Landscape Architecture Magazine LAM-2017-october

OCT 2017 / VOL 107 NO 10 US $7 CAN $9

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

NEXT COAST

New views on Los Angeles’s future

FOR A CHANGE Making public housing better, step by step

BUMMER CROP How cannabis is changing California’s landscape

STADIUMS ON STEROIDS Studio-MLA mixes sports into the city

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

LAM

72 PLANTS

24 INSIDE

Growing Obsession

26 LAND MATTERS

BY TIM WATERMAN

London’s Garden Museum celebrates Great Britain’s passion for plants.

84 PLANNING

34 LETTERS

FOREGROUND 42 NOW The upside of downtown vacant lots; an asphalt coating to cool hot roads; the reSite gathering in Prague; and more.

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

66 INTERVIEW

All Landscape Is Local Glen Dake, ASLA, of DakeLuna Consultants applies what he’s learned about community and resilience in a public-minded practice.

BY WENDY GILMARTIN

Smartphone Landscape Restoring Indonesian land fouled by tin mining is a humbling task, but Fred Phillips has a plan.

BY BRIAN BARTH

100 PALETTE

Play It as It Layers The designs of Pamela Burton, FASLA, are all about the subtle complexities.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

116 GOODS

See You at EXPO Test drive a graffiti-proof bar stool, secure some new bike lockers, and more at this year’s ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Los Angeles.

KYLE JEFFERS

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

8 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

“ THERE WAS AN EXPLICIT DESIRE TO LEARN FROM PRECEDENT.” —DAN ADAMS, FORMERLY OF BRIDGE HOUSING, SAN FRANCISCO, P. 166

FEATURES 132 THIRD WAY L.A.

THE BACK 202 THE 2017 ASLA LANDMARK AWARD

The architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne ponders the next, and future, Los Angeles.

Trails of Trees: The J. Paul Getty Center Turns 20

BY TOM CARSON

After 20 years, this Los Angeles landscape has seasoned beautifully.

144 FAN FAVORITE With three projects under way in the region, Studio-MLA has become the unofficial stadium landscape architect of Los Angeles.

BY NATE BERG

158 ALTERED STATE The imminent legality of recreational marijuana in California is already leaving its mark on the state’s land.

BY MIMI ZEIGER

166 THE FINAL HILL GLS Landscape | Architecture is connecting a redeveloping public-housing project on Potrero Hill to the rest of a gentrified San Francisco, without displacing a single resident.

BY ZACH MORTICE

BY KELLY COMRAS, ASLA

218 BOOKS

Problem Not Solved, But Not a Problem A review of Landscape as Infrastructure,

by Pierre Bélanger.

BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

252 ADVERTISER INDEX 254 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 268 BACKSTORY

Black Design Matters Harvard students focus on design activism that goes beyond a call to action.

BY JENNIFER REUT

180 SALT PONDS TO PICKLEWEED The salt industry has long dominated South San Francisco Bay. Over the past decade, AECOM and a team of scientists have been returning its waters to fish, shrimp, and the snowy plover.

BY LISA OWENS VIANI

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 9

Reuse | Revive | Repopulate by Rafael Duailibe dos Santos – Brazil

THE IS NOW Shade plays an essential role in creating vibrant outdoor spaces.

Without intentional shade design, the sun’s effects — heat and glare — can result in desolate spaces where no one wants to be. Shade not only protects people and property from the sun, it helps define areas within a landscape.

Provide a large shaded grass area in a park and you are likely to see community yoga classes gather there during fair weather. Or, shade sidewalks along retail shops, and see people linger for window shopping. A canopy over picnic tables may become a meeting place for a variety of groups from young mothers to retirees.

Shaping light through the use of new and innovative shading devices creates outdoor spaces that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional.

S H A D E C R E AT E S HE A LT HY O UTD O O R S PA C E S People seek out the sun, but too much can be harmful. Skin cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the U.S., and globally one out of every three cancers diagnosed is skin cancer.

Yet, studies have shown that exposure to nature may provide health benefits. One such study 1

by Roger S. Ulrich, a healthcare building design researcher, compared hospital patients undergoing the same surgery who had rooms with either a view of a brick wall or a view of trees. The patients with the view of trees experienced less anxiety, required less pain medication and were discharged from the hospital earlier.

Providing public spaces with shaded areas where people can enjoy views of nature, whether it’s flowers in streetscape planters or trees in a park, may provide mental and physical health benefits for communities.

IN N OVATIV E SH A DE DESIGN S Brazil-based architect Rafael Duailibe dos Santos used shade to redefine an abandoned part of São Luís, a city in northern Brazil. His conceptual design, “Reuse | Revive | Repopulate,” takes the remaining walls of old colonial buildings whose roofs have fallen in and creates new park spaces.

Following a sunlight study of the building shells, Duailibe dos Santos created a grid structure with fabric panels where the roof had once been. He layered it so thicker portions of the structure provide more shade in portions of the building that get more sun. Inside, grass and other vegetation are juxtaposed against the colonial structure. Reuse | Revive | Repopulate won grand

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Design student Hyunjeong Kim also recognized the power of nature in her grand prizewinning 2016 Sunbrella Future of Shade project, “Draping Scenery.”

Large swaths of fabric drape over a frame structure to create loops where hospital patients can sit with a sky view. Circular perforations in the fabric create a dappled effect, similar to that of sun through tree leaves.

In both cases, the designers use shade to redefine areas for new uses: gathering, relaxing or rehabilitating outdoors.

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Draping Scenery by Hyunjeong Kim – Germany

Roger S. Ulrich, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery”

Science, vol. 224, Issue No. 4647 (1984): 420.

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YOUR WORKFORCE OF NATURE YOUR PARTNER IN SUCCESS ValleyCrest is now BrightView Meet BrightView. A new name for the same people you’ve come to trust to bring your landscape visions to life.

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

EDITOR Bradford McKee / bmckee@asla.org

Responding to a prompt from Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, Stoss Landscape Urbanism reimagined the remnant spur of an abandoned freeway project as an effervescent, multifunction public space, alive with color and form.

The park proposal doesn’t suggest taking the spur down—we must, and in some cases, want to, live with our monuments to moribund infrastructure. Instead, the structure is punctuated with pink and orange forms that will filter air pollution, capture stormwater and solar energy, and cool the park on hot days.

The Stoss proposal makes use of the space above and below the spur, connecting to Elysian Park and the L.A. River.

The project was published in Hawthorne’s column in the summer of 2016, part of a conversation that continues through his Third Los Angeles Project, page 132.

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ART DIRECTOR Christopher McGee / cmcgee@asla.org

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EDITORIAL INTERN Kassandra D. Bryant, Student ASLA / kbryant@asla.org

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

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

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

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

16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

STOSS LANDSCAPE URBANISM BOSTON

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

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LAM

INSIDE

/

CONTRIBUTORS KASSANDRA D. BRYANT, STUDENT ASLA,

(“The Trees of North America,” page 201) was the magazine’s first summer intern. She is a third-year MLA student at Virginia Tech’s Washington–Alexandria Architecture Campus.

You can reach her at dbkass9@vt.edu.

“Though I expected the processes to be similar, being edited is a bit different from having drawings redlined, because changes in tone and cadence can be read immediately. In a drawing, a bit more time is required to see the improvements.”

TOM CARSON (“Third Way L.A.,” page 132)

is a freelance culture critic and the author of Gilligan’s Wake and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter. You can follow him on Twitter @TCarsonwriter.

KELLY COMRAS, ASLA, (“Trails of Trees,”

page 202) is a landscape architect and an attorney practicing in Pacific Palisades, California. This month she will be inducted as a fellow of ASLA. You can reach her at kcomras@gmail.com.

“OLIN’s continuing maintenance supervision and collaboration with staff at the Getty Center reinforce a superlative realization of a master landscape architect’s vision.”

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.

24 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

KASSANDRA D. BRYANT, STUDENT ASLA, TOP; VICTORIA F. GAITAN, CENTER; HUDSON LOFCHIE, BOTTOM

“I could have talked to Hawthorne forever about L.A.’s architectural history, but I knew we had to focus on its future.”

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LAND MATTERS

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DENIAL AND DEVASTATION M

ichael D. Talbott wasn’t shy in showing his hand about climate change. For 18 years, Talbott, an engineer, served as the head of the Harris County Flood Control District in Texas until his retirement in 2016. He flatly dismissed any links between climate change and the frequent extreme storms—four of them now since 2015—to hit Harris County, the nation’s third most populated county, and its seat, Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. The month he retired, Talbott told a team of reporters with ProPublica and the Texas Tribune that the flood control district did not plan to look at ways climate may be driving the extreme weather that affected Harris County.

“I don’t think it’s the new normal,” he said of these weather extremes. (The person to follow him in the job of executive director, Russell A. Poppe, “shares his views,” according to the report.) People who are saying it’s the new normal, Talbott said, have “an agenda” to fight development.

AT LEAST ONE FORMER HOUSTON FLOOD CONTROL DIRECTOR VOICES HIS REGRETS. Just as remarkable as Talbott’s denial of climate breakdown was his acquittal of the role that urban development patterns play in worsening or relieving floods. When Hurricane Harvey sat on the region for days in late August, many indignant arguments arose online that Houston’s development habits either most certainly or in absolutely no way helped create the hazards that flooded Texas Gulf Coast neighborhoods from Katy in the west (31 inches of rain) to Beaumont and Port Arthur in the east (47 inches), with Cedar Bayou swamped between them (51.88 inches). In the 2016 interview, Talbott got a dig in about mitigating this kind of rainfall with absorbent landscape infrastructure, “these magic sponges out in the prairie,” as he put it, and said the idea that they would take in “all that water” is “absurd.” Note that in Harris County, between 1992 and 2010, nearly 16,000 acres of prairie wetlands (about one-third of its 1992 total) are estimated to have disappeared because of development, according to a Texas A&M University study. It doesn’t seem that prairie could soak up all the water

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Harvey left, but hard-top neighborhoods don’t soak it up, and flooded prairie is preferable to flooded neighborhoods. At any rate, tens of thousands of houses flooded both in and outside of known floodplains. At least 60 people died as a result of Harvey. The damages are in the many billions. And the flood control authority says it was doing all it could.

There is no practical shield against two or more feet of rain.

But a telling interview came a week after the storm in the Dallas Morning News, which located Arthur Storey as he cleaned out his flooded home. Storey had Talbott’s job as flood control district director in 1996, when the agency’s engineers determined that two critical pieces of infrastructure west of Houston, the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, had become functionally obsolete. The reservoirs were built in the 1940s. Since then, neighborhoods had been built within their “pools.” The engineers in the 1990s realized the reservoirs would not drain fast enough in catastrophic rains. The reservoirs could either flood neighborhoods at their upper edges on the west or be forced to drain and flood neighborhoods to the east. There was talk of building a $400 million conduit to drain them beneath neighborhoods along the route of the Katy Freeway, which was up for reconstruction, but there wasn’t time, money, or will. Alternatively, the bayous that drain the reservoirs could be enlarged. Homes could be bought out. New rules could restrict development.

None of it happened.

The scenario considered in the 1996 report came to life during Harvey. Storey expressed his regret after Harvey that he had not pushed harder for solutions in the 1990s. “My embarrassment is that I knew enough that this was going to happen,” Storey said. “And I was not smart enough, bold enough to fight the system, the politics, and stop it.” His successors, whatever they claim to know, haven’t been smart enough either.

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LETTERS

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BIM THERE, TOO

I

n his article “BIM There, Done That” (August), Brian Barth states that “a number of landscape architecture firms have dabbled in BIM over the past decade, but I’ve struggled to find even one that incorporates it into daily work flow.” We are happy to offer one counterexample. At PGAdesign, we have been using Revit since 2010 and have completed more than 58 projects using the software.

We are busy advocating and asking site furnishing companies to supply Revit files. We’re happy that this year companies such as Landscape Forms have provided those files for download on their websites.

Revit does have its shortcomings, including the inability to link PDFs and difficulty in modeling large sites.

Available 3-D tree libraries that show up in a not-rendered “shade mode” are far from optimal. Building these libraries on our own has been a struggle. We still rely on 3-D trees placed in Photoshop.

Every piece of software has its limitations, requiring landscape architects to be creative and discover workarounds. Working in Revit allows PGAdesign to seamlessly coordinate with architects, which has been es- Revit’s potential to improve coordinapecially valuable with on-structure tion between disciplines, streamline multifamily housing projects. drafting and sheet layout, and organize product and plant information has made it an indispensable part of our daily work flow since 2010.

KAREN KROLEWSKI, ASLA OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

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

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

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FOREGROUND

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NOW

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

REMNANT TO WHOLE

AT UMASS AMHERST, THE REGION’S ECOLOGY IS BROUGHT TO A NEW DESIGN BUILDING’S DOORSTEP.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

U

by Leers Weinzapfel Associates, is the first masstimber building on the East Coast and brings together the university’s architecture, landscape architecture, and building and construction technology programs. As such, it provides ample opportunities for collaboration and commingling, including a central atrium space and shared studios for architecture and landscape students, which excites McGirr. “It’s important for those two disciplines to start to appreciate what each one contributes to the field of But in January 2017, the LA&RP department—the design,” she says. second-oldest landscape architecture program in the country—moved into a new home. The Students and faculty pushed for an innovative 87,000-square-foot Design Building, designed landscape that represented contemporary ideas

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

TOP

The Design Building features an experimental “alpine” courtyard on its second floor.

INSET

Plantings include regionally appropriate species such as balsam fir and black spruce.

NGOC DOAN, ASSOCIATE ASLA

ntil recently, Patricia McGirr taught out of a converted men’s dorm room. Its floors were covered in gray vinyl, and the building, originally built in the 1960s at the edge of the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, had long been known to have poor air quality. The landscape, to boot, was mostly turf. “There was nothing about the landscape that said there were landscape architects in the building,” says McGirr, the assistant chair of the Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning (LA&RP) department, “or that design was going on.”

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TOP

The irregularly shaped building is surrounded by stormwater gardens and a large work yard.

BELOW

The northwest garden receives rainwater from the roof and the adjacent parking lot.

and celebrated natural systems.

The result, designed by Stephen Stimson Associates, is a reinterpretation of the Connecticut River Valley landscape, with native bluestone monoliths and indigenous trees and ferns. Woven in are large stormwater gardens that visibly collect and treat runoff from the roof and the adjacent parking lot, which was regraded to direct runoff to the new landscape. It’s a highfunctioning teaching tool but also an intervention on behalf of the historic Campus Pond, which, despite being part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original vision for the campus, had become a dumping ground for campus stormwater.

N

Lauren Stimson, ASLA, a principal at Stephen Stimson Associates (and a UMass Amherst alumna) says she envisioned the project as a collection of remnant landscapes that exist in and around Amherst. The summit courtyard, for instance, an inhabitable green roof on the second floor of the building, was inspired by a class called Hiking with Hal, in which the landscape architecture professor Harold “Hal” Mosher, ASLA, took students on walks through the countryside. There isn’t a single Sedum. The roof features mosses, evergreens, and ground covers like lowbush blueberry, planted in soils ranging from three to 18 inches deep.

It is unabashedly an experiment—one that students and faculty will be monitoring. Being visible from throughout the building “allows people to experience it but at the same time [conduct] observations,” says Robert Ryan, FASLA, the chair of the LA&RP department. “I’m excited to see how we tease that out.”

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

44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

STEPHEN STIMSON ASSOCIATES, TOP; NGOC DOAN, ASSOCIATE ASLA, BOTTOM

FOREGROUND

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F

THE VALUE OF VACANCY

UNINHABITED BUT NOT BARREN, VACANT LOTS COME OUT ON TOP FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES.

BY MADELINE BODIN

ABOVE

Trees crowd the back of a vacant lot in Cleveland, providing abundant ecological benefits.

46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

or all the watering, trimming, and fertilizing that we give suburban residential lots, they might show us a little love back. But according to a study conducted by Christopher Riley, an ecologist at the Ohio State University, the typical suburban yard provides few of the ecosystem services that we have come to associate with green space.

maple (Acer platanoides), and young American elm (Ulmus americana). “On the vacant lots,” Riley says, “the exotic species are adding most of the ecosystem value.” On suburban lots, the value was provided by native species, such as sugar maple (Acer saccharum). But it’s not actually a matter of species, Riley says. “When it comes to providing ecosystem services, it’s the biomass that’s doing the heavy lifting.” It was in their abundance that the vacant lot trees outperformed the residential lot trees.

In the study, which will be published Riley also found that, on average, urban vacant in a forthcoming issue of the journal lots had a greater diversity of species, supported Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, three times as many trees, and had twice as much total leaf area and leaf biomass than the two types of residential properties. These findings are no surprise to Peter Del Tredici, who teaches in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s urban planning department and recently retired as a senior research scientist at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum. He has long advocated for spontaneous vegetation, those plants that grow unasked for, because few native tree species are adapted to urban landscapes. “I define sustainability as ecological services rendered divided by the cost of maintenance,” he says. “For planted trees, street trees, these costs are fairly high. For spontaneous vegetation, the cost is zero.”

One way to use spontaneous vegetation, Del Tredici says, is to design by removing what you don’t want, such as toxic plants or invasive vines, rather than focusing solely on adding those you do. His best examples come from Germany, where Peter Latz combined spontaneous vegetation and designed gardens in his Landscape Park in Duisburg-Nord, or in Berlin, where a spontaneous forest and industrial remnants were woven into Natur-Park Südgelände.

Riley analyzed the level of ecosystem services provided by trees in three types of landscapes: suburban residential, urban residential, and urban vacant lots. He found that vacant lots provided more shade, removed more pollutants, and held on to more stormwater than their manicured Riley says the study suggests that landscape desuburban counterparts. (The study signs that boost the amount of vegetation at a site, did not address benefits to wildlife.) perhaps by incorporating both overstory trees and low-lying shrubs, could maximize biomass He found that the back of the vacant and therefore the value of the ecosystem services lots, all in Cleveland, were thick with provided. Del Tredici agrees: “Trees in particular white mulberry (Morus alba), Norway make cities more habitable.”

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FOREGROUND

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PAINT THE TOWN GRAY AN ASPHALT COATING COULD HELP COOL LOS ANGELES. WILL THE BENEFITS OFFSET THE COSTS?

nitially, the product was for the military. Marketed as CoolSeal, the light gray-colored asphalt seal coat was developed to reduce the surface temperature of runways so that they would be less visible to infrared satellites. A few years ago, Greg Spotts, the assistant director of the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services, wondered what would happen if you painted every street in the city with CoolSeal. Could you reduce the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that has been estimated to cost the city $90 million each year in energy bills?

ABOVE

In Los Angeles, city workers coat a street with CoolSeal, which has been shown to lower pavement’s surface temperature.

Allen Compton, ASLA, a principal at SALT Landscape Architects and the cochair of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee, is curious to see the results. But he also wonders whether or not there might be urban side effects, such as a decrease in the visibility of road striping, or troublesome glare.

The biggest question may be to what extent a local reduction in temperatures helps the world at large. A 2017 study conducted by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has consulted with Los Angeles on its pilot, compared traditional pavement and coatings like CoolSeal and found that the additional energy and emissions needed to produce the latter exceeds any energy savings achieved through lower surface temperatures. In other words, these coatings could have a net-negative environmental impact.

Now, with $150,000 in public funding, Spotts is testing the coating at locations in each of the city’s 15 council districts. The coating, which is just 15 microns thick, goes on in a brilliant gray, far lighter in color than a typical asphalt street, though Spotts says it soon fades to more of a Even if the coating were carbon neutral, Spotts acknowledges that the CoolSeal would represent an extra layer, and therefore “battleship color.” an extra cost, in street construction. But his hope is that the By this fall, all 15 streets should be complete, and project will signal to manufacturers that there is a demand according to the city’s asphalt testing lab, even in for cool pavement products. Right now, a standard asphalt the afternoon on the hottest days, the surface tem- street in Los Angeles gets something called a slurry seal, a perature of the coated pavement is, on average, 10 three-eighths-inch rubberized coating that seals it from water degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the uncoated pave- intrusion, Spotts says. “If there was a light-colored slurry seal, ment. The city also will monitor the coating to test that’s a solution we could take to scale with existing funding. how it performs over time, Spotts says.

But there isn’t one.”

48 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

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FOREGROUND

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RIGHT

Green stormwater infrastructure like that at the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee was the focus of a statewide audit of municipal codes.

BOTTOM

A water feature at Reed Street Yards filters dirty water from the Menomonee Canal.

IN WISCONSIN, A STATEWIDE AUDIT OF LOCAL ORDINANCES CLEARS THE WAY FOR GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE.

BY CAROL BECKER

M

unicipal regulation is the single biggest barrier to green infrastructure development, says Julia Noordyk, a water quality and coastal communities outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute. For instance, permeable hardscape installations often are not allowed because of local regulations that specify “all hardscape surfaces must be seal coated.” And this is just one of the many ways in which the presence of conflicting or outdated municipal regulations, or the absence of green infrastructure-friendly regulations, stands in the way of more ecological and efficient systems.

To help eliminate such barriers, Noordyk and her team at the Sea Grant Institute recently published Tackling Barriers to Green Infrastruc-

50 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

ture: An Audit of Local Codes and Ordinances for all communities in Wisconsin. The audit is based on a unique process designed for 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, a nonprofit environmental group, by Kate Morgan. Under Morgan’s leadership, it was successfully completed by the 28 cities in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) between 2012 and 2016. Now, to Morgan’s knowledge, it is the first code-auditing process of its kind to be launched statewide.

Morgan says an audit can be more effective than adopting a model ordinance, a regulatory template used by cities to write new regulation.

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group of nine MMSD communities, which are redeveloping a Milwaukee County park roadway, have a group municipal watershed permit that requires cross community green infrastructure projects as part of the permit conditions.

A new infiltration system at Milwaukee’s Bradford Beach includes sand dunes, native plants, and rain gardens.

BOTTOM

Often prevented by conflicting codes, rain gardens now have a clear regulatory path in Wisconsin.

MMSD. “Model ordinances might structure. Shared language about be adopted, but they won’t mean green infrastructure and even anything.” shared projects are emerging where the audit has been completed. WauAs part of the audit, municipal teams watosa was the first community in answered questions about architec- the MMSD pilot project to integrate tural design standards, construction, green infrastructure development landscaping, parking, site planning, into its tax-increment-financing stormwater and public works stan- policies, providing better financing dards, and public education. The opportunities to those projects that questions were designed to guide include green infrastructure. And a them through the often dark, deep, and ancient woods of municipal code with a specific light on green infrastructure. “We had to go deep into the codes to make it meaningful,” Morgan says. “If, for example, your code says, ‘In the curbing of a street, you cannot create curb cuts,’ and in another place the code allows bioswales, the swale you create will do you no good,” because stormwater would be unable to reach the swale.

The results have helped MMSD communities identify and remove complex code barriers, and provide a map of how Wisconsin can more efficiently implement green infra-

52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

KEVIN MIYAZAKI

ABOVE

For communities where plenty of open space is still available and local politicians have been reluctant to require green infrastructure, these new codes will be helpful when state or municipal regulation makes green infrastructure imperative, says Jeff Nettesheim, the director of utilities in Menomonee Falls in Waukesha County. For his county, he sees that imperative coming in the form of total maximum daily loading restrictions on pollutants in the water from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. When those restrictions take effect, Nettesheim says, the audit workbook will provide a road map forward.

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FOREGROUND

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LEFT AND INSET

MVRDV’s cofounder Winy Maas discussed Skygarden, a recent project in Seoul, as an example of redesigned urban infrastructure.

WITNESS TO THE INVISIBLE CITY AT THIS YEAR’S RESITE CONFERENCE IN PRAGUE, INFRASTRUCTURE WAS THE MAIN EVENT.

BY JOANN PLOCKOVA

“T

The event, whose theme this year was “In/visible City,” is the signature initiative of reSITE, a global nonprofit organization founded by Barry that, in a nutshell, aims to improve urban sustainability in all forms. The Czech Republic-based organization has played a leading role in pushing urban issues to the top of the agendas of Prague’s municipalities and has plans to extend its reach beyond the region.

56 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

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he story of infrastructure is not just about technical issues. It affects almost every part of our lives,” said Martin Barry during his opening address at the recent reSITE conference in Prague. “We often don’t think about it, but it can be beautiful, not only the things we see, but the invisible things that it does to us as people. Infrastructure for us is a very, very human story. It affects our lives in vast ways that we don’t really recognize.”

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LEFT

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a granite threshold

by GGN has become an active public space.

The conference gathered more than 1,000 designers, thinkers, and municipal leaders working on urban infrastructure to present projects and discuss their influence. Caroline Bos, a principal and cofounder of Amsterdam-based UNStudio, said she and her team call a city’s infrastructure spaces the “ignored and in-between” spaces. But Bos, like an increasing number of landscape architects and other designers, sees their potential— and their need—to be much more. UNStudio’s Arnhem Central Station, opened in 2015, is part of a larger urban regeneration effort 20 years in the making that goes beyond a mere transfer point to become a transfer hub, incorporating Seeing the social, cultural, and economic benefits offices, retail, and housing. of these types of infrastructure spaces has given cities the confidence to invest in their own. “The In Seoul, South Korea, fellow Dutch architecture High Line incentivized 33 projects,” noted Barry, and urbanism firm MVRDV transformed a for- who also mentioned New York’s Hudson Yards as mer inner-city highway into the 3,000-foot-long an example of “exactly what infrastructure should Skygarden, which opened this year. Describing do.” The challenge is creating the right partnerthe space as a “floating garden,” where at night ships, with a current emphasis on civic sector the “trees become stars” when lighted, the firm’s participation, to bring them to light. “We think cofounder Winy Maas defined infrastructure as about infrastructure that provides not just a place a connective thread, one creating a landscape of for the trains to come,” Barry said, “but provides its own, with an ability to activate environments. a public space, a cultural space.”

58 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

RODRIGO ABELA, ASLA/GGN

In the United States, for the landscape of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., even security measures can be viewed as a “new infrastructure,” Kathryn Gustafson, FASLA, of GGN told the reSITE audience. In addition to a reinforced concrete security wall, which burrows six feet into the ground and surrounds the entire site, a 240-foot-long black granite wall has gone beyond conceptual artifact to some pleasantly surprising functions. “It turns out it is the hottest place in D.C. to go for lunch right now,” she said.

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FOREGROUND

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PAVING THE WAY A NEW STUDY IDENTIFIES WAYS TO MAKE HISTORIC STREETS SAFE AND ACCESSIBLE.

O

The report, Toward Accessible Historic Streetscapes, produced by Denisha Williams, ASLA, and Jeff Byles of Being Here Landscape Architecture & Environmental Design, focuses on the Belgian block streets and sidewalks of DUMBO, where last year a series of roadway reconstruction projects prompted a question that no one seemed to be asking: Was it really necessary to tear out the existing rectangular granite pavers, or was there a way to make them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)? HDC hired Being Here to find the answer.

a wheelchair family,” she says. Her father used a wheelchair from age 11 until he died in his late 30s. It was an experience that made her “keenly aware of accessibility issues, long before the ADA became law.” Williams worked in historic preservation before going back to school for landscape architecture and founding Being Here in 2012. Byles, who is also a writer, joined in 2014. Still, they were “surprised by the richness and the depth of character that these materials bring to communities,” Byles says. “Historic paving materials tell such a powerful story about our past. A humble Belgian block or a historic brick really is a direct link to the industrial history of places like DUMBO.”

They were also delighted to find sophisticated and useful precedents for ways to preserve historic streetscapes and meet ADA requirements. For an ongoing roadway reconstruction project within the Gansevoort Market Historic District, Ken Smith Workshop devised a sorting system for the street’s granite pavers. The roughest, most irregular Belgian blocks will be reset in the roadway, while the smoothest, most For Williams, it was a topic of particu- regular blocks will be reserved for lar interest. “I grew up in what I call areas requiring ADA compliance.

