comfort, we’re be- challenging our definitions of intelginning to think about a system that ligence and creativity and the ability makes larger-scale decisions about to design—those redefinitions are what directions these systems go and going to have real consequences in takes on many variables alongside land management in the next dehuman comfort. To let us get outside cade. I’m thinking about a number of ourselves that might require some of artists who have thought about

how machine-learning systems ence around the globe. We’re taking could write text and be authors. the stance of increasing intensity in a way that implies less intensity.

HILL: Or make paintings. There’s a Machine intelligence systems might deep-learning machine algorithm not be about acting on the land but that tries to produce paintings in the learning about it in deeper ways. style of master human painters (The How to have the kind of continual Next Rembrandt). I want to pick up expansion of the human species on on some of what you’re saying in the the Earth while having less intensive paper and try a different version of operations on the Earth. In terms of it. In Donna Haraway’s book, Stay- our current way forward, I have a ing with the Trouble: Making Kin in hard time seeing how doing less will the Chthulucene, she’s interested in get us to where we need to be. Our the politics of interspecies relation- current forms of management of ships in the age we are now entering, human-dominated landscapes don’t which she calls the Chthulucene, need more, but need a more comnamed after the old subterranean plex understanding of managing the Greek gods. She comes to the point biology, geology, and hydrology. of arguing that we should do less in many cases, rather than do more, HILL: I think it’s true that Donna Hato create separate spaces for other raway presents contradicting ideas in species. It seems the idea of bots, her writing. Interacting with other drones, etc., is a way of doing more, species is a concept that exists in monot less. What do you think of the tion, and can’t be fixed at one point in time or space. But she writes about proposal of doing less? the idea that we could try not to take ELLIS: I’d love to hear what Donna action on everything—that we could Haraway would think. She would instead act to restrain ourselves. have a take none of us would. You’re We could choose not to go certain taking the interaction to the next places, to reestablish the mystery level because you’re going beyond of our world by limiting where we anything any organism or we can do and don’t go. A restrained stratdo, to nothing that exists already. egy doesn’t require developing this You can also look at this as an effort “third thing” you’re writing about, to paint humans out of the picture. this mediating form of machine You’re actually doing less. learning.

ture that allows us to dive into questions like you’re starting to bring up.

With Donna Haraway talking about a more complex or nuanced relationship with the environment, how do we get there? Not to a more primitive space but to a more enlightened way of interfacing with the environment.

MARTIN: I read Haraway’s most recent work on the Anthropocene and Chthulucene as a call for refuge that doesn’t lean on resiliency. We need areas of undetermined potential.

Conservation that doesn’t depend on the idea of keeping humans out, a complication of the distinction between technical and natural.

HILL: The question of how do we learn, along the continuum of the machine and the body, is important to us in being able to make a distinction about who we are. I don’t think the ideas of “purity” and “progress” have to be part of the approach; they can be counterproductive. Haraway is a touchstone for me because she doesn’t use those concepts much.

CANTRELL: In terms of our idea of defining wildness, there is some definition we’re aiming for, although the path there might be outside of our kind of understanding. I don’t think it is ever part of our intent, that pure wildness is the only desired result.

CANTRELL: In order to do less, we CANTRELL: My goal with the project have to find whole new ways of de- is not advocating that this is what we ELLIS: I agree. If you can name and creasing the intensity of our influ- need to do. It’s about painting a pic- produce the wildness yourself, then

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TYLER MOHR AND ANDREW BOYD

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RIGHT

A recent exhibition at the Harvard Graduate School of Design shows methodologies for developing relationships between autonomous infrastructures and land formation.

Exhibit design by Bradley Cantrell, ASLA, and Jeremy Hartley.

OPPOSITE

Research by Tyler Mohr and Andrew Boyd examining land formation as an indeterminate process in fluvial landscapes. The illustrations depict landform within a range of probability and directly relate the forms to the operations of physical infrastructure.

it’s not what we’re shooting for. It has to be something that is not just classic restoration, an image of what nature should be, and you just make it. A project like this has to have some of that in it, but the intention is to make not something that we know but something that we don’t know. It’s not about what we desire.

CANTRELL: It’s obviously a product of humanity but an extension of our mean to design a system that is free slow understanding of our relationof human influence. In that way we ship with the environment. are not using the language of “collaboration” with technology. Our HILL: It does raise the question of purpose is not to advocate that ap- whether this is a “should”—should proach as a way forward for land- we try to introduce autonomous mascape management but to open up chines or breed ancient animals? technical and philosophical ques- It’s kind of a prosthesis for human tions about what that approach experience. Are we talking about it would look like—questions about as a kind of “progress”? Or would design and landscape management. we do it just because we can? And is it something we should do?

ELLIS: It’s not just philosophical.

It’s a design and concept. I’d like to CANTRELL: My take is that it’s a see some experiments. It’s far from should with caution. For me, these anything we can apply. It’s an ex- forays into machine intelligence are perimental idea. It might never be a an extension of human agency but also an extension of the human brain good idea in reality. and the collaboration with our own HILL: I have been interested in how ability to think, perceive, and underfolklore affects the way people inter- stand the world. The fact that they’re act with the landscape. In folklore all autonomous physical managesuch as traditional Irish fairy stories, ment devices is one aspect. How we fairies are human-sized but have dif- would deploy them would be another ferent powers and live in different question. Like methods of modeling, ways. This kind of folklore introduc- it’s a form of representation of the es an anthropomorphic character world through this other intelligence, MARTIN: We do ask what would it

KEITH SCOTT

that acts as a mediator, something humans learn from through interactions over time. In a sense, the autonomous machine represents an independent character as well, a mediator that allows us to see the world differently and see ourselves differently.

and how we begin to interact with that becomes an important step in our understanding of the world.

MARTIN: I’m not convinced that we should embark on creating a prototype of the wildness creator. But should we call for interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and design and landscape management? Absolutely. There are many things to be critical of in landscape management right now, and it’s an ever-changing and everdynamic landscape. Recent calls to set aside large areas for protection of other species purposefully elide political and social questions, questions of power that we cannot run away from. We cannot save other species and ecological processes by setting humans and technologies apart from everything else. Given the science of global climate change, it’s a fiction to think that untouched areas exist right now, never mind into the future.

HILL: As you were talking, I was thinking about genetic modification.

We have experimented with it. Once it begins, it creates a new social and political landscape and may quickly alter our sense of what’s good. But instead of modifying the gene, we’re talking about modifying the landscape through the agency of machines and organisms we initiate but don’t control.

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ATLANTA’S BELTLINE, PICKING UP SPEED, DEMONSTRATES THE MANY POSSIBILITIES AND A FUNDAMENTAL RISK OF CATALYST INFRASTRUCTURE.

BY JONATHAN LERNER

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A THOUSAND MOVING PARTS JEFF KEESEE

A

figure eight on its side is the symbol for infinity. A simple loop isn’t usually freighted with such meaning but is similarly endless.

The loop called an ouroboros also represents the infinite—though ominously; it’s a snake eating its own tail. Atlanta’s BeltLine is a loop, 22 miles of old rail corridor encircling the city center and touching 45 neighborhoods. In what has been called the country’s biggest urban infrastructure undertaking, its reinvention has inspired endless visions of possibility.

