Landscape Architecture Magazine LAM-2018-july

JULY 2018 / VOL 108 NO 7 US $7 CAN $9

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE BEIGE HOLE London landscapes in service of global capital

CLIMATE AND PRESERVATION Rigid standards versus future flux

CRESCENT PARK Riverfront ambitions in New Orleans

VICTOR GRUEN A memoir of ideals and regrets

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 10 INSIDE 12 LAND MATTERS

FOREGROUND 16 NOW Finding greatness in tree grates; gondolas on the rise; a new home for the International Landscape Lighting Institute; the best plants for the Pacific Northwest; and more.

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

38 INTERVIEW

Urban Scanner Shannon Mattern’s book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, uncovers the way information has shaped our cities.

46 PARKS

The Hole Story Hornsby Quarry in New South Wales was thought too big to fill and too unsafe to leave open. Now it could be a park.

BY CAROL E. BECKER

58 PLANTS

Palms Out Palm trees may be iconic of Miami or Los Angeles, but they can thrive in more— and colder—places than you may think.

BY JANE BERGER

70 GOODS

Love at First Light Sconces, pendants, fixtures, and other brightening ideas can illuminate the way.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

TIMOTHY HURSLEY

BY JENNIFER REUT

6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

“ THE PROJECT NEEDED TO LOOK GOOD, BUT ALSO BE AUTHENTIC AND INSTANTLY FAMILIAR TO LOCAL PEOPLE.” —SEAN CUMMINGS, P. 80

FEATURES 80 THE OLD AND THE NEUTRAL In New Orleans, Hargreaves Associates weaves the hopeful future into the industrial past in Crescent Park.

THE BACK 126 THE FREEDOM OF WEEDS The artist Lise Duclaux’s Brooklyn exhibit has deep roots.

BY TOM STOELKER

BY JOHN KING, HONORARY ASLA

136 BOOKS 96 TWO LONDON SQUARES AND A THEORY OF THE BEIGE HOLE Sleek, tidy, generic: a critique of Fitzroy Place and Rathbone Square, two privately owned public spaces in London’s West End.

Dreams and Regrets A review of Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America, by Victor Gruen, edited and translated by Anette Baldauf.

BY KELLY COMRAS, FASLA

BY TIM WATERMAN

158 ADVERTISER INDEX 110 BALANCING ACT In a wetter world, how do we weigh the need to adapt to the future against the imperative to preserve the past?

159 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

172 BACKSTORY

Tower Power In Victoria, Australia, a trail connects grain silos painted with murals that nod to the region’s agricultural history.

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 7

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS EDITOR Bradford McKee / bmckee@asla.org

PUBLISHER Michael D. O’Brien, Honorary ASLA / mobrien@asla.org ADVERTISING SALES

202-216-2335 SENIOR SALES MANAGER Daryl Brach / dbrach@asla.org SALES MANAGER Gregg Boersma / gboersma@asla.org SALES MANAGER Kathleen Thomas / kthomas@asla.org

ASLA BOARD OF TRUSTEES PRESIDENT Gregory A. Miller, FASLA PRESIDENT-ELECT Shawn T. Kelly, FASLA IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Vaughn B. Rinner, FASLA VICE PRESIDENTS Haley Blakeman, ASLA Lake Douglas, FASLA Eugenia M. Martin, FASLA Wendy Miller, FASLA Tom Mroz, ASLA Vanessa Warren, ASLA EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Nancy C. Somerville, Honorary ASLA

PRODUCTION

PRODUCTION MANAGER Sarah Strelzik / sstrelzik@asla.org

ART DIRECTOR Christopher McGee / cmcgee@asla.org

MARKETING

SENIOR EDITOR Jennifer Reut / jreut@asla.org ON THE COVER

The site of what would become Fitzroy Place in London, 2011, page 96.

COPY CHIEF Lisa Schultz / lschultz@asla.org WRITER/EDITOR Katarina Katsma, ASLA / kkatsma@asla.org CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Brian Barth; Jessica Bridger; Sahar CostonHardy, Affiliate ASLA; Jonathan Lerner; Jane Margolies; Zach Mortice; Anne Raver; Timothy A. Schuler; Alex Ulam; James R. Urban, FASLA; Lisa Owens Viani EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE Falon Mihalic, ASLA / Chair Haley Blakeman, ASLA / Vice President, Communications Magdalena Aravena, Associate ASLA Kofi Boone, ASLA Conner Bruns, Student ASLA Kassandra D. Bryant, Student ASLA Ujijji Davis, ASLA Diana Fernandez, ASLA William Green, ASLA Deb Guenther, FASLA Richard S. Hawks, FASLA Joan Honeyman, ASLA Tobie E. Merrill, ASLA Cleve Larry Mizell, ASLA Erin Monk-Tharp, ASLA Forster O. Ndubisi, FASLA Abigail M. Reimel, Student ASLA Fern Lan Siew, Associate ASLA EDITORIAL Tel: 202-216-2366 / Fax: 202-898-0062

MARKETING MANAGER Lauren Martella / lmartella@asla.org SUBSCRIPTIONS

REPRESENTATIVE Monica Barkley / subscriptions@asla.org REPRINTS For custom reprints, please call Wright’s Media at 877-652-5295.

BACK ISSUES 888-999-ASLA (2752) Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing oices. 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 2018 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.

The magazine is also available in digital format through www.asla.org/lam/zinio or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.

SECRETARY Curtis A. Millay, ASLA TREASURER Michael D. O’Brien, Honorary ASLA TRUSTEES Aaron A. Allan, ASLA W. Phillips Barlow, ASLA Robert D. Berg, ASLA Shannon Blakeman, ASLA Gary A. Brown, FASLA Kevin W. Burke, ASLA David H. Contag, ASLA Patrick F. Dunn, ASLA Scott V. Emmelkamp, ASLA William T. Eubanks III, FASLA Melissa M. Evans, ASLA David V. Ferris Jr., ASLA Robert E. Ford, ASLA Nick Gilliland, ASLA David Gorden, ASLA David A. Harris, ASLA Jonathan Henney, ASLA James A. Jackson, ASLA Lucy B. Joyce, ASLA Jennifer Judge, ASLA Ron M. Kagawa, ASLA Roger J. Kennedy, ASLA Mark M. Kimerer, ASLA Marieke Lacasse, ASLA Lucille C. Lanier, FASLA Dalton M. LaVoie, ASLA Robert Loftis, ASLA Jeanne M. Lukenda, ASLA Timothy W. May, ASLA Bradley McCauley, ASLA Douglas C. McCord, ASLA Baxter Miller, ASLA Ann Milovsoroff, FASLA Cleve Larry Mizell, ASLA Jennifer Nitzky, ASLA Dennis R. Nola, ASLA April Philips, FASLA Jeff Pugh, ASLA John D. Roters, ASLA John P. Royster, FASLA Stephen W. Schrader Jr., ASLA Jean Senechal Biggs, ASLA Susanne Smith Meyer, ASLA Brian H. Starkey, ASLA Mark A. Steyaert Jr., ASLA Judith Stilgenbauer, ASLA Adam A. Supplee, ASLA Nicholas Tufaro, ASLA Thomas J. Whitlock, ASLA LAF REPRESENTATIVES Barbara L. Deutsch, FASLA Jennifer Guthrie, FASLA NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Magdalena Aravena, Associate ASLA NATIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Abigail M. Reimel, Student ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Kay Williams, FASLA

8 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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INSIDE

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CONTRIBUTORS CAROL E. BECKER (“The Hole Story,” page

46) is a Chicago-based writer, landscape designer, and design instructor specializing in sustainable and wildlife-friendly gardens.

You can follow her on Twitter @ladysage14.

“There was no space to write about the regeneration of viable soil in some locations at Hornsby Quarry, a process that has already been scientifically documented to have happened in 30 years, thanks to the volcanic past of this site.”

KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA (“Love at First

“Working at LAM has been a rewarding experience that I will sorely miss. The past years spent among the talented magazine staff of six will always be irreplaceable.”

TIM WATERMAN (“Two London Squares and a Theory of the Beige Hole,” page 96) teaches and writes about landscape and urban theory in London. You can follow him on Twitter @tim_waterman.

“I found out that the rectangular form of the water feature in Rathbone Square echoes the shape of a pond that existed long ago just north of the site which, with a windmill, powered a fountain in Soho Square, just the other side of Oxford Street.”

CORRECTION

In “Ethic and Aesthetic” in the April issue, two landscape architects were misidentiied as principals at Design Workshop. Kenneth Francis, ASLA, was an associate, and Sandra Donner, ASLA, worked for the irm on a contract basis. We regret the error.

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.

10 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

WATSON ART STUDIO, TOP; ALEXANDRA THIRUMALAI, CENTER; JOHANNA WARD, BOTTOM

Light,” page 70), is a landscape designer and writer from Chicago. She is the cofounder of a travel blog, The Secret Garden Atlas, that highlights quirky, little-known landscapes around the world. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @katkatsma.

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LAND MATTERS

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BY THE NUMBERS H

ere at LAM, we’re always humbled by reader feedback— whether it’s great, good, or not so good. As many of you know, we recently wrapped another cycle of our online LAM Reader Survey. Six hundred forty-ive people responded, far fewer than in cycles past; we suspect survey fatigue is abroad in the land. To everyone who took time to answer the questions, we extend our sincere thanks.

Now, on to some results. We asked you irst for certain quality judgments on the range of topics covered, the quality of writing, the level of technical detail, and so forth. On the whole, these quality ratings for the magazine were solid, which is to say they fell within a deinite range of positive satisfaction—there were no spikes or craters. In adding up the responses, I like to remove those for “average” and look at levels for excellent and good (so as to judge relative above-averageness). In that calculation, we performed best in the quality of the images we use (90.22 percent excellent/good) and for overall appearance (87.54). For those, we can thank our excellent (not just good) art director, Chris McGee. Our lowest combined excellent/good ratings were for the range of topics we cover (70.8 percent) and the usefulness of information on the job (64.14 good/excellent), though if we add in the “average” on the usefulness score, we get to 90 percent, which is important, given that 78 percent answered elsewhere in the survey that the main reason they read LAM is to stay current in their jobs.

The topics of construction and design/build, not surprisingly, ranked highest in the column of “needs more coverage” where we asked which topics need more, less, or the same degree of ink. Runners-up in the calls for more coverage are “climaterelated design, speciication, and maintenance issues” and “development trends.” The winners, if you will, in the needsless-coverage contest were international projects (we will keep going where intrigue takes us) and residential design, which is a little puzzling, since we more frequently hear that we don’t show enough residential design. We tend to favor residential designs that have real innovation embedded in them, whether in planting design (such as the work of Virginia Burt, FASLA,

12 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

in the March 2018 issue) or water conservation, as with an acequia-focused house project by the Surroundings studio in New Mexico that appeared in April.

The open-ended comments brought many moving compliments and also several dozen rocks thrown at this column for its frequent political content, which is to be expected. That may change when our politics stops T-boning the core principles and priorities of ASLA, whether in the regulation of the environment, eforts to de-license landscape architects, or removing protections for threatened or endangered species.

One other harsh criticism, which I share: about that plastic bag in which the magazine is mailed. Several years ago, we began poly-bagging the magazine because of a sharp increase in copies arriving damaged and in need of replacement. We recently were assured by our partners at Royle Printing in Wisconsin, a wonderful company, that bagging is no longer viewed as a best practice, and that our current method of mailing should not result in damaged magazines, so beginning with the June issue, the bag went away. (If your copy ever arrives damaged, we are always happy to replace it.)