60 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

(ADA Standards for Accessible Design stipulate that “surfaces should be firm, stable, and slip-resistant” and limit vertical surface changes to a quarter inch and gaps to half an inch.) Elsewhere in the city, a type of granite paver called Tumblestone is being used to re-create the appearance of historic Belgian block.

Williams and Byles also make specific recommendations to the city’s Department of Transportation, such as the establishment of a separately funded Historic Streets Maintenance Plan, but the study’s relevance is not limited to New York City. Any municipality with areas of historic paving will face similar questions, and the intention is that this study can help.

“There’s not much guidance or technical assistance readily available for city agencies who are looking for help in preserving their historic streets,” Byles says. “We hope that our study can be a first step in making these best practices more available.”

TOP

A historic Belgian block streetscape in DUMBO, including a reconstructed crosswalk of granite pavers.

INSET

An area along Bridge Street illustrates the accessibility challenges of historic pavements.

BEING HERE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE & ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

f the many threads that form the fabric of New York’s historic districts, streets can be among the most vulnerable. They are public rights-ofway, susceptible to utility upgrades and required by law to meet accessibility standards. As a result, historic paving such as the distinctive Belgian block in the DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood of Brooklyn is often chopped up, cut through, paved over, or replaced, contributing to a gradual degradation of the district’s historic character. But according to a new report commissioned by New York’s Historic Districts Council (HDC), modern accessibility standards and the preservation of historic paving need not be in opposition.

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FOREGROUND

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INTERVIEW

ALL LANDSCAPE IS LOCAL AT THE CONFLUENCE OF GREENING LOCAL POLITICS WITH GLEN DAKE.

BY WENDY GILMARTIN

ellissier Village is a quiet pocket neighborhood, snug at the foot of the Puente Hills Landfill and between the intersection of highways 60 and 605 near the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area. The park’s 1,500 acres are precious green space for these outskirts of southeast Los Angeles County’s least glamorous sections.

The tightly spaced stucco homes are kept tidy and look like any other suburb save for the cowboy and rodeo iconography on front shutters, driveway gates, and iron entryways: Pellissier Village is horse country. Hooves rhythmically knock along the quiet streets. Riders pull on their hats toward neighbors and passersby as the graceful process of exercising the family’s horses plays out past the neatly kept, working-class houses.

ABOVE

Glen Dake, ASLA, of DakeLuna Consultants was recently appointed to the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

At the tip of Pellissier Road, the blacktop dead-ends and gives way to the rough edge of the Rio Hondo river — an offshoot of the larger San Gabriel River that connects to the park, and which is used here as a recharge area for the local watershed. A dusted-up, 10-foot-wide path currently serves as

66 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

a buffer between the neighborhood and the craggy riverbank, but it’s a no-man’s-land of sorts; flies buzz over the mess of horses, sandy soil, and uneven concrete, and the shrubby embankments offer little to no cover from the sun.

use funds from Measure A—a local parcel tax for parks that Dake helped to campaign for last year. He’s simultaneously a keen expert on elements involved in such a transformation of the landscape (multiple public agencies, neighborhood and community organizing, and translating local “Kids from the neighborhood use it needs into a buildable solution) and a to get to that street way over that way, participant in the discovery each new and of course the horse owners exer- project entails. cise their horses here. Those guys are always out here,” says the landscape I toured the project site with Dake, architect Glen Dake, ASLA, with a big and then sat down with him to find smile. In his bright pink shirt sleeves out more about DakeLuna’s work and summer straw hat, Dake cuts a in Southern California and the perbrisk figure in the dusty landscape. sonal connection Dake brings to his projects.

Dake and his firm DakeLuna Consultants (he is principal there along This interview has been edited and with Miguel Luna) are completing condensed. construction documents for a trail remediation project that will trans- What’s the signature of a DakeLuna form this ambiguous edge of the Rio project?

Hondo: a riverside park with horse I think we’ve completely failed in the training amenities. The project will signature category [laughs]. If we were be built by the L.A. Conservation going to do what’s right for marketCorps, a nonprofit group that provides ing, we’d create creative differentiayoung people with job skills training tion where you can tell that a project is in construction projects, and it will a DakeLuna project. But actually, and

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/INTERVIEW

ABOVE

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California includes representatives from 26 public agencies.

we say this in our marketing materials, we seek projects that are effective and durable over time because we do refuse to build things that look good but don’t wear well. So a lot of our projects have it’s not always the sort of a dowdy, county-built—well, I parks department. It shouldn’t say that dowdy… could be a neighborhood group. It could be the electResilient? ed representative. It could be Yes, resilient. That could be the signa- a whole set of people, especially ture. It’s really important for it to be when it is a multibenefit project. resilient, otherwise it’s not well main- The recreation interest could be the tained and it falls apart, and the kids proponent, but also the clean water inare playing on the broken swings. terest could be the proponent. TrafficI can’t tolerate the dead plants and safety or bike-safety people could all the broken swings—it’s bad and it’s be proponents, and they have to come wrong. Especially in a place where together and get the permits and the they don’t have much. We simplify. money and the control of the land in These projects might not have the order to do the project, so that’s a lot of most bells and whistles. We’re inter- the battle—communicating effectivefacing with people, and that’s their ly with all those people to understand whole world. They’re worried about what their interests are and to reflect the money, and if you can’t talk about back at them a physical thing that they the money and the capital, that’s an can get behind. But I think the time issue. I think of people who have has gotten to be really insufferable for been really successful in practice like the regular participants. They don’t Joe Brown (AECOM’s planning and want it to take 10 years. I’ve worked design director), who says, “We’re on the L.A. River, and our tiny little gonna change the world by doing part of it is going to take a generation these three things.” And his is a re- to complete. And people are excited ally forceful, business-focused sales about that, but it’s also frustrating. job. I can’t do that. But we have our feel-good moments.

I know you have personal background in other community orgaCan you talk about the many different nizing and local initiatives. In that agencies and groups you work with to sense, you bring something different achieve those resilient results? to the table.

Let’s say there’s the project proponent, Meeting people in their language, and it could be any variety of people— in Spanish, of course, but also in

68 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

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the kinds of language that they use.

They don’t say “signage.” They say “sign.” Making the mundane mundane and the exciting exciting rather than making everything exciting is really important, and being able to listen is important. Sometimes the amount of distance between the speaker and the decision maker creates shrillness. So when people use their shrill voice, you know it’s not about you. They’re saying, “I’ve been asking for this for 20 years, and nothing has happened.”

If I’m successful, we can bring them a little bit of excitement and

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

/INTERVIEW

“IF I’M SUCCESSFUL, WE CAN BRING THEM A LITTLE BIT OF EXCITEMENT AND GRACE ABOUT THEIR OWN PLACE.” —GLEN DAKE, ASLA

The Rio Hondo river’s edge as it is today.

grace about their own place. And you have to disappoint. You’ve got to tell people there’s not enough money for a swimming pool. They appreciate that. I have done that many times, and people appreciate the honesty.

Tell me a little bit about the work you do privately.

I volunteer on a lot of committees.

In the late 1990s, I helped start the Echo Park Community Garden, and I had positive experiences meeting my neighbors. I worked my precinct for a guy who ran for city council.

Knocking on all those doors really revealed to me there are many more different kinds of people in my precinct than I thought there were. I was the only person who knew how irrigation worked, so I put in the water lines, and it went smoothly thereafter.

Through the process, I met other people who are part of the environmental movement: the water quality people, air quality people. I worked on a lot of those bond-measure campaigns in California in the late 1990s because those allowed us to establish parks for our neighborhood from state bonds.

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Around that time, I joined nowMayor Eric Garcetti’s staff when he was a council person in 2001, and we helped found the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, which helps neighborhoods maintain their gardens. In the city of L.A., we’ve had trouble with the parks department maintenance of small city parks—they’re costly compared to the value that the neighbors get. But we thought if we could just organize the neighbors to open and close the gate and pick up the trash and really watch over it, it would re-

duce the parks department’s cost by so much. With the Land Trust, we had to do that community organizing to convince the neighbors to watch and make sure they do the work.

And now you’ve been appointed by Mayor Garcetti to the Metropolitan Water District board.

Which is a regional group, and I break out into a cold sweat about every third meeting because, like, we’ve just voted Tuesday on this $50 million construction contract! But the Met has for a very long time had an institutional approach to asking 19 million people in Southern California to reduce their water consumption. My time there has been to ask them to develop better data about what people are actually thinking. I believe I’ve helped Met do a lot better work on that.

Do you think there’s a reciprocal influence with a Rio Hondo-type trail project that can influence how people think about their own green space?

I think it matters a huge amount when a public agency takes out turf in a median and puts in a bunch of, you know, Callistemon ‘Little John,’ and people say, “Oh my, that’s such a cute little plant,” and then they take a picture and tell their landscaper. To have the public agency make the example is a huge, huge mind-changer.

WENDY GILMARTIN IS AN ARCHITECT AND JOURNALIST IN LOS ANGELES.

WENDY GILMARTIN

ABOVE

The day came when this nonprofit that I was a part of, the L.A. Community Garden Council, was going to make application to the competitive process to use the bonds to buy the land that the Crenshaw Community Garden is on, and to buy the land that the Echo Park Community Garden is on, and we didn’t get selected. But that was an important disappointment. I learned a lot about our public processes from that experience. And out of that, [then] Mayor [Antonio] Villaraigosa appointed me to the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission. I joined the board of the L.A. League of Conservation Voters, which endorses candidates in L.A. County running for municipal races and interviews the candidates about their environmental platforms. Getting to know how all these small cities and little water districts operate was important to see—and really exciting.

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FOREGROUND

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PLANTS

GROWING OBSESSION

ABOVE

The Sackler Garden

by Dan Pearson Studio viewed from the Garden Café at the Garden Museum.

The Garden Museum’s main focus is British gardens and gardening, including not just the most elaborate and vaunted ones, but also a more intimate history of smaller gardens.

72 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

THE COLONIAL PAST AND THE HORTICULTURAL PRESENT TAKE TEA AT LONDON’S GARDEN MUSEUM.

Featured in particular are those of the middle classes, which have given Britain the sense of being a “nation of gardeners.” For landscape architects with an interest in either stately or domestic gardens in Britain, the museum, which has been recently redeveloped and now includes a building addition, two newly redesigned gardens, a superb café, and an expanded collection, will be a delight. Rather than serving, as a botanical garden might, to narrate garden history through garden spaces, the Garden Museum’s collection gives a more personal-scale view through tools and ephemera that help relate the space of the gar-

BY TIM WATERMAN

den to the space of the imagination and desire. The museum fits compactly into the space of a historic neighborhood church and the tightly bounded urban churchyard.

The Garden Museum opened in 1977, following the church’s deconsecration, but it had come perilously close to demolition—its creepy, boarded-up

GARDEN MUSEUM

J

ust upstream and across the River Thames from the long, neo-Gothic bulk of the Palace of Westminster, which contains the houses of Parliament and the tower that contains the bell Big Ben, are two venerable buildings that have been added to since the Middle Ages.

One is Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The other is the old church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now the home of the Garden Museum.

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FOREGROUND

/PLANTS

skull—a memento mori. The hydra would become a metaphor, in the 1700s, for the multiple insurgencies of piracy, mutiny, and slave rebellion faced by the British Empire in the early days of globalization.

scape architects. Pearson’s courtyard garden, barely 1,000 square feet, replaces the staid knot garden that once occupied the churchyard around the tombs, and it is framed by a light but confident bronze-clad addition by Dow Jones Architects. The bronze cladding echoes the scaling bark of the vast London plane trees that ring the museum, and some of the apparent lightness of the structure may be attributed to the fact that it had to be built without foundations, due to the roughly 20,000 bodies that have been interred in the churchyard since before the Norman Conquest.

The museum, in fact, is full of such reminders, and the English garden in modernity—since the 1600s—is itself a record, not just of a love of beauty, nature, and design, but of a violent history of conquest. Plant hunting is now a much more gentle quest, and the fruits of vigorous global botanizing, courtesy of Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones of the celebrated Welsh nursery Crûg Farm, are visible in Dan Pearson’s design for the new Sackler Garden. Dan Pearson is a celebrated British plant designer and horticulturist whose practice employs a number of land-

One wonders if the roots of the plantings mingle with bones. If so, it’s heartening to think of the death below springing into life above. Some of the new addition around the courtyard of the Sackler Garden covers the old churchyard, but not the tombs of Vice Admiral Bligh and the Tradescants, which now visually anchor Pearson’s design. Plantings have an Anglo–Dutch sensibility, arising from the continuing conversation between British designers such as Pearson and the powerful influence from the Netherlands, particularly Piet Oudolf.

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ABOVE RIGHT

The museum entrance with the new forecourt garden by Christopher Bradley-Hole.

dereliction made it suitable for use as a location for the supernatural horror film The Omen. It was saved by the efforts of garden enthusiasts Rosemary and John Nicholson, who were drawn to the place because of its association with the great 17thcentury plant hunters and naturalists John Tradescant the Elder and his son (the Younger), who are both buried in the churchyard, alongside William Bligh, himself a plant hunter, and whose ship, the Bounty, uncomfortably crammed full of potted breadfruit plants, was the site of a famous mutiny. The Tradescants’ elaborate tomb, once in the churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth, what is now the site of the museum’s new extension and its courtyard, is adorned with reliefs of exotic Mediterranean landscapes, and on one panel, a deeply carved many-headed hydra and a

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DAN PEARSON STUDIO, LEFT; GARDEN MUSEUM, RIGHT

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FOREGROUND

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ABOVE

The tomb of Vice Admiral William Bligh is highlighted against the new addition’s bronze cladding.

Among the plants, Ficus carica ‘Ice Crystal’ is one of the stars here—it is literally starry—its striking palmate snowflake-starburst leaves spangling away in one corner. Everywhere plant forms are celebrated. There is no distracting variegation, so one is given the luxury, for example, to contemplate just what a softly unearthly hue of green is Melianthus major, or just how starkly alert the stems of Equisetum are. Plantings are in succinct drifts—just large enough for an appreciation of the massing, but not so much as to become a monoculture.

Plant forms are accentuated by these tight groupings. Plant heights are seemingly random, but the courtyard is small enough that low spots frame vistas punched through. From the new Garden Café inside the new extension, those views are to an educational kitchen and a classroom—the Clore Learning Space—where city kids can get their hands on plants, soil, earthworms, and food, though not all at once. “Many children in

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this neighborhood haven’t seen a worm or touched a plant,” says the museum’s director, Christopher Woodward. All these rooms have clean, elegant glazed walls facing the courtyard. The café has glazing on two sides, and Pearson’s plantings continue in a narrow strip before the street. One dines amid the plants.

At the main entry to the museum, the old church door, is another garden by created by the minimalist designer Christopher Bradley-Hole.

When I visited in August, the garden was incomplete, with gravel where there will soon be Croatian limestone. The space is formed by two elongated lozenges, edged round with waist-high clipped yew hedges.

The outline of the space is traced out with bright LED strips at the base of the hedge. The use of such lighting has already lapsed into cliché owing to overuse, and here, as in so many other applications, any sense of mystery or shadow is sacrificed.

HUW MORGAN, TOP LEFT; DAN PEARSON STUDIO, RIGHT

ONE WONDERS IF THE ROOTS OF THE PLANTINGS MINGLE WITH BONES.

DAN PEARSON STUDIO

PLANTING PLAN

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ABOVE

The plantings by Bradley-Hole play nicely against a foil of yew.

/PLANTS

Though the space is generous and its expanse of reflective stone will light up the heavy shade under the plane trees, it is both bland and static, and small areas of perennial planting near the door lack the verve of Pearson’s choices.

records of the British garden designers John Brookes, Beth Chatto, and Penelope Hobhouse) and a growing selection of books, artworks, plans, and drawings. Highlights include Humphry Repton’s 1793 Red Book for Sundridge Park in Kent and Dominic Cole’s general layout plan for the There is continuity, at least, from Eden Project. The design drawing the lighted outline of the garden to display is limited, but there is much the museum interior, where strip else to delight garden enthusiasts. lights continue up the stairs and along the balconies. Visitors’ faces At the end of the church is a galare uplit as they gaze at the exhib- lery for temporary exhibitions (this its. As in the courtyard, where the autumn there will be one dedicated building must not intrude upon the to Repton), and opposite, where the historic remains, the museum is a altar once stood, is now a small room freestanding installation within the with an idiosyncratic miscellany on old church structure that must not display called the Ark Gallery. It is touch the walls. As a result, the struc- a reference to the Tradescants’ priture, of blond wood, twines and floats vate museum by that same name, through the arches and recesses. The once one of London’s wonders and collection housed in the museum a classic cabinet of curiosities. Some was originally composed of vintage of the items are on loan from the tools, which over the years expanded Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and to include garden ephemera. There include such items as a Native Ameris now an archive (which includes the ican ball club, elk skulls, a statue

78 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

of Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, and, most bizarre, a hoax object called a “vegetable lamb.” This was purported to have been a plant that fruited sheep. The “lamb” is, in fact, pieced together from nascent, fuzzy fern fronds. The miscellany might seem random, but it helps to see how the garden was viewed as a collection, or a naturalist study by the Tradescants rather than primarily as a designed or aesthetic space.

Standing in the Ark next to a portrait of Tradescant the Elder with some of his collection of exotic seashells, I ask Woodward whether the museum will have international appeal. “The thing about plants,” he replies, “is they’re as local as the flower in your eye or as distant as a breadfruit.”

The Tradescants believed that all the dispersed plants of Eden could someday be collected in a botanic garden. What better place to contemplate the cosmopolitan nature of the garden, and the darker side of conquest, than a museum at the heart of a former empire.

TIM WATERMAN LIVES IN LONDON AND TEACHES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH AND THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE. YOU CAN FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER @TIM_WATERMAN.

GARDEN MUSEUM

FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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PLANNING WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE INDONESIAN TIN MINERS STEWARDS OF THE LAND?

BY BRIAN BARTH

ABOVE

Fred Phillips (fifth from the right) with members of Telapak, an Indonesian environmental organization, during site analysis of a tin mining reclamation site on Bangka Island.

84 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

n July 2015, Fred Phillips, who runs an eight-person firm in Flagstaff, Arizona, that specializes in wetlands restoration, took a call from a prospective client. On the line was a representative from one of the world’s wealthiest companies: Apple. The representative spoke hurriedly, Phillips says, and he struggled to follow at first. They needed help with a project to restore land that had been mined for tin in Indonesia. And it had something to do with pineapples, dragon fruit, and an extremely tiny primate.

the representative from Apple, who had been referred by a mutual acquaintance, was persistent. By the end of the conversation, she offered Phillips a job with the company. He declined. “I told her I was happy with my firm, but would be glad to help as a consultant,” Phillips recalls.

“She said, ‘Can you be on a plane to Jakarta in 10 days?’”

Virtually every electronics product in the world uses tin solder for its circuits, and 30 percent of that tin comes from Indonesia, mostly from Phillips knew nothing about tin deposits in the ancient riverbeds that mining landscapes, nor what was run across Bangka and Belitung Isinvolved in rehabilitating them. But lands, palm-studded paradises a few

TELAPAK

SMARTPHONE LANDSCAPE

I

/PLANNING

ABOVE

The floodplain of this Bangka Island river valley has been mined for tin. Pangkal Pinang, a city of 200,000 downstream, flooded in February 2016.

Vegetation loss in upstream mining areas may be partly to blame.

degrees south of the equator. An estimated 30 percent to 40 percent of the population on Bangka is employed in the industry. Large mining companies denude vast tracts of land to dredge tin ore from the sandy granitic soil using industrial equipment. These companies are legally responsible for restoring the landscape after they are done mining.

But in practice, restoration efforts are meager at best, and government enforcement is lax.

This is complicated by the 50,000 or so artisanal miners—laborers who illegally enter abandoned mine sites to sift for remaining bits of tin with rudimentary equipment, undermining any attempts at reforestation.

86 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Driven by poverty, and encouraged by the rising demand for tin from the $430 billion global cell phone market, the artisanal miners abandon personal safety to enter open pits of loose, wet earth filled with cloudy water. Child labor is rampant, as is death by landslide or drowning. According to a 2012 article in the Guardian, an estimated 100 to 150 artisanal miners die annually on the job.

on the list of threatened species— and taken the island off Indonesia’s tourist circuit.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Phillips says.

“Bangka used to have some of the best beaches in the country. Now when you fly in, all you see is exposed white sand on the land and muddy water extending miles out from the shore. The rivers, and the estuaries they feed, are all brown; the mangroves and coral reefs are smothered Flying over Bangka Island, where by sediment. It’s not much of a travel Apple hoped to rectify the horrors destination anymore.” stemming from the source of its tin, Phillips looked down on 1.5 million The plight of Indonesia’s artisanal acres of pocked moonscape. Loss miners has been known for decades. of the lush forest cover has put the But as electronic devices increasingly Horsfield’s tarsier, a small primate, saturate our homes, not to mention

EED GREENG/BBST

FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

/PLANNING

ABOVE

At this encampment of artisanal miners, Phillips asked one how much he made in a month. “He said, ‘around $100.’ Then I asked what it would take for him to do something else besides this, like be a farmer.

He said, ‘$110.’”

landfills, manufacturers’ supply chains have garnered greater scrutiny. In 2013, 14 of the biggest electronics companies, Apple included, formed the Tin Working Group, a partnership housed under the umbrella of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), a nonprofit that monitors ethical supply chain management for electronicsbased industries.

The idea was to leverage the buying power of multinational electronics companies to force Indonesia’s mining companies and government regulators to reform the tin industry. The Tin Working Group has considered audits and incentive mechanisms to nudge the local ac-

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tors in that direction, but the forces of supply and demand seem to be nudging the other way: Consumers aren’t forcing change, and the electronics companies aren’t so noble as to sacrifice profits to pay for cleaning up the industry themselves, leaving the mining companies with all the cards in their hands.

Enter the pineapple. On Phillips’s first foray to Bangka in 2015, it was clear that the only way to stop illegal tin mining and restore the mined landscapes was to create an alternative livelihood for the miners that paid them more to steward the landscape than to destroy it. Farming—based around agroforestry plantings designed as much to restore local ecosystems as to yield cash crops—seemed the only feasible solution. If the produce could be marketed through fair trade or organic channels, the premium price might help make the whole affair more economically sustainable.

Apple declined my requests for an interview, though Michele Bruelhart, a tin industry expert at the EICC, shared her view on the conundrum of sustainable smartphones. “Mining is an inherently unsustainable activity because it’s dealing with finite resources, so rather than talk Apple hired Phillips to design a 125about ‘sustainable tin,’ we call it ‘re- acre restoration pilot project that he sponsibly sourced’ tin.” says the company hopes will become

FRED PHILLIPS CONSULTING LLC

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE BOUNTIFUL FARMS SPRINGING UP ON SUCH HIGHLY DEGRADED LAND.

FOREGROUND

/PLANNING

LEGEND PTBBTS 10 Ha. Reclamation Boundary Existing Pond Flow Line Existing Large Spoil Pile Toe of Slope Top of Slope Drainage Basin Boundary (Watershed) Existing Native Forest Existing Road

a proof of concept for turning illegal miners into ecofriendly farmers (officially, the EICC is his client). The conceptual plan, completed in late 2016, calls for smoothing out the random piles of soil and dredging pits that typify tin mining sites into broad planting terraces threaded with constructed wetlands to filter runoff. Half the site is slated for agriculture and half for reforestation with native species, which may also be managed for timber, honey, and other goods.

ABOVE

Phillips used this image of a former tin mining site to help plan reclamation work, as topographic maps of the area were not available.

cal horticulture experts, Phillips devised a plan for intercropping trees with smaller species: coconut palms with pineapple, timber bamboo with citronella and vetiver grass, and so on. The plan calls for eight tons of compost to be tilled into every acre to jump-start biological activity in the soil, though the initial plantings have been chosen for crops known to thrive in infertile conditions. Some of the crops will also produce biomass as a by-product, which will be incorporated into the soil, allowing plants with higher fertility needs to Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to imagine bountiful farms be established later. springing up on such highly degraded land, but wet tropical places Soil and water toxicity is a major are well-suited to dense, multistory concern on any mining reclamation plantings, where various perennial project, let alone on a site where food crops are grown in concert, mimick- is to be grown. Toxic chemicals are ing ecological functions and rapidly not used to extract tin as with other building soil. With the help of a U.S.- metals (cyanide is often used in gold based agriculture consultant and lo- mining, for example), nor is tin it-

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self considered acutely toxic. However, the naturally acidic soils and groundwater in the region, made more acidic by the removal of topsoil at the mining sites, are a recipe for mobilizing heavy metals, which may then become concentrated in plant and animal tissues. Although there is evidence of toxic levels of heavy metal contamination at abandoned Bangka mines, negative impacts to human health have not been documented. Still, out of an abundance of caution, Phillips says the plan is to start with nonfood crops, such as vetiver, citronella, and palm varieties that produce coco coir, rather than coconuts, while monitoring soil and groundwater conditions during the first years of the reclamation effort. Phillips expects the pH to rise as biological activity resumes, with hopes of paving the way for diverse food crops.

EED GREENG/BBST

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INNOVATION THAT SHINES

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Phillips’s preliminary research uncovered two examples of successful pineapple plantings on tin sand tailings in Malaysia where the crop did not appear to accumulate unsafe levels of heavy metals, giving hope that TOP this cash crop, already grown sucThe reclamation plan cessfully on Bangka, will be the first calls for tailings ponds edible produced. To further evaluate and soils to be formed the potential for edible crops, Refined into planting terraces.

A series of constructed Bangka Tin, the mining company wetlands will filter that provided the 125-acre site for the runoff and help to pilot project from one of its mining improve water quality concessions in the Pemali District downstream. along with seed money for the projINSET ect, hired an Indonesian consultant Artisanal miners use to test a series of crops in a plot of rudimentary equipment soil hauled from the site to its testsuch as this pumping ing facility. The verdict: Root crops, device to separate the remaining bits of tin such as cassava, risked unsafe levels of heavy metal contamination, but from the sandy soils dragon fruit, pineapple, papaya, and that mining companies have left behind. other tree crops are a safe bet.

92 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Phillips has spent two years navigating the Indonesian bureaucracy, getting to know local practices, and engaging with both the mining companies and the artisanal mining community to earn their trust and understand their needs. He hired Telapak, an Indonesian nongovernmental organization headed

by the environmental activist Silverius Oscar Unggul, to facilitate the negotiations. The organization has worked with illegal loggers on Belitung Island to form economically viable and environmentally friendly farming cooperatives and ecotourism ventures; the hope is to do the same with Bangka’s illegal miners.

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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SPENDING MONTHS TO BUILD UP A NEW FARMING BUSINESS IS NOT AN OPTION.

ABOVE

Phillips records observations and design ideas on his phone during a site visit to collect soil and water quality data.

to set up composting facilities and nurseries based on the assumption that there will soon be demand for those products, and that the scent of commerce will inspire artisanal miners to take the leap.

Reza Andriansyah, the director of Refined Bangka Tin, told me he hopes to break ground later this year on the first 25 acres of the pilot project using the company’s own funds, and is hoping to secure grants through the EICC for the rest of the 125-acre pilot project. He’s branded the initiative Timah Tani, which translates as Tin Farmer. “The message we want to send is that the tin industry is serious about reclamation,” he says.

“People in Indonesia have been talking about reclamation projects and alternatives to tin mining for years, so sometimes the artisanal miners feel it’s just talk, talk, talk and no action,” Unggul says. “We told Fred that to be successful, in our experience, you have to show people what we call ‘quick wins.’ Then they will For Phillips, getting this far is already follow you.” a success. He thinks the reason Apple wanted to hire him is that they’d For this reason, quick-maturing crops heard about his ability to get people will be emphasized. And Telapak is with diverse perspectives talking to already working with people locally each other—for two decades, he’s

94 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

worked in the Southwest on projects with groups that included local tribes, small-town Chambers of Commerce, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, among others. “[The Apple representative] kept telling me how frustrated they were after hiring high-paid consultants who weren’t getting any traction to get the project moving. This was really the first time that the electronics industry, the mining companies, and the villages where all the illegal miners come from all came to the table to listen to each other, which is what I think will make this time different, and will make the project replicable,” Phillips says. “This is the crucial moment if we are to bring this idea to scale.”