The project’s intentions, surprisingly various, are not infinite, but there sure are a lot of them. Simple the BeltLine is not—nor is it free of danger. ↘

OPPOSITE

Atlantans thronged to the first section of BeltLine trail.

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ABI REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM ATLANTA BELTLINE, INC.

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TAX ALLOCATION DISTRICT

ATLANTA BELTLINE STUDY AREA

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ABOVE

Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. worked with the nonprofit Trees Atlanta to develop a concept for the BeltLine as a linear arboretum.

OPPOSITE

The mostly disused rail corridor is flanked by abandoned industrial properties.

a park, but it also incorporates renovations of existing parks and the creation of new ones. It is green infrastructure for stormwater management and landscape connectivity. It is a stimulus for urban farming, an arboretum, an arts and events venue, and a focus for public health initiatives.

When a second major section of the trail opens this summer, while the transit and many other pieces remain in planning, the BeltLine won’t be one third complete. But its first sizable segment is already hugely popular. It has incubated fashionable places to eat and shop and become a magnet for urbane aspirations. The BeltLine is meant to revitalize dead industrial spaces and left-out communities with new businesses, construction, and employment. It incorporates jobs training,

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homeownership support, and affordable housing. At the same time, the BeltLine is spurring gentrification and displacement, which is its biggest challenge.

Before everything else, the BeltLine was a vision for a transitand park-poor city segregated by race and class. That idea is the belief, or the hope, that long-standing barriers can be bridged—not least the fenced-off, kudzu-choked railways that slash through the city fabric, a linear dumping ground for old refrigerators and homeless people. The BeltLine exemplifies the notion that infrastructure done right can remake a place and heal its culture. It is an inspiration and a model. It is also a ginormous public works project. So it isn’t perfect.

It was first proposed, conceptually, as a thesis by Ryan Gravel, who in 1999 was earning a master’s degree in architecture and planning at Georgia Tech. The idea was simple: Take these

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→ The BeltLine is a trail and a transit system. It’s

CONTINUOUS CANOPY REFORESTATION STRATEGY

VARIED CHARACTER “ROOMS” AND DESTINATIONS

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mostly disused freight lines, fill in the few gaps, and reactivate them with a light rail loop. This would stimulate circulation, interaction, infill, and the return of population to the old “intown” neighborhoods. Later, Gravel and a few supporters expanded the concept to include a trail on the corridor, and this scenario—a transit line and a trail—appealed to people. Not that its embrace was automatic; the early boosters spent several years taking it to the neighborhoods. The BeltLine became a real project because people got it and then insisted on it.

Ellen Dunham-Jones, who has taught at Georgia Tech since 2001 and directs its urban studies program, says, “The city wasn’t producing anything of joy. Here was something that neighborhoods could see as an asset. The fact that it’s a loop, and not just a line, is so important, literally binding neighborhoods together.” By 2004, feasibility studies were under way. In 2005, the early grassroots effort was folded into the

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EASTSIDE TRAIL

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Perkins+Will worked on the corridor design, seen here with the Eastside Trail in the foreground.

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Slicing across Atlanta’s rolling piedmont terrain, the BeltLine opens vistas previously unavailable.

new city-sponsored Atlanta BeltLine Partnership, which was charged with raising private-sector support and public engagement. A BeltLine-focused redevelopment plan and a tax allocation (or taxincrement financing) district to pay for it were both approved. In 2006, the nonprofit Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. (ABI) was established to build it.

in his book Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities, Gravel used the project as a touchstone in arguing for “catalyst infrastructure.” That usually describes projects meant to have economic impacts. Gravel means that but more. He argues that transforming the culture and life of a place should be a major project’s explicit purpose.

“When we’re working on infrastructure, it’s easy to forget that the physical design of our waterfront, transit line, or sewer is not our only objective. Our primary goal is more basic—to create opportunities for people to lead the kind of lives that they want.”

The array of programs and related projects the BeltLine has come to encompass was implicit, if not detailed, in Gravel’s original thesis. It’s less that the scope has expanded than that the potentials have been abundantly expressed. Last year,

In many ways the BeltLine is already prompting the sort of shifts Gravel hoped for. Dunham-Jones lives a few blocks from a completed section of trail, which she can follow practically to the door of Trader Joe’s a mile and a half away. On weekends there are “crowds and crowds of people,” she said on a recent

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Friday. “I’m going to go get my groceries today, because if I try to ride my bike there on the weekend, all these people are giving me dirty looks.” Many people, apparently, are unfamiliar with the etiquette of a shared-use path. “But no one anticipated how beloved it would be, to be able to walk without stopping for cars.”

She referenced Hannah Arendt’s idea of public space as where a society appears to itself. “This constant Easter parade—it’s a phenomenal place for Atlantans to see each other.” That is powerful for a city where seeing each other has not been valued or easy, given populations separated by economics and ethnicity, and a sprawling urban form where even intown neighborhoods mostly comprise single-family houses, and daily life is overwhelmingly dependent on cars; appearing to one another through the windshield was not what Arendt meant.

Generally speaking, the neighborhoods along the west and south of the BeltLine are African American, ranging from middle class to low-income. The first bit of trail opened there in 2008, but it’s an anomaly: half a mile of wide sidewalk and some landscape work along White Street, which is broad and lined on one side by tidy bungalows and on the other by vacant warehouses. (The rail corridor, behind those, is too narrow there to accommodate both people and transit.) The first piece within the corridor—perceptually, the first real piece, the one Dunham-Jones frequents—opened in 2012 on the whiter, more affluent Eastside. It links the 189-acre Piedmont Park, which was recently resuscitated, with several formerly shabby neighborhoods that were, however, already experiencing redevelopment. A decade after the BeltLine was proposed,

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PONCE CITY MARKET

when it seemed necessary to “create proof of the promise,” says Paul Morris, FASLA, now ABI’s president and CEO, the Eastside was targeted.

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Before, the disused rail corridor gathered refuse and danger.

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After, the success of the Eastside Trail challenged autooriented Atlantans to learn the etiquette of a shared trail.

The resulting synergies have been stunning. Next to the Eastside corridor, Historic Fourth Ward Park was created on 17 acres of waste ground. Its lake, depressed between sinuous granite walls, is actually a stormwater detention basin, which saved the city $15 million on a proposed tunnel. Ending the threat of recurrent floods facilitated the adaptive reuse of an enormous adjacent former Sears, Roebuck distribution center for apartments, offices, a food hall, and shops, connected to the BeltLine by a footbridge. It’s hot: Office rents there broke

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Infrared sensors counted 1.7 million visitors on the Eastside Trail last year. People don’t come just to eat, or to walk a route that’s unimpeded (except sometimes by other walkers and cyclists), or for the exercise classes and art installations. They also come because the rail corridor, essentially level as it slices across Atlanta’s piedmont terrain, offers a new and enchanting experience of both the city and the landscape: intimate passages through cuts and beneath trestles opening to long prospects of skyline and topography never before available.