A inal note of farewell with this issue to our talented and devoted staf writer/editor Kat Katsma, ASLA. Kat came to us in 2014 shortly after inishing a landscape architecture graduate degree at the University of Sheield. She has in four years locked down a very demanding role in producing our twice-weekly enewsletter, The Landscape Report, keeping our website current, designing layouts, writing the Goods section and Palette pieces, being our resident plant geek, and running what amounts to an in-house tea and sweets shop. Kat is of to practice at a landscape architecture oice in Chicago. We look forward to the day she receives her license.

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FOREGROUND

THICK AND THIN

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 15

FOREGROUND

/

NOW EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

PLANS TO STRING GONDOLAS OVER AMERICAN CITIES ABOUND.

BY RANDY GRAGG

I

ABOVE

n the early 2000s, one of Portland, Oregon’s leading employers and research institutions, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), faced a steep, downhill battle. Sited on a hilltop, surrounded by unbuildable canyons and neighborhoods unwilling to yield another inch to expansion, OHSU’s nearest sizable hunk of developable land lay on the Willamette River less than a mile away—for a blue heron. Cars and buses contended with winding, traic-snarled commutes of anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes.

Oregon Health & Science University solved a major transportation hurdle with an aerial tram in 2007. Other cities are eyeing similar systems.

A campus planner’s brain brightly blinked: Why not an aerial tram? Protests erupted, politicians tangled, and costs lurched $47 million over the earliest budget fantasy of $9.5 million. But in 2007, two sleek, bubble-shaped cars (their shiny

16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

artisanal shells carefully machine-hammered by craftsmen from Ganglof Cabins of Switzerland) began flying to and fro across the campus. Today, they ferry more than 50,000 riders per week to a 2.35-million-square-foot cluster of new OHSU buildings.

At the time, the tram was only the third urban transit ropeway system in America, after Telluride’s in Colorado and Roosevelt Island’s in New York. Now, however, proposals for urban tramways are becoming more prevalent. A consortium in Washington, D.C., is poised to launch a $1 million environmental impact study for an aerial connection between Rosslyn, Virginia, and Georgetown across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., to bypass the clogged Key Bridge. New York is angling for two flights: a midtown connection to Roosevelt Island and a three-stop connection between the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. Boston’s megadeveloper, Millennium

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ABOVE AND RIGHT

European examples of aerial trams: the Koblenz cable car in Germany and the Emirates Air Line in London.

/NOW

Partners, is dangling a one-mile line over the congested South Boston Seaport. And Austin, Texas, is studying a 19-stop, eight-mile tramway that would alleviate its now-notorious traic. Other cities pondering aerial options include Chicago; San Diego; Seattle; Cleveland; Cincinnati; Bufalo, New York; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Tampa Bay, Florida; Miami; Albany, New York; Toronto; and Burnaby, British Columbia.

“There are now clear examples of these systems succeeding as fully integrated components of transit networks, particularly in Latin America,” says Steven Dale, a ropeway system planner and creator of the website The Gondola Project, an aggregator of information about the systems. “The technology has proven itself, and people are looking for new solutions.” Medellín, Colombia, blazed the urban ropeway trail in the 2000s, building gondola systems to connect long-clustered favelas where topography, budgets, and narrow, often self-built roads would never allow subways, rail, or buses. Cities in Venezuela, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, France, and Vietnam all opened gondolas in the past 10 years.

“When alternative modes pop up—personal rapid transit, monorail, hyperloop—people position them as the best, brightest, fastest, cheapest, everythingest,” Dale says. “Gondolas and cable systems work well in certain situations—unbelievably well in some. They’re not going to work everywhere.”

18 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Mike Deiparine, an engineer with SCJ Alliance, an engineering and landscape architecture irm with oices throughout the Paciic Northwest, is a veteran of 50-plus ropeway projects, many of them for ski resorts. He says aerial systems “ofer a lot of transit for a lot less money” than light rail or bus rapid transit but work best for “getting people past a barrier: a hill, a river, or the man-made one of bad traic.”

Views from the cars are often a selling point for aerial transit systems. Views of the towers, cables, and cars are hotly debated. But with an international design competition, Portland embraced its tram as a bold addition to the landscape. The winner, the architect Sarah Graham, shaped the curving, stainless steel cars to reflect the sky and the single 197-foot tower into a striking, sharply contoured icon of engineering forces.

Carol Mayer-Reed, FASLA, led a team that further enhanced Graham’s tower at ground level, encircling its constricted base with a stairstepping landscaped path leading to, and processing the rainwater from, a pedestrian bridge. “We embraced it as the monument it is,” she says.

HOLGER WEINANDT, TOP LEFT; MATT BUCK, RIGHT

FOREGROUND

/NOW

K

A TEST IN LIGHTING THE INTERNATIONAL LANDSCAPE LIGHTING INSTITUTE BRINGS ITS INTENSIVE COURSE TO NEW AUDIENCES.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

20 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

athryn Toth didn’t know what to expect when she showed up in Brunswick, New York, in 2011 to take a class on landscape lighting. All she knew was that Janet Lennox Moyer, the founder of the International Landscape Lighting Institute (ILLI) and the author of The Landscape Lighting Book, was legendary. But by the end of the course, which took place over ive days and ive nights on Moyer’s secluded property and included instruction in everything from the importance of pruning to how to wire electrical systems, Toth says, she was a diferent person.

“It changed my world. It was the irst time as an architectural lighting designer that I got a chance, in the ield, to play with things and not be scolded,” says Toth, who went on to work with Moyer and is now the founding principal of Theia Lighting Design in Long Beach, California, as well as an ILLI mentor. Nearly everyone who has attended the course has a similar story. “The experience exceeded my expectations in every way,” Elizabeth Donof, the editor in chief of Architectural Lighting, wrote after attending the workshop in 2013. She was particularly smitten

ABOVE

Participants rig lighting during one of ILLI’s intensive courses in Brunswick, New York.

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FOREGROUND

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by the vast array of high-end light ixtures that could be iddled with.

“This is an unprecedented access to luminaires,” she noted.

And yet the term intensive is not used lightly. Toth says the course is like an apprenticeship crammed into ive days, each of which begins at 7:45 a.m. and doesn’t conclude until 10:30 at night. Participants are encouraged to wear work boots and bring heavy-duty work gloves, along with a change of clothes in case of inclement weather. Each course has slots for 18 students and 16 mentors, who take turns giving lectures on subjects such as path lighting and how the evolution of a landscape will afect illumination. Afternoons and evenings are spent in the ield, with students working in groups to create temporary lighting installations for previously selected sites.

22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

In 2017, ILLI entered a new chapter, transitioning to a new home at the University of Oklahoma under the leadership of Scott Williams, ASLA, who until recently taught one of the few classes in outdoor lighting design ofered as part of a Landscape Architectural Accreditation Boardaccredited landscape architecture program. This year’s course will take place October 11 through 16 at the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. (Moyer, who moved to Arizona in 2015, will remain ILLI’s principal instructor and lead mentor.)

Williams hopes to bring the ILLI experience to new audiences and new types of landscapes. Last year, ILLI conducted its irst international workshop at a nature park outside Tokamachi, Japan. Williams says he also plans to streamline the organization’s administration to reduce the

cost of the course, which currently is $3,500, not including airfare and lodging, though some scholarships are available. But his main objective is to inspire a new appreciation and technical proiciency in landscape lighting. “Seeing the difference between good and bad lighting is tremendous,” Williams says. “But people don’t know that there is a diference until they see it.”

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

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The photography studio at Janet Lennox Moyer’s former property in Brunswick, New York; the desert landscape is illuminated during a workshop in Rio Verde, Arizona; participants during a product presentation in 2013.

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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F

les, for instance, anodized aluminum tree grates designed by Hood Studio feature hand-cut openings that trace the gnarly trunks of 100-year-old Barouni olive trees. At the American Copper Building on First Avenue in New York City, SCAPE Landscape Architecture designed iron tree grates that follow the tessellated pattern of custom limestone pavers. Some of the country’s most popular grates, at least according to Instagram, are along Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District and feature a pair of folksy skeletons inspired by Dia de los Muertos. Designed by the landscape architects John Dennis, ASLA, and Martha Ketterer of the San Francisco Department of Public Works, the Mexican motif shows up again and again in photos appended with the tag #treegrate. (Yes, there is a hashtag.)

PROTECTING TREE PITS FROM TRAMPLING FEET HAS SERIOUS IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGING STORMWATER.

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

For many designers, including SCAPE’s John Donnelly, ASLA, custom grates are just one more element that can help give public spaces a distinct sense of place. Of course, tree grates and their cousins, tree guards—short metal railings that circumscribe a tree well to prevent trampling— are primarily about function, and new research suggests that they have an important role to play in supporting the health of urban trees but also in managing stormwater. In a new study published in Ecological Engineering, the Columbia University engineering professor Patricia Culligan and her coauthors showed that unprotected tree pits, their soil compacted by foot traic,

ABOVE

Tree grates such as these on Valencia Street in San Francisco provide a sense of place but also increase stormwater infiltration.

LEFT

The custom grates at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles were cut by hand to follow the trees’ trunks.

COURTESY IRON AGE DESIGNS, TOP RIGHT; VLADIMIR PAPERNY, BOTTOM LEFT

GUARDIANS OF THE SOIL

ew elements of modern American cities would be familiar to denizens living at the turn of the 20th century, but among them would be urban streets’ ubiquitous tree grates, as common today as they were in the early 1900s. Perhaps as surprising is that they serve the same function: preventing soil compaction while serving as a decorative element within the streetscape.

Today, tree grates remain a design opportunity for landscape architects.

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FOREGROUND

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LEFT

Workers install a custom tree grate designed by SCAPE at the American Copper Building in New York City.

BELOW

The geometric grate echoes the tessellated shapes of the surrounding pavers.

It’s a reminder that a green infrastructure network already exists across the urban landscape in the form of our urban forests—that is, as long as the trees and the soil they’re planted in are cared for properly. Researchers showed that retroitting a tree pit with a guard can improve iniltration rates. “We actually got the New York City parks

28 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

department to take a series of street trees that were unguarded, with the tree pit soil having very low iniltration capacity, and guard them for us as an experiment to see whether you would actually improve the iniltration capacity of the soil,” Culligan says. “We’ve been measuring changes for several years, and yes, retroitting with a guard does make a diference.”

JOHN DONNELLY, ASLA/SCAPE

iniltrated stormwater at one-sixth the rate of tree pits with guards.

(Although the team didn’t speciically study grates, Culligan says they likely function similarly.) Rob Elliott, the study’s lead author, notes that just 14 percent of New York City’s trees have guards or grates. If every tree pit were protected, the city could manage six times the amount of stormwater that it does today.

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FOREGROUND

/NOW LEFT

Nadia Amoroso, Ailiate ASLA, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Guelph, with the students who designed and built Rising Up. BELOW

Each installation must be aixed to a lifeguard stand (in red), which provides an anchor to withstand gales but introduces a variety of design challenges.

QUIET RIOT ON A FRIGID CANADIAN BEACH, THIS YEAR’S ITERATION OF THE WINTER STATIONS COMPETITION GOT POLITICAL.