BRIAN BARTH IS A TORONTO-BASED JOURNALIST WITH A BACKGROUND IN URBAN PLANNING AND LANDSCAPE DESIGN. REACH HIM AT BRIANJBARTH.COM OR ON TWITTER @BRIAN JBARTH.

ARY IRAWAN

The challenge, Unggul says, is for well-meaning foreign interests to get past buzzy sustainability speak, which means nothing to someone whose only way to feed his family involves sitting in a mud pit 12 hours a day sifting for tin. The miners need to see an alternative that will replace their current income without missing a beat—spending months to build up a new farming business is not an option.

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FOREGROUND

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PALETTE PLAY IT AS IT LAYERS A

WITH MORE THAN 30 YEARS OF PRACTICE, PAMELA BURTON, FASLA, HAS AN EYE FOR THE STRATA OF HER DESIGNS.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA ABOVE

Pamela Burton, FASLA, uses her home in Ojai to experiment with new plants and design ideas.

100 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Here and elsewhere in her work, Burton harnesses key principles from her experiences and artistic influences. She uses the borrowed views of the Topatopa Mountains to the north and the architecture of people-centered spaces through the creation of rooms. And to connect these elements, she employs intricately composed layers so subtle that it takes some time before they become evident.

MARION BRENNER, AFFILIATE ASLA

t Pamela Burton’s home in Ojai, California, above the yoga mat in a small office off the bedroom hangs a large painting with horizontal stripes of color titled Pamela’s Secret. Burton says it was done by Jane Wells, a friend whose garden she designed, explaining that each band of color represents different parts of the landscape. She joked it was Wells’s secret as to why the painting was named as such, but over the course of several days of visiting Burton’s work in the region, it became apparent that Wells recognized Burton’s fine-tuned ability to create the layers from ground to sky that form the underpinnings of her designs.

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FOREGROUND

/PALETTE

Between her undergraduate and graduate degrees, Burton took time off to travel around Japan, where she was met with the subtle complexities of Japanese landscape design. She says it was there that she learned ABOVE the art of borrowed scenery to creBurton’s home in Ojai ate a landscape that seemingly exis hugged by mountains on three sides, creating ceeds its boundaries. She says that the Japanese were the original modspectacular views all around. ernists, as their views of simplicity

102 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

and drawing from nature were so aligned. Both aesthetics, she says, influenced her work, but “by knowing history and by understanding the good moves,” you know which cultural landscape principles to use and where. It’s not just emulating one particular aesthetic, she says.

After she returned, Burton worked at the legendary Ace Gallery in Los

Her home in the Ojai Valley is one example of her approach. It is where, for 30 years, she has been experimenting with both design and plants. She says the property has been a defining element in her growth as a designer. It is where her 1920s stone farmhouse is gently hugged by rolling mountains and a patchwork of orange groves. This combination of aesthetics and utility is an important part of her designs, and one with historical reach back to William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement. As she observes, “that which is useful is beautiful, and that which is beautiful is not always useful.”

MARION BRENNER, AFFILIATE ASLA

Angeles, where she met many contemporary artists. She enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for architecture and graduated in 1975, saying that if she wanted to do landscape, she had to know architecture.

This she combined with her horticultural interests from an undergraduate degree in environmental design, also from UCLA. When developing a design, she says that she “follows her nose” and allows the landscape to speak for itself through intuition.

“Don’t ask me how I got to doing this kind of stuff; I just do it,” Burton says.

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FOREGROUND

/PALETTE

Bonhill Residence

O

Each part of the garden is set aside for a different purpose, whether it be for art, solitude, gardening, or relaxation. Burton says the landscape becomes an extension of the house to give the users a “place for repose.”

A walkway that navigates the perim-

104 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

XXXXXXX

ne of Burton’s earliest designs, the Bonhill Residence has been a labor of love for the past 30 years.

She has designed and redesigned the landscape to fit the changing needs and desires of her clients. A modern house sits at the top of a fourtiered garden that constitutes a 30foot change in grade, with a stone staircase cutting down the middle to help separate the site into different rooms. Citing the Sissinghurst Castle Gardens as a big influence, Burton says she designed this stone walkway with tall hedges on both sides that intermittently reveal views of uniquely individual spaces.

BONHILL RESIDENCE, LOS ANGELES

PLAN 1 PARKING COURT 1

2 OVERLOOK TERRACE 3 OFFICE GARDEN 4 AXIAL STAIR AND WALK 5 URN FOUNTAIN 6 GARDEN FOLLY 7 FRUIT TREE AND HERB GARDEN 8 RILL

2

9 BADMINTON COURT (NOW GRASS LAWN)

3

10 ROW OF PLEACHED SYCAMORES 4

11 PATH

11

9

8

10

7

JACK COYIER, PHOTOS THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE; PAMELA BURTON & COMPANY, PLAN

6 5

N

eter made of decomposed granite connects each of these experiences, slicing through planting beds composed of contrasting textures and heights that lead to a formal lawn for outdoor parties at the base of the property. Looking back toward the house reveals the climb in elevation, dramatized by a carefully layered tapestry of trees, shrubs, and ground

covers that knit together like a wellcomposed painting. “It’s not complicated; it’s really making places for people,” Burton says. “These spaces are great, and then you see different things in them.” The owners are art collectors, and many different sculptural elements appear throughout the site, adding a human element to what seems almost wild.

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

The garden tiers help navigate the elevation change; tall hedgerows line the main path to conceal and reveal views; the vegetable garden allows for quiet contemplation.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 105

FOREGROUND

/PALETTE

BURTON’S PICKS ith the recent drought in California, it has become critical to design with the careful management of resources in mind, Burton says.

While she doesn’t stick strictly to natives, she leans toward using plants adapted to Mediterranean climates to ensure a plant will survive and thrive in the California climate. She eschews “political boundaries” for plants, as she calls them—as long as the plants will do well.

PLATANUS RACEMOSA (CALIFORNIA SYCAMORE)

Also referred to as the western sycamore or California plane tree, the California sycamore is native to a stretch along the Pacific coast down to Mexico. It can grow up to 110 feet in height and is adaptable to a wide range of site conditions.

1

1 SCHINUS MOLLE (PERUVIAN PEPPERTREE)

The fast-growing peppertree is an evergreen native to the Andes in Peru.

At maturity, the canopy can reach 30 feet wide and 50 feet high. The tree is considered an invasive in some regions as it is long lived and highly drought tolerant.

OLEA EUROPAEA (OLIVE TREE)

The olive tree is a classic element in the drought-tolerant, Mediterranean planting scheme. Burton favors the fruiting variety in her work; however, there are many cultivars to choose from, including fruitless variants.

QUERCUS AGRIFOLIA (CALIFORNIA LIVE OAK)

4

Native to the Pacific coast of California west of the Sierra Nevadas, the California live oak is evergreen and thrives in the mild winters of the coastal environment. Its acorns are annual, and it is extremely susceptible to the pathogen Phytophthora ramorum.

106 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

2

3

2 ECHIUM CANDICANS (PRIDE OF MADEIRA)

3 ROSA ‘SALLY HOLMES’ (SALLY HOLMES CLIMBING ROSE)

This fast-growing species can reach eight feet high and is drought tolerant. The purple flower heads are large and are favored by pollinators.

Often referred to as a “problem child” by Burton, it is not very long lived and can become woody underneath. It is considered of limited invasiveness by the California Invasive Plant Council.

Representing one of the many older rose species that Burton likes, the ‘Sally Holmes’ cultivar blooms start off as a soft, buttery pink that eventually turns white. It is a climber with a subtle fragrance.

AGAVE ‘SHARKSKIN’ (SHARKSKIN AGAVE)

Admitting her love for agaves, Burton lists ‘Sharkskin’ as just one in ROMNEYA COULTERI a long line of favorites. This agave (COULTER’S MATILIJA POPPY) hybrid’s striking architectural foliage A popular native in the Californian is a muted silver-blue; it grows up to landscape, the Coulter’s Matilija three feet high. poppy can grow up to seven feet high and has brilliant white flowers TEUCRIUM CHAMAEDRYS throughout summer. Burton says (WALL GERMANDER) it can be a tricky plant to establish, The wall germander is a purple noting 10 have to be planted just to flowering shrub native to Europe. It prefers sheltered locations and can get one to take. have serious dieback during winter PHLOMIS FRUTICOSA in colder locations. A light shearing (SHRUBBY JERUSALEM SAGE) will keep it from becoming too leggy.

This evergreen shrub is native to the Mediterranean and produces DECOMPOSED GRANITE striking yellow flowers in a whorled A favorite of Burton’s for its great wapattern from spring to summer. The ter percolation, decomposed granite foliage is woolly and is both drought makes an appearance in many of her landscapes. and deer tolerant.

SALVIA X ‘ALLEN CHICKERING’ (ALLEN CHICKERING SAGE)

A hybrid cross between S. clevelandii and S. leucophylla, the ‘Allen Chickering’ cultivar grows up to five feet high and boasts large purple flowers throughout the spring and summer.

It thrives in low water environments and full sun exposure.

4 LOCALLY SOURCED STONE

Burton uses many types of stone in her designs, as LEED Platinum qualifications (Burton is a LEED Green Associate) require stone to be quarried within 300 square miles of the site. Of the types of stone available, Burton prefers colors in buff, blue, and canyon tones.

BY GEORGES JANSOONE GFDL, CC BY SA 3.0 OR CC BY 2.5 , VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 1 ; BY TANGOPASO PUBLIC DOMAIN , VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 2 ; BY EPIBASE CC BY 3.0 , VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 3 ; KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA 4

W

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FOREGROUND

/PALETTE

Santa Monica Business Center

T

he Santa Monica Business Center landscape is a 13-acre site nestled between six office buildings and is described by Burton as more of a “botanical stroll” than a commercial park. Despite the utilitarian connections, the north corner acts as a neighborhood park where the local community comes to work out and play. Construction yielded nearly 30,000 cubic yards of excess soil, which Burton and her team decided to repurpose on a stretch of grass surrounded by California sycamore.

What was supposed to be a lawn became a grassy mound that gently draws people in to play and relax.

N

108 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

JACK COYIER, TOP LEFT; PAMELA BURTON & COMPANY, BOTTOM LEFT; UNDINE PRÖHL, BOTTOM RIGHT

SANTA MONICA BUSINESS CENTER, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

PLANT LIST LEFT AND BELOW

The lushly planted “botanical stroll” (left) leads to the foot of a series of planted steps (below) dotted with quirky plants.

OPPOSITE TOP

A central courtyard acts as an anchoring element for the design.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM

The vistas from the office buildings borrow views from the surrounding mountains.

TREES (ENTIRE SITE)

Bauhinia x blakeana (Bauhinia) Corymbia citriodora (Lemonscented gum) Jacaranda mimosifolia (Black poui) Liquidambar styraciflua (Sweet gum) Phoenix roebelenii (Pygmy date palm) Platanus racemosa (California sycamore) Schinus molle (Peruvian peppertree) Washingtonia robusta (Washington fan palm) BOTANICAL WALK GARDEN

Agapanthus praecox ssp. orientalis (Lily of the Nile) Ajuga reptans ‘Jungle Bronze’ (Common bugle) Liriope muscari ‘Majestic’ (Majestic lilyturf) Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Golf Ball’ (Golf Ball kohuhu) Tibouchina heteromalla (Silverleafed princess flower) ENTRY COURTYARD GARDENS

Cortaderia selloana ‘Pumila’ (Dwarf pampas grass) Crassula capitella ‘Campfire’ (Campfire crassula) Pennisetum spathiolatum (Slender veldt grass) Phormium tenax ‘Duet’ (Duet New Zealand flax) MEDITERRANEAN GARDENS & PLANTED STEPS

UNDINE PRÖHL

Aloe striata (Coral aloe) Bougainvillea ‘La Jolla’ (La Jolla bougainvillea) Libertia peregrinans (New Zealand iris) Ligustrum japonicum ‘Texanum’ (Texanum Japanese privet) Plectranthus forsteri ‘Aureus Variegatus’ (Gold-edged plectranthus) Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Miss Jessopp’s Upright’ (Miss Jessopp’s Upright rosemary) Salvia apiana (White sage) Santolina rosmarinifolia (Green lavender cotton)

A lushly planted walkway stretches from the northern part of the park southward and features a diverse assortment of California climateadapted plantings, such as the silverleafed princess flower and the lily of the Nile. While the visitor still has sight lines outward, the space becomes more enclosed and intimate as the layers of plantings build from the ground level upward, bleeding into the landscape and buildings beyond. This walk leads to centralized open café seating and a large set of planted stairs, with wild, contrasting plantings of textures and colors. The steps are wide and shallow enough that they invite the pedestrian upward to explore the curious specimens— as coarsely textured as the coral aloe and as delicate as the New Zealand iris—up close.

CENTRAL PLAZA GARDEN

Acanthus mollis (Bear’s breech) Euphorbia ‘Froeup’ EXCALIBUR (Excalibur spurge) Fuchsia hybrida ‘Double Otto’ (Hybrid fuchsia) Strelitzia nicolai (Bird-of-paradise tree) Tradescantia pallida ‘Purple Heart’ (Purple queen) RED GARDEN

Burton says that an initial challenge to the redesign was the existing main diagonal entryways that obscured inward visibility. To open this space and draw people inward, straight avenues were cut into these diagonals, creating three additional entrances.

Burton chose different plantings and material colors at each of the seven entryways to help orient visitors and create a distinct identity for each access point.

Aloe nobilis (Gold tooth aloe) Echeveria crenulata (Echeveria) Photinia x fraseri (Fraser’s photinia) Pyracantha ‘Tiny Tim’ (Tiny Tim firethorn) Strelitzia reginae (Bird-of-paradise) SHADE GARDEN

Camellia japonica ‘Nuccio’s Gem’ (Nuccio’s Gem camellia) Clivia minata (Kaffir-lily) Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Domotoi’ (Domotoi bigleaf hydrangea) Polystichum munitum (Western sword fern) Rhododendron x ‘Red Poppy’ (Red Poppy azalea) Woodwardia fimbriata (Giant chainfern)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 109

FOREGROUND

/PALETTE

B

urton describes the biggest challenge of this private residential An ellipse meadow lot in Ojai as connecting the five allows views of the surrounding mountains. seemingly disparate buildings on site while simultaneously trying to OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE obscure them from view. Arriving FROM BOTTOM LEFT from the driveway toward the main Burton uses a “poché” house reveals what she calls a “poto help frame views ché,” or framing device of plantings around the site; the yellows of Phlomis around views of the main entrance, fruticosa compliment to help guide the visitor forward. the purples of Echium Out back, a set of planted stairs of candicans; an “Ojai Mexican feather grass and silver potato” boulder Dymondia fans out from the main incorporated into the wall adds an interesting house to the pool where carefully texture. selected openings in the trees creABOVE

110 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

ate striking vistas of the surround- A circumnavigating path of decoming mountains. posed granite connects the buildings around the edge of the property, A formal stone walkway leads from leading from intimate guesthouses the main building to the guesthouses, sheltered by giant peppertrees to a cutting through an oval opening lined productive avocado grove. Along the with olive trees. Burton says the owner path is a thick perimeter wall made had asked for a big open lawn, but she from the stone combed from the countered with the idea of less water- site before construction. Its surface intensive native grasses. This open- is pocked every now and then with a ing, though small in scale, encloses large boulder, which Burton refers to the visitor through a careful layering as “Ojai potatoes.” Her take is practiof native grasses and the yellows and cal, as well as aesthetic: “You can’t purples of Phlomis and Salvia that lead move it, so you just use it.” the eye upward toward the olive trees and mountains beyond.

MARION BRENNER, AFFILIATE ASLA, PHOTOS THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE

Ojai Ranch

OJAI RANCH, OJAI, CALIFORNIA

PLAN 1 ROCK WALLS 3

2 AVOCADO GROVES 3 PARKING COURT

11

6

7

4 ENTRY GARDEN

6 PRIVATE GARDEN TERRACE

8 DINING TERRACE 9 OLIVE GROVES

1

10

5 POOL TERRACE

7 VEGETABLE GARDEN/ FRUIT TREES

GUEST HOUSE

MAIN HOUSE

2

8

11

4

6

1 3 5

9

POOL HOUSE

6

10 AGROSTIS MEADOW 11 PATH

PAMELA BURTON & COMPANY, PLAN

N

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 111

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GOODS

SEE YOU AT EXPO PLANTERS, CHAIRS, WATERWORKS, AND MORE: THIS YEARâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ASLA EXPO WILL HAVE IT ALL.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

JOIN COLLECTION

The Join Collection is made up of a series of benches and planters that can be configured and customized to fit any need. The benches are available in a variety of colors and materials and sit at the same height as the planters, allowing for a seamless transition in space.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.MALIKGALLERYOUTDOOR.COM.

116 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

MALIK OUTDOOR

FOREGROUND

VELOPORT

With 20 options for powder coat finish colors, this all-metal bike locker

by Dero holds one bike for short- or long-term storage. The whole unit is secured by surface mounting and can be locked in the front either by key or with a personal padlock.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.DERO.COM.

AVIVO BAR STOOL

This aluminum bar stool has a variety of applications. Its powder coating in a range of color options is highly weather- and graffiti-resistant. It is available with three different perforation patterns for the seatback.

COURTESY FORMS+SURFACES, TOP; DERO, CENTER; COURTESY THE PORTLAND LOO, BOTTOM

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THE PORTLAND LOO

Meant for the grimiest of streets, the Portland Loo is made from stainless steel for ease of cleanup; it is lightweight and protected with a clear coat to resist graffiti. The unit can be illuminated by solarpowered LED fixtures or prewired, and it is built to ADA standards.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.THELOO.BIZ.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 117

FOREGROUND

/GOODS

TAPERED HUDSON POT

These Branch Studio containers are fabricated from 1/8-inch-thick, cold-rolled steel then galvanized and finished in a patina that is weather- and rust-resistant. They are available in three sizes ranging from two to three feet high.

JONATHAN HOFLEY

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.STICKS-AND-STONES.CA.

118 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

® Professional Grade Aluminum Landscape & Hardscape Edging for Every Application

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FOREGROUND

/GOODS

TORRES COLLECTION

The Torres lighting family comes in a range of heights and styles to fit a multitude of purposes, including area, path, wall, and catenary lighting. Each model uses efficient multidie LED technology and is made of cast aluminum with aluminum poles.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.LANDSCAPEFORMS.COM.

AQUABOW TRIO

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.WATERTOYS.COM.

120 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

COURTESY LANDSCAPE FORMS, TOP; EMPEX WATERTOYS, BOTTOM

This series of three spraying archways builds from a height of 85 up to 99 inches, giving a clearance suitable for all ages, and can be installed in up to a foot of water. Cone spray nozzles are fitted to the interior of each archway and emit a soft mist.

CHAIR 483

These easily portable chairs by DuMor are made from steel, coated in zinc-rich epoxy, then finished with a polyester powder coating in a variety of colors.

The chair is available with or without armrests and comes with the option of an ipe seat and back.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.DUMOR.COM.

MUSE

The Muse tile collection offers many colors, patterns, sizes, and finishes to choose from, including iridescent options. Oceanside Glasstile uses recycled glass and is LEED certified, with each color option ranging from 30 to nearly 100 percent recycled content.

COURTESY DUMOR, TOP; COURTESY OCEANSIDE GLASS & TILE, BOTTOM

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.GLASSTILE.COM.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 121

FOREGROUND

/GOODS

SOCIAL CIRCLE FIRE PIT

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THIRD WAY L.A. OPPOSITE

Christopher Hawthorne leads a walking tour of the Glendale Narrows section of the Los Angeles River in April 2015 as part of his Third Los Angeles Project.

132 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

MARC CAMPOS/OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

AT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE IS LEAVING BIGGER FOOTPRINTS ON HIS BEAT THAN GENERALLY EXPECTED OF ARCHITECTURE CRITICS.

BY TOM CARSON

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 133

L

earning that Christopher Hawthorne went to Yale is a surprise on a par with discovering that Joe Biden is interested in politics or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar used to play basketball. His brisk intellectual aplomb, whose charm is its implication that sharing interesting ideas is an enjoyable form of social life, could have been teleported with no change in demeanor from the heady days of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.

This edition has been the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times since 2004.

Before moving from New York to L.A. to take up his L.A. Times duties, Hawthorne did the same job for Slate. He’d also written extensively for the New York Times.

Thanks to that curriculum vitae, he’s occasionally perceived as the kind of East Coast transplant whose superiority to local values has irked Angelenos forever. But that’s a bum rap in Hawthorne’s case. He’s a native Californian, Berkeley born and raised, and he’s even immune to Bay Area snootiness about demotic SoCal.

134 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Like the Randy Newman song Even so, “the public realm” is no trifling issue to him. He’s taken says, the man loves L.A. a special interest in the political From the start, his L.A. Times uses and meanings of commucolumns drew attention for their nal urban spaces ever since he scope and vigor. He’s written did his undergraduate thesis on about Los Angeles architecture’s the subject. Last February, after manifestations and repurpos- airport demonstrations against ings in pop culture—movies, Donald Trump’s Muslim ban most obviously. But he’s also erupted nationwide, he wrote a taken his readers to Medellín, column analyzing LAX’s upsides Colombia, once best known for and downsides as a setting for its eponymous drug cartel, to ex- improvised agitprop. plore the innovative civic architecture in even the city’s poorest He’s also spent a lot of time spelunking in Los Angeles’s archaeology neighborhoods.

—not only its architecture, but His aesthetics are complex and its whole evolution as a built enstimulating. While he’s a devot- vironment, from transportation ed proponent of the greening of to hydrology. His latest research L.A., the buildings most likely to interest, he tells me as we stroll galvanize his inner preservation- out of the L.A. Times building ist are the oft-despised mirrored- one balmy May morning, is also glass behemoths of the 1970s our destination: the Bradbury and 1980s. These days, he tells Building, erected in 1893 and me, he frets about the imminent pure steampunk retrofuturism demise of the not especially be- within. It bemuses him that he’s loved buildings comprising the only found three prior monoLong Beach Civic Center: “They graphs on the subject: “If this don’t meet the public realm well. building were in New York, with They’re sort of off-putting. But that crazy history, there would they’re also amazingly powerful be so much more literature about it.” as architecture.”

To my disappointment, the anodyne corner coffee shop Hawthorne leads me to has no view of the Bradbury’s intricately latticed innards. But we aren’t meeting up to talk about Los Angeles’s understudied architectural yesterdays —except, that is, as a possible foreshadowing of its next incarnation. I’m here to learn about Hawthorne’s most ambitious attempt to kick-start a public discussion of the city’s design and landscape future: the Third L.A. Project.

In tandem with Occidental College, where he teaches a related course called Architecture and the Built Environment, Hawthorne launched Third L.A. in 2015. He moderates half a dozen forums and panel discussions each year on topics as diverse as Lyft and Airbnb, L.A.’s latest bid—since approved—to host the Olympics, and the vexed question of how to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the urban and regional landscape. The participants he’s recruited range from neighborhood activists and academic experts to Mayor Eric

Garcetti, Honorary ASLA, who’s project and its original sin, as Muldone two events so far. holland destroyed the Owens Valley’s agricultural viability for Los Strikingly, Hawthorne and his Angeles’s sake—and the movie cohorts play to packed and oc- business and the defense industry, casionally argumentative rooms. in that order.

His audiences are well aware that Los Angeles’s metamorpho- The “Second L.A.” is the familiar sis into a place where you’ll be American Century paradise most more likely to look up than look Angelenos cherish even now. around, not to mention one you’ll It’s the L.A. of cars and bucolic get around in by using a Metro Eisenhower-era freeways, of endcard instead of shelling out for gas less single-family homes in proat the pump, is already under way. liferating subdivisions, and the Whether that disgusts or thrills mosaic of blue-eyed swimming them, they’re all ears—and they’d pools, lawns, and dingbat archilike to be voices, too. tecture whose celebrants ranged from Reyner Banham to David hy Third L.A., you ask? Hockney to the Beach Boys.

In Hawthorne’s schema, Venting New York’s horror at its the “First L.A.”—leaving upstart West Coast cultural chalout the pueblo, founded in 1781, lenger, Norman Mailer lamented that became one of the West’s in 1960 that everything looked more notoriously violent cow as if “it was built by television towns during the 19th century— sets giving orders to men.” But was the metropolis that grew by anything this unprecedented was leaps and bounds from the 1880s bound to panic settled taste. to the end of World War II, initially because of the mild climate. One of that L.A.’s hallmarks was Then came the oil boom depicted a very Californian confidence in There Will Be Blood, William that, as Hawthorne says, the city Mulholland’s 1913 aqueduct—at could “grow its way out of most once L.A.’s first great public works of its major problems.” Well into

W

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 135

Hawthorne listens during the Third L.A. panel “City of Quartz at 25,” on the book

by Mike Davis, at Occidental College in March 2015.

er felt more impoverished than when, to my more upscale friends’ astonished amusement, I had to confess to getting around by bus.

urban spaces across Los Angeles,” he explains. “With every new Metro line comes a new linear landscape, which I think has the potential to be a green landscape. With every line comes station architecture, which is civic architecture.” He talks up Medellín as a successful example of integrating innovatively designed libraries and schools with new station construction to redefine even its poorest neighborhoods’ civic character.

The city’s present-day subway and light-rail lines weren’t introduced until the 1990s. As of now, they comprise just 105 skimpy miles of track in a metropolitan area with a population of 13 million. But last November, voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M, which will allocate a staggering $120 billion over the next 40 years to a At the same time, L.A.’s automo- vast expansion of Metro’s public- If importing that model sounds tive glut is providing the impetus transportation grid. quixotic to me, that’s partly befor a major uptick in public recepcause the comprehensive vision tiveness to alternatives. For de- Hawthorne has high hopes for Hawthorne imagines guiding cades, mass transit was a wheez- Metro expansion as a goad to re- Metro’s expansion seems uning and déclassé sideshow in the thinking other aspects of L.A.’s likely to survive contact with the gaudy circus of Los Angeles-style landscape and built environ- reality of L.A.’s at once cumbermobility. Thirty years ago, when ment. “We have an incredible some and diffuse patchwork of I was living a Guns N’ Roses sort opportunity not just to remake governing entities, chauvinistic of life in scruffy Hollywood, I nev- the mobility map, but to remake communities, and powerful busi-

136 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

SUSANICA TAM

RIGHT

the 1980s, the larger Los Angeles megalopolis looked primed to keep sprawling east and south without encountering anything resembling armed resistance until it reached Barstow. But no more.

With space no longer looking so limitless—or, perhaps, limitlessness no longer looking so attractive —going vertical and high-density by building up instead of out is the most obvious solution to, among other things, the area’s nagging shortage of new housing.

Last March, albeit in an election with absurdly low turnout, voters soundly rejected Measure S, an antigrowth initiative that would have put a two-year moratorium on new building projects requiring zoning changes or other waivers of the existing city rules.

IF HAWTHORNE QUALIFIES AS A UTOPIAN AT ALL, HE’S A VERY PRACTICAL MINDED ONE. ness interests. But I also can’t picture Metro’s officials being anything but bewildered by the idea of themselves as the vanguard of trendsetting urban design, a point Hawthorne readily concedes. “As I’ve been able to gauge it, the people they’ve hired to think about [design issues] have not found a hospitable environment there,” he says.

Yet it’s not hard to see why the possibilities fascinate him. Thanks to Measure M, no other entity has Metro’s budget or mandate to do so much to bring the “Third L.A.” into being in a more or less organized—and conceivably enlightened—form. If Hawthorne qualifies as a utopian at all, he’s a very practical-minded one.