People also come to understand what the BeltLine is, via bus tours of the entire project area, bike tours of the trail and adjacent neighborhoods, and horticulture walking tours—about 100, last year alone—because the BeltLine is being planted and managed as an arboretum by Trees Atlanta, a nonprofit that has been working to enhance the city’s urban forest since 1985. One sunny morning this spring, four people showed up for the arboretum tour: a retired couple from suburban Stone Mountain, which was a white-flight destination half a century

COURTESY TREES ATLANTA

the city’s $50-per-square-foot ceiling; West Elm and Williams-Sonoma are retail anchors. The new park is now surrounded by new apartment developments. Atlanta’s first skatepark was built just down the trail, and similar mixed-use infill—including another food hall a mile away—has occurred along it.

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HISTORIC FOURTH WARD PARK

ago, who had visited the BeltLine previously with their grandchildren; a South Asian immigrant from a distant suburb who was moving away and felt she had to see the BeltLine before she left; and a visitor from Japan who took notes.

The arboretum’s planting concept groups native varieties into five collections meant to reflect the nature and history of the different parts of the city. A big element, representing the historic railroad edge, is an “evolving meadow regime” that can help restore the soil, Morris says, “which made sense from a designer’s and expert’s mind-set but was a little bit sketchy for the public.” To many people, for now, the arboretum just looks like saplings and weeds. Greg Levine, Trees Atlanta’s coexecutive director, says, “So much is going on in the corridor, and being built, that it’s constantly getting scars, whether it be somebody trying to create an access path, or digging for fiber optics or a new development.” The original concept was more complex, with 14 “natural neighborhoods,” but “working with two major groups, ABI and the parks department,”

Levine says, “there’s more compromise than a botanical garden or arboretum would be making on its own.” Despite such frustrations, “the BeltLine has given us a very visible presence, on the most popular project in the city,” he says.

The number of volunteers for Trees Atlanta has nearly doubled in recent years; it now has five staff people running an education program “which didn’t exist before the Eastside Trail was being built.”

That is hardly the only positive ramification for the greater city. Dunham-Jones points to Peachtree Corners, a master-planned 1970s suburb without a center where infill “millennial housing” is being built on an original office park campus and a trail network is being established throughout the community. “Also, there’s a bunch of food halls being proposed out in the ’burbs,”

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In what had been a sparsely inhabited, moribund industrial area, the new park is now flanked by dense residential projects.

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The lake, functioning as a stormwater detention basin, allowed redevelopment of the flood-prone district.

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LANDFORMS AND STORMWATER CAPACITY

she says. “I see this pattern in a lot of cities. Something is able to revitalize intown, and then the suburbs start picking it up.” Atlanta itself, intown at least, has become noticeably kinder to bikes and pedestrians, with many recently installed bike racks and sharrow-marked lanes, new crossing signals, and midstreet safety islands. Although those are not elements of the BeltLine, increasing consciousness and provisions for noncar mobility have surely been fostered by it.

But to some people, the Eastside’s success provoked “anxiety around ‘Here we go again’—the city always favoring some quarters,” says Morris, “largely around race and income.” The BeltLine had committed to generating 30,000 permanent jobs and 5,600 affordable housing units by the end of its 25-year project life. “There had not been a lot of work done on those things, some as a result of the economy, some an unintended disproportionate emphasis on infrastructure elements, especially trails and parks, but not necessarily where everybody wanted them.” ABI underwent what Atlantans sometimes call a “come to Jesus,” and resolved henceforth “to be working in all parts of the BeltLine, in some form, at the same time.” Those forms might be property acquisition,

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EMBANKMENTS

or planning and design, or construction of sections of trail, along with attention to the project’s obligations in other realms such as economic and social development.

An extension of the Eastside Trail is going in now. More significantly, 2.5 miles of the Westside Trail, in the rail corridor, will open this summer. It is being built more completely, at more than twice the cost per mile, of that first Eastside piece. It has LED lighting every 90 feet, security cameras, and many fully articulated connections to nearby streets and neighborhoods; on the Eastside, to economize, lighting and cameras were forgone, and connections were less frequent. Other factors also added cost: bioswales and retention ponds, necessitated by tightened stormwater regulations; more retaining walls, given steeper terrain; and preparation for light rail, including relocation of underground fiber optic cables belonging to telecoms grandfathered in the right-of-way. The median income in this area is about $25,000 for a family of four. Many families don’t have cars. The trail touches a shopping center with the only supermarket for miles around. “Being able to ride a bike or walk the trail to go buy food is a big deal,” says Kevin Burke, ASLA, ABI’s senior landscape architect. More connectivity: The new segment’s northern terminus is a park with tennis courts, ball fields, a pool, and a junction with another paved trail that leads west through residential neighborhoods; a street connection a quarter-mile south places walkers one block from a branch library and two blocks from a public high school.

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GREEN EMBANKMENTS/SOFT WALLS

FLAT RIGHT OF WAY

SUNKEN CORRIDORS

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FUTURE

The fast, fabulous growth spurt that was accurately anticipated for the Eastside is unlikely to be replicated on the Westside soon. But more than a trail segment is coming. ABI owns a 17-acre parcel on the corridor there; economic analysis is under way to inform its mixed-use redevelopment. With $500,000 from Kaiser Permanente, the BeltLine Partnership is now evaluating proposals for grants to Westside nonprofits for projects using the trail to promote and increase physical activity. There are new enterprises moving into those empty warehouses along White Street that should energize the public realm and provide a few jobs: a pickle factory, a cheese maker, a bike-share depot, a gelato shop, and a brewery and tasting room. To the surprise of many—given the gentrifying-hipster whiff of craft beer—the brewery proposal received a wild ovation at a neighborhood meeting. And the first of several possible urban farms on

ABI properties is in its third year. This summer it launched a community-supported agriculture program and a retail stand at a trail crossing that both drivers and walkers can easily reach.

To create the farm, ABI remediated and graded a 3.8-acre brownfield site, dug stormwater ponds and a well, and gave a cheap lease to farmers Andy Friedberg and Andrea Ness, who both moved to the neighborhood. Their challenges include poor soil quality, little capital, limited continuing support from ABI, and finding themselves greeted as white newcomers “right in the middle of this social-political thing,” says Friedberg, “trying to figure out how to navigate it and

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Variations in topography will require a range of relationships between trail and transit.

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The Westside Trail at Holderness Street is envisioned to include transit.

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WESTSIDE TRAIL

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less. A Georgia Tech master’s student in city and regional planning, Matthew Bedsole, estimated that between 2008 and 2016, about 2,000 apartments within a half mile of the BeltLine disappeared from the market in one- to three-story buildings, a typology generally correlating with affordability. Some may have been replaced; some may not have been affordable. Still, ABI’s promise must be reckoned against this context of an increased housing deficit.

respect the old community.” Since they’ve been there, they’ve seen nearby house prices more than double. “The urban farm is a selling point for people who are moving in, the gentrifiers.

‘Walk to the farm stand!’” Ness says. “When you undertake endeavors that will fundamentally change the city, you can’t pretend you’re not responsible for that kind of stuff.”