BY BRIAN BARTH

ach February for the past four years, a string of art installations has sprouted from a frozen beach like a winter mirage on the Lake Ontario shore in Toronto. These temporary displays, each of which is anchored to a permanent lifeguard stand to keep it from blowing away in the snowy gales, beckon area residents with bright colors and moving parts.

Many of the installations have been designed to provide a respite from the wind for any brave souls who wish to venture onto the sand.

Despite the context of the competition, landscape architects have been scarce to nonexistent in the annual design competition, a collaborative project among several local architecture irms. But this year, competition organizers extended a special invitation to the bachelor of landscape architecture program at the University of Guelph, located just outside Toronto. The theme—RIOT—invited strong sociopolitical submissions.

(Among the winning projects was Pussy Hut, a giant pink knitted hat draped over a wooden armature, designed by the architects Mo Zheng and Martin Miller.)

32 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

The group of six undergraduate Guelph students put a decidedly environmental spin on the theme.

Their installation, titled Rising Up, is a reference to local floodwaters.

The team took topographic contour lines from the Don River Valley, the mouth of which is near the installation site and is notoriously floodprone, and abstracted the shapes into a jungle gym-like structure made of CNC-milled plywood. Inside, visitors found a little bench on which to contemplate the treatment of nature by society—or simply take in the shoreline view. “Our interpretation was the riot of nature,” says Alexander Good, a fourth-year student on the Guelph team. “We wanted to create a dialogue about urbanization and nature’s response to its pressures.”

Aaron Hendershott, a project architect at RAW Design, one of the irms behind the competition, says that’s a dialogue that area residents can relate to. Record-breaking rains in 2017 washed away several muchloved beaches in this eastside Toronto neighborhood known simply as the Beaches, where Hendershott grew up. The 2018 Winter Stations installations were located on a diferent beach from the previous year’s as a result. “What I like about the Guelph piece is that it was not simply an isolated sculptural object but had a profound message about the threat of rising sea levels. It’s interesting that the same subject that they wanted to discuss afected the event itself,” he says.

KHRISTEL STECHER

E

FOREGROUND

/NOW RIGHT AND INSET

GPP’s perennials and bulbs committee in March 2018; gold-laced Primula, a 2017 selection.

T

REGIONAL PLANT MAVENS HASH IT OUT TO IDENTIFY THE FINEST, MOST DEPENDABLE GARDEN PERFORMERS.

BY KYNA RUBIN

ABOVE AND INSET

The trees and conifers committee; Abies balsamea ‘Nana’ was a 2017 pick.

Despite the lively debate, these flora are unlikely to become Great Plant Picks (GPP), whose selection committee met this past March to produce a list of ornamental plants proven to thrive in the Paciic Northwest. Twice a year since 2001, the panel has gathered at the Elisabeth Carey Miller Botanical Garden, which lies in a gated community 10 miles north of downtown Seattle on Miller’s former estate. Miller, who died in 1994, was an avid gardener who learned from trial and error, says Richie Stefen, the garden’s curator and GPP chair. “She liked helping other gardeners ind good, reliable plants.” That’s the mission of GPP, the private garden’s main outreach program. Besides home and master gardeners, GPP also targets nurseries and landscape architects.

Committee members include designers and heads of botanical gardens, city park systems, and nurseries. The group screens for plants that are easy to grow, hardy in USDA zones 7 and 8, long lived, low maintenance, reasonably disease- and pest-resistant, and available from two or more retail suppliers. A pick that doesn’t cut it over time can be rescinded; one that

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

is no longer available becomes a “GPP emeritus.” Stefen says that GPP has taken cues from both the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Gold Medal and the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit programs.

Most other awards groups pick only a handful of plants a year. “What we wanted was something gardeners could use as a palette of plants,” Stefen says, and the GPP list comprises almost 1,000 plants, with 20 to 100 added each year.

This past March, Connor, the bamboo expert, advocated for the clumping bamboo Fargesia, the genus most suitable for GPP, he says. Indeed, Fargesia denudata will make the “sneak peek” list of tentative new GPPs that the program will distribute at the 2018 Farwest National Nursery & Greenhouse Trade Show in August. The list will be tweaked after further input, and then, a week before the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival in February 2019, GPP will post on its website the winning plants, with photos and fact sheets, and supply a poster that highlights the winners to anyone who asks for it.

Having a large set of curated, regional plants has proven enormously useful for landscape architects seeking plants that are easy to grow and maintain. A program like GPP also helps local nurseries know which plants to stock. GPP fans are ardent. Lucy Hardiman, a GPP committee member, recalls being approached by a woman who said her garage walls are plastered with posters from years past. Similarly, Amy Whitworth of Portland-based Plan-it-Earth Design keeps the latest GPP list close by, she says, knowing that any plant on it “is a performer because it’s been vetted by local professionals I trust.”

KYNA RUBIN, TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT; RICHIE STEFFEN, INSETS

CRITICS’ CHOICES

he banter is fast and dotted with insider jokes shared by people who’ve been working together for years. From the perennials and bulbs group in the dining room: “Are we keeping Agapanthus on the list?” “If you’re not mulching it constantly, the freeze kills them.” Down the hall in a small library, the shrubs and vines folks are voicing concern about a “very handsome” mildew-resistant cultivar of Mahonia fortunei “that we could nominate, but it’s limited in its availability.” And from the more raucous trees and conifers geeks in the sunroom, “It’s got monstrous growth; it’s a collector’s plant,” says Ian Connor, a Portland, Oregon-based bamboo expert, of the Chusquea valdiviensis.

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INTERVIEW

URBAN SCANNER TRACKING THE WAYS TECHNOLOGY HAS SHAPED OUR CITIES, SHANNON MATTERN ARGUES FOR A BROADER RECOGNITION OF URBAN DATA.

BY JENNIFER REUT

BELOW

An image by Michael K. Chen Architecture from Shannon Mattern’s book illustrates how data infrastructure shapes the urban landscape.

echnology companies thrive on the gospel of the new, while our most cherished cities are often those with a distinct culture and history.

In order to reconcile our seemingly ungovernable appetite for technology with our desire to create lived places that are valued by citizens, we’ll need to confront the ways in which many kinds of knowledge networks shape space. In her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, Shannon Mattern, an associate professor in the School of Media Stud-

ies at the New School in New York, argues that our cities have always had networks of information that powerfully shaped urban places in ways that far exceed the Internet of things.

Well, irst of all, I think it brings a degree of humility. Much of the innovation engine is based on a kind of willful historical inattention or ignorance. In order to make claims of innovation and disruption, there is an almost purposeful disregard for history.

T his interview has been edited and condensed.

Another thing that history allows is for us to recognize that there are There is this enormous push by tech- multiple forms of intelligences and nology companies to have certain knowledges and community wisdom kinds of technology embedded in that are built into cities that have city planning. What does a historical nothing to do with algorithms and context bring to the conversation? the newest technology. It expands our deinition of what constitutes technology, to recognize that analog materials are still very much present and pertinent in the urban environment. All these types of things, if we think of technology very liberally, could be counted as technology. History allows us to recognize that there is a wider array of technology shaping urban culture and that there are other kinds of non-algorithm-cized, non-dataied forms of intelligence and things that are worth knowing in the urban landscape also.

How do you see information landscapes diferently from other forms of power or other ways of social organizing, such as race, gender, or class?

Does information bring a diferent set of knowledge to understanding the built environment?

38 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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FOREGROUND

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One thing that a lot of discourse often reduces information access to is access itself—just having the ability to get online and that should be suicient. Fortunately, I think the discussion is expanding and enriching a bit, and we’re recognizing that simply having the ability to access the Internet is not suicient.

We also have to have pedagogical services and support systems like public libraries, for instance, which I also write about fairly often, to help people make distinctions. We hear a lot of reference in the discussion of fake news and new forms of media literacy that we have to equip people with today.

I do think that information resources do, in many cases, reinscribe a lot of other forms of power that you mentioned. Information is inequitably distributed along lines of race, class, and gender, things that we see actually writ large in the urban landscape. Information provision and distribution also follow a lot of the same patterns.

RIGHT

An example of what Mattern calls telegraphic architecture, “a building where human operators interfaced between both machines and people.”

But information is also a way to overcome some of those inequities as well. Empowering communities [and] marginalized populations with information about how, for instance, infrastructure works, or what redlining is, or the history of certain types of oppression can be a means of perhaps overcoming those

40 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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RIGHT

communication and telegraph and telephone—so I think a lot of the texts that I read in graduate school helped to cement that connection and recognize the city itself as a medium and as a place that has evolved in response to changes in communication technologies.

A Berenice Abbott photograph from the 1930s documents the vitality of newsstands as hubs of information in urban life.

obstacles or building our own infrastructures when the existing ones don’t work. So that’s a place where I think information- or knowledgebased resources can help to maybe overcome or overturn inequitable distributions of power.

to my speciications. So my entire material environment growing up was, in a way, an expression of affection, I guess you could say—it was an afective medium. So that sounds really sentimental and I am fully aware of my privilege here in that regard, but that was something Given your background in media that was very palpable and apparent studies, how did you come to see the to me from a very young age. city as a kind of subject?

I think part of it is my own personal I read a lot of foundational texts [in background. I grew up with a father graduate school], including Marshall who is a furniture maker. I grew up McLuhan and especially Lewis Mumin a hardware store. I’ve got an uncle ford. Not only his Technics and Civiwho is an architectural engineer, a lization but his The City in History, grandfather who is an industrial books that really help me to see a engineer, and a godfather who is a parallel between the history of techcontractor. So people around me in nology and the history of cities. So my childhood, all of them are kind much of the kind of examples he of shaping space in some way or an- draws from in his two grand histoother. I loved books, so I kept getting ries of urbanization books are recmore and more books, and when ognizing that cities have evolved in I needed a new bookshelf my dad response to changes in communicawould just make me one according tion technology—for instance, wired

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

What other questions about the city are most interesting to you right now?

That’s a huge question! One of the challenges goes back to a question you asked earlier. I am interested in how not only city form but architectural form reflects the logics of particular technology. But I also don’t want to give primary or sole agency to those technologies, which often happens in kind of more technological determinist fashion. I want to incorporate the social and political dimensions like race, class, and gender that you asked about before. So the challenge, the question I ask, is more of a methodological one than an ethical one. How can you pay attention to all this contemporary discourse about how technology has historically, and continues to, and will in the future transform urban form, but also recognize that the city is a social environment, it’s a social ecology, and that new technologies are not a panacea and they could potentially exacerbate existing social inequities that are written into urban form itself?

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One is about the sound of logistics. There’s a lot of research in my ield, and in architecture and urban planning as well, about logistics these days. Media studies are now getting in that game as well. Most people are writing about it in terms of dashboards, and data visualizations, and other modes of graphic representation—the paperwork, the enterprise software that makes logistics possible. So I was asked to think about what we can learn about logistics by listening to it. What are the sounds of logistics?

Aren’t you working on a project about sound?

I’ve often been interested in multisensorial methodologies. When I was writing my irst book on library buildings, I would visit library buildings, and I was so conscious of how they were multisensorial environments. Sound, acoustic programming, is a really integral part of making a building with so many different programmatic elements happening simultaneously.

ABOVE

Information embedded in building materials, even standardized ones such as concrete, includes knowledge from scientists and laborers.

So that was an important lesson for me early in my own kind of intellectual development, to recognize the importance of looking at things through a multisensory methodology. Right now, I’ve been commissioned to write a couple of projects that all happen to be about sound.