E

ven so, he pushes back against the idea that what he’s doing is advocacy. “I think what’s happening is a kind of inexorable set of changes,” he tells me. “I really don’t think of what I’m doing as trying to advance or accelerate a certain outcome. It’s really more about trying to grapple with the ways

in which the city is changing and urban and suburban living. L.A.’s understand how that’s informed downtown is only its downtown by the longer history of the city.” because that’s where the original pueblo was. Although it’s recently Acquainting people with “the lon- become much more chic, thanks ger history of the city” is Haw- to an array of new cultural venues thorne’s favorite teaching tool. and the conversion of commercial To his mind, the First L.A. isn’t spaces to residential ones, that still so much an urban model the doesn’t make it a hub. city has outgrown as much as a potential prototype Angelenos Despite that, the First L.A. had a have largely ignored. For starters, proud sense of civic identity, manit had an extensive and efficient ifested in its ambitious public arpublic-transit network: the Red chitecture. Before single-family Car trolley system, with more homes became L.A.’s (and much than 20 lines operating on 1,100 of the country’s—just not other miles of track. Not until the free- cities’) Eisenhower-era definition ways replaced it did owning a car of bliss, architects like Irving Gill become a prerequisite to getting were also designing multiunit dwellings that reflected the city’s around the city conveniently. distinctive hybrid of urban and Incidentally, it fascinates Haw- suburban living by remaining thorne that the city’s boulevards, modest in height and scale while its trolley lines, and finally its accommodating greater density. freeways all mimicked the patterns of movement imposed by One example Hawthorne cites the property boundaries of the with special fondness is Gill’s area’s vast 19th-century ranchos. design for Santa Monica’s HoraThat helps explain why the free- tio West Court apartments. Cerway system’s layout, unlike the tainly, my own idea of the most wagon-wheel map so common to romantically echt-Angeleno living other American cities, doesn’t pro- arrangement of all remains the vide any real demarcation between circa-1940s courtyard apartment

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 137

I lived in when I first came to L.A. in 1985, with six or eight studios and one-bedrooms in two L-shaped structures enclosing a eucalyptus tree. Heightwise, the whole complex was unprepossessing enough to be dwarfed by the adjacent Hollywood Freeway overpass, but its footprint was probably smaller than the average McMansion’s.

Early in the 20th century, so Hawthorne tells me, Los Angeles’s citizenry also energetically debated many of the same issues the city faces now, from mass transit to preserving Los Angeles’s uniquely intense relation to the landscape by keeping skyscraper mania at bay. But L.A.’s civic culture worked very differently before what he calls the “privatization” of Angelenos’ outlook in the freeway era. Once the I-10 could take people from the Los Angeles Coliseum to, say, Santa Monica without much interest in or knowledge of whatever was in between, broad-minded concern with the city’s evolution began coming in second to insular ostrich thinking.

138 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Hawthorne either believes or hopes that the First L.A.’s collectively minded spirit is still part of the city’s DNA, a term he likes to use. It’s an attractive thought, but in my experience, an ability to erase the memory of anything at odds with the current inhabitants’ flimsy notions of perpetuity is part of the city’s DNA as well. No matter how he tries to reawaken an understanding of the city’s past to help it embrace its future, all too many Angelenos probably agree with the young producer who famously got enraged when a veteran TV writer made the mistake of bringing up Shakespeare’s plays: “No history, no literature, nothing that happened before I was born is relevant to my life today.”

T

he way Hawthorne sees it, the 1970s generation of single-family homeowners who’ve seen their property’s value skyrocket have become the reactionaries in the Third L.A. debate. The idea is sure to annoy them, since neighborhood preservation so obviously seems like a “Think globally—act lo-

cally” Good Liberal Cause. But especially when the communities in question are relatively affluent ones, which is what gives them the political clout to get their way, their insistence on preserving their nabe’s pleasurable status quo—or should that be sine qua non?—can leave global thinking looking indistinguishable in practice from membership in the Flat Earth Society.

In their reflexive antagonism to even constructive, well-modulated change that might benefit people who aren’t them, L.A.’s better-off zip codes, in Hawthorne’s words, have “pulled up the ladder” behind them. While he’s usually quick to defang the charge by pointing out that his parents belong to that 1970s generation of Californian homeowners themselves, he’s exasperated by how often well-heeled parochialism thwarts any larger conception of “we” in envisaging what’s best for Los Angeles as a whole. “Part of the conversation needs to be an acknowledgment that they’ve been extraordinarily fortunate,” he says.

Economic disparities with racial underpinnings are the eternal Los Angeles yin to the zesty yang of the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around.” My own introduction to 21st-century local privilege guarding its perks was the Third L.A. event Hawthorne devoted to the future of the Silver Lake Reservoir. Built by William Mulholland in 1908, it’s been this increasingly posh neighborhood’s scenic crown jewel ever since. The reservoir was “decommissioned” in 2008 after the Environmental Protection Agency banned municipal water-supply storage in open-air facilities and drained in 2015. Then it spent two years as a fenced-off eyesore while tell you about their neighbor- everyone bickered about its fate. hoods’ urban-renewal expulsion when Dodger Stadium got built One faction pushed for turning all in one and no less than six free- 96 acres of the site into a public ways gouged their way through park, one with more pedestrian the other. But during the same amenities and recreational faciliera, Beverly Hills successfully ties than the picnic area known resisted a disfiguring freeway, simply as “the Meadow.” But at and why? Because Beverly Hills the other extreme were Silver Lake was—and is—overwhelmingly residents who just wanted their wealthy and Anglo, that’s why. artificial lake refilled. Never mind By and large, the inhabitants that it no longer served any practiof Chavez Ravine and Boyle cal function beyond giving local joggers something to jog around Heights were neither.

MARC CAMPOS/OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

He’s well aware that the tradeoff between local priorities and citywide or regional needs was once traumatizingly weighted in the opposite direction. Elderly former residents of Chavez Ravine or Boyle Heights can still

and providing the affluent homeowners in the hills surrounding it with a pleasing scenic view.

True, a case could be made—and was—for the reservoir’s value as a wildlife refuge. It is or was home to at least one legally protected species: the great blue heron. It’s just hard to believe blue herons were the hillside homeowners’ primary concern.

Things turned quarrelsome fast.

The park’s advocates accused reservoir protectionists of fearing an influx of nonwhite, murkily threatening outsiders from lesspampered parts of the city. The protectionists came back with scare rhetoric about their opponents wanting to turn the site into “the Santa Monica Pier,” which actually doesn’t sound so bad to me. Thanks in large part to L.A. itself, I’m a sucker for democratic vulgarity.

LEFT

Mayor Aja Brown of the City of Compton speaks at a March 2017 panel at Occidental College on new leadership in the Los Angeles region.

Between Brown and Hawthorne is Mayor Robert Garcia of Long Beach.

Hawthorne told me that the Silver Lake Reservoir event was the most acrimonious he’s moderated since the Third L.A. Project began. My own notes are embarrassing

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 139

“ISN’T ‘A BENEVOLENT ROBERT MOSES’ ALMOST A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?” I ASK. evidence of how quickly I lost track of why Person A was badgering Person B or how come Person C had just walked out. But the dominant panelist throughout was Anne-Marie Johnson, a cochair of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council’s Governmental Affairs Committee and a tenacious defender of refilling the reservoir with no ifs, ands, or buts.

By the time we talk in June, her side has won. (The reservoir was refilled in April, and any plans to alter its function, or nonfunction, are in abeyance.) But even in victory, Johnson is one of those people who never gives an inch, right down to her suggestion that park advocates only introduced the race issue to inflame public opinion and generate clickbait.

Johnson can pull rank on multiple counts, since she’s not only a moderately well-known actress (dozens of TV roles, including a recent stint on NCIS: Los Angeles) but also a lifelong Silver Lake resident. She’s also a “person of color”—her term—and therefore ideally situated to rebut the idea that reservoir protectionists were motivated by racist fears that converting it into a park would attract what used to be called the wrong element. “I think I should be the expert— and I am the expert when it comes to discrimination, racism, and bias,” she says. “So I’m very wary when people throw terms like that around where it’s completely inaccurate.”

Having already seen her in action, I gamely try with my first question to reframe the issue as one of affluence, not bigotry. But Johnson trips me up by asking, “Is that your personal agenda?” before switching the subject back to the racial angle. When Johnson took up acting, some powerhouse L.A. law firm lost a formidable litigator.

140 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

She’s quick to remind me that she’s speaking only for herself, not the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council. But I’ve called her because I’m betting she’ll push back in either capacity against Hawthorne’s argument that the pendulum in favoring neighborhood priorities over citywide

concerns has swung too far, and she does. “There shouldn’t be an overall agreement,” she tells me.

“There shouldn’t be a ‘one size fits all.’ I think what upsets downtown and what upsets people who support Christopher’s position is that neighborhoods are finally speaking up.”

As it happens, “one size fits all” is a considerable distortion of Hawthorne’s prescriptions, to whatever extent he’s being prescriptive— which is, in turn, a bit more than he’s willing to admit. He’s told me there are “lots and lots and lots” of single-family neighborhoods he thinks should stay as they are.

He also believes there’s plenty of Irving Gill-esque middle ground between L.A.’s horizontal fetish and dread of “Manhattanization,” the current term of opprobrium for higher-density growth.

But that’s unlikely to cut much ice with Johnson, who rejects Third L.A.’s forward-looking premise in toto. “If I can find a better word for ‘silly,’” she says, “it’s not something that I would support.

It’s not something that I think

the overwhelming majority of An- lywood moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn (b. Warsaw, 1879) or gelenos would support.”

Louis B. Mayer (b. Minsk, 1884).

In effect, Johnson blames the But in polemical terms, it’s a popush for higher density on out- tent one, even though her brand side agitators. “I think it’s a de- of Angeleno nativism is a far cry sire and a daydream of those from the freewheeling, more-thewho are not L.A. natives or who merrier version of L.A. identity I haven’t lived here for several de- encountered—and felt instantly cades,” she says. “I think it’s the included in—in the 1980s. pressure from those who can’t afford to live in New York and Once we hang up, I realize I Chicago and San Francisco, but didn’t ask her whether she’s unspecifically on the East Coast, der the impression Hawthorne who travel west and come to Los is one of those obnoxious Noo Angeles and who want to trans- Yawk transplants himself. Then form Los Angeles into what they it occurs to me that perhaps I left, but with the advantage of didn’t need to. perfect weather.” ohnson is undoubtedly According to her, these deracifamiliar with the publicnated East Coasters are the ones works despot who wreaked responsible for “forcing an atti- mayhem on New York neighbortude and a lifestyle on a city that hoods from the 1920s through was formed and is loved and be- the 1950s, inspiring both Jane Jaloved for its sense of freedom.” cobs’s The Death and Life of Great At one level, she must know American Cities and Robert A. this is a caricature, since 20th- Caro’s The Power Broker. She’d century L.A. was almost exclusive- probably be appalled to hear that ly defined if not created by people L.A. architects and planners, acoriginally from the Midwest and cording to Hawthorne, often dayEast Coast. Or farther than that, dream about having “a benevoif you count first-generation Hol- lent Robert Moses” as the city’s

J

urban-design czar. I’m mildly disconcerted myself: “Isn’t ‘a benevolent Robert Moses’ almost a contradiction in terms?” I ask.

“Let’s say a green-minded Robert Moses whose sensibility matches that of the people calling for that kind of a figure,” Hawthorne says.

But before that scenario starts giving L.A. traditionalists nightmares, the odds against such a jolly green giant are considerable.

From the dozens of independent municipalities within Los Angeles County to L.A.’s own City Council, too many cooks have a KitchenAid in this fight. A former council member himself, Garcetti probably knows all too well how much heat he’d get for proposing that the whole kit and caboodle ought to be supervised by a next-generation William Mulholland whose agenda and bailiwick would almost certainly face widespread public opposition no matter how either was formulated.

Political gridlock—deriving here from jousting jurisdictions much more than jousting ideologies—

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 141

In March 2016, Hawthorne hosted Janette Sadik-Khan at the Hammer Museum to discuss her book Streetfight about mobility and the public realm.

142 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

to a master plan for renewing a waterway that’s mostly been a trickle of water between massive slabs of concrete embankment ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got busy turning the river into one more built environment, mainly for flood control’s sake, in the late 1930s.

Nobody knows what Gehry will produce. But Gehry style, he’s put on a great show of enthusiasm and energy. Also Gehry style, he’s taken criticism for keeping the process secretive, disregarding any preliminary input from the multiple constituencies, townships, and other interested parties—the Corps of Engineers included—who will eventually not only pass judgment on his vision but, at least in some cases, be in a position to make their judgment stick.

MARC CAMPOS/OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

RIGHT

is another of Hawthorne’s frustrations. Garcetti, he tells me, “is more interested in and sophisticated about the issues I write about than any other elected official I’ve ever talked to, publicly or privately. The problem is that he has very little or no political incentive to take bold measures opportunity to change L.A.’s of the type that I would like to see planning priorities. No doubt, he and others would like to see.” does this partly to attract Garcetti himself to the possibility of leavProving Hawthorne right, Garcet- ing a momentous legacy. But I’m ti’s fluency was on impressive not sure Hawthorne believes it. display at one Third L.A. event I Even if Garcetti stays on the job attended where he was the main and doesn’t run for higher office draw. That only made it more no- well before 2022 rolls around, ticeable that he wouldn’t commit which almost everyone expects himself to any of the proposals get- he will, five years is actually a ting bandied about. Yet Garcetti’s fairly small time frame for the notoriously cautious tempera- large-scale makeover implied by ment only exacerbates the practi- Third L.A.’s name. cal difficulty—or boon, depending on your perspective—that his However, the most ambitious authority is more circumscribed potential transformation of the than that of other big-city mayors. Los Angeles landscape aside from Metro expansion already has L.A.’s Because Hawthorne can switch idea of a substitute czar on the from pessimism to boosterism case: a celebrity. In 2015, Frank on a dime, he sometimes frames Gehry was commissioned by the the unusual length of the second Los Angeles River Revitalization term Garcetti won last March— Corporation (now River LA) to add five and a half years—as a rare the Gehry touch—or H-bomb—

L.A. IS THINKING BIG AGAIN, EVEN AGAINST ITS WILL. Grande Jatte replacing the river’s brutalist present-day incarnation.

He doesn’t think those concrete embankments are going away— and he doesn’t want them to. “If you understand what makes Los Angeles different and you like Los Angeles for itself,” he says, “then you go down to the lower stretches of the river near and in Long Beach. I think the scale of the concrete there is really sublime, and I think it’s a very L.A. Star power counts for a lot, landscape.” though. If Gehry isn’t the architect best suited to the job, he’s still He adds, “If you dismiss that as someone who can “galvanize and a potentially striking landscape, consolidate a conversation both with all that concrete, then it’s like politically and in terms of fund- Ed Ruscha never existed.” It’s his raising,” Hawthorne explains. “If way of reminding me that L.A.’s you need somebody who can call culture and its architecture have [Governor] Jerry Brown and say, been engaged in a creative dia‘I need someone from your office logue for decades. In both fields, and Garcetti’s office and the Army Los Angeles has always chalCorps in my office next week to lenged conventional—meaning, hammer out the last remain- essentially, bourgeois—notions ing issues of this thing,’ Gehry’s of beauty. somebody who can do that.”

“A freewheeling city that is hospiNo matter what Gehry comes table to experimental architecture up with, Hawthorne has bad is also a city that makes lots of news for Angelenos who imag- room for ugliness,” Hawthorne ine something like Seurat’s La says. He doesn’t see that as a Hawthorne says he’s come around to admiring Gehry more than he once did: “I think there’s a kind of humanist streak in his work that’s underappreciated.”

Even so, he agrees that this is a very odd project for Gehry. “I do wonder why they would choose somebody who has not thought a lot about, let’s say, hydrology or open space or shown himself to be especially politic.”

clash; he sees it as a stimulating symbiosis. From Rudolph Schindler to Gehry himself, he argues, L.A. architects have seen “the generic and even ugly cityscape as an inspiration and have incorporated the ugliness: Gehry’s chain link, or Schindler’s tilt-up concrete walls.” From Ruscha to David Hockney, artists have done the same.

Me, I’m a confirmed Gehry skeptic. I’m betting he’ll come up with something grandiosely Gehryesque and unworkable. I don’t really believe Metro expansion will augur a new age in L.A.’s urban design either. But willy-nilly— planned or unplanned, guided or haphazard—L.A. is thinking big again, even against its will.

Hawthorne and Anne-Marie Johnson may not see eye to eye about much, but he’d probably endorse this observation of hers: “No one wants to see the sausage being made. But we are all now part of the sausage. And I think it’s fantastic.”

TOM CARSON IS A FREELANCE CULTURE CRITIC AND THE AUTHOR OF GILLIGAN’S WAKE AND DAISY BUCHANAN’S DAUGHTER.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 143

FAN

DODGER STADIUM

TOM LAMB

A stair through planted slopes takes people from parking areas to the main entrance level of Dodger Stadium.

144 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

FAVO R IT E

HOW STUDIO MLA LEARNED TO EMBRACE THE POTENTIAL OF THE SPORTS STADIUM.

BY NATE BERG

A

mong Southern California landscape architecture firms, Los Angeles-based StudioMLA (formerly Mia Lehrer + Associates) is arguably highbrow. Known for public spaces like the 1,300-acre Orange County Great Park and Vista Hermosa Park in an underserved section of Los Angeles, and transformative master plans for infrastructuralized landscapes like the Los Angeles River and the Silver Lake Reservoir, the firm has a serious approach to the needs of Southern California and the services landscape architecture can provide. It’s complex, civic-minded work built out of decades of engagement in the community.

So it’s somewhat unexpected to see some of StudioMLA’s recent work diversify into the mass market world of professional sports. The firm is currently working on three separate sports stadium projects in the Los Angeles area, starting with a reimagining of Dodger Stadium in 2012, a stalled urban development turned National Football League stadium in 2014 in Inglewood, and the stadium for a Major League Soccer expansion team, the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC), in Exposition Park. Within five years, Studio-MLA has become the unofficial stadium landscape architect of Los Angeles.

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Monica are some of the most visited, and arguably the most successful, of the city’s publicly accessible spaces. Like shopping, sports have a broad appeal, and they’re able to pull in big crowds. The new LAFC soccer stadium will be able to seat 22,000; Dodger Stadium sells out at 56,000; the NFL stadium in Inglewood—the design still under wraps—could accommodate up to 80,000. For Lehrer, those numbers made the potential impact of good landscape design outweigh any reservations about the troubling history of stadium projects.

“The way some of these stadiums are developing “I had to allow myself to understand the typology and the way they’re integrated and knit into the of these projects to make sure we weren’t selling community, they actually bring a tremendous our soul,” she says. infusion of energy,” Lehrer says.

At roughly 15 acres, the site of the LAFC’s Though it would be a stretch to call any of these 22,000-seat, Gensler-designed soccer stadium stadiums public spaces, given their private own- is a tight squeeze, and that’s partially on purpose. ership, ticketed entry, and business operations, Located near the southeast corner of Exposition Lehrer says they can still serve a public purpose. Park and scheduled to open in 2018, the stadium In L.A., privately owned public spaces such as will add to an already packed 160-acre park space the faux-city mall complex The Grove and the that includes facilities originally built for the pedestrianized Third Street Promenade in Santa 1932 Olympics, a string of museums, a school,

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Hundreds of trees were added to Dodger Stadium’s massive parking lot.

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Public entrances emphasize the soccer stadium’s connection to downtown and Exposition Park.

HUNTER KERHART

Given sports stadiums’ tendency to end up as fortresses ringed by excessive parking lots, they may not seem the most adventurous project type for a conscientious landscape architect. But despite a long history of problematic and divisive development, the form is beginning to change, moving away from the suburban big box approach and toward a more urban, connected, parklike feel.

That’s created new opportunities for inventive design and, according to Mia Lehrer, FASLA, the firm’s president, a chance to undo some of the mistakes of stadiums past.

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a historic rose garden, the site of the future George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, as well as the Studio-MLA-designed gardens and learning environments outside the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. But even inside this heavily programmed complex of a park, the LAFC’s corner touches on an urban mix of residential and retail along a major north–south corridor. Among the firm’s stadium projects, Lehrer says this is “the most intensely nestled into the city fabric.”

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s bulldozers grade and cranes lower the massive concrete supports for the grandstands, StudioMLA principal Benjamin Feldmann, ASLA, walks to the northwest corner of the construction site and points out where the main public space of the stadium will sit, totaling about eight acres.

An open and programmable plaza looks down on the field and links to ancillary buildings housing a team store, dining facilities, and a roughly half-acre roof terrace designed by Lehrer’s firm.

It opens out to a preexisting tree-lined space in Exposition Park used by fans for tailgating before games at the adjacent Los Angeles Memorial

Coliseum, the temporary home of Lehrer’s other type of football client, the Rams.

About 215 sycamore, ash, and sweet gum trees were removed for construction and will be replaced around the site’s perimeter, along with some seemingly obligatory palms. Studio-MLA’s design specifically worked around one existing tree, a 90-year-old sycamore on the street side of the stadium. Planters and hardscape are to be installed around the tree, which is designed to become a signature gathering space at the main entrance for those not arriving in cars—a group the firm hopes will be significant. This corner of the site was designed to open directly to the sidewalk, opening views of downtown from inside the stadium and, more important, views into the stadium from the corner of the street.

Feldmann notes that the team’s owners—a group that includes the Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson and the actor Will Ferrell—wanted the stadium to feel connected to the city, so people could walk right up to it without passing through any gates, like an English soccer stadium woven into the urban fabric.

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Public spaces around the stadium will encourage festivities and tailgating.

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But South Los Angeles is far from urban England. Instead of dense streets of shops and housing, fast food restaurants and parking lots fill the space between the stadium and 16 lanes of Interstate 110 to the east, and state-owned land on two sides of the stadium will remain asphalt lots. To the south the area quickly becomes almost entirely residential, but it’s still linked to Figueroa Street, a major artery in the city and the focus of a wide-ranging streetscape improvement project, My Figueroa, that aims to improve the street for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users. Studio-MLA’s design embraces that mission, with wide pedestrian walkways, shade trees, and plentiful bike parking on the street side of the stadium, purposely positioned in a prominent location, “not hidden behind some secret doorway,” Feldmann says. The stadium’s design also calls for a streetaccessible restaurant space, adding more to the Figueroa corridor than just the wall of a stadium.

“It’s helping bring our community even better development, and development we’ve wanted for a long time,” says Adrienne Kuhre, president of the North Area Neighborhood Development Council, the local city-chartered neighborhood council. She

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STUDIO MLA, TOP; GENSLER, BOTTOM

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says the new spaces integrated into the stadium’s design will give the area a more lively and civic atmosphere. Compared to the barren parking lots and dead space that have dominated this section of the park, particularly since the 2016 closure and demolition of the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena, the public-focused design elements of the new stadium are welcomed. “It’s just been a plot of land sitting there for so long,” Kuhre says. “To finally have something significant there is great.”

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he firm’s most established stadium work is the master planning and renovation of Dodger Stadium. Originally built in 1962, the stadium was given a $100 million makeover after the 2012 season, with new team-focused facilities, restored architectural features and signage, and upgrades to the spectator experience. Part of that budget was set aside for a new landscape plan for the 300-acre stadium site. The firm focused the master plan on improving circulation and visitor amenities. ↘

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BANC OF CALIFORNIA (LAFC) STADIUM SECTION THROUGH NORTH EDGE PAVERS

SECTION THROUGH NORTH EDGE

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STUDIO MLA

SECTION THROUGH EAST EDGE FIGUEROA

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NORTHEAST PLAZA

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STUDIO MLA

SECTION THROUGH MAIN ENTRANCE FIGUEROA

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Mexican American neighborhood cleared under the auspices of urban renewal and housing development, Dodger Stadium was an unconventional stadium in its time—a futuristic, almost sculptural marvel of concrete, car-oriented and disconnected from the city. Though that model of detachment would soon dominate stadium design, since the 1990s the pendulum has been swinging back toward a more connected and people-focused approach to siting and designing sports facilities.

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After more than 50 years, Dodger Stadium has become an example of what not to do. But as others like it were torn down and replaced, the stadium also gradually became one of the oldest ballparks in Major League Baseball. Now an icon of midcentury modern design, Dodger Stadium needed preservation, but it also needed to adapt.

The stadium’s renovation was headed by Janet Marie Smith, the senior vice president of planning and development for the Dodgers, who came to the

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Wider promenades and plazas have augmented the original landscape.

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Studio-MLA’s Senior Associate Kush Parekh, ASLA, (left) takes a photo of the view.

HUNTER KERHART

→ Controversially constructed on Chavez Ravine, a

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organization after leading a string of innovative stadium makeovers that prioritized the fan experience, like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and the preservation and expansion of Fenway Park in Boston. “Today’s game experience is more than just nine innings of baseball,” Smith says.

STUDIO MLA, TOP; BENJAMIN FELDMANN, ASLA, BOTTOM

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At Dodger Stadium, Smith charged Studio-MLA with turning a stadium surrounded by a desert of asphalt into a pleasant place that could be easily accessed by multiple means of transportation. The firm focused on expanding the space surrounding the stadium gates, creating new plazas and themed gathering areas in spaces once given fully to car parking. New planters and trees were added throughout, replacing nearly 30,000 square feet of asphalt that wasn’t explicitly being driven over or parked on. More than 500 trees were added to the grounds or repositioned during construction, including 100 fruit trees. Clearly marked pedestrian walkways were added to connect the stadium to the city sidewalks beyond the parking lots, as were bike racks, drop-off and pickup zones for

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car-sharing services, and a well-used public transit shuttle. The ticket gates themselves were moved to create more active space within the stadium’s concourses, which included children’s playgrounds, vending zones, and seating areas. The work has been gradual and ongoing since 2012, with more development planned for the future.

“We tried to make it much more a place for the fans, for pedestrians, for cyclists, who actually filter into the park through a human-scale space,” Lehrer says. A buffer of between 40 and 50 feet now exists around the stadium, replacing parking spaces with plazas, plantings, and areas for fans to gather. “For a stadium to be willing to give up hundreds of spaces to end up with plazas so people can have a more pleasant, interesting arrival is pretty amazing,” she says.

STUDIO MLA, TOP; HUNTER KERHART, BOTTOM

The new spaces are being used. Before a game on a recent spring weeknight, fans were milling

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Pushing the stadiumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gate back created more space for fans.

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Planting replaced asphalt to improve the parking-to-stadium transition.

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TOM LAMB , TOP; STUDIO MLA, BOTTOM

ENTRANCE FORECOURT

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THE POPULIST MAGNETISM OF SPORTS STADIUMS HAS MADE THEM INTO ALMOST A NEW TYPE OF PUBLIC SPACE.

around the new plaza spaces, waiting to meet people, carrying movable seats to shady areas, and taking photos next to a recently installed statue of the baseball legend Jackie Robinson.

At Top of the Park, the plaza near the stadium’s uppermost entrance with straight-on views of downtown L.A., families paused for pictures next to a cluster of palm trees and orange and red Euphorbia. A small boy leaned over a bright blue planter and poked at the spiny stem of a crown of thorns (Euphorbia milii).

by making it easier for them to come and enjoy the space. This approach to Dodger Stadium has ended up guiding the firm’s thinking about its other stadium projects and how they can create better spaces for people to gather. Lehrer, admittedly not a sports person, says she has come to appreciate the role sports and sports stadiums can play. “I think they are an opportunity to revitalize cities and really bring an infusion of economic, environmental, and cultural benefits,” she says.

Smith says Studio-MLA’s approach is the continuation of the stadium’s original landscape design, noting that the original owner spent $1.5 million on the landscape around stadium entrances and on the hillsides surrounding the park—the equivalent of roughly $12 million today. Outside the stadium gates, a bronze plaque installed in 1963 honors the original landscape team, led by the landscape architect John T. Ratekin.