The BeltLine never pretended that. Of money raised by the tax allocation district, 15 percent is earmarked for affordable housing. Alas, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, between 2010 and 2014 alone, the city as a whole lost more than 5,300 units renting for $749 or

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Booming real estate and displacement of longtime residents are economic forces hardly limited to Atlanta or the BeltLine’s redevelopment area. Rob Brawner, the executive director of the BeltLine Partnership, says that ABI’s 5,600-unit commitment isn’t enough to solve the whole housing problem. But “that was groundbreaking, that a project would even contemplate having any accountability for affordable housing,” he says. “It’s the responsibility of a city, if it’s going to make billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure, to, in parallel, put in place policies and resources and programs to ensure that those investments accrue benefit to the full range of incomes.”

Statements like this are forthcoming now, it seems, from everybody working on the BeltLine; this year’s first ABI quarterly public meeting departed from its usual progressupdate format to include a panel discussion on the housing

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Neighborhood connectivity at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive was challenging.

A new pedestrian bridge with accommodations for future transit is a significant upgrade.

JUNE 2014

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FUTURE

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Multifamily infill, like that envisioned at the Donnelly Avenue section of the trail, was prompted by the opening of the Eastside Trail.

problem. If this represents a redoubling of commitment, it may have been sparked by the resignations last September from the partnership board of Nathaniel Smith, founder of the nonprofit Partnership for Southern Equity, and Ryan Gravel.

They wrote a joint letter asserting that the project had “lost a conduit for the grassroots, sometimes rabble-rousing voice of the people who had given it life in the first place,” and expressing the fear that it could worsen rather than help resolve inequality. Smith points out that during the recession it would have been possible to acquire property next to the corridor for housing at very good values. He suggests that the project’s priorities have been misaligned, and that mission creep is a factor. “I would never go so far as to say that it was done on purpose. But I would say that it’s difficult for everyday people to have a chance to put their arms around what the BeltLine is doing to the city when you have so many things associated

with it, and not a focus on how you measure success,” he says. “It shouldn’t be about whether you had a lantern parade or how many yoga classes.

Folks can get caught up in the marketing aspects and not necessarily the substantive aspects, or at least the things that many of the community stakeholders are concerned about.”

Shawn Walton was studying childhood development at Morehouse College when he formed the nonprofit WeCycle Atlanta, on the Westside.

Its mission has broadened from teaching bike riding, renting bikes, and building bicycle culture to include promotion of health, nutrition, and general awareness of the urban potential represented by the BeltLine. Recent posts on its

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review proposals for those Kaiser-funded health grants. But he criticizes the BeltLine not only as having “completely failed” in addressing affordable housing, but also as “archaic,” “checkbox,” and “formulaic when it comes to community outreach.”

He says, “The requirements for applying for programming funding are complicated and sometimes difficult for a grassroots group without capacity.” Still, “Even with my displeasure about how the BeltLine is going about things, I’m trying to stay very close in the process, to aid and to guide and be a voice.”

Given the glowing promise, people can have trouble grasping the hurdles and frustrations a massive initiative like this involves. Take land acquisition: Though most of the BeltLine

THE SINTOSES REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM ATLANTA BELTLINE, INC. .”

website, for example, announced that the state’s Department of Transportation had adopted a Complete Streets policy, and offered how-to advice for “converting to life without a car.” (Tip: “Cute flats.... This lifestyle change has certainly made me have to change up my wardrobe.”)

WeCycle even has a program called Youth in the Yard that provides lawn-care services. “These new neighbors who are investing in the area because of the BeltLine have given the opportunity for these youth to be employed,” Walton says. “I will use every resource that comes our way.” He is one of the people the partnership has asked to

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There are still miles to go before the BeltLine’s target completion date of 2030.

loop existed, most was owned by railroads. Acquiring it has not been easy. Early on, for example, a farsighted developer (or perhaps better put, speculator) purchased property including a 4.6-mile northeast segment of the corridor, bordering two of the most affluent intown neighborhoods, from Norfolk Southern Railway for $24.5 million. He offered to donate some for parkland in exchange for the right to build 3,000 homes, most in high-rise towers—precisely the kind of infill those neighbors wouldn’t tolerate.

Much shouting and three years later, he resold the property to ABI—for $66 million. Then there is funding: A lawsuit by antitax activists, filed in 2008, plus various bureaucratic quirks in how revenue from the tax allocation district would flow to the project, delayed those payments for several years; prerecession income estimates proved unrealistically high, too. Then a 2012 referendum in the 10-county metro area, to add 1 percent to sales tax for transportation including BeltLine transit, was defeated. Last year—fully a decade after the creation of ABI—a sales-tax-increase referendum, this time presented only to the more transit-friendly voters of Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, passed. Finally, money for the light rail seems secured, and ABI is moving to phase it in.

ridor, but also five other on-street routes—in all, a 53-mile streetcar network. From a connectivity standpoint this seems sensible. But it certainly adds to ABI’s to-do list. And then, what mode?

Fifteen years ago, the transit of the future seemed to be light rail, instead of heavy rail networks like the one built in Atlanta in the 1980s. ABI remains committed to light rail, but others—including the city’s planning commissioner Tim Keane— contend that bus rapid transit in dedicated lanes on city streets would be cheaper and more functional. Besides, technology evolves. “It’s crazy to make it streetcar,” says Dunham-Jones, who admits “the jury’s still out” but sees the transit future in autonomous vehicles, citing one prototype, the 12-passenger self-driving Olli, already being tried in several cities. She points out that the biggest share of the cost of operating transit is the driver.

“Get rid of that, you can buy more smaller shuttles and run them more frequently.”

But over that same decade, the transit plan has broadened enormously. ABI is now charged by the city with developing not only bidirectional light rail within the 22-mile rail cor-

JONATHAN LERNER’S MEMOIR OF THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, SWORDS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN, HAS BEEN PUBLISHED BY OR BOOKS.

Transit is one of the BeltLine’s many uncertainties. Can the entire corridor even be acquired, and all the ancillary projects completed, by the target date of 2030? And as this marvelous thing makes central Atlanta a desirable place to live, will only the affluent be able to choose living there? “We have an opportunity still,” Shawn Walton insists, “to come up with a solution to some of these problems that are an ill not just for Atlanta but for the entire nation.”

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THE BACK

YOUR GLACIAL EXPECTATIONS

ANNABEL ELSTON

By Olafur Eliasson and Günther Vogt, with a literary contribution by Josefine Klougart; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017; 174 pages, $95.

Some 500,000 years ago glaciers scraped and shaped the landscape that now surrounds the Kvadrat textile company’s headquarters in Ebelto , Denmark. In 2012, in a collaboration between the landscape architect Günther Vogt and the artist Olafur Eliasson, an installation called Your Glacial Expectations was created

at Kvadrat to recall that past. This new book shows the process behind the sprawling work, including the groves of trees that dot the project, the waving grass (mowed only every two years), and the five large elliptical mirrors embedded around the grounds to mimic ponds of glacial melt as they reflect the sky.

CAN WE GET TO

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE CAN MITIGATE CARBON EMISSIONS, BUT IT IS ALSO IMPLICATED AMONG THE CAUSES.