44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

The beeps on trucks as they back up, all the sounds of the container port, for instance, that provide cues to the people in machines working there. The diferent kinds of sonic cues of the whole supply chain that kind of extend the city into a global network. I want to think again about what we can learn about logistical landscapes, not just by looking at them, but by engaging them through other senses.

How have you thought about landscape or landscape design as a figure or force in your argument about cities in urban data?

Just looking at it from the historical perspective, particularly when I was thinking about working on my chapters on sound, I realize there was only so much that architecture could ofer. Because so much of the

resounding force of cities happens in those spaces in between buildings, for instance. It happens in the plazas and the open spaces, and it might ricochet of the facades of architecture, but it’s actually kind of the landscape in between that actually transforms the public space of the city or makes it into a sonic or acoustic space for the voice for sonic broadcast for all the diferent types of acoustic resonances.

I think landscape is really important there, and of course the presence of other agents in space, whether they be other species or flora and fauna, that shape that acoustic environment too, shape the acoustic properties in a space. In several of the chapters, I tried to reinforce the fact that even if I am thinking about sound or thinking about the visuality of text, all media encounters are kind of multisensorial, and we encounter them in highly complex ecological environments. So landscape as well, with its methodologies and ecological way of seeing things and thinking about things, can really help to imagine the fact that, when we have these supposedly cognitive experiences with a media text, for instance, it’s our intellectual experience that is being shaped by the larger ecology that is surrounding it. Those are some ways I think landscape has been really helpful.

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FOREGROUND

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FOREGROUND

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PARKS

THE HOLE STORY

AN AUSTRALIAN TOWN DECIDES WHAT TO DO WITH A SPENT QUARRY.

H ABOVE

Aerial view of the quarry parkland in December 2017, before landfill work began.

ornsby Quarry is like many quarries that roared with life in the 19th and 20th centuries and then suddenly fell silent because their resources were tapped out or became too expensive to extract. It is deserted today. The quarry, in Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia, has for a generation remained “the big hole in the ground”—300 meters roughly square, 100 meters to the bottom—and a major safety hazard that Hornsby Shire was

46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

forced to buy at the market rate of AU$25 million (about $16 million U.S.) after CSR Limited, a private company, ceased extracting hard rock basalt for road base material and gravel in 2001.

The Hornsby Shire Council acquired the quarry in 2002. Because it was built before reclamation laws and it was zoned as Local Public Recreation Land (technically called Open Space A) by the New South

Wales Environmental Planning Act in 1994, CSR had no obligation to mitigate the site before ceasing operations, and the Shire was required by state legislation to buy it back.

The huge cost of the land, set by the solicitor general, was ultimately reduced in court by AU$9 million, but the inal price still cost each rateholder (taxpayer) approximately $50 per year, for a total of 10 years, says Kurt Henkel, a landscape coordinator at Hornsby Shire.

HORNSBY SHIRE COUNCIL

BY CAROL E. BECKER

FOREGROUND

/PARKS

LEFT

The bottom of the original quarry hole is eight meters above sea level; the top is approximately 90 meters above sea level.

BOTTOM

LEGEND

Site boundary Ridgeline Existing creek line Existing lake Significant built form (Industrial heritage) Prominent landform/High point Significant geological landform – Diatreme Steep slopes Visual boundary/Valley edge Enclosing slope/Space Significant contextual views Flat land/Open area Tall Eucalypt forest/Natural bushland

The quarry will not remain dormant, however. Its stories—physical, historical, geographical—parallel the long development of Australia and are about to get a bold retelling.

The vision for Hornsby Quarry is to move from accidental money pit to

N

48 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

extraordinary new parkland, and it’s all about politics, geology, preservation, conservation, and, of course, landscape architecture at one of its most interesting callings.

Practical considerations alone prevented the quarry from being illed after its closing. Its location and size were prohibitive. The quarry lies less than a kilometer from the city center, having been established around 1900, long before the town of Hornsby became a major suburban rail stop northwest of Sydney. It would require eight years of running trucks through the city center to provide the estimated four million cubic meters of ill that would be required, according to a study by Clouston Associates, a Sydney-based landscape and strategic planning firm. The council deemed it a “too-painful consequence” for the residents, Henkel recalls. “We already knew [at that point] the more we illed the hole, the more the distinctive landscape would be lost,” he told me.

A soil scientist, Simon Leake, says that what remains today owes to the unique characteristics of this quarry. Leake is known in Australia for creating the soils in Sydney’s new Barangaroo Park (see “Peter Walker’s Point,” LAM, November 2016).

He has more recently evaluated the Hornsby site. The eastern face of the quarry has exposed the cross section of a basaltic diatreme, a geological feature said to be rare worldwide.

In simple terms, Leake says, it’s a remnant of an ancient explosive tube that erupted with force through existing rock to create not a mountain, as we think of volcanic eruptions, but a large, deep valley with basaltic rock soils, rare and therefore commercially valuable in the Sydney area.

The quarry’s operations dug deep— nearly to sea level in this case—to reach the hard rock basalt and mine it until it was spent. Today, the site itself is largely volcanic basalt with a sandstone overlay. Leake also mentions a rare inding of granite “that can only have landed here from a volcanic eruption.” To his surprise and research interest, he adds, deep pockets of healthy soil have returned in selected areas of the site in just 30 years.

HORNSBY SHIRE COUNCIL

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FOREGROUND

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Usable open space 1:3 Accessible revegetated steep slope (fill) 1:1.2 Exposed rock wall (cut) EEC Community – Blue gum diatreme forest Sportsfield/Village green Lake Existing quarry face/Fill area to be retained Old crusher plant zone Diatreme

The steep walls of the quarry make the bottom of the pit feel remote; that the city of Hornsby lies less than a kilometer away seems improbable. At the bottom, spring-fed water ills the lake. Stormwater from the upstream catchment bypasses the quarry hole before draining into Berowra Creek, a tributary of the Hawkesbury–Nepean River system.

The old crusher plant still sits above the quarry to the southwest, silent and derelict for the time being. High above the quarry walls, the feeling of remoteness is enhanced by gum trees that are already 20 feet high.

Until all the talk about what to do with the quarry started, many people did not even know the quarry was here.

Given the fact that the site remained vacant and untouched for a generation, natural bushland vegetation has regrown quickly. But the area surrounding the quarry is more than just a native parkland. It has, thanks to its volcanic soil, become a small and critically endangered ecological community called Blue Gum (Eucalyptus saligna) High Forest. Tucked

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FOREGROUND

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with the community’s desire to see something result from its massive investment in the quarry land.

ABOVE

The filling operation as of February 2018.

The imported material is deposited via conveyor belt, seen at top right.

What to do with it suddenly took on new life with the Clouston study in 2014. A Clouston principal, Crosbie Lorimer, believed that the rare geological heritage alone “almost requires us to express it rather than hide it.” Clouston is known for its work in restoring industrial heritage

52 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

sites, of which the greater Sydney area has many. Its study points to the old crusher not as an eyesore, but as an artifact that should be restored, repurposed, and used to teach visitors about the history of the place.

These considerations led to Clouston’s recommendation to retain “the “Develop a structure plan for the quarriness of the place,” creating Hornsby Park site, identify approa park that might ofer everything priate recreational and open space from heritage bush walks to extreme uses for the site, and determine sports: zip lines, rope climbing, rock the best location for each element. climbing, and non-snow tobogganDevelop a detail plan for one choing. Although there are critical safety sen part of the site, demonstrating challenges to be met to implement a variety of site speciic uses and this recommendation, it would go a consider the overall landscape setlong way to increasing open green ting for the park.” space in the region, currently at about half of the Shire Council’s own From among the 50 students in the plan projections. It also falls in line class, Henkel cites ive renderings

HORNSBY SHIRE COUNCIL

in the embayment of the quarry itself is also the Higgins Family Cemetery, resting place of 23 pioneers who settled this valley two centuries ago. In all, the site of 59 hectares includes the quarry, the surrounding bushland, an open area known as Old Man’s Valley, and the adjacent Hornsby Park, which already contains bush walks and mountain bike trails.

But how? For so long, the focus had been on the constraints of the site, and it seemed that new thinking was required to help turn Clouston’s recommendation into real possibility. Then landscape architecture students at the University of New South Wales were introduced to the project. They hiked to the bottom of the quarry in 2016. Their task, said Jessica Hodge, a landscape architect and the author of the Quarry Project brief, assigned as one of two projects for students in the Site Planning 2031 course, was outlined thus:

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that shifted the focus to future possibilities. It was “an unshackling,” he says, because the students were “not always following the constraints.”

Their renderings demonstrated wide-ranging approaches to the site and “showed [us] the fun that can come from the site when it is developed as a park.” Nearly two years after completing their assignments and graduating, these landscape designers talk enthusiastically about the future of Hornsby Quarry.

ABOVE

A rendering produced by the Hornsby Shire Council shows how the strong topographic and vegetative features of the quarry and surrounding landscape could create an extraordinary park on the northern edge of Sydney.

The irst step is stabilization. The quarry won’t be illed, but ill is needed on a monumental scale to shape the new parkland and stabilize the void for parks development. “If we ill about a quarter [of the void], we remove almost half of the problems of stabilizing, and we still have a water body and a very dramatic site with space at the bottom for visitors,” Lorimer says. What developed is an agreement among the Shire

54 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Council, the state government, and the federal government to place ill from NorthConnex, a roads project that is digging a motorway tunnel in Sydney. At a rate of 35 truckloads dumping 800 cubic meters per hour, NorthConnex is currently providing 100 million cubic meters of the necessary ill in a project that will run throughout the winter, inishing in August of this year.

Before the operation began, there had to be permitting, noise abatement construction, including a new access road into the park, and a conveyor system to deposit ill into the quarry.

Work could not begin until 2016.

As the illing by NorthConnex continues, landform studies are under way in consultation with geotechnical engineers, constructability specialists, and environmental impact analysts who study the proposed landform works. While the Shire may spend

AU$4 million to AU$7 million more to complete stabilization, the exact plan will not be known until the end of the year, Henkel says. Hornsby Quarry Park is expected to be complete in ive to seven years, by which time the area’s population, including the suburbs of Hornsby, Asquith, and Waitara, is projected to grow about 15 percent and require an additional 1,000 jobs. Hornsby Quarry Park will be the only local destination adventure park and will go a long way to closing the gap between actual and recommended green space in the region, connecting to adjacent Berowra Valley National Park and the Great North Walk 250 kilometers along the east coast from Sydney to Newcastle.

CAROL E. BECKER IS A WRITER, TEACHER, AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER IN CHICAGO, SPECIALIZING IN SUSTAINABILITY IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT. REACH HER AT CAROL@SAGEADVICE.NET OR ON TWITTER @LADYSAGE14.

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PLANTS PALMS OUT

THERE’S A PALM FOR JUST ABOUT ANY PLACE YOU’RE PLANTING.

Y

LEFT

The coconut palm is ubiquitous in south Florida and other tropical locations.

RIGHT

Native to Mexico, the endangered Guadalupe palm is prized as a specimen in California landscapes.

ou can’t always get what you want—unless, that is, you’re into palms. Lisa Gimmy, ASLA, of Lisa Gimmy Landscape Architecture in Los Angeles, inds palms uniquely suited to small gardens, given small root balls that leave “a very tiny footprint on the ground.” One that Gimmy likes to use is the blue hesper or Mexican blue palm (Brahea armata), native to Baja California, Mexico, with stunning, silvery-blue, fan-shaped fronds and creamy white flower clusters that cascade down from the leaves. Gimmy selects palms for spatial characteristics irst, then for texture, leaf color, and the character of the trunk. “They are like poems,” she says. “With the head up in the air, there’s really nothing else like it.” Gimmy also likes palms because they provide “instant gratiication, and that’s very important in Southern California.”