It’s surprising territory for Lehrer and her firm— “I didn’t go looking for stadiums, to be honest,” she says—but it’s turned out to be fertile ground for innovative landscape architecture. The populist magnetism of sports stadiums has made them into almost a new type of public space. “They are becoming parks; they have that allure,” Lehrer says. “People do go and will go to these places.”

And that’s a clear mandate to make them better spaces for the people who use them.

Plans for the future aren’t yet public, but Lehrer says the ongoing intervention is intended to embrace people’s connection with the stadium

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NATE BERG IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST BASED IN LOS ANGELES.

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The view downtown.

Some parking spots were traded for pregame gathering spaces.

HUNTER KERHART

Project Credits DODGER STADIUM: OWNER LOS ANGELES DODGERS, LOS ANGELES. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT STUDIO-MLA, LOS ANGELES. ARCHITECT DAIQ ARCHITECTS, BOSTON. ASSOCIATE ARCHITECT LEVIN & ASSOCIATES ARCHITECTS, LOS ANGELES. AV DESIGN WJHW, CARROLLTON, TEXAS. STRUCTURAL NABIH YOUSSEF ASSOCIATES, LOS ANGELES. MEP ME ENGINEERS, CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA. GRAPHICS ASHTON DESIGN, BALTIMORE. CIVIL MOLLENHAUER GROUP, GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA. GEOTECH URS CORPORATION, LOS ANGELES. GENERAL CONTRACTOR HUNT CONSTRUCTION, ORLANDO, FLORIDA. LANDSCAPE CONTRACTOR VALLEYCREST LANDSCAPE [NOW BRIGHTVIEW], CALABASAS, CALIFORNIA. CONCRETE CONTRACTOR BOMEL CONSTRUCTION, ANAHEIM HILLS, CALIFORNIA.

BANC OF CALIFORNIA (LAFC) STADIUM: OWNER LOS ANGELES FOOTBALL CLUB, LOS ANGELES. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT STUDIO-MLA, LOS ANGELES. ARCHITECT GENSLER, LOS ANGELES. AV DESIGN IDIBRI, ADDISON, TEXAS. STRUCTURAL THORNTON TOMASETTI, LOS ANGELES. MEP ME ENGINEERS, INC., CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA. CIVIL KPFF, LOS ANGELES. LIGHTING FIRST CIRCLE DESIGN, COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA. FIELD CONSULTANT MILLENNIUM SPORTS TECHNOLOGIES, LITTLETON, COLORADO. ROOF ENGINEER NOUS ENGINEERING, LOS ANGELES. GENERAL CONTRACTOR PCL CONSTRUCTION SERVICES, GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA. LANDSCAPE CONTRACTOR AMERICAN LANDSCAPE, CANOGA PARK, CALIFORNIA. CONCRETE CONTRACTOR BOMEL CONSTRUCTION, ANAHEIM HILLS, CALIFORNIA.

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© 2017 GRACE & CO., INC. PHOTO

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TTERED STATE MARIJUANA WAFTS ACROSS THE CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE AS LEGALIZATION OF RECREATIONAL USE APPROACHES.

BY MIMI ZEIGER

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D ROSENTHAL GROWS WEED. like wild mustard; the female plants He has for decades. The Oakland, California-based horticulturist, author, and activist is the go-to expert on home cultivation. He’s written more than a dozen books on the subject and the policies that surround medical marijuana and legalization.

Their titles fall somewhere between what you’d see in your local nursery and your corner head shop: The Big Book of Buds (volumes one through four), Marijuana Garden Saver, and Marijuana Pest & Disease Control.

are the ones that produce buds for consumption. “With humans and cannabis, the female is considered more beautiful,” he explains. “I have a bunch of marijuana plants growing, and they all look different, like six different varieties of a dahlia.

Each plant is an individual.” He compares homegrown marijuana to homegrown tomatoes. “The person who grows the best marijuana is the person who is growing at home.

Everybody loves their own produce.”

“Growing is addictive,” Rosenthal says with a laugh, and then quickly clarifies that the drug is not. “Given the right conditions and a sunny backyard, marijuana can be grown almost anywhere in California.” He speaks poetically about marijuana’s diverse morphology: It has male and female plants. Some are tall, some wide, and there are different strains like indica or sativa that range in color—like heirloom tomatoes— from absinthe yellow–green to maroon and deep purple. To cultivate cannabis for its THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and psychoactive properties, only the female plants are grown. The male plants look a bit

It’s a vision of cannabis production that is far different from what the public imagination associates with marijuana: the resource-heavy hydroponic “grow house,” which makes high demands on labor, energy, and water. Or the news reports of thousands of plants seized and destroyed on illegal grow sites on U.S. Forest Service land.

In 1996, Californians passed Proposition 215, permitting the use of medical marijuana. This measure allowed state residents with a medical ID card stating that they have a condition treatable by consumption of cannabis to grow up to six

“GROWING IS ADDICTIVE,” ED ROSENTHAL SAYS WITH A LAUGH, AND THEN QUICKLY CLARIFIES THAT THE DRUG IS NOT.

plants at home. In 2018, thanks to the passage of Proposition 64 last November, California will join Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia, in legalizing recreational use.

This means that cultivation will grow across many scales as it hits the mainstream—from the home user to industrial nurseries. And, at the moment, it is up to cities and counties to regulate who grows weed and where. In 2018, the California Department of Food and Agriculture will begin to oversee marijuana cultivation. The proposition will still allow localities to tax and regulate, but state regulations, licensure, and taxes will be imposed on all retail sales and cultivation.

As legalization approaches, industrialized cannabis cultivators are poised to take advantage of the expansion to recreational use with large grow facilities in areas not typically known as marijuana country.

For decades, Northern California’s Emerald Triangle—Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino Counties—were (and still are) the best-known sites for legal and illegal pot production.

But the impact of the green rush is felt across California, even in unlikely landscapes such as Desert Hot Springs, a suburban community just outside Palm Springs that voted in conditional-use permitting for cultivation on industrial or undeveloped land in 2014. In September 2016, the Santa Barbara grower Canndescent opened the first facility in the Coachella Valley. But its 9,600-square-foot state-of-the-art warehouse will soon be trumped by a 111,500-square-foot operation from Cultivation Technologies Inc. in Irvine. Located on a six-acre plot of land that was once a wrecking yard, the megacampus broke ground in June.

But what is the impact on the environment when usage changes from relatively light demands on water and power services to high-tech cultivation? Cultivation Technologies Inc. boasts an energy-efficient campus that relies on features such as LED grow lights. Most cities and counties across the state regulate energy use as a condition of permitting. As for water, a single marijuana plant consumes on average six gallons per day: Multiply that by

the tens of thousands of plants per facility. (The cultivator Dan Grace of Dark Heart Nursery explains that growers will generally plant from one half to one plant per square foot of canopy, depending on the utilization of a given warehouse.)

Officials of Mission Springs Water District, which serves Desert Hot Springs and the Coachella Valley, worry that a booming industry will put a strain on their water infrastructure. The water is there—sourced from the Mission Creek Subbasin aquifer—but there may not be the means to deliver it. Under the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act and overseen by the Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation, growers will be required in 2018 to account for their sources and consumption. State law SB 837, drafted during California’s recent drought, is unique compared to other states’ regulations for its emphasis on water conservation and environmental impact. The law addresses the effects of unregulated outdoor grow sites (mostly in Northern California), among which are the diversions of streams or creeks that have damaged fish and wildlife habitats.

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“OUR PUBLIC LANDS ARE BEING USED FOR PRIVATE GAIN. YOU CAN’T GROW CORN, TOMATOES, STRAWBERRIES, OR MARIJUANA ON PUBLIC LAND.” MOURAD GABRIEL, INTEGRAL ECOLOGY RESEARCH CENTER

Mourad Gabriel, the executive director and cofounder of the Integral Ecology Research Center (IERC), has seen firsthand the devastating effects of trespass growing on state, federal, and tribal lands. He regularly works with law enforcement to find and eradicate a small fraction of some 350 illegal sites annually discovered on public lands. He explains that the U.S. Forest Service, Region 5, in Northern California is particularly attractive to the drug trafficking organizations. The area is the size of Connecticut and is monitored by one or two law enforcement officers. Nationwide, most illicit growing activity occurs in California. In 2016, according to a U.S. Forest Service agent, Stephen Frick, 1.5 million marijuana plants were seized on national forest land in the state. Seizures elsewhere in the country totaled only a few more hundred thousand. “Free land.

Free water. No regulation. No taxes,” he says. “With a $10,000 to $30,000 investment, you get a couple million dollars in profit. It’s a great investment,” Gabriel says.

on protected landscapes and wildlife ecosystems. Trespass growers hike into sites (some just a mile off a road, others five miles into the wilderness), packing in plants and equipment.

They clear native vegetation and use irrigation hoses to divert water.

Whereas medical marijuana growers have strict regulations over the use of pesticides, illegal operations have no such restrictions. Gabriel regularly finds trash and open containers of herbicides, rodenticides, and pesticides scattered across grow plots deep in the woods. The pesticides and rodenticides leach into the ground and pollute waterways. Animals eat the chemicals and then the poison travels through the food chain. “Deer and elk also eat marijuana plants—they are browsing sites with chemicals that are banned for use in the United States and Canada because of human health risks,” he explains. “We find certain chemicals that the EPA says only last two to four weeks. We see them lasting three to four years.”

The IERC has limited money and muscle to eradicate and remediGabriel and his team track water and ate sites. The remoteness of these soil contamination caused by illegal grow plots and the threat of armed marijuana crops and damage wrought growers mean that trash must be

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cleared out on foot or by helicopter in a single day. As a result, on the 30 to 60 sites the team cleans annually, only a tiny percentage of the natural environment is able to be restored.

Gabriel wants to bring more attention to the damage to the environment. He sees these illegal grows as a violation of the public’s will. “We are not talking private lands. This isn’t the war on drugs,” he stresses.

“Our public lands are being utilized for private gain. You can’t grow corn, tomatoes, strawberries, or marijuana on public land.”

Although some proponents argue otherwise, Gabriel is skeptical that Proposition 64 will produce a decline in trespass growing. Harvests are generally not produced for medical dispensaries. Rather they find their way across state lines for black market sales and consumption.

Meanwhile, farther down the coast, Monterey County government officials are interested in bringing rogue cultivators into the fold. They offered incentives for growers to come forward and become legal by August 2017. Those who obtained permits would get amnesty, and those who didn’t would face law enforcement.

IERC

California’s Central Coast is a longtime agricultural region. Row after row of lettuces and strawberries blankets the Pacific bluffs. Although the region’s temperate climate would be great for growing weed outdoors, both the cities in the area and the county ban outdoor cultivation. Plasha Fielding Will, a political consultant and founder of the Monterey County Cannabis Industry Association, says that officials wanted to ensure that Salinas Valley would remain the lettuce capital of the world.

They worried that the more lucrative marijuana crop would take over. Other fears included odors, security, and criminality—all issues that fall under what Gavin Kogan, an attorney, entrepreneur, and founder of Grupo Flor, calls “cannabigotry.” Area regulations encourage marijuana cultivators to restore existing Dutch greenhouses that previously had been used for cut flower production. They’d been shuttered as a result of the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement of 2012, which has bol-

stered flower exports from Colombia to help the country free itself from the cocaine trade.

One of the most interesting byproducts of the green rush along the Central Coast is cultural. For generations, Japanese and Filipino families operated these old Dutch greenhouses, but as the cut flower business was undercut by imports, their businesses closed. As the cannabis industry beckons, some are benefiting by selling their properties, while others are getting involved in production. Kogan looks to these farmers for their skills in scaling a business, knowledge of agricultural processes, and ability to reduce labor costs. “I’m excited about this crosscultural evolution…bringing expertise with cut flowers and combining it with cannabis cultivation,” he says.

So far, the Salinas Valley’s rolling landscape seems unchanged by a booming industry. Yet inside those refurbished greenhouses, high-

tech growing practices are at work.

“Greenhouse cannabis cultivation is really new,” says Kogan, whose self-described “ecology” of companies under the Grupo Flor umbrella includes property management, cultivation, edibles production, and dispensaries. “It’s not common because it is hard to hide it. With passage of the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act and adult use, people are more comfortable stepping out into full view in the economy.” That visibility, though, comes with rules and costs that can be frustrating to growers used to the freedoms of the underground.

Legal cultivation comes with building permits, fire permits, business

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Pesticide-laden trespass grows on U.S. Forest Service land threaten natural habitats and damage the environment. The IERC is on a mission to eradicate them.

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Years before Dan Grace founded Dark Heart Nursery in 2007 with his partner, Sara Ubelhart, he was an activist and spent time in Kentucky working in community gardens. His earliest cannabis grows were the efforts of an informed hobbyist. Today, Grace runs his nursery out of a 20,000-squarefoot warehouse, a former food processing plant. Dark Heart specializes in developing premium clones for growers in Northern California.

They entice with fantastically evocative names: Romulan Grapefruit, Sour Diesel, Gorilla Glue #4. Their industrial building, however, blends into its East Oakland environs—the city’s “green zone,” a designated area for permitted cannabis cultivation.

But warehouses are ill suited for agriculture. Humidity is a problem; airconditioning is a problem. And cooling systems just add to already heavy energy loads. “Indoors, you have to control the whole world,” Grace says.

Kogan bridles a bit at the need for this kind of constructed opacity, which Gavin Kogan of is paired with security guards and Grupo Flor is betting closed-circuit television cameras. It his refurbished Dutch greenhouses on harks back to the highly opaque dealCalifornians accepting ings of illegal practices. He’d rather marijuana as just see transparency both in physical another crop— space and permitting processes. This like lettuce. past June, Grupo Flor was the first marijuana company to participate in OPPOSITE A progressive cocktail: the Forbes AgTech Summit in SaliOakland mixes cannabis nas alongside local producers such and social justice. as Taylor Farms (salad greens and Deep in the city’s lettuce) and Driscoll’s (strawberries). “green zone” lies He hopes that people will eventually Dark Heart Nursery see marijuana simply as an agricul- Oakland is considered a leader in and its lush selection of boutique strains. tural crop, albeit a lucrative one. permitting marijuana. In 2004, it ABOVE

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became the first city to give permits to dispensaries, a move that seemed unthinkable at the time. “It was the Bush years. John Ashcroft was attorney general,” says Oakland Councilmember at Large Rebecca Kaplan.

Today, the Trump administration is echoing the sentiment of those days.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has threatened to crack down on states that allow medical and recreational use. Although 60 percent of Americans live in an area that permits some legal use, Sessions plans to target marijuana providers.

“I was involved in this ‘wild experiment’ from the very beginning, when everyone said we were nuts. I asserted that what is causing crime is not the marijuana, it’s the prohibition. Just like the Mafia and alcohol prohibition,” Kaplan says. She hopes that permitting cultivation will put an end to jerry-rigged electrical wiring and other unsafe warehouse conditions. Still, rules go beyond simply governing the grow facilities’ odor

PFW CONSULTING

licenses, and taxes. And while Grupo Flor boasts 2.6 million square feet of properties and operations in permitted zones, security concerns with the Salinas Valley community requires that eight-foot-high fencing wrap its holdings. Cultivators favor chain link with green side striping through the links—an identifying tip for those driving through the area.

IN OAKLAND, REAL ESTATE PRICES HAVE MORE THAN TRIPLED FOR GREEN ZONE WAREHOUSES.

mitigation or environmental impact.

Cultivators are also asked to submit a community beautification plan that details “specific steps your business will take to reduce illegal dumping, littering, graffiti, and blight and promote beautification of the adjacent community.”

© 2017 GRACE & CO., INC.

For Grace, permitting has allowed cultivators to stop hiding. “We introduced ourselves to our neighbors and invited them in for tours,” he recalls. “We found a sense of community. Here in Oakland, we have plenty of shared problems like crime and vandalism in the neighborhood.

It took a lot of courage to do that back then. You were always worried you were going to run into a stick-inthe-mud neighbor who would call up the drug enforcement agency.”

But Oakland’s openness has created a rush on the limited number of existing spaces and parcels where cultivators can set up shop. Real estate prices have more than tripled for green zone warehouses. “There’s a mismatch on supply and demand in certain areas,” Grace says. Concerns remain that better funded entrepreneurs will shut out local business, es-

pecially in historically African American neighborhoods. This spring, the city council approved an equity permit program for cannabis businesses. It aims to prioritize issuing permits to people most affected by the war on drugs as well as residents who were arrested and convicted of cannabis crimes in Oakland over the past 20 years. “Look at the history of the war on marijuana. It’s a war on black people,” Kaplan says. “Racism is fundamentally intertwined in the system. [With legalization], it would be more unjust if we excluded them from the chance to profit.”

tion is unlikely to solve cultivation’s impact on habitat in Northern California. Special Agent Frick has seen only steep and steady increases in illegal activity as the state loosens its laws. And it’s hard to predict whether it will bring equity to hardhit Oakland communities. It does, however, seem to provide new opportunities for industry in areas that need revitalization. Home grower Ed Rosenthal offers some philosophical advice to an uncertain future. Of growing marijuana, he says, “You know that life is fragile. The plants die in a season.”

As 2018 approaches, the cannabis landscape in California promises a host of social, economic, and environmental complexities. Legaliza-

MIMI ZEIGER IS A CRITIC AND CURATOR BASED IN LOS ANGELES. SHE WAS RECENTLY SELECTED AS A COCURATOR OF THE UNITED STATES PAVILION AT THE 2018 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE.

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THE FINAL HILL

MIXED INCOME HOUSING ALONE CAN’T CHANGE PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS’ LIVES. SO GARY STRANG IS PUTTING THE LANDSCAPE TO WORK.

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he first thing you notice is all the cars.

The Potrero Hill housing projects occupy a strange landscape divided by Jersey barriers and concrete retaining walls that carve up the site’s topography. Endless rows of cars are parked along its curving streets and in front of 62 three- and four-story barracks-style buildings that step down the steep hill. It’s the first indication that this isolated, often forgotten section of the city is not that well connected to the thriving, upscale urbanism of San Francisco that surrounds it. “The beautiful green landscape, the

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BY ZACH MORTICE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY KYLE JEFFERS

Corbusian dream, just becomes parking,” says Gary Strang, FASLA, the founder of GLS Landscape | Architecture, the firm that was hired to radically reshape this place.

For Curteesha Cosby, who lives at Potrero, these parked cars are sometimes a refuge of last resort. When she’s walking her kids to school at 7:00 a.m. and hears gunfire, she hits the ground and rolls her children under them till it ends. She says she hears shooting nearly every day. She’s exhausted by Potrero. “I just want people to be happy and everyone to be safe,” she says. Her cousin was gunned down in the housing complex a few days before we spoke. Edward Hatter, the executive director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, a

nonprofit serving the area, tells me the community is waiting residents, Latinos, and Asian Americans. But, for the retaliatory violence that often follows shootings. says Hatter, “This area was a forgotten [place] for many, many, many years.”

Potrero Terrace and Annex has long been one of San Francisco’s most dysfunctional large-scale public housing de- He’s seen Potrero transition from a neighborhood velopments. Residents complain of mold and pests in their of working-class San Franciscans in the 1960s apartments. According to BRIDGE Housing, the nonprofit and 1970s to a community ravaged by crack codeveloper working at Potrero, violent crime is five times the caine in the 1980s, then buffeted by the dot-com city’s average, a particularly heartless statistic in light of the boom and bust in the 1990s. Lately, a cresting fact that 25 percent of residents are unemployed, one third are wave of gentrification has washed over the Potrero disabled, and fewer than half have bank accounts. By the low Hill area. But the area’s public housing has been standards of American public housing, Potrero is fairly inte- left untouched. grated and has no racial monoculture, with African American

ABOVE

The Potrero Terrace and Annex are some of San Francisco’s most isolated and dysfunctional public housing.

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Potrero’s buildings are surrounded by hilly lawns with little differentiation of public and private space.

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Across the entire Potrero site, the elevation changes by more than 200 feet.

Today Potrero Terrace and Annex is top of mind for San Francisco’s civic officials and affordable housing advocates. It’s to be “revitalized,” in the parlance of development, the latest phase of the city’s ambitious HOPE SF program. The vision for Potrero includes a plan to raze and rebuild, adding market-rate housing and a comprehensive landscape plan by GLS Landscape | Architecture. Strang’s efforts will connect Potrero to the city’s grid for the first time, integrating it with the charming bungalows and stepped Victorian confections just blocks away. It will also use open space as a way to bridge the gulf between longtime residents and the affluent newcomers who will help subsidize the affordable public housing.

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Strang hopes that the new arrivals will accept Potrero and its current residents as their neighbors, though current public housing residents are wary that this will actually happen. “I feel that as the demographics change on Potrero Hill, the conversation is getting better,” he says. “There’s a lot of local pride, especially as developers and other people start discovering [this] neighborhood. People get protective.”

Jeris Glover has lived at Potrero for 46 years, raising her kids there as well as the children of others. She looks forward to when it will look “just like the rest of the hill. It’s going to change,” she says, “and there has to be a change.”

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HE POTRERO TERRACE AND ANNEX, built in 1941 and 1954, respectively, were made to house shipyard workers employed on the bay, just to the east. They were racially integrated, and their residents were solidly working class, but

the buildings were not great exemplars of design. “Designed by civil engineering,” says the architect Fred Pollack. “What’s the simplest way of throwing boxes on a hillside and doing the least grading?” His architecture firm, Van Meter Williams Pollack, did a new master plan for the site and is designing the first phase of its redevelopment, a 72-unit building that began construction in January, set to be complete next year.

Potrero Hill has a meandering suburban feel. Uniform, breadbox-shaped apartment buildings march down the curves of the hill like the ridges on a fingerprint, putting an abrupt halt to San Francisco’s relentless (if somewhat improbable given the city’s topography) street grid. There are wide lawns, but little space to be programmed for an organized public use.

Strang’s plan will tear out these meandering streets and connect the 38-acre site to San Francisco’s street grid, and add a network

of small and large park spaces. In the process, it will regrade approximately 286,000 cubic yards of earth (the equivalent of six U.S. Capitol rotundas) and add another 98,600 cubic yards of soil. It’s a massive feat of earthworks on an extreme site that has made Strang revise his definition of what landscape architecture can be. All said, Strang will weave the Potrero plan through slopes of 20 percent, across a site that increases in elevation by 225 feet, offering spectacular views to rich and poor alike. “We come to landscape architecture with the idea that we’re working with plants and soil, and that it’s a horticultural undertaking. But when you get into a site that is this intense,” says Strang, who’s an architect as well as a landscape architect, “you realize that it’s literally about the architecture of the landscape.”

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Potrero Hill was designed and built to require as little regrading of the steep site as possible, with buildings placed along the contour of the hill.

OPPOSITE

In GLS’s plan, a steep pedestrian street runs through the north–south axis of the plan. The flattest street runs across the east– west axis, where retail and community spaces will be located.

This is most apparent in the sets of pedestrian stairs that span the steepest blocks at Potrero; the primary north–south axis of Connecticut Street north of 25th Street, and a smaller stair to the east along 23rd Street. Careful refinements of the city’s historical pedestrian street stairs (“some of the most cherished places in San Francisco,” says Strang), these new paths are made up of intricate patterns of green, planted areas and sets of stairways placed perpendicularly to each other so that a trip up and down gives a 360-degree view of the bay. Though it’s how the city’s original pedestrian stair streets were done, a 30-foot-wide stairway parading resolutely in one direction would have been “a little bit overly monumental for the time that we’re in,” Strang says. “We’re really trying to create a more intimate and human-scaled experience, and to make sure the circulation doubles as outdoor space so that each landing is a place to stop and sit, facing every cardinal direction. It took a lot of effort to make them buildable, give them spatial logic,

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and also make them green enough [so] that people want to spend time there.”

If these spaces are successful, Potrero will be a topographic playground—literally, in the case of the 23rd Street stair, where a concrete slide will flow downhill, following the ground plane.

“Having viable open space on really steep slopes is kind of new territory,” Strang says. “There have always been hilltop parks in San Francisco. This is not a hilltop park. This is a hillside park. It’s broadening the definition of what landscape architecture is.”

Much of the site’s intense topography is made up of a vein of serpentine rock that runs across the peninsula. This oddly pale green rock was one of Strang’s most intense constraints, as its high magnesium content inhibits plants from absorbing and metabolizing nutrients, essentially dwarfing them, and its density prevents predictable and steady infiltration of rainwater. As such, many of the plants selected have to survive a trifecta somewhat unique to Potrero: serpentine resistant, drought resistant, and tolerant of poor drainage.

This is especially true of the trees that line both pedestrian

GLS LANDSCAPE | ARCHITECTURE

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Community Facilities Mixed Use with Ground Floor Retail Open Space and vehicular streets, like redflower gum, eucalyptus, ginkgo, and the Squiggle Park (ADA access from Starr Mini Park King to Community Neighborhood Center) 24th Street Texas Street Overlook and Edible Garden palm trees planted as accents at Neighborhood Central Park 23rd Street Stair intersections. (Beyond trees, the deCenter N Connecticut Park Terrace Gateway Park finitive planting list hasn’t yet been determined.) Because of the sheer inclines, rainwater on site moves fast, and the serpentine rock belowground makes moisture giving serpentine slopes. The recipient of a 2011 harder to deal with once it’s infiltrated. Water that enters the ASLA Honor Award in Analysis and Planning, ground through “cracks and crevices can pop up elsewhere, Strang’s plan also reconnected the neighborand you don’t really know where [it’s going],” Strang says. hood to the city’s street grid where possible, and “Ultimately, that led to a strategy where we’re controlling scattered a series of small parks across the site, more of the water on the surface.” This includes green roofs, like the oval park that dramatically orients views planters, cisterns, an avoidance of permeable paving systems, northward, toward San Francisco’s skyline. It’s and rain gardens in the new parks with liners that redirect attracted prominent Bay Area architects such as water into storm drains.

David Baker to the site to design affordable housing. No market-rate housing has been built there It’s the second time that Strang has had to plan a public hous- yet, but it’s still planned. Today Hunters View’s ing landscape amid inhospitable geology. At the Hunters View rich Cor-Ten steel finishes, cozy courtyards, cuHOPE SF site a few miles south of Potrero Hill, Strang took rated views, and mild Italian hill town sensibility what was an even more isolated and dilapidated public housing signal that Strang already knows how to set the development and reorganized its landscape on top of unfor- table for a vibrant public realm to emerge.

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EXISTING STREET GRID

PROPOSED STREET GRID

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The Potrero Terrace and Annex were laid out on the hillside like ridges on a fingerprint.

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Curving streets give Potrero a meandering, quasi-suburban feel.

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GLS’s plan will connect Potrero to San Francisco’s street grid for the first time.

There are currently about 600 units of housing at Potrero, but the new development promises more than 1,600 dwellings, more than doubling density in buildings up to seven to eight stories.

Just about every element of the Potrero plan hinges on this increased density. With a strong housing market and a history of cheek-by-jowl living, “you can achieve multiple goals,” says Dan Adams, an architect and until recently the director of real estate for BRIDGE Housing, the nonprofit developer in charge of Potrero’s transition. “You can preserve the existing public housing, you can add more affordable housing, and you can bring market-rate housing on at the same site.”

being demolished in the first phase of construction. (Nineteen units in this building will be designated as lightly subsidized affordable units.) The remaining current Potrero units will be rehoused in existing, vacant units on site. There will be a broad mix of sizes, says Adams, with predominantly one, two, and three bedrooms, with a few studios and four-bedroom units.

The goal is to choose bedroom counts by meeting the needs of the existing population at Potrero, so the final mix of units will be determined phase by phase.

After decades of a relatively uncrowded landscape, current residents are wary of this denser housing. “I feel like we’re going to be crunched up” and placed “in a canyon,” Cosby says.