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BY STEVE AUSTIN, ASLA

he Paris Agreement on climate change, created by the consensus of 197 nations, went into effect in November 2016 and has enormous implications for the practice of landscape architecture. If adhered to by its signatories, the agreement signals the end of the fossil fuel era by midcentury, well within the life spans of many landscape architects currently practicing. Though it may seem wonderfully “green,” this energy transition poses profound questions for the practice of landscape architecture at a time when the discipline is needed more than ever.

The Paris Agreement foretells a civilization powered nearly exclusively by renewably generated electricity, not fossil-fueled fire, like today. This will impose severe limits on landscape architecture’s materials, construction methods, and professional mobility. The agreement also portends a society with much less energy overall,

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as fossil fuels currently make up more than 80 percent of total energy consumed and cannot be easily replaced. These stark realities will challenge landscape architects to adapt to the impending zero-carbon future.

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ast year set the record for the hottest year in measured history, breaking 2015’s record, which itself broke 2014’s. The earth is rapidly warming owing to the use of fossil fuels, which spew huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Annual global mean surface temperatures are already close to 1 degree Celsius higher than preindustrial levels. Ominously, average temperatures in some months of 2016 were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. This means the planet is now approaching the upper range of temperatures that have existed for the past 10,000 years. That stable climatic period, the Holocene, coincides with the development of human civilization. If humans continue to heat the planet, civilization will be moved outside of its known safe operating space.

RO? To avoid this scenario, the Paris Agreement seeks to hold global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—and to pursue efforts toward a more ambitious limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Alas, the climate is already near that threshold. If anthropogenic warming continues at this rate, the global temperature could increase by as much as 4 degrees Celsius within this century. This would result in a climate that has not existed on earth for millions of years, far longer than the 200,000 or so years that modern humans have been around.

A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the last time the earth was that warm, about 125,000 years ago, sea levels were 15 to 30 feet higher than today.

That amount of sea-level rise now would lead to a radical reshaping of the earth’s coastlines, affecting hundreds of millions of people and all of the global economy, over a ridiculously short time frame. With an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, global farming would also be dramatically affected by either too much or too little water and destructive storms.

millions, perhaps billions, of people, potentially leading to severe and perpetual conflicts.

It must not get to that point. The Paris Agreement plots a path to ensure that it doesn’t. As a first step, the world economy must cease annual increases of CO2 pollution. This has occurred over each of the past three years, possibly attributable to energy efficiencies, increases in renewable energy, and the retirement of many coal-fired power plants.

The next step, however, is more difficult: getting annual CO2 production to near zero within the next 30 years. This is the largest challenge, because the industrial economy measures growth by increasing, not decreasing, CO2 emissions every year. The final step will require simultaneously offsetting all small but unavoidable CO2 emissions to achieve a net balance of zero carbon emissions. Doing all this, right now, will result in a two-thirds chance of limiting temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Those are humanity’s best odds.

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ow will our enormous civilization and economies be powered, if not with fossil fuels?

The answer: renewably generated electricity. This The incredible impacts associated with this heat- has two implications for landscape architecture. ing would likely disrupt the lives of hundreds of First, within our lifetimes, there will likely be

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ZE significantly less energy to use than today. And it means the end of most carbon-fueled fire, upon which much of current landscape architecture practice depends. These implications will fundamentally change landscape architecture.

Unsurprisingly, there are no real-world simulations as to how this will be possible. Still, the need to quit fossil fuels is growing every year.

Therefore and soon, while fossil fuels are being phased out, there may not be any near-term—and possibly not even long-term—replacement of A world without fossil fuels will be an all-electric that lost energy. one. Renewable energy technologies, such as solar panels and windmills, produce electricity. For- Renewably powered energy has some known limits. tunately, much of the world is already wired for Intermittency is obvious: The sun doesn’t always electricity. However, it is a mistake to assume that shine nor does the wind always blow. That leads all that is needed is to swap fossil fuel-powered to the second limit: storage. There are currently no energy generators with renewable ones. It is not industrial-scale technologies that can store large a matter of simply unplugging dirty energy and amounts of renewable energy. The third limit replacing it with “green” renewables. springs from the first two. The existing electric grid is a centralized system, sending out energy as it The first problem confronting us is the sheer is needed to where it is needed, whereas renewable scale of the energy that needs to be replaced. To- energy sources are scattered and intermittent. All day, only about 10 percent of the United States’s this indicates that meeting current energy demand energy comes from renewables. Nuclear power with renewables will require extensive, and expenprovides about 9 percent of the energy in the sive, system redesign.

United States, but this means that 80 percent of our energy is derived from fossil fuels. This is the Other issues remain unresolved. To generate scale of the problem: transforming renewables anything near current energy consumption, an from 10 percent of our energy use to at least 90 all-renewable future will require enormous spatial percent. This is a staggering task, yet one that footprints of solar and wind factories. Although will need to be done within 30 years to meet the the switch to renewables may be ultimately posiagreement’s goals. tive, there will likely be serious economic, envi-

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RO ronmental, and social ramifications with these primary machines, transportation, and much fixtures sprawling across the earth and seas. manufacturing. Renewable energy is not fire and cannot be used like fire.

Then again, visions of large-scale renewable energy factories may be a mirage. There is no proof For landscape architecture, the end of fossil-fueled that the mining, transport, and transformation of fire is critical to materials and construction methraw materials into renewable energy collectors, ods. Many of the primary building materials used nor their installation, can be done without fossil by landscape architects require high temperatures fuel inputs. It is not idle speculation to ponder that are primarily made with fossil fuels and that if an industrial-sized windmill can be used to do not have a ready renewable energy substitute. generate all the energy needed to make another Producing cement and steel requires extremely industrial-sized windmill from scratch. high temperatures presently achieved by the direct burning of fossil fuels. There have been experiSo, while it is not possible to estimate exactly how ments in developing methods to use electricity to much energy will be available in an all-renewable create the needed temperatures, but there is no future, it will likely be significantly less than we guarantee that there will be significant amounts have been accustomed to. Limited energy avail- of electrically made cement and steel in the future. ability, and the resulting high cost, will pose ethical questions for landscape architecture prac- Additionally, there is no way to eliminate the release titioners: For what projects, and for whose benefit, of large amounts of carbon dioxide that occur simshall we use that limited energy? ply as a by-product of the production of cement, steel, and plastic. In the zero-carbon future, all the Energy limits are one side of the transition. The carbon released from such industrial processes other side reveals the energy substitution chal- must be directly offset through sequestration in lenges landscape architects face. Renewable en- plants and soil. This may be minimal, given the ergy simply cannot do all of the things that fossil imperative to restore a stable climate by drawing fuels can. Right now, carbon-based fire is at the excess carbon from the atmosphere, not simply by core of the economy, powering most of society’s attempting to balance current emissions.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017 / 141

ZE The ultimate result is that, in our all-electric future, there will likely be much less of the building materials we use now. This raises other ethical questions for landscape architects: For whom and to what purpose should these limited materials be used?