58 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Ray Hernandez, the president of the International Palm Society, told me a story about a friend who drives from Long Island, New York, to Florida every year to pick up specimens that will last for just the summer season.

“The folks that live out in the Hamptons and have 10 zeros behind their bank account can aford to haul up a coconut palm or something hardier and plant it in their landscape, and they do it on a yearly basis,” he said.

“It’s that whole mentality of bringing the tropics home with you.”

tropics of the Amazon, the heights of the Himalayas, or the deserts of the Middle East—palms share the same characteristics. They are flowering trees and shrubs that bear fruits from the coconut and date to the currently trendy acai berry that is said to have numerous health beneits. They have single or clustering trunks and leaves that look like fans or feathers. A few palms even have trunks or stems so thin they resemble vines and clamber up trees, shrubs, and other structures.

Although some palms will survive winter temperatures down to −5 degrees Fahrenheit, they are shrubby in form rather than the tall, majestic varieties such as coconut, royal, and date that many people associate with palm-lined avenues in Miami, Unlike hardwood trees, palms are Los Angeles, and other warm loca- monocots and do not produce secondtions. Wherever they’re from—the ary growth that, with age, increases

BOTANICS WHOLESALE, LEFT; CAITLIN ATKINSON, RIGHT

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/PLANTS

TOP LEFT

The Puerto Rico palmetto is known for its gray cylindrical trunk and deep green leaves.

RIGHT

Leaves of the cohune palm look like feather dusters.

ABOVE

The sagisi palm arches over a patio.

the diameter of the trunk on woody plants. Palms have adventitious roots instead of taproots, and most flower once a year. Tall, erect palms are often called “trees,” but the shorter clumping and vining palms are most often described as woody, shrubby herbs.

There are more than 2,500 species of palms. The date palm was cultivated in ancient Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, and it is mentioned often in the Bible and the Koran.

60 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Jason Dewees, the author of Designing with Palms (Timber Press, 2018) and a horticulturist at Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, says coyotes, foxes, and western bluebirds use palms for sustenance, hooked orioles create nests in desert fan palms, and the trees are “a great source of nectar and pollen for pollinators.” He explains that an individual palm inflorescence has an enormous number of flowers that open progressively, and “a bee can come back to a flowering palm Around the world, it has enormous over and over again over the course of economic importance. The coconut a couple of weeks and have a reliable palm produces meat, milk, and wa- source of nectar.” ter, and its outer husk, coir, is used to make ropes, baskets, brushes, and Dewees has been obsessed with mats. The trunk is used by some for palms since he was a child, visiting timber, and palm wine and vinegar his grandparents in Florida. At age are made from the flower stalk.

17, he was the youngest member ever to join the International Palm Palm oil comes from African oil Society. As his knowledge increased, palms; wax palms from South Amer- he turned his preoccupation into a ica are used in polishes, candles, career as a palm specialist, consuland varnishes; the black sugar palm tant, and designer. of Malaysia is processed for iber, sugar, wine, and arrack, a distilled Dewees notes that the palm family is liquor. The native American cabbage amazingly diverse. In Hawaii, he says, palmetto (Sabal palmetto) is used to there are about 25 species of the native make wharf pilings, baskets, mats, genus Pritchardia, a fan palm. “Some and brushes, and its buds are ed- are short; some are tall; some are big; ible. Saw palmetto (Serenoa repens), some are small. Some grow up at another native, produces small black 4,200 feet in the cloud forest, some berries touted for prostate health. down by the sea in a brackish environOther items made from palms in- ment.” A wax palm from the Andes, clude parquet and rattan, charcoal Ceroxylon, prefers “cool, foggy condiand dyes, fencing and jewelry, chess tions.” It grows at an altitude of 11,500 pieces, clothing, animal feed, cos- feet in Ecuador and Colombia, and metics, handicrafts, medicine, bows, “with enough irrigation, thrives in the and spears.

Northern California climate,” he says.

JUNGLE MUSIC PALMS, CYCADS & TROPICAL PLANTS, TOP LEFT; TAMARA ALVAREZ, TOP RIGHT AND INSET

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TOP LEFT

The Florida thatch palm is excellent for small spaces.

TOP RIGHT

The yellow butterfly palm is often used to add color to landscapes.

RIGHT

At Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, the silver European fan palms stand out in this composition

by James Corner Field Operations and the meadow expert John Greenlee, Ailiate ASLA.

Most palms are happiest in tropical locations, but Dewees says some can be grown successfully up north.

He says the farthest north palms are reliable on the West Coast is near the Canadian border of Washington State along Puget Sound. On the East Coast, shrubby palms, notably the needle palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix), about ive feet high with fan-shaped, deeply divided leaves, will probably survive as far north as Cape Cod. Given some protection with proper placement, he says, “you might even see the Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.” It’s said to be the hardiest tree palm, and Dewees believes that because of the Gulf Stream, it might prosper in Europe as far north as Edinburgh, Scotland. He says it’s regularly seen in London, in Ireland, and on the south and west coasts of England.

The number of palms in cultivation gives designers a great choice for speciic landscape situations. Jesse

62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Bergman says the Canary Island date palm (Phoenix canariensis) is among the most common palms in California. It’s ubiquitous in Los Angeles, despite the problem of fusarium wilt, a fungal disease that has killed many trees. The king palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana), with feathery green leaves and a Bergman and his father, Phil, own ringed trunk, is also popular, often the Jungle Music Palms, Cycads & used as a street tree, in groves, or as Tropical Plants nursery in Encinitas, a specimen.

California. They carry about 700 species of palms. Jesse Bergman says Bergman’s favorites include the palms can be used to form a cano- teddy bear palm (Dypsis leptocheilos) py, a centerpiece, to screen views, with a reddish-brown, fuzzy crown to create shade for foliage plants, and the yellow butterfly palm (Dypand for “that lush, tropical feeling” sis lutescens), a multistemmed palm that a lot of clients desire. Other with a white trunk and a crown of clients want palms with thorns or yellows and golds, “what we lovingly bristles “because they keep people call the neighbor blocker.” and animals out of their yards.”

TAMARA ALVAREZ, TOP LEFT; JUNGLE MUSIC PALMS, CYCADS & TROPICAL PLANTS, TOP RIGHT; CAITLIN ATKINSON, BOTTOM

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As a specimen, perhaps contained within a deck near a swimming pool, Reynolds might use a Satake palm (Satakentia liukiuensis), with a deep burgundy-purple crownshaft and flat, pinnate fronds. “It’s very graceful and organized,” Reynolds says, “and it just looks like the perfect palm tree.” The bismarck palm (Bismarckia nobilis) is another favored tree, 20 to 70 feet high with a crown spanning 18 to 22 feet. It has fan-shaped, silvery, rigid leaves that Reynolds uses to “punctuate” a landscape.

TOP LEFT

Date palms can be either single-stem or clustering, with angled leaflets and delicious fruits.

TOP RIGHT

Designers favor the Satake palm for its shiny, purple-brown crownshaft and arching fronds.

ABOVE

The bismarck palm’s silvery-blue leaves and generous crown span provide screening.

Palms native to deserts, including the date palms (Phoenix spp.) and the California fan palm (Washingtonia ilifera), do best in hot, dry climates like Palm Springs.

palm (Syagrus romanzoff iana) is also very forgiving, growing well in Florida and California and prized for its lush, feathery leaves and medium size.

The European fan palm (Chamaerops humilis) is valued in California, Florida, and South Carolina because it tolerates desertlike or oceanside climates and can be used as a singlestem specimen or pruned into a cluster for an attractive hedge. The clara palm (Brahea clara) thrives in California, either in foggy coastal conditions or the hot, dry climate of inland areas. The queen

Craig Reynolds, a landscape architect in Key West, Florida, uses palms in almost every project. The species with palmate leaves come in diferent colors, he notes—silver and light green and dark green—and “they’re very bold and give you a lot of drama.”

Reynolds sometimes uses tall coconut palms (Cocos nucifera) to create ceilings in landscapes and smaller ones like Florida thatch palms (Thrinax

64 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Working mainly in south Florida, the Keys, and the Caribbean, Reynolds has innumerable options when selecting palms, and he orders some from Botanics Wholesale in Homestead, Florida. Mike Tevelonis, the irm’s general manager, says there is nothing else quite like Copernicia palms, a diverse group of fan palms from the Caribbean and South America. They’re known for their massive, smooth trunks “that look like concrete pillars.” Tevelonis says these palms are like “living sculptures,” with deep green, fan-shaped leaves that have a silver tint as well.

JUNGLE MUSIC PALMS, CYCADS & TROPICAL PLANTS, TOP LEFT; BOTANICS WHOLESALE, TOP RIGHT; STEPHEN DUNN, BOTTOM

radiata) or the native Florida cherry palm (Pseudophoenix sargentii) for visual breaks at the property line “so you don’t see the neighbors.”

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Some Copernicias, like C. baileyana, brilliant scarlet crownshaft just below are rare to uncommon, with trunks the dark green pinnate leaves.

40 feet high and two feet in diameter.

In Charleston, South Carolina, CinTevelonis planted Attalea cohune on dy Cline, ASLA, of Wertimer + Cline either side of his driveway. “I wanted Landscape Architects, has a narrowa tunnel to drive under,” he says. This er choice of palms because not too RIGHT palm has upright, feathery, arching many survive the colder winter temThe diverse Copernicia leaves, but it takes many years before peratures. She says the irm mostly genus includes C. gigas it lifts up and forms a trunk. uses the native cabbage palmetto and C. rigida, both (Sabal palmetto)—the state tree— native to Cuba, and the Jef Searle, a partner at the Rainforest because it’s cold-hardy, tolerant of rare C. baileyana, with Collection in Southwest Ranches, drought and salt spray, and can also a trunk that resembles concrete and deeply Florida (Broward County), also grows thrive in brackish water. It’s “a tough cut, overlapping, rare and exotic palms. For something and versatile plant,” she says, that fanlike leaves. unusual, he recommends the flame- can “create instant height on an oththrower palm (Chambeyronia mac- erwise treeless site.” It’s a relatively BELOW rocarpa), a slow-growing, relatively slow-growing palm, so Cline plants The native Florida small palm, just 30 to 50 feet high, them at diferent heights and stagcherry palm is often used in Florida, here with large, wide leaves that emerge gers them along a property line to popping up in a narrow bright red in a show-stopping dis- make a living bufer. space among evergreen play. Another captivating species is ground covers designed the sealing wax palm (Cyrtostachys She also plants palms in a colonby the landscape renda), with a thin, 30-foot-high nade pattern, “setting up a rhythm architect Craig trunk that looks like bamboo and a and order…to deliberately shape Reynolds. a space or extend the lines of the architecture out into the garden.”

Charleston gardens are often small, and Cline says palms are perfect for narrow beds and tight spaces “where not many other plants of any height would work.” As an accent or specimen, she might specify the southern jelly palm (Butia odorata), with arching, bluish-green leaves, burgundy flower buds that open to creamy white, and edible fruits of gold to deep orange. Taller palms with notable characteristics include the Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei), hardy to 10 degrees

66 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Fahrenheit, which Cline uses “to introduce another texture into the garden.” It has green fanlike leaves and a trunk that “almost looks furry.”