Residents like Glover say they’d prefer single-family homes, and she and Cosby both voiced understandable concerns over With the additional density, residents won’t have the security in quasi-public spaces such as the lobbies in apartto be moved far away to alternative housing, or ment buildings. take their chances with a Section 8 voucher on the private market while their old home is demolished Cosby, who works cleaning office buildings, is slated to move and their new one is being built. At Potrero, the into her new home at Potrero soon, but says she would prefer first new building (going up on a vacant site) will to move away. She says she’s mildly hopeful that the new house 53 of the 86 households whose homes are Potrero could be a better place, but is impatient for it to arrive.

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EXISTING STREET GRID “It ain’t gonna happen overnight,” she says. “We know that already.” Most people who stay in Potrero, she says, do because they “don’t have anywhere else to go.”

The HOPE SF program itself is a result of not having anywhere else to go. In 2005, the San Francisco Housing Authority was staring at a $267 million shortfall for maintenance of existing housing sites, with annual federal funding set to provide only $16 million. With federal money dwindling (the landmark public housing privatization program HOPE VI had its funding discontinued after 2010) and a growing crisis of housing affordability, San Francisco could only depend on itself. HOPE SF, which began building in 2010, is mostly locally funded, gathered from bonds and a dedicated trust fund taken from the city’s general revenue. All told, HOPE SF aims to redevelop 3,000 to 3,500 units of existing public housing on four sites, including Potrero.

PROPOSED STREET GRID

The program has a similar cast of characters seen in other developer-led public housing conversions. There’s the beleaguered and underfunded city agency, the shrewd private ↘

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SITE ANALYSIS

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Potrero Hill is in view of downtown San Francisco to the north.

→ developers at BRIDGE, the progressive

designer teams fighting through legacies of racism and poor urban planning, and suspicious residents who aren’t quite ready to believe all the promises being handed out. Yet HOPE SF still differs from past efforts nationwide.

“There was an explicit desire to learn from precedent,” Adams says. He’s referring to HOPE VI and other programs’ tendency to tear down housing and build back only a fraction of it, scattering the people who live there to find housing elsewhere with Section 8 vouchers, if they can get them. BRIDGE Housing was also careful to get to Potrero years in advance of construction, running community outreach and social programming.

HOPE SF has two rules that set it apart: No relocation off-site, and a guaranteed 1:1 ratio for unit replacement, a strategy enforced by a city ordinance.

With these safeguards for residents, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has called HOPE SF a “reparations effort” owed to his citizens. By giving developers no latitude to reduce the amount of affordable housing that’s replaced when the market winds blow the other way, San Francisco has crafted as progressive a public housing policy as exists in this country. It’s a rare convergence of the political will

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to comprehensively address floundering and outdated public housing with the wealth needed to do so.

In addition to the 600 public housing units at Potrero to be replaced, there will be 200 units, lightly subsidized by tax credits, targeted at people making 50 to 60 percent of the area median income. Additionally, there’ll be 800 market-rate units, either for rent or sale. Across a build-out that BRIDGE hopes to be complete by 2026, the city plans to spend $750 million to $1.5 billion for everything at Potrero, and that’s excluding market-rate housing.

“We have a lot further to go,” Adams says. HOPE SF, he says, is a narrow answer to a narrowly defined problem— redeveloping and revitalizing the city’s existing public housing stock. He hopes it will allow those in public housing to have a better place to live so they can stay in their community. “It’s not

the answer to the question of, ‘How do we provide affordable disappointed in how the Potrero plan is playing housing in San Francisco?’” out. At Potrero and other HOPE SF sites, not a single building will mix market-rate residents And at Potrero, the city is rushing to meet the need for af- with subsidized residents. “That’s what I call the fordable housing by providing subsidized housing before the segregation of poverty,” Hatter says. market-rate units. “This isn’t a project that is basically run on ECENT RESEARCH has cast serious doubt the market-rate side, and we just happen to do the affordable on mixed-income housing’s ability to trans[housing],” says Olson Lee, former director for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. form the lives of public housing residents. When “The affordable [housing] is driving the whole project.” Develop- Chicago unleashed its Plan for Transformation to ers like BRIDGE are mainly paid up front with developer fees tear down more than 18,000 units of high-rise and get relatively little from the sale of market-rate units. The public housing and build back mixed-income city pockets the revenue from the sale of market-rate units, garden apartments and town houses, the results achieved—after a traumatic upheaval—were dewhich becomes subsidy for additional affordable housing. cidedly modest. As documented by the Urban It’s a template that starts by addressing current public hous- Institute’s Susan Popkin, the relatively small ing residents’ needs first. But neighborhood activists are still number of housing residents that made it back

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into these new communities didn’t get new jobs that vaulted them into the middle class. Their lives were not remade with the help of neighbors who taught them how to code. They did find themselves in neighborhoods that were safer and more stable.

But architecture alone hasn’t been able to cross that final bridge.

And because Potrero is surrounded by affluence (a block away, a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house recently sold for almost $2 million), it’s already a de facto mixed-income community. So why not just build back with the same high level of density, but make everything affordable?

buildings and lawns. But the new plan offers a rich spectrum of landscapes, each suited to varying levels of neighborly intimacy.

A large, central park just east of the main north–south axis has a dramatically terraced lawn that will break down the hill’s steep topography. The main east–west axis, 24th Street, will be oriented to pedestrians as the flattest street on the site, connecting to several new public amenities and retail spaces. (For those with limited mobility or disabilities, community services are located here.) There’ll be a small park (the provisionally named “Squiggle Park”) featuring a sawtooth design that alternates terraced seating, lawns, and gardens filled with lilacs and poppies. And at the most intimate and private scale, interior courtyards planted with olive trees and coffeeberry will give apartment buildings their own dedicated public forum.

The current Potrero landscape has no hierarchy of Across the entire plan, there is no singular space or monupublic-to-private spaces. It’s a series of undifferentiated ment that epitomizes the new Potrero’s ambitions for mixed-

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LEFT

Potrero sits on a vein of pale green serpentine rock that makes growing conditions difficult and stormwater drainage unpredictable.

BELOW

COURTESY VAN METER WILLIAMS POLLACK, INSET

The first new building at Potrero, built on a vacant site, will increase the development’s density so that no residents have to be relocated away from the neighborhood.

income living. Instead, Strang’s plan is a series of open space moments, connected to each other on the way to somewhere else. At the site’s northern edge, a series of small plazas eases visitors and residents into the neighborhood. The Squiggle Park connects to an existing local elementary school, and the central park is attached to the Connecticut Street pedestrian stair, itself a circulation path. The 23rd Street stair leads to a nearby commuter rail station. Each bit of green space here will be a bit of a trail marker along a wider web. Strang says it was vital that “the spaces be connected into networks, instead of isolated green spaces.”

If a new sense of shared community and granular social connectedness forms at Potrero, it will be in these spaces, where people can meet as equals and learn about and from each other.

There is no solution to affordable housing that is completely reliant on design at the expense of public policy. But landscape

design may well be mixed-income housing’s best hope to fulfill its stated mission of uplift through spatial transmission of cultural capital.

“The landscape component,” Adams says, “is particularly critical when we think about encouraging interaction and social cohesion across different socioeconomic groups.”

Strang is a bit less technocratic. “[Landscape] is the only neutral turf,” he says. “Whether or not the owners and developers can pull it off, I don’t know.”

ZACH MORTICE IS A CHICAGO-BASED ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE JOURNALIST. YOU CAN FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM @ZACHMORTICE.

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ECOLOGICAL TRADE OFFS AND NEW SEA LEVEL RISE PREDICTIONS DRIVE A COMPLICATED RESTORATION OF SALT PONDS IN SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO BAY.

BY LISA OWENS VIANI

Islands for shorebirds and other birds to rest and nest on were built into each of the restored ponds. Project managers are using lessons learned so far to improve their habitat and design.

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© AECOM/DAVID LLOYD

SOUTH BAY

SALT PONDS TO PICKLEWEED S

an Francisco Bay used to be a lot bigger—and a lot marshier. Wetlands fringed its edges, sponging up heavy storms and filtering pollutants. But since the 1850s, almost 92 percent of those wetlands have been lost: Cities and developers filled in and paved over the marshes; farmers and ranchers leveed off the tides and drained the wetlands for grazing and crops. Along the edges of the bay, commercial salt harvesting companies such as the Leslie Salt Company (later purchased

by Cargill) replumbed thousands of acres of tidal marsh into elaborate pond systems designed to evaporate water and concentrate salt in the sun for harvesting. In 1999, building on efforts begun by a conservation group formed in the 1960s to prevent yet more fill of the bay’s edges and concerned about continued declines in bay health, a coalition of scientists called for restoring 100,000 acres of tidal marsh around the bay. They—and many environmental groups—had been eyeing the South Bay salt ponds, having noticed that when the ponds dried out, the old footprint of the marshes and their networks of channels could still be seen. Today, after many more years of grassroots activism, scientific studies, and legal and financial wrangling, 15,100 acres of former salt ponds in the South Bay are on their way back to becoming tidal marsh or other types of wetlands in one of the largest ecosystem restoration efforts in the world, in one of the most densely urbanized areas in the country.

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RIGHT

The evolution of tidal marsh in Pond A21, showing development of annual pickleweed (bright green), cordgrass (circular “clones”), and perennial pickleweed.

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One of the first to be restored, Pond A21 has been transformed from a plain of gypsum to a fully functioning tidal marsh.

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© CRIS BENTON, TOP; STEVE MARTARANO, USFWS, OPPOSITE

One of the people who first noticed the ponds’ potential was Florence LaRiviere. In the 1960s, LaRiviere took daily walks along the South Bay shoreline and became determined to save the wetlands she loved from the development that was constantly encroaching into the bay. In the 1970s, she and her colleagues, including a group of duck hunters, persuaded Rep. Don Edwards, a California Democrat, to introduce legislation to acquire 23,000 acres of land—mostly salt ponds—to create the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge (later named after Edwards). LaRiviere, who went on to found the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge—and who is now in her 90s—says, “We came up with a map [of the ponds] that is still in use today. It seemed silly to me that we would just go for salt ponds. Restoration to tidal marsh was always the goal.” But in the deal with the government, Cargill retained the mineral rights to continue using the ponds for producing salt. “We made a lot of mistakes,” LaRiviere says. Yet without actions like LaRiviere’s, there might never have been a salt pond restoration project, says Marc Holmes, the bay restoration program director of the Bay Institute, in San Francisco.

By the mid-1990s, Cargill had discovered more efficient ways to process and harvest salt and needed much less land on which to do so. The company was also threatening to sell some of its land to developers, a threat that continues today. In 2002, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D–California) stepped in and negotiated a $100 million public purchase of Cargill’s mineral

rights to 15,100 acres of South Bay ponds and 1,400 acres of North Bay salt ponds on the Napa River slough. The purchase was a bit unusual because the refuge (the public) already owned the land in the South Bay. The 2003 purchase included some new ponds but mostly Cargill’s mineral rights, Holmes says. “That meant that Cargill had been able to mine salt in perpetuity even though the public already held title to the land.” Despite the oddness of this deal, the purchase freed up three different complexes of ponds encircling the tip of the South Bay, with 56 salt ponds that could at last be restored to marsh. (Cargill still retains the right to mine salt on another 11,000 acres of ponds.)

Shortly after the purchase went through, state and federal wildlife agencies, along with the California Coastal Conservancy, began a four-year public process to develop a restoration plan. A final plan was adopted in 2008, and the first phase of restoration began that year. The goals of the project are to provide habitat for birds and fish, to offer the public access and passive recreation opportunities, and to reduce flood risk for the two million residents of the South Bay living behind the ponds, says the AECOM principal and vice president Marcia

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SOUTH BAY

Bird’s-eye view of the South Bay salt ponds showing ponds of different salinities, including those still under Cargill’s operations.

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whether for birds, juvenile fish, or recreation—of each levee break for each different wetland complex. “We went through each pond with each member of the science panel, walking through the impacts and benefits of each alternative and developed a star chart scoring system,” Tobin said.

Scientists had hoped they could ultimately restore as much as 90 percent of the ponds to tidal marsh and other types of wetlands and retain only 10 percent ponds. But certain species of birds had relied on the salt ponds as habitat for years, including American avocets, black-necked stilts, and western snowy plovers, the last of which is listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. “One issue that really ended up shaping the project was that of ecological trade-offs. The ponds were never intended

© AECOM

Tobin, a landscape architect who was involved early on as a consultant at EDAW, which later became part of AECOM. “We worked with the science team to look at the entire complex and help them make decisions on the restoration spectrum, whether to restore to marsh or keep the ponds leveed off using fish, birds, people, and flooding as criteria,” she said. “As projects were identified and designed, we evaluated possible impacts and benefits under CEQA and NEPA,” the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Part of their analysis was using the modeling done by Philip Williams & Associates to help the scientists understand the results and benefits—

SOUTH BAY SALT POND RESTORATION PROJECT Project Areas Lands Sold to Local Government

REFERENCE FEATURES Highway Potential Limit of 100-Year High Tide

EDEN LANDING

(USACE 1988)

The Bay Trail Trails, Other

HABITATS Former Salt Pond Active Salt Pond Tidal Marsh Diked Marsh

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO BAY

Mudflat Lagoon Farmed or Grazed Bayland Ruderal Bayland Storage or Treatment Basin Upland Open Space (Selected)

RAVENSWOOD

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The decision was made to keep the ultimate goal of restoring 90 percent of the ponds to marsh, but to implement the project in stepped phases, with a lower starting goal. “Given our knowledge when the project began, we were pretty comfortable we could restore at least 50 percent of the ponds to tidal marsh and not have an adverse effect on the species that liked the ponds,” Bourgeois says.

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In addition to figuring out habitats for the birds, scientists also had to think about the physical challenges involved in restoring ponds that had been holding back very salty water.

Restoring former grazing or agricultural lands to salt marsh, if they are not too subsided, can be as simple as breaching a levee and letting the tides reclaim the land. But releasing too much salty water into the bay all at once can quickly cause water quality problems.

“We knew we needed to bring salinities down,” Bourgeois says.

So one of the first activities was to install 53 new water control systems to improve water circulation. Better circulation also led to more bird use. “Just doing that alone, we doubled the number of birds using the ponds—we saw a 100 percent increase in birds.”

Another big question was whether bay tides would bring in enough sediment to fill the ponds back up and begin to build marsh.

The plume of sediment moving down through the system from

ABOVE

A construction crew builds a structure to control the water flowing through Ponds E12 and E13 in the Eden Landing complex.

OPPOSITE

Multiple cells— with different salinities and water levels—were created in one big pond at Eden Landing to test how different salinities create different prey bases and affect bird use.

© CRIS BENTON, TOP AND OPPOSITE

to be wildlife habitat, but they had ended up supporting a lot of birds,” says John Bourgeois, the executive project manager of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. “If we’re restoring to tidal marsh, we’re taking away from one group of birds and giving to another.” To minimize the loss of the pond habitat, resource managers needed somehow to increase use of the nonrestored ponds by migratory and nesting waterbirds and shorebirds.

hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush has pretty much subsided: According to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists, the bay’s water is about 30 percent clearer than a decade ago. Although clearer water might sound good, it is also “hungry” water and will tend to scour sediment. Years of overpumping groundwater had caused the northern end of Santa Clara County—including some salt ponds—to subside by as much as six to 10 feet in some places, Bourgeois says. Scientists feared that once the pond levees were breached, the tides would scour them out. As sea level rises and the bay’s waters deepen,

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urbanized South Bay and prey on species like avocets, plovers, and terns. Scientists are experimenting with ways to manage the ponds to protect the more sensitive species.

Other worries involved water quality.

Would the very shallow (12 inches deep) ponds created for shorebirds experience algal blooms and fish kills? Would more marshland lead to increased levels of mercury—a legacy pollutant from mining—in the bay and its wildlife? The South Bay was the site of several huge “quicksilver” mines that operated from the mid-1850s until as INSET late as the mid-1970s: Miners cut into the hills and regraded A snowy egret wades slopes and creeks to get at the mercury, which washed down through pickleweed, into the creeks and the bay. Mercury, a heavy metal, tends to stalking prey. stick to sediments, but chemical processes in wetlands can convert inorganic mercury into methylmercury, which is much more easily absorbed by algae, zooplankton, fish, and birds, biomagnifying as it moves up the food chain.

© JUDY IRVING/PELICAN MEDIA, TOP; © AECOM, INSET

with less sediment dropping out to ABOVE help build up marshland, the marshes California gulls are thriving in the could be drowned.

LONG TERM OPTIONS AS MEASURED AGAINST SUCCESS CRITERIA NO ACTION

MANAGED POND EMPHASIS

TIDAL EMPHASIS

MIXED

RIGHT

EDAW developed graphics to help scientists evaluate trade-offs for each wetland complex.

And in addition to concerns about ecological impacts, two million residents and corporate headquarters such as Apple, Google, and Facebook need to be protected from floods. The salt pond berms had never been designed or engineered to provide flood protection, Bourgeois says. “But when we start taking levees down, we need to make sure some flood protection is in place.” Those residents also needed access to the bay. “This is their open space,” Bourgeois says. “We wanted to accommodate as much of the public as we can.”

© AECOM

With so many uncertainties in play, salt pond project scientists and managers decided to conduct the project in two phases, using an adaptive management approach. “We picked off the low-hanging fruit first, and then built experiments around the difficult technical questions,” Bourgeois says.

and another 700 acres of ponds reconfigured for specific wildlife species. In August, the project’s technical advisory group of scientists, regulators, and resource managers took a look at how well the project had performed by evaluating 26 different “key uncertainties.” Each uncertainty was given a modified “traffic light” color, ranging from deep green (meaning that original objectives had been achieved) to red, a flag that some major problem had been discovered and had to be addressed before things could progress. Participants agreed that overall progress had been good—with the caveat that 75 percent of the ponds are still being managed with interim structures.

There are signs of tremendous success—as well as The first phase was completed in the spring of 2016, with 1,600 some bright red “stoplights.” Sediment has been acacres of ponds fully restored, another 1,400 partially restored, creting and building marsh better than managers

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 189

for young fish, mysid shrimp, and other aquatic species like the Pacific staghorn sculpin, three-spined stickleback, Pacific herring, and leopard sharks. Longfin smelt, a species listed as threatened by the state, have been overwintering in the ponds.

Endangered Ridgway’s rails and salt marsh harvest mice are breeding in one of the ponds that was restored first. Pioneer marsh plants like pickleweed have colonized ponds such as A21. “A decade ago, A21 was a plain of white gypsum. It’s an almost wholly vegetated marsh now,” Bourgeois says. Creating The Alviso area ponds at the southernmost tip public access got a light green rating: Seven miles of trail, boat of the bay have become a productive nursery launches, and boardwalks have been built. AECOM designed

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© CRIS BENTON, RIGHT; © JUDY IRVING/PELICAN MEDIA, INSET

predicted. Snowy plover numbers are up, on track to achieve the initial project goal of 250 breeding pairs, says Karine Tokatlian, the plover program director with the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. Shorebirds and waterbirds are using the islands that were created in the ponds for nesting and roosting; however, in some spots, the wet clay cracked and their chicks fell in. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, Rachel Tertes, explains that to remedy this problem, they have changed the way they build the islands. “Once the islands are formed using bay mud, rather than have the contractors smooth them out like frosted cakes, we leave them rough and lumpy to deter nesting birds. Then once the mud dries, settles, and cracks, we use heavy equipment to essentially rake the dirt to fill the cracks and smooth the island, while still leaving some topographic diversity, to make it more appropriate nesting habitat.” These and other lessons learned from these islands will inform future designs.

ABOVE

AECOM designed observation platforms to give people perspective and access to the project without altering it or affecting sensitive species.

OPPOSITE, RIGHT

Pond E14 is being managed as a salt panne (showing a remnant tidal channel) for snowy plovers.

© JUDY IRVING/PELICAN MEDIA

OPPOSITE, INSET

This pond preserves historic remnants of wind-powered Archimedes screw pumps.

the recreation opportunities, connecting the restoration project to existing trails and figuring out visitor access points that would not disturb wildlife. “You want them to experience being within that natural environment and getting access to it, but you don’t want to do something to that environment that will alter it. At the same time, you want people to be able to look at the water and have the experience of the wildlife that are using it,” Tobin says. Another aspect she considered was the site’s unique topography. “It’s such a flat landscape.

When you’re in there, you really can’t tell where you are.” She also thought about what people would experience in a canoe or kayak. “Once you get into those channels in a boat surrounded by marsh vegetation, you can’t see much.” To give visitors some perspective, she elevated some of the walkways and created viewing platforms. “You’re down in the walkways and more down in [the wetlands], and then you come back up.” Some areas have to be off-limits for people to get “down into”—wetlands used by endangered Ridgway’s rails or salt marsh harvest mice, for example. In those areas, elevated walkways were created.

these ponds are very large, with very small water control structures,” Bourgeois says. Project managers wanted to avoid using pumps, which means that circulation and dissolved oxygen are limited.

Mercury got a red stoplight. Studies of the ponds by the USGS show that methylmercury levels increase during and immediately after restoration activities, but decrease after the disturbance stops.

“Mercury levels in Forster’s tern eggs were above common toxicity benchmarks that are often associated with impaired reproduction in birds,” says Josh Ackerman, a USGS scientist who has studied mercury in bay birds for many years. Those high levels caused the opening of the gates at Pond A8 to stop until the mercury levels returned to normal levels two years later.

Another uncertainty that earned a stoplight is the breeding success of terns, avocets, and stilts. In some of the large, isolated ponds, predators like gulls and ravens quickly learned how to pick off As feared, algal blooms have been a problem in some ponds, an the shorebirds’ chicks. What isn’t clear is what uncertainty that earned a yellow light from the group. “Some of the influence of the restoration project has been.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 191

RIGHT

Experiencing the project by kayak or canoe gives visitors a more intimate experience of the marsh.

as widening levees (in case they need to be built up later) will now play a much bigger role. The ponds in phase 1 were easier to restore and did not need extensive certified levee systems, Bourgeois says. “Our legal obligation is simply to not make things worse,” he adds. “However, we want to work with our flood control partners to be part of a larger regional solution that helps create a more resilient shoreline—thus the focus on multibenefit projects in phase 2.”

But in phase 2, one uncertainty has risen to the top. “Sea-level rise is our new major consideration,” Bourgeois says. “It was part of our thinking to begin with, but when we finished our planning process in 2007, we were looking at 12 inches of sealevel rise. Obviously, our thinking has changed dramatically as projections have changed; it pervades everything now.” With new models showing that seas could rise by as much as six feet by the end of this century, project managers are looking The lessons learned in phase 1 are informing for sources of sediment to help build marsh and reach the 50 phase 2, but flood risk reduction activities such percent restoration goal as quickly as possible.

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© JUDY IRVING/PELICAN MEDIA

There are more than 50,000 gulls in the South Bay now, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Cheryl Strong, who adds that only certain “problem” gulls are responsible. But the gull problem highlights another challenge associated with ecological restoration in the middle of an urbanized area. Tom Gandesbery, a Central Coast project manager at the Coastal Conservancy, says, “You can’t ignore the millions of people, landfills, and Walmarts going on around the project.” And those millions of people are using the project’s trails. A yearlong survey of 545 trail users showed that 97 percent of them were satisfied with their trail experiences (66 percent “very satisfied” and 31 percent “satisfied”). These visitors commented that the natural setting was most important to them.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges about two million cubic yards of sediment from ports, marinas, and refineries around San Francisco Bay every year, Bourgeois says. That sediment could be used to feed marsh development instead of being disposed of in the ocean. Bourgeois is now in discussion with “dirt bankers.” With the booming Silicon Valley economy and new tech offices being built all the time, leftover dirt—if clean enough—could be used for restoration instead of shunted into a landfill.

Bourgeois finds it a little ironic—and frustrating— that companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook will receive flood protection benefits from the restoration project. Yet, he says, “No one wants to pay for planning and science. Senator Feinstein challenged them to take on sea-level rise and climate change.

But the CEOs were like, ‘Why would we do this?’”

Perhaps they could heed the wise words of Florence LaRiviere. “Sea-level rise scares the dickens The other thing Bourgeois is looking for is money to complete out of all of us,” she says. “We need those tranphase 2. Even under formerly supportive federal policies, he says, sitional lands, the marshes at the bay’s edges.” project managers have struggled to find funding. Most of the funding for the restoration work has come from state bond mea- LISA OWENS VIANI IS A BAY AREA-BASED FREELANCE WRITER sures and some private funding. The state’s Resources Legacy AND LAM CONTRIBUTING EDITOR WHO SPECIALIZES IN ECOLFund chipped in $20 million for acquisition and another $2 mil- OGY, SCIENCE, AND WATER-RELATED TOPICS. lion to $4 million for the science program, Bourgeois says. “But we’re a 50-year project, and there is some funding fatigue: ‘Didn’t I already give you a million?’ But this is a billion-dollar project.”

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 193

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LANDMARK AWARD

202 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

TRAILS OF TREES:

THE J. PAUL GETTY CENTER TURNS 20 OLIN’S MOUNTAINSIDE DESIGN STANDS THE TEST OF TIME.

BY KELLY COMRAS, ASLA

© 2008 J. PAUL GETTY TRUST

L

os Angeles is the lucky beneficiary of a maturing urban forest of more than 10,000 evergreen native oaks, hundreds of pine trees, and dozens of Deodar and Lebanon cedars scattered across the main campus of the Getty Center. These trees were planted when the Getty opened in the Brentwood section of the city in 1997, along with scores of deciduous native sycamore, crape myrtle, and London plane trees, as well as tens of thousands of ground cover plants. Twenty years later the trees form a canopy that embraces and interweaves throughout the campus of the contemporary art museum, realizing the landscape architects’ intention for a seamless transition from designed landscape to wild chaparral. Its impeccable blending of artistic functionality and beauty has earned OLIN the 2017 ASLA Landmark Award, which is given to works of landscape architecture between 15 and 50 years old that have kept their design integrity and contributed to the civic realm. One juror said, “I don’t think we could do better than recognizing the Getty as a special, special place.”

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The J. Paul Getty Center is situated on more than 700 acres of open space within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

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Canopies of more than 10,000 native oak trees form a gentle greenbelt on the hillside.

BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT

A “trail” of Italian stone pines terminates in a grove of four pines where visitors disembark at the Arrival Plaza.

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The OLIN principals Dennis McGlade, FASLA, and Laurie Olin, FASLA, developed the landscape plan in collaboration with Richard Meier & Partners Architects. It has been argued that Meier violated the Frank Lloyd Wright maxim never to build on top of a hill, but rather into a hill, as I. M. Pei did at the Miho Museum in Japan around the same time. But many critics agree that Meier demonstrated a strong sensitivity to the project’s mountaintop location, climate, and light by taking careful advantage of spectacular views across the city and to the Pacific Ocean below, and by wisely breaking up the building mass into a set of pavilions. OLIN rationalized the relationships among the many different levels

OLIN/SAHAR COSTON HARDY, TOP; OLIN/TAKASHI SATO, BOTTOM LEFT; © STEVE PROEHL, BOTTOM RIGHT

TOP

The J. Paul Getty Center, a celebrated cultural institution in Los Angeles, blends art, architecture, and landscape architecture into a cohesive and serene experience. It is situated on more than 700 acres of open space within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Its main campus occupies 110 of those acres arranged along two mountain ridges shaped like a y, with its tail pointing north. Although it lies directly next to the San Diego Freeway, the Getty Center serves as an island of tranquility amid its urban setting. The Getty Museum is open without charge to the public. Many of its nearly two million visitors a year use its landscape as a public park, a meeting space, and an oasis of quiet.

MARION BRENNER, AFFILIATE ASLA

of the museum’s buildings. To link the pavilions to one another and to the surrounding landscape, McGlade and Olin conceived of the Getty as a 20th-century reinterpretation of a classic Italian garden, one with an intimate juxtaposition of gardens and architecture. The Mediterranean climate of Los Angeles influenced their decision, as did the similarities of native plant palettes to those of southern Europe. And then there was the zone between cultivated gardens and the wild chaparral landscape surrounding the Getty Center. McGlade and Olin looked at classic gardens such as Villa Lante, where the created garden splits the architecture and goes right between the buildings, and they studied Italian hillside

garden transitions, including artificial gardens, native gardens, and natural landscapes. One example came from the cross section of Villa Gamberaia in John Shepherd and Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Italian Gardens of the Renaissance.