An all-electric future also directly affects current construction methods. Carbon-fueled machines are taken for granted on most projects. Without fossil fuels, heavy machinery must be powered with either electricity or some combustible substance such as biodiesel. It is not feasible to electrify these machines using a fixed electric grid; imagine an excavator or backhoe connected to an overhead power line or even a power cord. Also, it appears that switching heavy machines to electric battery power is not possible given the physics of batteries. Alternative fuels such as biodiesel will likely be limited as well. Scaling up biofuels to come anywhere near the 35 billion barrels of oil a year the global economy currently consumes could negatively affect food production as energy crops are substituted for food crops.

Future travel of significant distance will also be at the mercy of electrical grids and even the wind.

Trains and sailing ships will likely have a future, while airplanes and long-haul trucks might not.

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This will determine material choices and supply chains, but also the ability to serve clients. The travel radius imposed by the zero-carbon reality may be considerably smaller than today.

Landscape architects might wonder if these stark implications are just “fake news.” Unfortunately, climate change is not a hoax, and neither are the limits of an all-renewables-based economy. There appear to be no solutions to our predicament if we continue to burn fossil fuels. Current carbon emissions cannot be mitigated through massive tree planting. To do so would take tree planting over an area larger than the state of California just to offset one year’s global carbon emissions.

We will run out of planet on which to plant trees, let alone food, before we run out of fossil fuels.

While both reforestation and afforestation, in appropriate landscapes, are vital responses to global warming, their primary value is in drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, not masking massive emissions.

The various rating systems, known by their acronyms, are not a complete answer at this point.

These systems rely on carbon efficiency as one measure of compliance in supposedly “green” projects. Carbon efficiency is important in the

RO short term, but it is not the same as zero carbon, which means all carbon emissions on every project are directly balanced by documented sequestration in plants and soils.

Finally, there is a persistent belief that there are technological solutions to our predicament. But technology is not energy. Technology simply allows society to exploit energy in ways deemed beneficial. Ultimately, there appears to be no realistic technology that will allow society to keep burning fossil fuels without unimaginable consequences.

O

ur society is in the early stages of an epochal transition. The shapes and limits of the near future are becoming clear owing to the needed and urgent responses to climate change.

However, even if nothing meaningful is done in response to climate change, humanity still faces the realities of resource depletion and ecosystem destruction. Addressing these crises is equally as vital as addressing climate change. For even in climate denial, those issues will remain, and then the climate will have been heated, perhaps intolerably. There is no escaping what Robert Louis Stevenson once termed the “banquet of consequences.”

Ultimately, the Paris Agreement’s imperative to end the fossil fuel era presents several fundamental questions for practitioners and teachers of landscape architecture, the answers to which may determine the fate of the profession. Some of these questions are: What is the essence of landscape architecture? Who benefits from landscape architecture? How is the work of landscape architecture done? How do the products of landscape architecture evolve? The longer it takes to address these questions, the more difficult it will be to adapt to the zero-carbon reality.

The world needs landscape architects more than ever, to help society adapt to climate change, to assist efficient and artful carbon drawdown, to restore ecosystems, and to improve quality of life for people. Yet, many of the tools and processes now considered essential to those tasks soon won’t be available because of carbon limits. Landscape architects must learn instead to work within the parameters of the zero-carbon future. In doing so, they will gain the practical experience and, more important, the moral authority to be the leaders of the climate-saving energy transition.

STEVE AUSTIN, ASLA, TEACHES LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, URBAN PLANNING, AND CONSTRUCTION LAW AT WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017 / 143

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BOOKS GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE THE RULE OF LOGISTICS: WALMART AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF FULFILLMENT

BY JESSE LECAVALIER; MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2016; 296 PAGES, $30.

LEARNING FROM LOGISTICS: HOW NETWORKS CHANGE OUR CITIES

BY CLARE LYSTER; BASEL, SWITZERLAND: BIRKHÄUSER, 2016; 210 PAGES, $44.95.

REVIEWED BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

W

e live in a world that is increasingly structured—both spatially and temporally—by logistics. Despite this ascendancy, logistics has yet to have a major impact on the pedagogy and practice of landscape architecture, even though its focus—on “flows and directions, on vectors and rates”— would seem to be of great relevance to a discipline that so often distinguishes itself from other design fields via its engagement with time, flow, and change. “Logistics landscapes” such as those affiliated with ports, distribution centers, and airports are likely the landscape or architectural prototypes that most typically come to mind as resulting from, or affiliated with, logistical processes, but a more nuanced understanding of logistical systems and processes could inform a new approach to landscape design rather than merely identify new landscapes for old approaches. This landscape logistics would embrace time and change, strategy and tactics, and pursue a precise indeterminacy that allows for open-ended ecological and cultural processes to unfold but does not sacrifice precise formal articulation to achieve ecological complexity.

approaches that architects have used to understand and design the city are rapidly being made obsolete by the logistical logics of global capitalism. In the face of this potential irrelevance, both books provide robust overviews of how these logics are permeating, if not actually shaping, so many aspects of contemporary society. Additionally, the fact that both books are written by what might best be termed designer-scholars or designer-theorists results in books that go well beyond merely describing this new logistical reality toward the development of logistically derived design techniques as well as architectural and urbanistic projections.

In Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities, Clare Lyster, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago, looks to the hugely influential Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour as a “methodological precedent” for the potential of a new conceptual territory—in this case that of logistics—to reveal new opportunities for design. Lyster contends that the network-driven nature of urbanism today preTwo recent books, Learning from Logistics and The Rule of Lo- sents a crisis for designers who have traditionally approached gistics, serve as excellent primers on the potential of logistics the design of cities via “geometric, palliative, symbolic, and for designers. Both argue that the traditional frameworks and geographic principles,” which are increasingly outmoded in

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THE BACK

/BOOKS LEFT (FROM LEARNING FROM LOGISTICS)

A visualization of airline traffic across North America over the course of one day helps reveal an aspect of the invisible infrastructure of logistics.

BELOW

an urbanism of networks dominated by issues of time and flow. She argues for a new “framework” capable of engaging this fluidity and thereby demarginalizing the cultural agency of architecture vis-à-vis urbanism. Learning from Logistics attempts to establish this framework via three mechanisms: theoretical essays, which effectively mix relevant historical precedents from architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism with case studies of logistical networks of the postindustrial age; maps and diagrams, which use the visual intelligence of the designer to explain the complex workings of contemporary logistical networks while reminding us that this intelligence is one of the key skills designers possess to engage such dynamic systems; and design projections, which apply or translate the lessons of logistics to actual urban situations. Learning from Logistics is organized around a series of chapters in which the potentially outmoded categories of site, plan, zone, circulation, and architecture are rejuvenated through a heavy dose of logistics.

Jesse LeCavalier, an assistant professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, pursues a similar goal— that of restored or newfound agency for architecture in the face of landscapes and cities where the old rules no longer apply.

In his case study of the logistical foundations and ethos of Walmart—The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture

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of Fulfillment—LeCavalier delves deeply into the multiscalar workings of the retail giant, revealing along the way that logistics is at the core of its emergence as the largest company in the world and its continuing success. Whereas Lyster broadly surveys logistical networks around the world that emerged after 1970—including Ryanair, FedEx, and Amazon—LeCavalier uses chapters on buildings, locations, bodies, and territory to demonstrate how logistics permeates every aspect of the global Walmart network.