Although the plant palette in Charleston is limited, the ordinary Sabal palmetto “contributes in a very sensory way to the space,” she says. “The palm fronds in a light breeze will rustle ever so slightly,” and the sun, at certain angles, will “highlight and catch the silvery green aspect of the palm leaves…and throw interesting shadow patterns against walls.”

No matter where you work, palms are an attractive alternative to trees and shrubs if the weather is not too cold. Ray Hernandez of the International Palm Society says it’s because “it’s a plant that looks like no other plant around.”

JANE BERGER IS A WRITER AND CERTIFIED LANDSCAPE DESIGNER IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BOTANICS WHOLESALE, TOP; BARRY FITZGERALD, BOTTOM

COYOTES, FOXES, AND WESTERN BLUEBIRDS USE PALMS FOR SUSTENANCE.

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THE OLD AND THE NEUTRAL THE MILE LONG CRESCENT PARK IN NEW ORLEANS SHOWS AMBITIONS MEETING REALITY.

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80 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

MANDEVILLE WHARF

An elliptical lawn marks the heart of Crescent Park, part of an ambitious project intended to revitalize a rough industrial edge of the Mississippi River in New Orleans.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 81

TOP

The industrial heritage of the riverfront seen in this 1950s photo is retained in the forms and materials of the park.

This low-key scene is typical for Crescent Park, a 1.4-mile-long public space From above, along the Mississippi River that was Hargreaves Associates’ completed in 2015. The park starts arcing lines take a hint from the crescent of the just east of the French Quarter but is cut of from easy inland access by a riverfront as it bends.

RIGHT

82 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

floodwall roughly 10 feet high as well as railbeds where freight cars might sit for days between journeys. The stylized promenade is promoted by some as New Orleans’s answer to Millennium Park or the High Line, one with a photogenic bridge designed by the architect David Adjaye. Its impact on the adjacent Bywater neighborhood, where small colorful houses line streets where the sidewalks come and go, can be seen in the condo complexes starting to rise along its edge.

Viewed through a wider lens, Crescent Park its within the constellation of urban waterfronts reclaimed by cities across the United States in an efort to serve locals, attract visitors, and help to kick-start growth. But as the rough-edged, sparingly artistic space designed by the irm Hargreaves Associates has settled into the physical and cultural landscape,

CAMPANELLA NOPSI, LEFT; STEPHEN HOUSER, RIGHT

O

N A LANGUID FRIDAY afternoon in New Orleans, the sounds of the French Quarter Festival spill downriver toward Crescent Park. The music is loudest at the park’s Mandeville Wharf, but the dozen or so visitors seem to pay no notice as they lounge on a raised lawn next to remnants of a vast storage shed, or ride scooters in the shade cast by the new corrugated roof, or lean against galvanized steel guardrails to watch a barge plow through the dark waters. Nor can the distant din compete with the cries of the seagulls who have claimed a fenced-of stretch of the wharf as their own.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 83

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it feels less like a catalyst than one more layer of New Orleans’s seductively tangled connection to its river—an insertion that’s diferent from what the city has seen before, but also one tempered by the deeper realities of place. city since the French Quarter,” according to the cover letter cosigned UST AS THE 20-ACRE PARK by then-Mayor Ray Nagin. Each end is shaped physically by the indus- of the six-mile-long planning area trial and natural features that press would be anchored by residential close on each side, its origins were towers, with an array of attractions shaped by a much grander develop- between them to form “a new, 21st ment plan that most likely will never century urban landscape.” come to pass.

The plan, which received a 2008 The concept traces back to Reinvent- ASLA Professional Award for Analying the Crescent, a planning efort sis and Planning, included projeclaunched by the New Orleans Build- tions that a $294 million public ing Corporation in the aftermath of investment would reap nearly $3.6 Hurricane Katrina. The plan’s inal billion in private development and version was released in 2008 with 24,000 new jobs. But the crystal ball an oicial goal to create “the most was clouded by hype. Today, Nagin signiicant physical addition to this is in jail after being convicted of

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The plan of the park knits a series of character-driven wharves together and is intended to draw locals from the Bywater, Marigny, and French Quarter neighborhoods.

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A prefabricated bridge elevates pedestrians for a bit of industrial glamour.

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(unrelated) corruption charges. The towers are nowhere to be seen. Only Crescent Park exists—built with $30 million in Katrina-related federal recovery funds, on a stretch of the river where cargo operations ceased decades ago.

Hargreaves was part of Reinventing the Crescent’s planning team, and it started work on Crescent Park as soon as city oicials decided to focus resources on what they hoped would be an attention-getting waterfront destination. To up the star wattage, the architects Michael Maltzan and David Adjaye were each hired to design bridges that would span the

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floodwall and rail lines and connect the isolated linear park to the city beyond—and, it was hoped, become symbols of head-turning change.

came standard-issue circular ones.

A playground was deleted, as was an interactive water feature on the edge of Mandeville Wharf’s elliptical lawn. The biggest loss, literally: Maltzan’s pedestrian bridge, which would have swooped from the edge of the French Quarter out above the river and then down into Mandeville Wharf.

“We wanted designers who would understand New Orleans at a very deep level,” said Sean Cummings, a local developer who led the Building Corporation during Nagin’s time in oice. “The project needed to look good, but also be authentic and in- Partly because of all this subtraction, stantly familiar to local people.” but also because of Hargreaves’s design strategy, Crescent Park today is The rezoning to allow the park was less a uniied space than a string of approved in January 2010, with an encounters connected by a 20-footexpectation that it would open in wide path of concrete and asphalt little 2011. But progress was itful, and changed from when it was a wharf the irst piece didn’t open until 2014. apron where workers moved pallets The second followed one year later. stacked with break-bulk cargo.

neighborhood by a striking but straightforward prefabricated bridge that rises amid utility towers and touches down alongside the platformlike wharf, which covers three acres.

Downriver at the other end, there’s a dog run and a parking lot that ofers the lone ground-level entrance to the park. Only a chain-link fence separates the parking lot from the rotted wooden remnants of a derelict pier.

The one section where things open up and Hargreaves could craft a more elaborate space is midway, at Piety Street, which also is where Adjaye’s bridge serves as the most obvious link to Bywater and such local mainstays as Frady’s, a corner market with humble but heroic po’boy and mufuletta sandwiches.

Along the way, design features There’s the area around Mandeville Here, the curving rail spurs to the were sacriiced to hold down costs. Wharf, reached from the French abandoned wharfs were replaced by Custom-designed picnic tables be- Quarter and the adjacent Marigny porous asphalt strips, between which

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Plantings feel restrained compared to the rest of the city’s storied fecundity.

are bands of native plants arranged in strokes of color. It’s a focused space intended as a communal crossroads, with a hammock as well as the round picnic tables scattered beneath oak, maple, and birch trees.

But even if the plants and trees were thriving, the main show would still be the surroundings. The river churns past on one side, masked in long stretches by fast-growing volunteer trees that emerge from alluvial soil along the riverbank and in the spring are laced with aromatic honeysuckle vines. (Kirt Rieder, ASLA, Hargreaves’s principal in charge for the park, calls this stretch of the tidal zone known locally as batture “junglelike. It’s mindblowing.”) Inland are the rail lines and floodwall, only a few buildings

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TIMOTHY HURSLEY

The striped plantings aren’t nearly as bold as in renderings, a lingering efect of elevated acidity levels in the soil imported by the contractor. The troubles related to soil quality were among the reasons for the delayed opening; even now, the park’s vegetation looks sparse and strained for a warm, humid coastal city where everything else seems overgrown.

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A bridge by the architect David Adjaye was intentionally designed to be a marketable icon of the park.

“We left it as an artifact,” shrugs Steve Dumez of Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, the New Orleans architecture irm that led the Reinventing the Crescent planning team. “The inspiration from the start was that this had been a working waterfront, and it

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was important to recognize that her- tics who see the park and its design itage and build on what was there.” aspirations as magnets for new development and for people seeking the Mary Margaret Jones, FASLA, Har- latest chic twist to a familiar locale. greaves’s president and a senior principal, agrees. “The design needed Look past the easy symbolism, to be robust, because it’s along the though, and the comparison is a Mississippi, and the existing wharfs stretch. Crescent Park isn’t nearly already have that character. All that as seamless, for starters. Where the igured into our decision not to chal- High Line is a curated progression of ine-grained sensations, at once lenge the industrial context.” romantically disheveled and meticuNEVITABLY, Crescent Park has lously maintained, Crescent Park been likened to the High Line. Usu- feels like a collage of found parts ally it’s in an upbeat, check-this-out amid an immense landscape—not sort of way (“New Orleans’ version just the mighty Mississippi or the of N.Y.C.’s High Line,” was Conde tattered wooden piers, or the graitiNast Traveler’s shorthand last winter). scarred freight cars, but such local Faded infrastructure is repurposed landmarks as a pair of large gray as a must-see destination. But the naval ships that are anchored just analogy has also been used by skep- beyond park boundaries and aren’t

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beyond them tall enough to be visible. Then there’s Piety Wharf, a clearing entered through blunt gates of rusted steel. The storage shed that once covered the nowopen wharf is long gone except for a 122-foot-long concrete ire wall that is 40 feet high at its peak; on the far side, behind fences, a scarred tangle of piles and timber bears witness to a ire in 2009 that apparently started in a homeless encampment beneath the wharf.

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likely to be redeployed anytime soon.

The signature design element for Crescent Park is Adjaye’s bridge at Piety Street. Known locally as the “rusty rainbow” for the Cor-Ten steel panels that frame the arcing form, it fans up over the floodwall to land alongside the picnic area. “The arch signals transcendence,” Adjaye said in an e-mailed statement, with a desire “to celebrate the city and its many triumphs.” But this is a determinedly controlled celebration, given that the Cor-Ten panels lining the steep steps inside are so high that you can’t look over the sides.

Then you reach the peak—and instead of a 360-degree vista, there’s a hemmed-in view straight ahead of the ire-scarred half of Piety Wharf and the water beyond.

“David was pretty clear-eyed about what he wanted,” says Dumez, conceding that he knows people who hate the bridge as well as love it.

“He desired that spatial quality of being within a contained path with the release being a rifle-shot view toward the river.”

All this adds up to an overly mannered drama in a setting where structural remnants like Piety Wharf’s concrete fire wall have an innate power all their own. Yes, the materiality of the bridge relates to the industrial surroundings. Yes, local boosters proudly call the bridge iconic. It still seems to try a bit too hard.

Though both landscapes are roughly the same length, the High Line has a $3.5 million operations budget with a large maintenance staf augmented by volunteers. Crescent Park has two maintenance staf members and a contract with a landscape company to tend the gardens. New York’s elevated Eden is framed by showy buildings by the likes of Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, with the Brobdingnagian towers of Hudson Yards rising at the High Line’s north end. The only inill project completed near Piety Bridge, Crescent View Lofts, consists of seven condominiums in two three-story buildings.

Although other projects are on the Another diference, to state the obvious, way, including a 12-unit complex next is that New Orleans is not New York. to the bridge that is being marketed

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Butia capitata (South American jelly palm) and Liriope muscari (big blue lilyturf) are among the plants featured in the gardens found midway through Crescent Park.

“Crescent Park abetted a reinvestment movement that was already under way” rather than serving to kick-start gentriication, says Richard Campanella, a geography professor in the Tulane University School of Architecture and the author of such books as Cityscapes of New Orleans.