Early on, Meier had established a 30-inch-square ground-plane grid to bring the campus into a cohesive whole. McGlade subsequently developed multiples of the module (affectionately dubbed “the Meier grid”) as a basis for defining the hardscape elements, as well as the location, spacing, and shaping of major trees throughout the campus. Stone paving in the various plaza levels, for

ABOVE

California’s active geological history is embodied within the sculptural boulders of the central courtyard fountain.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 205

example, uses this single organizing element to achieve an architectural link to the stone walls of otherwise unconnected pavilion exteriors. Multiples of the grid extend into the hardscape to shape spaces for patios and plazas, seating areas, stairways, planters, fountains, pergolas, and other exterior elements. OLINâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Meierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s partnership produced a plan in which the intersections of building and landscape are exquisitely resolved and integrated.

collection of the Getty Center. McGlade and Olin placed 28 pieces of sculpture in this area in a series of outdoor rooms. They are paved in a casual texture of decomposed granite and bordered by an edge of white-flowering crape myrtle trees, intimate and peaceful outdoor gallery spaces designed to promote contemplation or quiet conversation.

Public entrance to the Getty Center campus is carefully sequenced. You arrive at a parking garage at the base of the mountain and proceed up to the Fran and Ray Stark Sculpture Garden. This is your first encounter with the modernist figurative and abstract sculptures in the outdoor art

Leaving the Stark Sculpture Garden, you board an electric tramcar that glides up the mountainside through a forest of oak trees. The process gives you the opportunity to relax and ease into the experience ahead. Here, the Meier grid extends into the adjacent natural hillside landscape, establishing

Site plan of the J. Paul Getty Center mountaintop buildings and gardens.

INSET

A site study from 1986.

206 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

OLIN

TOP

OLIN/SAHAR COSTON HARDY

the organizing principle for installation of more than 10,000 native oak trees (Quercus agrifolia) at 20 feet on center. The geometry of the grid was easily visible when the trees were first growing.

Now, the canopies interlace with one another, forming a gentle greenbelt on the surrounding hillside; as the tramcar proceeds upward, the precision of the planting scheme is perceptible to the visitor as an understory experience. The Getty Center was constructed with a balance of

cut and fill, but excavation for infrastructure and parking facilities necessitated extensive replanting.

Thomas Gillespie, a biogeographer and professor in the Department of Geography at UCLA, has called the Getty’s oaks and other tree plantings “an urban forest of real consequence.”

McGlade is a consummate plantsman; his skill, experience, and appreciation for the qualities of individual plants show throughout the landscape.

ABOVE

Architecture and landscape work together at the Getty Center to create unique outdoor rooms such as the café patio, shaded by a bosque of pollarded sycamore trees.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 207

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OLIN, THIS PAGE; OLIN/SAHAR COSTON HARDY, OPPOSITE

These attributes are especially apparent in the mountaintop museum gardens. He understood that multiple uses of specific trees could unify the different levels throughout the campus. This understanding also applied to the use of different trees with harmonizing qualities. He designed “trails of trees” to link the museum entrance, mountainside plantings, and the lushly tailored mountaintop campus. These included extensive plantings of pine and plane trees, which recall classic Renaissance Italian gardens, placing them throughout the property to enhance one’s sense of immersion in a particular place. To reinforce that experience, he created a trail of Italian stone pines (Pinus pinea) that begins at the entrance

and lines the road going up the mountain to the top. The trail stops, and then re-emerges in a natural-looking grove of four pines where visitors disembark at the Arrival Plaza. Growing in only four feet of sand over a parking garage, the grove pines are, nonetheless, now substantial in height and girth. They serve as a signpost to guide you up a set of stairs to the main plaza. (Most visitors never realize the extent to which the majority of the museum garden’s trees are growing in rooftop planters. The Getty Center’s trees are essentially very large bonsai in six-foot or four-foot planters, pruned carefully to reduce the weight of biomass and thinned to stave off damage from the strong mountaintop winds.)

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

A fountain originates in a long runnel on the upper plaza and drops into a void from a basin at the end of the runnel; the water rematerializes below in a grotto modeled on the shape of an amphora; rivulets drip down grotto walls; drawings of amphorae.

OPPOSITE

A Museum Courtyard fountain features a line of Montezuma bald cypress.

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The South Promontory adapts harsh conditions of a chaparral landscape with an abstract composition of Opuntia, agave, and cactus with underplantings of bluegray Senecio and redflowering Kalanchoe.

210 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Glade. At the center, he created another trail of the cultivated plane trees, using three different methods of pruning and shaping to distinguish three different areas within the campus. The café patio features a pollarded grid of dense summer shade and airy openness in the winter. This area leads to a descending stairway with a cascade of naturally pruned plane trees. Finally, the trail extends into the Central Garden, designed by the artist Robert Irwin, where the trees are shaped

OLIN/TAKASHI SATO

ABOVE

Sycamores native to California (Platanus racemosa) cluster in a small grove at the entrance near the parking garage and ascend the adjacent canyon, then reappear at the front of the mountaintop museum as a casually sculpted drift that reminds us of the surrounding native landscape. The notion of having these native California sycamores meet the cultivated European hybrid plane trees (Platanus x acerifolia ‘Yarwood’) within the lushly designed center of the campus intrigued Mc-

MCGLADE AND OLIN CONCEIVED OF THE GETTY AS A 20TH-CENTURY REINTERPRETATION OF A CLASSIC ITALIAN GARDEN.

into a continuous double row of 40-foot square-shaped canopies that serve as an overstory for a path that leads down to the garden’s circular water parterre with azaleas. The maintenance is meticulous. The effect is gorgeous.

The “trail” of cultivated plane trees is one of two features that link the main campus landscape with the Central Garden. The second is a fountain that originates in a long stone runnel on the upper plaza. From a basin at the end of the runnel, water drops into a mysterious void, then rematerializes below as rivulets that drip into a giant grotto to run downstream through the middle of the Central Garden.

The presence of fountains provides a key to some of McGlade’s other plantings. These include a

trail of water-loving sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) trees, five in a row, which run between the East Pavilion and the South Pavilion and point to a circular pool featuring sculptural boulders found in Northern California, specimens of the state’s active geological history. The sweet gums disappear from view near the East Pavilion and reemerge in another row of three cultivars below the Exhibitions Pavilion. Microclimates of the two locations are sufficiently dissimilar to extend a brilliant fall foliage display.

Another fountain in the Museum Courtyard is long and aligns with the front of the Exhibitions Pavilion. It features a line of Montezuma bald cypress (Taxodium mucronatum). Native to the swamps of Texas and Mexico, the trees, 40 feet high, are planted in just four feet of sand and precisely pruned to feathery perfection. Along the stairway from the Arrival Plaza to the Main Plaza, McGlade planted the slope with whiteflowering Australian tea trees (Leptospermum

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 211

Stone paving in the various plaza levels uses the Meier grid to organize outdoor spaces and achieve an architectural link to the stone walls of otherwise unconnected pavilion exteriors.

OPPOSITE

Precisely pruned whiteflowering crape myrtle trees define a walkway above the Arrival Plaza.

212 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

MARION BRENNER, AFFILIATE ASLA

ABOVE

laevigatum) and trailing rosemary ground cover, Opuntia, agave, columnar cactus, both pruned to arch and spill downward like a and prominently placed golden tumbling stream. barrel cactus. This tapestry of bold textures is underplanted The South Promontory of the campus, located with blue-gray Senecio and redon the southern tip of the eastern ridge top, flowering Kalanchoe. The design offers a dramatic contrast. The planting design is also meant to tell the ecological in this section explicitly recognizes the harsh story of the site. “It really does tell you this isn’t conditions inherent in a chaparral landscape a well-watered place,” McGlade says. “It’s like exposed to heat, drought, wind, and glare. Using pulling the curtain back to see a little bit of the cacti and succulents, McGlade continued his truth. And although it’s not a desert, and those idea of the Old World meeting the New World. aren’t natives, there is this squinting into the sun The stairway down from the plaza features speci- and getting it—that it’s actually a dry region.” men African tree aloes and Euphorbia, and the This garden requires no irrigation. It reaches promontory features cactus and succulents from out toward the downtown Los Angeles skyline, a the Western Hemisphere. Here, McGlade cre- testament to both the fragility and the resilience ated a breathtaking abstract composition of of the chaparral landscape.

OLIN/SAHAR COSTON HARDY

Twenty years after the museum’s opening, the Getty Center gardens present a centrally situated urban oasis of extraordinary quality. McGlade’s Aesthetic Landscape Maintenance Manual for the Getty, a very thick book that articulates the design rationale and specific effects intended for each plant, has become an institutional archive of OLIN’s original intent, constantly referred to as the landscape matures. The Getty Center gardens also provide a glimpse of the astonishing success

of the urban forest aspect of the plantings. “This is one of the best habitat restorations I have ever seen,” said Gillespie, the UCLA biogeographer.

Especially when the land is seen from above, “the Getty Center did a fantastic job, one that is beyond compare.”

KELLY COMRAS, ASLA, IS A LICENSED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND A MEMBER OF THE STATE BAR OF CALIFORNIA. HER BOOK, RUTH SHELLHORN, WAS RELEASED IN 2016.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 213

LINE

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BOOKS PROBLEM NOT SOLVED, BUT NOT A PROBLEM LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE

BY PIERRE BÉLANGER; ABINGDON, UNITED KINGDOM, AND NEW YORK: ROUTLEDGE, 2017; 512 PAGES, $65.

REVIEWED BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

T

o listen to some mainstream urbanists today, you have to wonder what body of theory, if any, they are paying attention to in order to make what often seem hopelessly naive and homogeneous proposals for new urban developments.

Admittedly, this group is often the same bunch who don’t have time for impractical theorization because they are out there doing real work, but some idea about “good” city form obviously drives their approach. Unfortunately, many of the theories in circulation stem from a belief that the city is nothing more than a problem to be solved—it’s too dense, or not dense enough; gray and dirty rather than green; impervious and polluting; unjust and inequitable; or not living up to that crowning achievement of being “walkable.” Obviously, most if not all of these criticisms can be leveled at cities in one place or another at one time or another, but what are the implications for the urban imagination of designers if this is the only lens through which the city (arguably the greatest cultural artifact ever produced) can be viewed—a massive problem which must be “restored” to some nostalgic, fictional notion of the healthy city? And, more optimistically, what new propositions, pedagogies, and disciplinary alignments are necessary to overcome these narrow worldviews and begin to engage the phenomenon of urbanization in a more compelling and realistic way?

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In his new book Landscape as Infrastructure, Pierre Bélanger, ASLA, an associate professor of landscape architecture and a codirector of the Master in Design Studies Program in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, lays the groundwork for such an approach. Assembling a decade of design and scholarly research, Bélanger provides readers with a much-needed alternative history of urbanization (primarily in mid- to late 20th and early 21st-century North America), as well as a survey of the contemporary forces that drive urbanization patterns today.

These aspects of the book are complemented by an account of the accompanying epistemological shifts brought about by new understandings of complexity and ecology as well as a resurgence of the importance of geography, and all of these facets add up to a convincing challenge to many of the ideological positions that continue to dominate the planning, design, and engineering of urbanism today.

Bélanger, a self-proclaimed landscape urbanist, argues that a new, ecologically informed set of conceptual frames and material techniques will replace the tradition of reductive, monofunctional, centralized approaches to infrastructure that have dominated urbanization up to now. This new approach is

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imperative if the design, planning, and engineering disciplines are to engage productively the dynamic forces of the 21st century such as shifting climates, migrating populations (both human and nonhuman, one assumes), and the endless cycling of materials across the planet. Bélanger, who is critical of the ideology of city design premised upon “centralization, containment, and compactness,” calls for an alternative to the nostalgic RIGHT inheritance of “Old World” city and landscape making that is Relational diagrams are more in line with the postindustrial realities of contemporary part of the research urbanization. Such a shift requires the abductive capacity of the ABOVE

Engines of urbanization such as New Jersey’s Foreign Trade Zone No. 49 fall outside the traditional approaches to the design of the city.

Landscape as Infrastructure is a 500-plus-page slab of a book that combines old and new writings by Bélanger along with a variety of explanatory photos, graphic timelines, and diagrams of dynamic processes of urbanization. The book begins with 10

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, TOP; OPSYS, BOTTOM

and visualization tool kit for the conceptualization and communication of landscape infrastructures.

designer to replace the inductive and deductive approaches of engineering and planning. “Abduction draws from many fields and appropriates many levels of knowledge, extensively and intensively, to formulate ideas and strategies based on uncertain conditions, indeterminate circumstances, and sometimes incomplete information.” But Bélanger is realistic about the fact that, even though landscape architects and designers may be particularly well suited to engage this project given the ways they are educated, a cross-disciplinary alignment of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning is required to undertake the “strategic design of infrastructural and territorial ecologies” as a “synthetic landscape of living, biophysical, and sociopolitical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape the future of urban economies and cultures into the twenty-first century.”

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ABOVE

Demanufacturing of “white trash” in Japan and other waste recyling processes catalyze new spatial and social conditions in postindustrial urbanization.

BELOW

Mapping the complex flows of materials over time is essential to engaging the city as an open system.

“prepositions” that set up the essays that follow and provide a more exhaustive case for their validity and potential as strategic catalysts. Prepositions include “The fundamental problem with urbanization is that we consider it a problem,” “Decentralization is one of the greatest structural forces reshaping patterns of urbanization,” and “Ecologies of scale are the new post-industrial economies for the weak world of the future.”

tory of urbanization that challenges, refutes, or adds nuance to the more traditional history of urbanization and infrastructure in North America. Informed by the work of regional urbanists such as Benton MacKaye, Jean Gottmann, and Howard T. Odum, Bélanger argues that by replacing the predominant urbanization-as-problem lens with an “ecological optic,” a new generation of landscape infrastructuralists could move beyond the need to “minimize, control, or arrest” the processes of This introductory section is followed by 10 essays that cor- urbanization to shape and direct these forces toward more respond to the 10 prepositions and serves to juxtapose “condi- productive socioeconomic and socioecological ends. tions and dynamics in and out of the industrialized West…” across “…a series of scales, strategies, and systems for under- In a chapter on “Ecologies of Disassembly,” Bélanger describes standing and shaping knowledge of urbanization through how a shift to a postindustrial economy is accompanied by contemporary patterns, processes, and precedents.” Bélanger the emergence of “waste ecologies” in which materials that is at his best in chapters such as “Systems of Systems,” which previously held little or no value are now “catalyzing the birth provides a rigorously researched and referenced alternative his- of novel ecologies across major urban agglomerations…and across different continents, where the significance of circular economies make growth possible beyond production.”

Bélanger then goes on to describe these ecologies in places such as the quasi-informal markets of Lagos, Nigeria, and the demanufacturing of “white trash” in Japan, to name only two of several examples. The author sees such “multilateral feedback strategies” as diversion, separation, recycling, and composting as increasingly common globally and a necessary development in the shift to more ecological forms of postindustrial urbanization.

In addition to the aforementioned chapters on systems and wastes, chapters on “Regionalization,” “Synthetic Surfaces,” and “Infrastructural Ecologies” support a multiscalar and multilayered understanding of the patterns and processes of contemporary urbanization. What is perhaps less explicit is how landscape as infrastructure is actually defined or practiced, but I think this is in part owing to the expectation that

222 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

PIERRE BÉLANGER, ASLA, 2004, TOP; OPSYS, BOTTOM

THE BACK

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ABOVE

Graphic timelines such as this one showing the evolution of the agronomic landscape demonstrate the synthetic capacity of designers to embrace complexity rather than suppress it.

infrastructure will continue to operate as it has in the past under the logic of closed systems rather than as diffuse, decentralized componentry of a much larger ecology. This is arguably the most significant takeaway for a discipline such as landscape architecture that continues to privilege projects that some would call high design and which are often characterized by their discrete site boundaries, exquisite materiality and detailing, and preferably ample budgets. Although that is not to say that such landscapes are necessarily incompatible with landscape as infrastructure, the latter type requires a different “optic” through which to evaluate and value them and to take into consideration characteristics and qualities of new landscapes that engage the ubiquity of logistics, that embrace the aesthetic qualities of time and change that are so much a part of dynamic ecologies (whether organic or inorganic), and that develop the potentials inherent in decentralization.

landscape architecture from the Old World and its surrogate, intellectual affiliations with the discipline of architecture….”

And given the fact that engineers outnumber architects, landscape architects, and urban planners by more than five to one, and that an often uncritical belief in density and centralization dominates the imagination of many, if not most, professional designers and planners, as well as many academics training the future professionals who might shape urbanization, it may appear that what’s ahead is simply more of the same. But despite what may at times seem to be the daunting inertia of landscape and urbanism—especially in North America—I would argue that there is much to be optimistic about as well, given the innovative new landscape architecture firms now experimenting with a variety of landscape infrastructures and new generations of academics that are finding creative ways to educate across a spectrum of practices from high design to landscape as infrastructure. Landscape as Infrastructure proLandscape as Infrastructure is a compelling addition to a vides a new optic through which to see advances along these growing body of literature that challenges simplistic notions lines that are already here but not fully understood, as well about the city, or more accurately, urbanization. The book as a new foundation from which to bring others into being. is critical of architecture’s overreliance on “theory,” and civil engineering’s near-total lack of it; of the overreliance by urban GALE FULTON, ASLA, IS DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECplanning (whether practiced by architects, urban designers, TURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AND CAN BE CONTACTED AT GFULTON@ or landscape architects) on outmoded or unrealistic theories UTK.EDU OR FOLLOWED ON TWITTER @LANDINTEL. and practices (the “streets, blocks, and buildings” approach); and of the “borrowed, aristocratic histories of the profession of

224 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

OPSYS/CURTIS ROTH

THE BACK

THE BACK

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BOOKS OF INTEREST THIS BOOK EXAMINES GREAT BENCHES IN HISTORY (THERE ARE MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK).

INFRASTRUCTURAL ECOLOGIES: ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT MODELS FOR EMERGING ECONOMIES

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE THEORY: AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH

BY MICHAEL D. MURPHY; WASHINGTON, D.C.: ISLAND PRESS, 2016; 331 PAGES, $40.

BY HILLARY BROWN AND BYRON STIGGE; CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: THE MIT PRESS, 2017; 313 PAGES, $30.

The infrastructure systems that emerging nations most need in order to “emerge”—sanitation, energy, food and water distribution, transportation—are often too expensive for them to put into place.

Hillary Brown and Byron Stigge address this problem by presenting an array of programs already working in communities around the world.

Particularly interesting is the chapter on postcarbon infrastructure, which rejects the notion that developing countries can’t afford to concern themselves with moving beyond oil. In it, the authors detail alternative energy sources including solar technology in South Africa and India, wastewater power in Burundi, and stream-powered energy in Nepal.

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THE BENCH IN THE GARDEN

BY MICHAEL JAKOB; NEW YORK: ORO EDITIONS, 2017; 200 PAGES, $29.95.

A bench is much more than a place to sit. “To sit on it means to share a view with the creator of the garden,” writes Michael Jakob. Benches are guideposts through the garden, they are markers of social status, and they are even political statements, he says. This book examines great benches in history (there are more than you might think) and their representation in literature and, especially, art. “The painted bench acts in other words as a scopic device built into the picture,” Jakob notes. “Once ‘occupied,’ once our eyes start to discover the other parts of the painting from there, we see the entire image in a different light.”

What part can landscape architects play in building a sustainable future?

“We must begin to design and manage in ways that ensure the means of production,” writes Michael D. Murray, “as well as the output.” His book is a primer on doing just that, with chapters laying out ecologically focused explanations of design purpose, form, process, collaboration, and more. While not necessarily for experienced practitioners, this book provides a valuable overview of the profession for those who wish to know the environmental “why” behind the “how.”

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

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

N AT U R E I S H E A L I N G The idea of nature as restorative is a concept that spans cultures and is more than a thousand years old. Contact with nature has long been seen as beneficial for health and well-being. The World Health Organization formalized a definition of health more than 65 years ago in the preamble to its Constitution as, “a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Defining health with this broad definition encompasses the understanding that there are many dimensions of wellness — and wellness is compromised when one or more dimensions is out of balance. The human connection with nature is a bond that can foster healing to restore the balance; early medical practitioners understood this.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, monastery infirmaries included gardens, often elaborate, to distract the ill. In the 1800s in both Europe and America, pavilion-style hospitals were commonly designed with gardens for the patients to use.

Discover by Enrique Ramirez and Alessandra Farias is a circular shade pavilion with spaces for gatherings and solitary meditation with small perforations and large openings that allow light and shade to change shape as the sun traverses the sky.

HE ALING GARDEN RESE ARCH Florence Nightingale, nurse and public health reformer, wrote in 1898 that patients should be able to see out of windows from their beds, “to see sky and sunlight at least, if you can show them nothing else … I assert [this] to be, if not of the very first importance for recovery, at least something very near it” (Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not). Those involved in caring for the sick intuitively understood that views and access to nature were therapeutic, even though they did not understand why.

2 0 T H C E N T U R Y T H EO R Y & D E S I G N The 20th century leaps in medical knowledge and technology sidelined a connection with nature. The need to accommodate modern technologies in healthcare facilities, to improve efficiency and to prevent infection overshadowed the importance of therapeutic elements such as gardens.

The result was starkly institutional hospitals that looked like office buildings — exteriors dominated by parking lots and interiors closed off with air conditioning. This design, combined with an environment in which patients have little choice or control, led to a setting that did nothing to calm patients, reduce stress or meet the emotional needs of not only patients, but also families and staff.

PAT I E N T- C E N T E R E D D E S I G N The patient-centered care movement of the early 1990s began a renewed awareness of the negative effects of institutional settings. Economic factors pushed this movement forward as competition between healthcare providers grew, and patients had more choices among hospitals and assisted living facilities. Healthcare organizations are now moving toward a holistic approach to treating the patient, taking the needs of family members and staff into consideration as well. The growing body of research on the benefits of nature to mental, physical and social well-being has meant that many healthcare facilities are returning to the concept of healing gardens, this time with scientific evidence and understanding of how and why they are therapeutic.

Mounting evidence shows that gardens are one way to measurably reduce stress for patients in healthcare settings and can benefit family members and healthcare staff.

In a 1984 study in science, environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich was the first to use modern medical research standards (strict experimental controls, quantified health outcomes) to demonstrate that recovery times shortened with a view of nature. Gallbladder surgery patients with a view of trees healed on average a day faster, needed significantly less pain medication, and had fewer postsurgical complications than those with a view of a wall.

Even pictures of landscapes can soothe. Another study by Ulrich at Uppsala University Hospital in Sweden provided heart surgery patients with either a simulated window view showing a photo of a stream or a forest; abstract paintings; a white panel; or a blank wall. Patients who viewed the trees or stream photo needed fewer doses of pain medicine and were significantly less anxious during the postoperative period than the other patients.

Since these studies, many more have shown that exposure to healing gardens reduces patient levels of pain and stress. This may in turn boost the immune system and allow the body and other treatments to help. A welldesigned healing garden can help to restore the balance of physical, mental and social well-being, and in this sense, it can facilitate healing in anyone who uses it, not just patients.

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246 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

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Project: Cafe Pergola, Farm Neck Golf Club, Oak Bluffs, MA - 86 ft long overall, 32 ft. radius beam, 3 lighted apexes, 21 - 8" sq. columns, all crafted in AZEK.

800-343-6948 • See video of project at walpoleoutdoors.com Fence, pergolas, arbors, gates, trellis, lattice, railing, planter boxes, and more for your home or business.

HALS: PRESERVATION THROUGH DOCUMENTATION

The Ideal Sustainable Wood for Outdoor Needs ◊ Lasts for decades ◊ Impervious to rot and disease ◊ No chemical treatment needed ◊ Creates American jobs ◊ Restores habitats

The mission of the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) is to document our country’s dynamic cultural landscapes. In collaboration with the National Park Service and the Library of Congress, ASLA offers resources to guide members through the documentation process. www.asla.org/HALS

westernjuniper.org

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 247

DRIVABLE GRASS® Driveways Parking Fire Lanes Utility Access Pathways Drainage Channels

www.soilretention.com 800-346-7995

248 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Big Fun for Little Ones

MOST DEPENDABLE FOUNTAINS, INC.™ The one water source trusted for over 25 years.

Introducing two new playstructures for your youngest players.

Smart Play®: Nook is for kids ages 6 to 23 months, and Smart Play®: Loft is for kids ages 2 to 5 years. Learn more at playlsi.com/smart-play.

www.MostDependable.com

800-552-6331

©2017 Landscape Structures Inc.