These very different approaches complement each other well and effectively translate logistical concepts for application by designers who may be less likely to plow through the literature of logistics on their own. LeCavalier’s initial chapter, simply titled “Logistics,” is an excellent overview of the evolution of logistics from its origins in military theory to becoming primarily known today as a tool (or science) of contemporary management. Defined at its simplest as “the science of managing things in space and time,” logistics, along with strategy

FLIGHT PATTERNS, 2005, COURTESY OF AARON KOBLIN STUDIO, TOP; FEDEX, INSET

Logistical systems, hard or soft, operate with precision in both space and time. This is the FedEx Memphis world hub in Tennessee.

/BOOKS

ABOVE (FROM THE RULE OF LOGISTICS)

Walmart locations in and around Vermont, 2011.

(the plan or vision) and tactics (deployment and execution), became a critical part of warfare owing to the need to manage its increased complexity. Parallel to advances in technologies of mobility and communication throughout the late 19th and all of the 20th century, the study and practice of logistics evolved and expanded into multiple aspects of society, especially the way many businesses now operate. Logistics has become infrastructure. We unwittingly rely on logistics for everything from (rapid) home deliveries of a constantly increasing range of goods, hotel and flight reservations, fresh food from all over the world being continuously available at grocery stores, and many other services and supplies that have come to be an assumed part of many lifestyles—at least in the United States. These “info-organizational regimens” are made possible through the coupling of digital information technologies with physical distribution systems in a global network capable of moving physical matter of all kinds with truly awesome precision and efficiency.

buildings, and territories. Formats, or the idea of formatting space, although rarely a term architects and landscape architects have used to describe the object of their work, are one of the most productive aspects of looking to a field like logistics— new language and frameworks through which to approach our work as designers and planners of landscapes and cities. Chapter 2 of Rule, focusing on Walmart’s buildings, is particularly relevant here as it productively reframes the way a traditional object of design is considered. In general, LeCavalier says that “logistical architecture” further challenges old architectural notions of the relationship between what a building does and how it looks—its function and its form. Logistical architecture “allows certain aspects of a design to remain open-ended until forced to adapt to a local situation.” More specifically, Walmart does not refer to buildings as buildings. Instead, it refers to “formats” and “prototypes.” Formats represent a kind of store.

Prototypes describe a particular “configuration” of a format.

Store designs are both highly generic and highly specific. Their Along with these info-organizational regimens come new exterior shell, orientation on site, as well as how they link to formats—spatial, formal, temporal—of cities, landscapes, the infrastructure around them all maintain a high degree of

148 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

JESSE LECAVALIER, BASED ON INFORMATION FROM WALMARTSTORES.COM AND GOOGLE MAPS

THE BACK

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ABOVE (FROM THE RULE OF LOGISTICS)

Comparative diagram of Walmart’s Prototype 150 with three instances. From left to right: Prototype 150; Walmart 2185, Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania; Walmart 1820, Kittanning, Pennsylvania; Walmart 2953, Swansea, Massachusetts.

flexibility to meet the local constraints of site, aesthetics, and even politics. Their interiors, however, maintain a high degree of specificity given that these are the areas that are more critically tied to the performance of the business model and therefore less open to variation. Imagine if landscape architects (or city parks or planning departments, as the case may be) were to reconsider the often shockingly banal public park using the framework of the format and prototype. Such an approach could leverage known categories or types (formats) such as the neighborhood or community park, while extending the specificity of their design through more prototypically derived approaches that better engage site specificities of terrain or program in place of what is now largely a generic smear of pastoralism resulting in a landscape type that is increasingly irrelevant as a cultural space.

This top-down bottom-up combination of logistics is echoed

by Lyster in her second chapter, titled “Plan—Double Vision: Total Design, Total Choice.” Describing FedEx’s organizational schema, she points out that the company is both top-down and hierarchical, but “embedded in its disciplined framework is an aptitude, like the rhizome, to self-regulate,” which means that the organization of the network has the intelligence to adapt to

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local specificities as necessary to maintain a high level of performance. The company maintains “contingency plan on contingency plan,” realizing that redundancy is the key to resilience in the face of unexpected change. This “double vision” of total control on the one hand and total flexibility on the other, as well as this layering of contingency plans, recalls some of the approaches taken in the much-publicized Downsview Park competition in Toronto. According to Lyster, OMA/Bruce Mau’s Tree City entry for the competition is exemplary of the “framework” approach she believes these disciplines can continue to evolve as they learn from logistics.

However, one could also argue that while the strategic framework is an unquestionable advancement over its more rigid, master plan predecessor, strategy without precision (the realm of tactics?) may very well run the risk of failing to evolve much of anything worth mention.

In a recent essay in New Geographies: Islands, Anita Berrizbeitia, ASLA, convincingly argues that many contemporary landscape architecture projections lack the precision necessary to achieve the emergent complexity so often touted as the goal. She argues that designers now overrely on process at the expense of form, mostly as a result of the influence of new ecological paradigms that have had great influence in the discipline in the past few decades. This has led to an overly diagrammatic approach to design in which the somewhat generic conditions of emergence are set up, but, lacking any real specificity for how materials or flows are to be shaped, directed, slowed, or accelerated, what results is likely to be as much the unintentional results of ecological succession as the intentional work of a designer. And although the former may have obvious value

JESSE LECAVALIER

THE BACK

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THE BACK

/BOOKS

THE LOGISTICAL IMAGINATION IS NOT WITHOUT ITS DARK SIDE.

LEFT (FROM LEARNING FROM LOGISTICS)

Public escalators such as these in Medellín, Colombia, are indicative of how logistical infrastructures and processes might more explicitly shape cities in the future.

Both authors also acknowledge that the logistical imagination is not without its dark side, and in design fields increasingly plagued by the deadening tendencies of “evidence-based design,” it is important for designers to engage logistics from a critical perspective. LeCavalier writes that the “logistician” tends to conflate object and environment through an abstract vision that is ill-equipped to meaningfully engage that which is not easily quantified or in some other way instrumentalized. In order to manage complexity, whether on the battlefield or in a global supply chain, it must to some degree be simplified. For this reason, logistics has a tendency to flatten or abstract the complexities of a given territory—conceptual or physical—to

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ensure the smooth, efficient flow of goods through a system.

Lyster also acknowledges the shortcomings of a strictly logistical approach but argues that, similar to the approach taken in Learning from Las Vegas, bracketing some degree of complexity is useful, if not required, if one is to begin to see how logistics might inform design practices. Both are valid points. Logistics can and does blinker a fuller view of the complexities that need to be considered by designers today. But one must also acknowledge that even without a focus on logistics, many of these complexities go unconsidered. Perhaps another way of looking at the potential of logistics for design is not simply that one wields logistics toward the same ends of efficiency and optimization as global capitalism, but rather that an understanding of logistics is yet another form of intelligence that contemporary designers should have in order to increase their overall cultural agency.

GALE FULTON, ASLA, IS DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AND CAN BE CONTACTED AT GFULTON@ UTK.EDU OR FOLLOWED ON TWITTER @LANDINTEL.

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for its ecological potential, the aspirations of the latter are to have much greater cultural potentials as both art and ecology.