A former neighborhood resident, he puts the park in context by switching to local slang: “Crescent Park is lagniappe, a little something extra.…

On a beautiful Saturday morning

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you’ll see it enthusiastically utilized, going lures are a trio of free itness but not packed by any stretch of the classes at Mandeville Wharf run by imagination.” the local krewe Move Ya Brass.

What the linear space has become, for now, is a neighborhood park with a spectacular location. You see people strolling deep in conversation, parents teaching toddlers to use their bikes, young adults lunching at the picnic tables or sharing bottles of wine later in the day. Piety Bridge is popular with people working out, doing their best to jog up and over, back and forth.

Not only does Crescent Park lack the crowds associated with the High Line, or such high-proile waterfront esplanades as San Francisco’s Embarcadero, it’s free of the programming that ills other recent urban spaces in other U.S. cities. Though both wharves are wired for large events, the only on-

Part of the reason for avoiding large events was a conscious decision not to rattle neighbors who had complained at meetings about the traffic and noise impacts that might result from concerts or festivals. But the low-key draws that are ofered instead have struggled. A morning cofee truck in the picnic area did almost no business. Nor did a cart on summer evenings ofering sno-balls, New Orleans’s take on shaved ice.

“We live in a city saturated with events and markets on the weekends,” says KC Guidry, who manages Crescent Park for the French Market Corporation, an autonomous city body that was selected for the job when larger operators showed little

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as Piety on the Park, fears that Crescent Park might be a Trojan horse for gentriication seem to have faded.

Airbnb is a more pressing concern of local activists; many of the cheerfully ramshackle houses in Bywater and Marigny have been purchased by affluent nonresidents who treat them as second homes and rent them out for much of the year.

PLANTING PLAN

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Swaths of plants in monochrome bands are interspersed with concrete paths that follow the crescent forms.

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Pedestrian views on the bridge are constrained by design.

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interest. “The thing that’s hard is that people say they want these things, but getting them to come over the bridges is diicult.”

Soon, there might be more options.

City Hall and the Port of New Orleans last fall worked out a deal to transfer a pair of wharves alongside

Crescent Park to city ownership so that they can become publicly accessible. A full makeover is years away, with no telling what form any new public spaces might take, but the short-term goal is clear walkways that will connect Crescent Park to the Moonwalk, a public waterfront space that leads down to Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

The Moonwalk dates to 1975, and it was the irst place where a regular person could stand alongside the Mississippi on this stretch of the river. A decade or so later it was joined

by Woldenberg Park, adjacent to the city’s aquarium toward the convention center. Though both spaces are popular and have been recently renovated, they’re fairly generic clearings

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Part of a challenged plan to revitalize the Crescent, the park is coming into its own as a destination, slowly.

that ofer benches and panoramas There’s an only-in-New-Orleans but not much else. phrase, “neutral ground,” that applies to street medians and the like. FiguraThe idea of Reinventing the Crescent tively, at least for now, Crescent Park was to push New Orleans beyond the is neutral ground as well—between tried and true, to use the waterfront locals and tourists, recently arrived as a tool “for attracting new talent in a hipsters and deep-rooted residents, new economy driven by information, people who want a photogenic spot media, and technology,” to quote the for selies and people who just want 2008 plan. This raw global ambition to be alone. In today’s America, stratiis part of why the efort foundered in ied and suspicious, that’s a modest a historically proud though troubled triumph in itself. city, why neighborhoods were wary.

But the comfortable success of Cres- JOHN KING, HONORARY ASLA, IS AN URBAN DEcent Park has exerted a slow gravita- SIGN CRITIC FOR THE SAN FRANSCISO CHRONtional pull that helps other elements ICLE AND LIVES IN BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA. begin to fall into place.

Despite the loose ends and halfrealized visions, Crescent Park feels right for New Orleans, a city where tattered shingles or stoops add to the shrugging ambience. If the tension between ambitions and reality is inescapable, so is the pleasure of a wholly new landscape that takes the complexity of its surroundings as a given.

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, DESIGN LEAD HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS. EXECUTIVE ARCHITECT ESKEW+ DUMEZ+RIPPLE, NEW ORLEANS. ARCHITECT MANDEVILLE WHARF MICHAEL MALTZAN ARCHITECTURE, LOS ANGELES; PIETY WHARF & BRIDGE ADJAYE ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK. CULTURAL SCRIPTING CAROL BEBELLE, NEW ORLEANS. CIVIL & STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING KULKARNI CONSULTANTS, NEW ORLEANS. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT M. JOHANNA LEIBE, NEW ORLEANS. LIGHTING PHA LIGHTING DESIGN, ATLANTA. MEP LUCIEN T. VIVIEN JR. & ASSOCIATES INC., NEW ORLEANS. MARINE ENGINEERING WALDEMAR S. NELSON & COMPANY, INC., NEW ORLEANS.

MARK BIENVENU

Project Credits

“When you build a thing like this, nobody wants to go all-in at irst,” Guidry says. “You have to be patient.”

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FITZROVIA

The demolished Middlesex Hospital site, now Fitzroy Place, as it awaited development in 2011.

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TWO LONDON SQUARES AND A THEORY OF THE BEIGE HOLE HOW CREATIVE, THOUGHTFUL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS MAY BE TRAPPED IN THE MAKING OF NON-PLACES BY DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES.

BY TIM WATERMAN

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HIS ARTICLE attempts a tricky critique of two new London squares (privately owned public spaces) in a very ine-grained part of the historic West End; of processes and products of development and real estate speculation in a wildly distorted market; of place and nonplace, and taste and non-taste. The irst project, completed in 2016, is GROSS.MAX.’s design for Fitzroy Place, and the second is Gustafson Porter + Bowman’s Rathbone Square, completed in September 2017. These two squares are only a block apart, though “block” is a term that doesn’t quite apply to the irregular knot of streets that is characteristic of the area. A further complicating factor is me. I live a block away from Fitzroy Place and two blocks from Rathbone Square, and as a landscape architect, urbanist, and resident of the area, I have some fairly strong opinions.

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In each, no expense is spared on the landscape, as these landscapes are what will drive the sales of the apartments on overseas speculative markets, along with images of the interiors. All aspects of the design are geared toward their imageability on real estate websites and in glossy brochures. The Guardian’s architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, doesn’t pull any punches when I talk to him about

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the developments: They are “the kind of generic could-be-anywhere development that sucks the life out of Fitzrovia,” he said. “The developer claims to be giving back to the public, by opening up a space in the center of the site that has long been of-limits, but the residual canyons have clearly only been designed as a ‘visual amenity’ for the well-heeled residents above—it is not the kind of space where anyone would want to dwell.” Of the development at Fitzroy Place, he says it feels like “a bleak promotional computergenerated image.”

I also spoke with Anna Minton, a journalist and the author of the recent Big Capital: Who is London For? and Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-irst-century City. She agrees. “Fitzroy Place and Rathbone Square are the sort of developments that are ripping the heart and soul out of London. There is nothing about this sterile, privately owned, high-security enclave that connects it to the wider area—it could be a high spec development anywhere in the world.” Indirectly, Eelco Hooftman of GROSS.MAX. acknowledges

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Map of neighborhoods and detail of the two sites.

Fitzrovia workshops still serve the rag trade on Oxford Street and the furniture business on Tottenham Court Road, two of Fitzrovia’s boundaries.

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Rathbone Square and Fitzroy Place (so named because there is already a Rathbone Place and a Fitzroy Square) are both developments that are responding directly to market forces. They are, as the title of Carol Willis’s 1995 book suggests, results of the fact that “form follows inance.” Each plays games with elevations and massing to hide its excessive bulk and deep, dark floor plates. Fitzroy Place even went through the acrobatics of hiring two architects (Sheppard Robson and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands) to provide diferentiation between the blocks. In both cases the distribution of the buildings on the site and their massing were determined by the architects, with the landscape architects brought in later in the process.

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The view from the BT Tower overlooks the neighborhood just west of Fitzroy Place.

as much. “The market has changed,” he says. “All Fitzrovia the public work in London now is with private HE NEIGHBORHOOD of Fitzrovia fails to clients.” And further, “Landscape is a commodity.” appear, for the most part, on most people’s mental maps of London, which might seem surOf course, it can be argued that landscape has prising once one inds out just how central it is. always been a commodity—certainly when it is It is bounded on the west by genteel Marylebone, employed as the scenography of power and pri- on the east by leafy Bloomsbury, on the north by vate wealth, as it has so often been. It is an irony, the thundering Euston Road, and to the south though, at a time when our profession is more by all the hubbub of Oxford Street and Soho. It focused than ever on themes of sustainability and has, in the past, been known as North Soho, and ecology and social beneit, that the most lucrative briefly in the 1930s as the Old Latin Quarter, but work for Britain’s best landscape practices is root- since the 1940s it has taken its name from the ed elsewhere—and nowhere. The scenography Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street. Fitzrovia is a of contemporary capital demands a virgin space fancy sounding name, but the Fitzroy Tavern (still so that its business logic is not disrupted by the standing) is a good emblem for the neighborhood ethical obligations that the real city demands. The and its history. late Zygmunt Bauman put it so well in his essay “City of Fears, City of Hopes”: that the goal of The Fitzroy Tavern sits on a corner of Charlotte such development is “to raze to the ground the old Street, which has long been home to exotic resquarters of the city; to dig up a black hole in which taurants, and which has even longer been home old meanings sink and disappear, irst from view to artists, artisans, actors, writers, socialists and and soon after from memory, and to ill the void anarchists, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and, with brand new logic, unbound by the worries of as the town planner Nick Bailey notes in his book Fitzrovia, “the eccentric and impecunious.” Bailey continuity and relieved from its burdens.”

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The philosopher Walter Benjamin could have been writing of Soho and Fitzrovia when he says of the dense, ine-grained urban landscape of the city in the title of his famous essay “Naples” that “building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations. The stamp of the deinitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no igure asserts it ‘thus and not otherwise.’ This is how architecture, the most binding part of the communal rhythm, comes into being here.” Like Soho and Fitzrovia, Naples is “anarchic, embroiled, village-like in the center,” and all its nooks and crannies were haunts for a who’s who of 19th and 20th century luminaries: Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, Aleister Crowley, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Quentin Crisp, Roger Waters, Siouxsie Sioux.

for diferent uses: a tailor or a lampshade maker below street level under a mansion block; a studio over an embroiderer over a café. Tiny mews streets illed with work spaces are capped at their ends with cozy pubs that become raucous as Friday approaches. The scale and grain of the area is changing fast, though, as it “modernizes.”

Fitzrovia’s nooks and crannies: glorious Arts and Crafts in polychrome brick; Colville Place, one of many soulful narrow streets; once the haunt of George Orwell and Dylan Thomas, the Wheatsheaf caps a working mews street.

The Beige Holes of Modernization

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OBERT FITCH, in his 1993 book The Assassination of New York, wrote of the postindustrial city that it “is a mutation masquerading as a modernization.” The industrial city in the extensive phase of capitalism, in which labor, resources, and thus “surplus” wealth were extracted from far-flung empires and agricultural hinterlands, could aford the illusion of “inevitable” progress.

Earlier a more agrarian extensive capitalism had declared vast stretches of land “empty”—as terra nullius—to justify colonialism, simply erasing lives and cultures in the process. The Jefersonian grid is an emblem of that ideology of emptiness.