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PLAYGROUND & RECREATIONAL SAFETY SURFACING

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800.875.5788 • spectraturf.com

250 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

TURF

THE BACK

/ADVERTISER INDEX

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

ADVERTISER 2017 EXPO Promotion A. Zahner Company Acker-Stone Industries Inc. ACO Polymer Products Inc. American Hydrotech, Inc. American Sports Builders Association Amish Country Gazebos ANOVA ANP Lighting Aquatix by Landscape Structures ASLA Annual Meeting & Expo Atomizing Systems, Inc. Belgard Hardscapes Berliner Play Equipment Corporation Bison Innovative Products by UCP B-K Lighting, Inc. BrightView Design Group Bureau of Land Management Calpipe Industries Inc. Campania International, Inc. Canaan Site Furnishings Canterbury Designs Cast Lighting LLC Chicago Botanic Garden Citygreen Systems Classic Recreation Systems, Inc. Columbia Cascade Company Country Casual DeepStream Designs DOGIPOT Doty & Sons Concrete Products DuMor, Inc. Earthsavers Erosion Control, LLC Easi-Set Buildings EJ emuamericas, llc Envirospec, Inc. Equiparc Ernst Conservation Seeds Eurocobble Evergreen Walls US Fermob USA Form and Fiber Forms+Surfaces Fountain People, Inc. Gale Pacific, Inc. Goric Marketing Group Inc. Gothic Arch Greenhouses Grand Slam Safety, LLC Greenfields Outdoor Fitness Greenform LLC greenscreen Gregory Industries, Inc. Gsky Plant Systems, Inc. HADDONSTONE HandyDeck Systems Inc. Hanover Architectural Products, Inc. Hauser Site Furniture Holm/Hunter Huntco Supply, LLC Hunter Industries Incorporated IAP Illusions Vinyl Fence Industrial Fabrics Infrared Dynamics Infratech International Society of Arboriculture Iron Age Designs Ironsmith, Inc. Jackson Pottery, Inc. Kafka Granite Kaswell Flooring Systems Keystone Ridge Designs, Inc. Kichler Landscape Lighting Kornegay Design Landmark Ceramics, Inc. Landscape Architecture Foundation

252 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

WEBSITE www.aslameeting.com www.azahner.com www.ackerstone.com www.acousa.com www.hydrotechusa.com www.sportsbuilders.net www.amishgazebos.com www.anovafurnishings.com www.anplighting.com www.playlsi.com www.aslameeting.com www.coldfog.com www.belgardcommercial.com www.berliner-playequipment.com www.bisonip.com www.bklighting.com www.brightview.com www.blm.gov/programs/naturalresources/native-plantcommunities www.calpipebollards.com www.campaniainternational.com www.canaansf.com www.canterbury-designs.com www.cast-lighting.com www.chicagobotanic.org www.citygreen.com www.classicrecreation.com www.timberform.com www.countrycasual.com www.deepstreamdesigns.com www.dogipot.com www.dotyconcrete.com www.dumor.com www.earth-savers.com www.easisetbuildings.com www.ejco.com www.emuamericas.com www.envirospecinc.com www.equiparc.com www.ernstseed.com www.eurocobble.com www.evergreenwalls.com www.fermobusa.com www.formandfiber.com www.forms-surfaces.com www.fountainpeople.com www.galepacific.com www.goric.com www.gothicarchgreenhouses.com www.grandslamsafety.com www.greenfieldsfitness.com www.green-form.com www.greenscreen.com www.gregorycorp.com www.gsky.com www.haddonstone.com www.handydeck.com www.hanoverpavers.com www.hauser.ca www.hunterindustries.com www.huntco.com www.hunterindustries.com www.iapsf.com www.illusionsfence.com www.ind-fab.com www.infradyne.com www.infratech-usa.com www.isa-arbor.com www.ironagegates.com www.ironsmith.biz www.jacksonpottery.com www.kafkagranite.com www.kaswell.com www.keystoneridgedesigns.com www.kichler.com www.kornegaydesign.com www.landmarkceramics.com www.lafoundation.org

PHONE 202-898-4444 999-888-7777 800-258-2535 440-285-7000 800-877-6125 866-501-2722 717-951-1064 888-535-5005 800-548-3227 763-972-5237 202-898-2444 888-265-3364 877-235-4273 864-627-1092 888-412-4766 559-438-5800 844-235-7778 202-912-7273

PAGE # 266-277 13, 264 219, 261 123, 256 62 232 264 115, 257 69, 260 234 19 99 87 57 234 199 14 196

800-225-7473 215-541-4627 877-305-6638 323-936-7111 800-914-2278 847-835-5440 855-892-1961 800-697-2195 800-547-1940 240-813-1117 305-857-0466 800-364-7681 800-233-3907 800-598-4018 866-928-8537 800-547-4045 800-874-4100 303-733-3385 716-689-8548 800-363-9264 800-873-3321 877-877-5012 770-840-7060 678-884-3000 888-314-8852 800-451-0410 512-392-1155 407-772-7900 617-774-0772 251-471-5238 315-766-7008 888-315-9037 310-331-1665 800-450-3494 330-477-4800 888-708-4759 866-733-8225 202-417-2161 800-426-4242 519-747-1138 760-304-7216 503-224-8700 760-304-7216 510-534-4886 631-698-0975 225-916-6850 714-572-4050 310-354-1261 217-355-9411 206-276-0925 800-338-4766 214-357-9819 715-687-2423 508-879-1500 800-284-8208 800-659-9000 877-252-6323 931-325-5700 202-331-7070

93, 257 C2-1, 263 225, 258 63 28, 260 97 39, 263 112 82, 261 45 237 249 256 4-5, 126, 258 248 235 103 238, 258 260 21, 258 263 36-37, 262 256 65, 259 232 17, 257 113, 264 89 95, 130, 261 127, 264 238 245 239 35, 259 30 197 221, 262 38 241 29 107 242 64 241 256 12 248 79 198 114, 256 227, 256 246 18, 261 261 230 96, 259 47, 257 22, 262 265

THE BACK

/ADVERTISER INDEX

Landscape Forms Landscape Structures, Inc. Livin the Dog Life Louis Poulsen Lumion Madrax Maglin Site Furniture Inc. Marmiro Stones McNichols Company Meteor Lighting Most Dependable Fountains Museum & Library Furniture LLC Ohio Gratings Inc. Oly-Ola Edgings, Inc. Outerspace Landscape Furnishings Inc. Paloform Paris Equipment Manufacturing Ltd. Partac Peat Corporation Pavestone Company Peacock Pavers Penn State Department of Landscape Architecture Permaloc Aluminum Edging Petersen Concrete Leisure Products Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc. Pinnacle Lighting Group Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice Planterworx PlayPower Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

QCP Renson, Inc. Rico Associates Robinson Iron Corporation Roman Fountains Rooflite, A Division of Skyland USA Salsbury Industries Shelter Outdoor Simpson Strong-Tie Company Inc. Sitecra Sitescapes, Inc. Soil Retention Products Solus Décor, Inc. Spectraturf Spring Meadow Nursery Inc. (Proven Winners) Sterling Lighting Sternberg Lighting Stewart Brothers Nurseries Ltd. Stone Forest Streetlife StressCrete Group / King Luminaire, The Structureworks Fabrication Sunbrella Superior Concrete Products Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging Tensile Shade Products, LLC Terrakoat International Themed Concepts Tiger Deck Tournesol Siteworks/Planter Technology Trellis Structures Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock TUUCI USA U.S. Green Building Council Unilock, Ltd. UPC Parks Vectorworks, Inc. Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System Victor Stanley, Inc. Vitamin Institute VORTEX USA Walpole Outdoors LLC Water Odyssey Waterplay Solutions Corp.

Wausau Tile Western Juniper Alliance Westile Westminster Teak Whitacre Greer Williams Stone Company, Inc. Wishbone Site Furnishings Ltd.

www.landscapeforms.com www.playlsi.com www.livinthedoglife.com www.louispoulsen.com www.lumion.com www.madrax.com www.maglin.com www.marmiro.com www.mcnichols.com www.meteor-lighting.com www.mostdependable.com www.mandlf.com www.ohiogratings.com www.olyola.com www.fences.com www.paloform.com www.peml.com www.partac.com www.pavestone.com www.peacockpavers.com www.psu.edu www.permaloc.com www.petersenmfg.com www.americaspremierpaver.com www.pinnaclelightinggroup.com www.hooksandlattice.com www.planterworx.com www.playpower.com www.poligon.com www.quickcrete.com www.renson-outdoor.com www.landscapespecifications.com www.robinsoniron.com www.romanfountains.com www.rooflite.us www.mailboxes.com www.shelteroutdoor.com www.strongtie.com www.site-cra .com www.sitescapesonline.com www.soilretention.com www.solusdecor.com www.spectraturf.com www.provenwinners.com www.sterling-lighting.com www.sternberglighting.com www.stewartnurseries.com www.stoneforest.com www.streetlife.nl www.stresscrete.com www.structureworksfab.com www.sunbrella.com www.concretefence.com www.surelocedging.com www.tensileshadeproducts.com www.terrakoat.com www.themedconcepts.com www.tigerdeck.com www.tournesolsiteworks.com www.trellisstructures.com www.carderock.com www.tuuci.com www.usgbc.org www.unilock.com www.upcparks.com www.vectorworks.net www.versa-lok.com www.victorstanley.com www.superthrive.com www.vortex-intl.com www.walpolewoodworkers.com www.waterodyssey.com www.waterplay.com www.wausautile.com www.westernjuniper.org www.westile.com www.westminsterteak.com www.wgpaver.com www.williamsstone.com www.wishboneltd.com

800-430-6205 800-328-0035 800-931-1462 954-349-2525 303-562-6666 800-448-7931 800-716-5506 201-933-6461 877-884-3280 213-255-2060 800-552-6331 240-743-4672 330-477-6707 800-334-4647 800-338-2499 888-823-8883 800-387-6318 800-247-2326 866-409-7971 800-264-2072 814-865-7832 800-356-9660 800-832-7383 800-334-8689 888-338-0186 760-707-5400 718-963-0564 704-949-1600 616-399-1963 951-256-3245 310-745-8905 508-842-4948 256-329-8486 877-794-1802 610-268-0017 323-846-6700 855-768-4450 800-999-5099 800-221-1448 402-421-9464 760-966-6090 877-255-3146 800-875-5788 800-633-8859 800-939-1849 847-588-3400 604-306-8450 505-982-7988 646-583-2937 800-268-7809 877-489-8064 336-227-6211 817-277-9255 800-787-3562 520-903-9005 407-442-7334 651-289-8399 503-625-1747 800-542-2282 888-285-4624 301-365-2100 786-532-2498 202-552-1369 416-646-3452 530-605-2664 443-542-0620 800-770-4525 301-855-8300 818-503-1950 514-694-3868 800-343-6948 512-392-1155 800-590-5552 800-388-8728 503-221-6911 800-433-8453 800-750-1595 800-947-2837 800-832-2052 604-626-0476

27, 71, 258 43, 250 261 51 61, 264 6-7, 259 124 217 235 233 250 59 237 249 257 40 98 263 C4 194 244, 245 215, 260 250 33, 262 246 236 240 23, 32, 101 80 25, 83 248 53 233 20 73 259 239 15 129 214, 258 248 240 250 200 91 216, 260 243 231 195 244 263 10-11, 228-229 243 119 128 242 249 260 49, 263 249 262 223 251 31 54 81 243, 257 259, C3 246 67 247 264 236 2-3 247 75 125 85 262 55

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017/ 253

THE BACK

/ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY GOVERNMENT/PUBLIC AGENCY

ASSOCIATION/FOUNDATION

Bureau of Land Management

Tiger Deck 202-912-7273

503-625-1747

260

Country Casual

240-813-1117

45

Museum & Library Furniture LLC

240-743-4672

59

196

2017 EXPO Promotion

202-898-4444 266-277

American Sports Builders Association

866-501-2722

232

ASLA Annual Meeting & Expo

202-898-2444

19

International Society of Arboriculture

217-355-9411

198

American Hydrotech, Inc.

800-877-6125

Landscape Architecture Foundation

202-331-7070

265

greenscreen

800-450-3494 35, 259

Paloform

888-823-8883

40

U.S. Green Building Council

202-552-1369

251

Gsky Plant Systems, Inc.

888-708-4759

197

Solus Décor, Inc.

877-255-3146

240

Western Juniper Alliance

503-221-6911

247

McNichols Company

877-884-3280

235

TUUCI USA

786-532-2498

223

Rooflite, A Division of Skyland USA

610-268-0017

73

Westminster Teak

800-750-1595

125

Berliner Play Equipment Corporation

864-627-1092

57

Columbia Cascade Company

800-547-1940 82, 261

DOGIPOT

800-364-7681

Goric Marketing Group Inc.

617-774-0772 95, 130,

OUTDOOR FURNITURE GREEN ROOFS/LIVING WALLS 62

BUSINESS SERVICES Rico Associates

508-842-4948

53

PARKS AND RECREATION

IRRIGATION Hunter Industries Incorporated

760-304-7216

64

DESIGN CONSULTANTS BrightView Design Group

844-235-7778

14

DRAINAGE AND EROSION

LIGHTING ANP Lighting

800-548-3227 69, 260

B-K Lighting, Inc.

559-438-5800

249

261

199

ACO Polymer Products Inc.

440-285-7000 123, 256

Cast Lighting LLC

800-914-2278 28, 260

Grand Slam Safety, LLC

315-766-7008

238

Earthsavers Erosion Control, LLC

866-928-8537

248

Holm/Hunter

760-304-7216

Greenfields Outdoor Fitness

888-315-9037

245

Industrial Fabrics

225-916-6850

12

Kichler Landscape Lighting

800-659-9000 96, 259

Landscape Structures, Inc.

800-328-0035 43, 250

Iron Age Designs

206-276-0925 114, 256

Louis Poulsen

954-349-2525

51

Livin the Dog Life

800-931-1462

261

Ironsmith, Inc.

800-338-4766 227, 256

Meteor Lighting

213-255-2060

233

PlayPower

704-949-1600

23, 32,

Ohio Gratings Inc.

330-477-6707

Pinnacle Lighting Group

888-338-0186

246

Sterling Lighting

800-939-1849

91

Sternberg Lighting

847-588-3400 216, 260

StressCrete Group / King

800-268-7809

237

EDUCATION Chicago Botanic Garden

847-835-5440

97

Penn State Department of Landscape

814-865-7832 244, 245

107

Bison Innovative Products by UCP

888-412-4766

234

Envirospec, Inc.

716-689-8548

260

HandyDeck Systems Inc.

202-417-2161

38 249

Evergreen Walls US

770-840-7060

256

Gregory Industries, Inc.

330-477-4800

30

Illusions Vinyl Fence

631-698-0975

256

Oly-Ola Edgings, Inc.

800-334-4647

Outerspace Landscape Furnishings Inc. 800-338-2499

257

Permaloc Aluminum Edging

800-770-4525 243, 257

254 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

651-289-8399

249

UPC Parks

530-605-2664

54

PAVING/SURFACING/MASONRY STONE/METALS

Luminaire, The

LUMBER/DECKING/EDGING

Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System

Themed Concepts

244

Architecture

FENCES/GATES/WALLS

101

Acker-Stone Industries Inc.

800-258-2535 219, 261

Belgard Hardscapes

877-235-4273

87

Eurocobble

877-877-5012

36-37, 262

Hanover Architectural Products, Inc.

800-426-4242

241

Kafka Granite

715-687-2423 18, 261

800-356-9660 215, 260

Kaswell Flooring Systems

508-879-1500

Simpson Strong-Tie Company Inc.

800-999-5099

15

Landmark Ceramics, Inc.

931-325-5700 22, 262

Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging

800-787-3562

119

Marmiro Stones

201-933-6461

261

217

THE BACK

/ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY SOFTWARE

Sitescapes, Inc.

402-421-9464 214, 258

Streetlife

646-583-2937

195

Sunbrella

336-227-6211

10-11,

Pavestone Company

866-409-7971

C4

Peacock Pavers

800-264-2072

194

Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc.

800-334-8689 33, 262

Soil Retention Products

760-966-6090

248

STREET FURNISHINGS AND SITE AMENITIES

Spectraturf

800-875-5788

250

ANOVA

888-535-5005 115, 257

Wishbone Site Furnishings Ltd.

604-626-0476

Superior Concrete Products

817-277-9255

243

Calpipe Industries Inc.

800-225-7473 93, 257

Victor Stanley, Inc.

301-855-8300 259, C3

Terrakoat International

407-442-7334

242

Canaan Site Furnishings

877-305-6638 225,258

Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock

301-365-2100

262

Canterbury Designs

323-936-7111

63

Unilock, Ltd.

416-646-3452

31

DeepStream Designs

305-857-0466

237

A. Zahner Company

999-888-7777 13, 264

Wausau Tile

800-388-8728

2-3

Doty & Sons Concrete Products

800-233-3907

256

Amish Country Gazebos

717-951-1064

264

Westile

800-433-8453

75

DuMor, Inc.

800-598-4018

4-5,

Classic Recreation Systems, Inc.

800-697-2195

112

Whitacre Greer

800-947-2837

85

Easi-Set Buildings

800-547-4045

235

Williams Stone Company, Inc.

800-832-2052

262

Gothic Arch Greenhouses

251-471-5238 127, 264

Vectorworks, Inc.

443-542-0620

81

228-229

126, 258

STRUCTURES

EJ

800-874-4100

emuamericas, llc

303-733-3385 238, 258

Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

616-399-1963

80

PLANTERS/SCULPTURES/GARDEN ACCESSORIES

Equiparc

800-363-9264 21, 258

Renson, Inc.

310-745-8905

248

Campania International, Inc.

Fermob USA

678-884-3000 65, 259

Shelter Outdoor

855-768-4450

239

263

Forms+Surfaces

800-451-0410 17, 257

Structureworks Fabrication

877-489-8064

263

215-541-4627

C2-1,

103

55

Form and Fiber

888-314-8852

232

Gale PaciďŹ c, Inc.

407-772-7900

89

Tensile Shade Products, LLC

520-903-9005

128

Greenform LLC

310-331-1665

239

Hauser Site Furniture

519-747-1138

29

Trellis Structures

888-285-4624

249

HADDONSTONE

866-733-8225 221,262

Huntco Supply, LLC

503-224-8700

242

Walpole Outdoors LLC

800-343-6948

247

Jackson Pottery, Inc.

214-357-9819

246

IAP

510-534-4886

241

Lumion

303-562-6666 61, 264

Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice

760-707-5400

236

Infrared Dynamics

714-572-4050

248

Planterworx

718-963-0564

240

Infratech

310-354-1261

79

Stone Forest

505-982-7988

231

Keystone Ridge Designs, Inc.

800-284-8208

230

Tournesol Siteworks/Planter

800-542-2282 49, 263

Kornegay Design Landscape Forms

Technology

WATER MANAGEMENT AND AMENITIES Aquatix by Landscape Structures

763-972-5237

234

877-252-6323 47, 257

Atomizing Systems, Inc.

888-265-3364

99

800-430-6205

Fountain People, Inc.

512-392-1155 113, 264

Most Dependable Fountains

800-552-6331

250

27, 71, 258

PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS

Madrax

800-448-7931 6-7, 259

Roman Fountains

877-794-1802

20

Citygreen Systems

855-892-1961 39, 263

Maglin Site Furniture Inc.

800-716-5506

124

VORTEX USA

514-694-3868

67

Ernst Conservation Seeds

800-873-3321

263

Paris Equipment Manufacturing Ltd.

800-387-6318

98

Water Odyssey

512-392-1155

264

Partac Peat Corporation

800-247-2326

263

Petersen Concrete Leisure Products

800-832-7383

250

Waterplay Solutions Corp.

800-590-5552

236

Spring Meadow Nursery Inc.

800-633-8859

200

QCP

951-256-3245

25, 83

Robinson Iron Corporation

256-329-8486

233

(Proven Winners) Stewart Brothers Nurseries Ltd.

604-306-8450

243

Salsbury Industries

323-846-6700

259

Vitamin Institute

818-503-1950

246

Sitecra

800-221-1448

129

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 255

BUYER’S GUIDE

TRANSFORM YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Leadership by design

WITH PLANTABLE CONCRETE RETAINING WALLS

An IRONSMITH specialty is curved trench grates with matching installation frames to any radius you specify.

Evergreen’s eco-friendly landscape walls increase in integrity, while decreasing maintenance and deterioration.

Install, plant and watch it become part of the environment.

Needle Bollard

KlassikDrain KS100

Cast Aluminum with Powder Coat Finish

SunTrust Park - Atlanta Braves Stadium Atlanta, GA

employee owned

DECORATIVE CASTINGS & CUSTOM DESIGNS

877.706.2158

877-418-3568 I RO N AG EG R AT E S .CO M

acodrain.us

Recycled/Recyclable Material. Made in the U.S.A.

256 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

Visit www.evergreen-walls.com tree grates

trench grates

www.ironsmith.biz

bollards

paver-grate

800-338-4766

®

Contact us today at (800) 247-2819 or Clay.Warner@evergreen-walls.com

BUYER’S GUIDE

BE AUT Y IS A LOK .

Welded steel wire fences, gates, trellisses and structures.

ARCHITECTURAL, SAFETY, AND HIGH-SECURITY BOLLARDS • Fixed, Removable, Retractable, Lighted, and MORE • Manufactured in the USA from carbon steel, Type 304 or 316 stainless steel Protecting Times Square and hundreds of other public areas since 1998

(877) 283-8518 calpipebollards.com

Gilman Playground Trellis; San Francisco, CA

VERSA-LOK.COM ®

www.fences.com 858.459.6994

First and Lasting Impressions®

©2012 Kiltie Corporation • Oakdale , MN

888.535.5005 | anovafurnishings.com

Mundo Series

L A N D S C A P E C O N TA I N E R S

ASLA EXPO BOOTH 923

A MODERN TAKE ON TAKING A BREAK

:OV^U PU H ZHUKISHZ[ ÄUPZO

Vaya benches, lounge chairs and tables | See more at ASLA Expo booth 923 www.forms-surfaces.com

877.252.6323 KornegayDesign.com

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017 / 257

BUYERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GUIDE

35COLLECTION The 35 Collection grows with a new generation of high performance products.

Designed by frog design.

800.430.6205 landscapeforms.com DESIGN. CULTURE. CRAFT.

258 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

BUYER’S GUIDE #5132R ADJUSTABLE MOUNTING CLIP

Three-dimensional modular green facades Visit our website for information about our versatile trellis system with mounting attachments. resources for design, detailing and delivery @

greenscreen.com

www.fermobusa.com

800.450.3494

Discover why Kichler has been the industry standard in LED landscape lighting for more than 25 years.

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Browse an archive of webinars providing information on new and evolving practices and products. The ASLA Online Learning series provides convenient and affordable distance learning opportunities and offers LA CES-approved Professional Development Hours (PDH). Presentations are recorded and made available for on demand viewing. learn.asla.org

ASLA EXPO 2017.... the place landscape architects go to experience new products and services How Social Media Extends Your EXPO Investment

By Russ Klettke

you can attract more readers to it via Twitter. And when you participate in the ASLA EXPO, you can reach attendees and non-attendees alike with photos, news, and stories before, during, and after the meeting.

Getting started is relatively easy. Break the task of digital marketing at the EXPO into two categories: tools from ASLA that enable you to communicate digitally with meeting participants, and set up accounts and strategies on social media platforms to expand beyond the Annual Meeting and EXPO participants: 1. ASLA EXPO tools Executive summary â&#x20AC;˘ Social media is an increasingly useful marketing tool, and a majority of ASLA EXPO exhibitors used it in 2016. Íą Ë?& 13*."3: 1-"5'03.4 t "$&#00,A 8*55&3A /45"(3".A &5$F t "553"$5 %*Ë&#x2020;&3&/5 "6%*&/$&4 and marketing communications tactics. Íą Ë?& */ 04 /(&-&4 *4 " (3&"5 1-"$& 50 45"35 03 &91"/% :063 40$*"- .&%*" ."3,&5*/( 130(3".F If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not using social media yet itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not too late to start: The September 2017 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO is an excellent occasion to put digital communications to work. Tools like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can complement the sales and marketing program youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re already investing in.

Yet almost 40 percent of ASLA EXPO exhibitors didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use any such platform in 2016. So why not make the Annual Meeting in Los Angeles your social media debut â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or take your existing program to the next level?

Social media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram) can showcase products, educate buyers, and develop direct connections with people and organizations. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an example: Modular Trail Structures has posted photos of their product applications on Instagram.

Anyone searching there for such terms as â&#x20AC;&#x153;boardwalks,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;trails,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;hiking trails,â&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;outdoor recreationâ&#x20AC;? will find an image the company posted. In just a few clicks web searchers can find themselves at the Modular Trail Structures website.

Or, search on Twitter for â&#x20AC;&#x153;sitefurniture,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;sustainablefurniture,â&#x20AC;? or â&#x20AC;&#x153;landscapearchâ&#x20AC;? and some excellent photography and posts from Anova Furniture (@AnovaFurniture) surface. Anova has about 500 tweets that can be found by landscape architecture firm specifiers, their clients, students, and others.

Something else about social media: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a mostly free way to make use of your other marketing expenditures. For example, photography from your website and sales collateral can be repurposed on Instagram and elsewhere. If you have a website blog,

A number of tactics, available to all exhibitors, will let all attendees know youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re there, where you can be found, and what you have to offer. â&#x20AC;˘ Register your eBooth profile, eBooth logo, your product categories, goods, press releases, show specials, and brands.* â&#x20AC;˘ Participate in the Attendee Direct Connect and Appointment Requests.* 2. Top social media tools in landscape architecture These are the most popular platforms for business use.

Facebook â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Establish an account to increase brand awareness and form new business relationships. Most of it is free, but you can purchase various tools to promote your posted content, increase your network, and provide a direct connection to ecommerce functions.

ASLA LA2017

Annual Meeting and EXPO October 20-23 Los Angeles

Common Ground

#ASLA2017

Twitter – Become one of 328 million active (once monthly or more) users, which include 20 percent of the U.S. adult population, 60 percent of whom have purchased a product or service they saw on Twitter. It’s a great platform for posting product installations and linking your work to news events.

Instagram – Like Pinterest, Instagram is pretty much all about the visuals with attached hashtags (words to associate with your imagery, such as “permeable pavers” with a photo of a complete landscape that involves a driveway). Where user demographics for Pinterest skew female (three times that of men), Instagram is almost an even split between genders. A quarter of users earn more than $75,000 per year; beautiful and interesting imagery is the key characteristic of the site.

EPNAC PHOTOGRAPHY ©2016

Pinterest – It’s a lot like Instagram, but with more focus on the content you curate and less on what you create. But if your target audience skews female, this is the place for your company.

YouTube – In a business context, the video site is a place for how-to instructions. Companies produce and post short tutorials on how their products are used and, most importantly, how they solve problems or answer other needs. Perhaps your EXPO experience is worth recording on video for posting later: questions you have been asked by

Number of people using the top social media platforms Facebook 1.79 billion monthly visitors 2 billion total accounts

EXPO visitors, your answers to those questions and demonstrations of the product use (note: Los Angeles is full of freelance video producers).

LinkedIn – This might be the social media network that works best for companies with an international audience, as 70 percent of its 500 million account holders are outside the U.S. LinkedIn fosters intelligent, specialized professional discussions.

Suggestion: Have your CEO write a “thought leadership” article about something learned at the EXPO.

Twitter 328 million monthly visitors 420 million total accounts Instagram 76.2 million monthly visitors 700 million total accounts

To learn more about what you might post on any of these sites, try this: Visit each site and search for “landscape architecture.” The posts and numbers of followers are a good indication of what your competitors and customers are doing – and the results that are possible.

YouTube

*For more information, email ASLA’s Tradeshow Manager lkramer@asla.org.

For information on how to exhibit at the 2017 ASLA EXPO contact sales@asla.org.

LinkedIn

1.5 billion monthly visitors 5 billion views per day

125 million monthly visitors 500 million total accounts

THE BACK

/

BACKSTORY

BLACK DESIGN MATTERS AN EMERGING PLATFORM FOR DESIGN ACTIVISM BRACES FOR THE FUTURE.

BY JENNIFER REUT

I

t can be difficult, even in the face of powerful evidence, for designers to accept responsibility for the role the profession has played in reinforcing the boundaries of race and class that shape urban lives, not just the spaces in which they’re lived. “As designers and planners, we have neglected these communities,” says Lindsay Woodson, a recent graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in urban planning.

Woodson is talking about neighborhoods like Sandtown in Baltimore, or Ferguson, Missouri—historically ABOVE segregated communities that are disMap the Gap analyzed proportionately affected by police viofatal encounters lence. In 2014, Woodson and fellow with police in light of Harvard graduate student Marcus historical patterns Mello began a project that would ilof race and class in Baltimore (shown here), luminate the systemic crosshairs in Saint Louis, and Boston. which black urban residents literally

268 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE OCT 2017

and figuratively find themselves. Titled Map the Gap, the project and report, which was recently published online (harvardgsdaasu.wordpress.com/ map-the-gap) is an example of mapping as activism. Woodson and Mello, with contributions from other GSD students, mapped every fatal encounter in Baltimore, Boston, and Saint Louis from 2000 to 2015 and overlaid it with census data to analyze historical patterns of urban renewal, transportation access, and educational attainment. They found that disadvantaged communities unequally bear the brunt of police brutality. “The goal,” Mello says, is “to get people to question why these sorts of fatalities are happening.”

This October, the conference is in its second iteration at Harvard. Subtitled Designing Resistance, Building Coalitions, the program includes Diane Jones Allen, ASLA, and Walter Hood, ASLA, and the urban design leaders Toni L. Griffin and Mabel O. Wilson, among others. The organizers want to maximize the reach of the conference by livestreaming from the conference website (www.blackin design.org) and sharing via social media outlets. Natasha Hicks, a current student in the urban planning program and a co-organizer of the event, says the emphasis will be on developing coalitions and networks. “In the first conference, we were exploring the different scales of design,” she Stephen Gray, an assistant profes- says. “Hopefully, through this confersor of urban design at the GSD and ence, we can come to some actionMap the Gap’s faculty adviser, calls the able conclusions.”

JOSHUA JOW, DAYITA KURVEY, AND DANA MCKINNEY

mapping Woodson and Mello have done “gut-wrenching.” But it is part of a larger effort to build knowledge that can be used for action. “The way in which we are building our cities and communities can have a better outcome, and as designers we can really focus on all the issues,” Mello says. As part of the African American Student Union at the GSD, Woodson and Mello were also involved in the organization’s signature event, the Black in Design Conference.

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SDC-36

Sage Dual US Patent D783,919 S.

Sage US Patent D785,269 S.

DYN-SD-36 with Dome US Patents D573,766 S; D542,993 S; D606,271 S; Canada 114394.

RSDC-36 US Patents D671,289 S; D661,857 S.

A-36 US Patents D483,538 S; D487,537 S; D487,538 S; D487,177 S.

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