With regard to the potential of logistics for landscape architecture, the question then becomes whether or not the study of logistics might provide as much insight into the specific as it does to the more generic capacities of the strategic framework, and I think that both books persuasively demonstrate that the answer is yes.

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BOOKS OF INTEREST “A MURAL-PRINTING ROBOT THAT WORKS BY FIRING PAINTBALLS AT WALLS? THIS ISN’T TECHNOLOGY OF THE DISTANT FUTURE.”

PARADOXES OF GREEN: LANDSCAPES OF A CITY STATE

REPRESENTING LANDSCAPES: HYBRID

BY GARETH DOHERTY; OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2017; 210 PAGES, $29.95.

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Green is both a color and an idea.

This beautifully written book delves into how both come together in the unlikely place of Bahrain, where— despite the desert climate—green things have a long history (some say it may even have been the site of the Garden of Eden). “Green follows blue in arid environments,” writes Gareth Doherty, ASLA. “Blue water, when mixed with the yellow and white sands of the Gulf, has the power to produce greenery.” In fact, he says, “A number of my interlocutors argued that the demand for green had altered the supply of blue.”

154 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

TRANSMATERIAL NEXT: A CATALOG OF MATERIALS THAT REDEFINE OUR FUTURE EDITED BY BLAINE BROWNELL; NEW YORK: PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, 2017; 316 PAGES, $40.

Synthesized spider silk spun from bioengineered bacteria? A muralprinting robot that works by firing paintballs at walls? Floors embedded with LED-equipped salt crystals that light up under your footsteps? This isn’t technology of the distant future; they’re all close to commercial readiness right now. Brownell’s book is a fascinating compendium providing more than 100 amazing materials’ backstories, as well as information on their makeup, applications, limitations, sustainability, and more.

Hybrid renderings of landscapes use a combination of hand drawing or model making and digital imaging.

This book features chapters by a variety of landscape architects weighing in on hybrid illustrations, along with examples ranging from sophisticated work using CAD and Illustrator to one quick collage “sketch” layering graph paper, tracing paper, and a photo of the sky. “A hybrid approach,” says Nadia Amoroso, Affiliate ASLA, “brings forward a more open process that is complex and unpredictable and can yield landscapes that embrace experiences that are scaled effectively to engage the human body and mind.”

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OLMSTED

SCHOLARS PROGRAM Recognizing and supporting exceptional student leadership 2017 GRADUATE SCHOLARS (Left to right) $25,000 Winner: David de la Cruz, University of Washington Finalist: Catharine McCord, University of Colorado Denver | Finalist: Ruth Nervig, City College of New York | Finalist: Ylan Vo, Washington University in St. Louis Alexis Alvey | Chris Anderson | Atyeh Ashtari | Austin Bamford | Andrew Barringer | Lauren Bergenholtz | Ryan Bowen | Ryan Coates | Colin Curley | Caroline Donaldson | Joni Emmons | Jacob Ferreira | Susie Gomez | Kamila Grigo | Hans Herrmann | Donielle Kaufman | Jonathan Knight | Ann Mai | Nuo Man | Ethan McKnight | Alexandra Mei | Kristen Sullivan | Nicolas Odekon | Adele Pierre | Samuel Quick | Dylan Reilly | Michael Ross | Elizabeth Sacks | Danielle Schwartz | Andrew Sell | Caley Shoemaker | Katherine Shrosbree | Kyle Sitzman | Alexandra Stoicof | Jamie Sun | Carlin Tacey | R. Melody Tapia | Mark VandenDungen | Sean Vanderslice | Nicole Wagy | Bonnie-Kate Walker | Adam Walters | Rachel Ware | Paula Wheeler | Hua Yan | Thomas Young

2017 UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLARS (Left to right) $15,000 Winner: Lauren Delbridge, Virginia Tech Finalist: Kristi Lin, University of California, Davis | Finalist: Nathania Martinez, University of Florida | Finalist: Stephen Zimmerer, The Pennsylvania State University Feras Abdallah | Victoria Bruskin | Christopher Creasey | Morgan Dunay | Hillary Eppel | Amanda Flores | Hanna Gold | Mark Hirschbeck | Alysa Horn | Yixuan Li | Yisi Liu | Emily Meer | Kathryn Miller | Hannah Moll | Jacob Oswald | Blane Potts | Curtis Schaldach | Victoria Shao | Anjelica Sifuentes | Derek Suomi | Justin Timko | Chloe Weigle | Juliana Welch | Ashton Williams | Emma Winkler | Yinuo Yin | Allen Yu

The Olmsted Scholars Program is made possible through the support of: Lead Sponsor: The Toro Company Annual Sponsors: EDSA, HOK, OLIN, Sasaki Associates, IRONSMITH, LandDesign, Thomas C. and Gerry D. Donnelly, Steven G. King, and Bill Main Promotion Partner: American Society of Landscape Architects

THE BACK

/

BACKSTORY

THE PETERS PRINCIPLE A CHANGE OF MAPS FOR BOSTON SCHOOLS.

T ABOVE

The Gall-Peters projection.

BELOW

The Mercator projection.

he Boston public school system just changed the world for its students—by changing its maps. The depiction of the spherical earth on flat paper is known as a projection.

Now all Boston’s new social studies classroom maps will use the Peters projection instead of the more familiar Mercator. The Peters, published in 1974 by the German historian Arno Peters as a cartographic antidote to Eurocentrism, is an “equal area” pro-

jection. This means that the relative areas of continents shown on the map are preserved, though their shapes are distorted. Landform area ratio versus shape is a trade-off all map projections face: The Peters shows Africa and South America as much larger, though vertically stretched, than they appear in the Mercator. The Mercator gets the continents’ shapes right but their areas (relative to other landforms on the map) wrong. It shows Africa and Greenland as similar in size, though Africa is actually almost 14 times larger.

view of the world. But so does the Peters, which is also known as the Gall-Peters, since cartographer James Gall first presented it at a scientific conference in 1855. Ironically, says Daniel Strebe, a computer scientist who specializes in map projections, Peters “was supposed to have righted the wrong of European domination of the world’s presentation—and yet chose a projection whose only usable region is along the parallel of [his] native Germany. The tropics are a disaster.”

Though there are countless map projections, not one is perfect. But that variety is good, says Strebe. The key is to use different projections according to the need at hand. “Fixating on any one projection is wrong,” he says.

“You don’t want to canonize any view of the world when all flat views are so bad. If you expose people to diversity, they will innately develop a sense that any particular view isn’t quite right.

They’ll probably also learn the commonalities expressed by the different It’s true that the Mercator, published projections, which is good because

by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 as a those commonalities are where the navigational tool, provides a distorted truth lives.”

Boston’s new map policy is part of a long-range plan to shift away from a Eurocentric curriculum in the city’s public schools, where people of color comprise 86 percent of the student body. The use of the Peters map is “intended to counter a biased worldview,” according to a school system press release. “These maps offer a more culturally proficient view of the world.”

184 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2017

BY DANIEL R. STREBE CC BY SA 3.0 , VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, IMAGES UPLOADED APRIL 14, 2017

BY MAGGIE ZACKOWITZ

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