Now the postindustrial city is driven by intensive capitalism, which is forced to transform itself from within, shaping itself around markets and services that cannibalize the city.

Asset stripping in colonialism gridded vast terriFitzrovia’s urbanism is both the result of and tories, mapping them for exploitation. Now cities the reason for its particular sociality. Everywhere are turned inward, and the new terra nullius must diferent floors of the same building yield space be found within. All the nooks and crannies nec-

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TIM WATERMAN

goes on to comment that the area has always been marginal though at the heart of the West End. “The explanation for this must lie in the way the area was developed—mainly by piecemeal speculation over many years—and the resulting medley of diferent ownerships, tenancies, and leaseholders.”

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More views of Fitzrovia: Newman Passage, just north of the new Rathbone Square; an old lampshade maker’s sign on Whitfield Street; the BT Tower is visible along Charlotte Place.

essary to everyday life in urbanism are ironed out, and the Jefersonian grid manifests itself as vast floor plates: oice space and lateral apartments.

The ideology rationalizing these tyrannical spaces visualizes them as “open,” “democratic,” and “free” “spaces of engagement” just as the colonial grid was spuriously theorized as a guarantor of spatial equity. As the grid of extensive capitalism worked a mutation upon rural land, so the grid of intensive capitalism now skews the space of the city. As Darwin saw, however, mutation rarely leads to evolution.

A whole generation of architects and landscape architects have, as students, read Marc Augé’s 1995 book-length essay Non-Places, and yet ind themselves trapped in a system that endlessly replicates the model. The non-place is deined as a place of transit, a space that deies acts of dwelling, and is exempliied by the modern airport. “The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.” “Since non-places are there to be passed through, they are measured in units of time.”

The urban spaces within which these vast grids are being realized are a phenomenon I have come to think of as “beige holes.” Like black holes in the universe, they have the power to attract, compress, and trap money in the inancial system as black holes consume all matter in their supergravity. Beige, though, because driven by real estate imageability they must be styled to be sleek, tidy, and generic; currency which, like the Euro, must be all things to all people and therefore nothing.

Beige because they reflect the non-tastes of the elites in the FIRE (inance, insurance, real estate) sector. Beige because they must place the power of the transaction over local distinctiveness. Realtors and developers themselves call these places “safe-deposit boxes in the sky” or “concrete gold,” which clariies their function as inancial instruments rather than as places for living, working, or playing, or for dwelling.

The beige hole is a type of non-place—a place of transit. In this case the beige hole is a place of the transient wealthy and of money in transit—the units of time with which these spaces are measured are amortized in mortgages, counted in leasehold years, in annual contracts, in fluctuations of boom and bust. They are the relics of a inancial system in which transience itself is the operative factor. If money in the current system ever stopped for long enough, it would only take a moment’s examination to discover its value is baseless and placeless, a iction in motion, of motion. As Augé says, “the user of a non-place is in contractual relations with it (or with the powers that govern it),” and these contracts are temporal.

Beige holes are non-places that exist as records of transactions and contracts, as intangible and impermanent as flickering numbers on a stock market screen.

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ERTAIN PROJECTS should not shout,” says Eelco Hooftman of GROSS.MAX. landscape architects as he and his partner Nigel Sampey show me the small site at the center of the large new development at Fitzroy Place. “This is not a statement project.” Indeed, it is luxurious understatement as a cipher for a certain moneyed sophistication and the inancialized non-taste that characterizes the project. I have written scathingly about the architectural style of these developments in the past, which the architecture critic Owen Hatherley has described as “pseudomodernism” in his 2010 A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and which I have derided as blang— a mix of bland and bling. Fitzroy Place, launched in 2016, is a major full-city-block development on

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the 3.2-acre site of the former Middlesex Hospital, where many Fitzrovians both came into the world and left it (those leaving it including Rudyard Kipling and Peter Sellers). It is now home to Estée Lauder’s London oice and some of London’s most expensive apartments, starting at about $1.5 million for a one-bedroom flat (in Britain, price is calculated more by number of bedrooms than by square footage).

All that is left of the hospital is an exquisite chapel by the architect John Loughborough Pearson (designed 1891, completed 1929), and a street-length facade along the west side of the site, both exhibiting on their exteriors the very high-quality bricks, brickwork, and stone and stonework lavished on early 20th-century public projects in London.

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The landscape design at Fitzroy Place faced a huge challenge to step down the scale from the massive buildings to the precious chapel.

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Planters crowd the entrances at the north of the square.

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The square is busy with lunching workers on a sunny day.

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The Cor-Ten steel colonnade sketches in a more intimate overhead plane for Fitzroy Place.

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The chapel juts into the new square, but because it is so dwarfed by the scale of the surrounding buildings, it was clearly not possible to use it as the square’s focal point. A Cor-Ten steel colonnade and pergola, developed by GROSS.MAX. with the architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, help to step down the scale of the surrounding buildings to the chapel. Then the chapel is shrouded behind a screen of evergreen Magnolia grandiflora trees.

A stone sculpture (The One and the Many by Peter Randall-Page), suggesting a neolithic standing stone and etched with polyglot lettering, echoing the Rosetta stone housed at the nearby British Museum, serves to refocus the square, while further stepping the scale down to the human.

These are deft tricks, exercising the designers to new levels of virtuosity, but to ends that could have been avoided earlier in the design process.

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The plantings in the square have sufered since they were installed, and this may be the result of further tricks by the architects to appease the planners or the clients. It is my hunch that renderings of sun and shade might have been overly optimistic, and that the physic-garden plants chosen to reflect the site’s medical history simply aren’t getting enough sun. The plants that have flourished most are graceful multitrunk Amelanchier lamarckii, which have been placed in giant gunmetal-gray containers, and which all receive angular shafts of light longer into the afternoon, placed on the pedestrian lanes that serve the square. Elegant as they are, their body language is aggressive. They are placed as obstacles, as efective deterrents as beefy bouncers to physical and visual access into the site from the surrounding neighborhood. This is a clear statement that

HUFTON + CROW

Lawn and bench curve into one another to provide informal space for lounging and interaction below the new Facebook headquarters at Rathbone Square.

the pretensions to publicness expressed in the Here the gravest planning error was committed planning applications were the usual whitewash. early on, with a failure to provide a direct east– west pedestrian connection at the very north of Rathbone Square the site that would have created ease of passage ATHBONE SQUARE, just completed in for locals as well as new small retail possibilities.

2017, has become the new London headquar- Instead the route jogs south, frustrating access in ters for Facebook as part of a mixed commercial/ the same way the Amelanchier planters do at Fitzresidential complex. Its central gated square was roy Place, and the passage is constricted through designed by Gustafson Porter + Bowman, and the verdigris-green ceramic-clad gated tunnels. These surrounding buildings by Make Architects. The do have the efect of squeezing visitors just a bit square, like Fitzroy Place, opens up important so that the square appears to open out generously east–west pedestrian access in an area with a after they issue forth into the space. Inside the pronounced north–south grain. Here no beloved space, the building massing is more successful community building was cleared to create the site; than at Fitzroy Place. The buildings step down rather, a grim postal sorting oice and a barbed- to allow generous light in from the south, so the wire-frilled parking lot were the pre-existing con- prognosis for both the success of the plantings dition. It was a palpable relief when they were and the square’s actual and emotional warmth demolished. are better.

MARTINA FERRERA/MAKE ARCHITECTS

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Seating is similarly refined, stepping up and down at right angles to provide a maximum of

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There is a clear mismatch between the insubstantial building cladding and the very high quality and robust materials in the landscape.

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The narrow passage through which the square is entered is the right scale but the wrong form for Fitzrovia.

GUSTAFSON PORTER + BOWMAN, TOP; PATRICK COLLINS, BOTTOM

Donncha O Shea, who along with Mary Bowman designed the square, spoke proudly of the oblong rectangular fountains that organize two of the entrances to the square. “They celebrate the entrances and pull people in with the reflections and the sound of water.” Gustafson Porter + Bowman may well be the inest designers with water in Britain, and these fountains are no exception.

Each was tested extensively. “You have to test water—you can’t wait for day one,” says O Shea.

Testing began with foam and moved to stone, “each time becoming more real.” Visitors to the square reflexively dabble their ingers in the placid water as they pass, and it sheets elegantly down the fountains’ convoluted stone sides.

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sittable space and deining a dark grid against the light grid of the Canadian granite paving that establishes a rhythm with the building’s facades.

Here, though, the richness of the square’s materials is at odds with the building cladding, which, as does the cladding at Fitzroy Place, appears to be stretched as thinly as cling ilm across the surface of the buildings. Windows are set into metallic panels at Rathbone Square that possess the dull luster of a disposable aluminum turkey pan.

At the center of Rathbone Square, curving into the edge of Facebook’s oices, a crescent of lawn has been provided. Lawn is de rigueur in London squares, and in heritage squares is often a statutory requirement. Here it is intended as a catalyst for activity. “Private squares in London don’t support actual activity,” says O Shea, and time will tell

whether Rathbone Square, with its alluring water features, actually comes to serve as a community space or whether it merely serves as a place for the building’s workers to perch at lunch.

A World Less Beige

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HOPE I have not portrayed GROSS.MAX. and Gustafson Porter + Bowman as villains or failures. They are neither. Indeed, they are two of Britain’s most illustrious landscape architecture practices, stufed to bursting with talent, ambition, and verve. If there is villainy or failure, it is systemic, and bred in the bone of development processes that are conceived of irst and foremost as extractive and proit-driven. These forces also militate against artistry and urbanism, catering to generic international non-tastes and imageable outputs. William Morris, whose famous

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Rathbone Square soon after its opening.

Touching the fountain is nearly irresistible.

If we want a world less peppered with beige holes, then we will have to work with other professions and political and economic processes to transform development. There is hope here, with cooperation and communication improving year-on-year between architects, planners, and landscape architects, and with new models for development emerging in forms such as community land trusts. Then, perhaps, we can begin to make our cities more in ways that are genuinely wanted by those who authentically live in them.

TIM WATERMAN TEACHES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH AND AT THE BARTLETT, BOTH IN LONDON. HE IS COEDITOR OF THE RECENT BOOKS LANDSCAPE AND AGENCY: CRITICAL ESSAYS AND THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANDSCAPE AND FOOD. FIND HIM ON TWITTER @TIM_WATERMAN.

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MARTINA FERRERA/MAKE ARCHITECTS

furnishing company was located near Fitzrovia on several sites, diagnosed the same problems in his time in Hopes and Fears for Art, and the words are still true: “Only we must not lay the fault upon the builders, as some people seem inclined to do: they are our very humble servants, and will build what we ask for; remember, that rich men are not obliged to live in ugly houses, and yet you see they do; which the builders may be well excused for taking as a sign of what is wanted.”

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LEGEND CONTOURS BATHYMETRY BUILDING FOOTPRINTS LAND PARCELS 1777 BLASKOWITZ MAP SHORELINE

n a chilly Sunday a ernoon in the spring of 2016, a group of designers and preservation professionals wandered through one of Newport, Rhode Island’s oldest neighborhoods, visualizing what it would look like underwater. It wasn’t hard to imagine water flowing down the narrow streets and into the basements of the quaint, colonial-era homes located just blocks from Newport Harbor and a mere four feet above sea level. Some had already seen it.

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BALANCING ACT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS WORK TO KEEP HISTORY INTACT AS WATERS RISE.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

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NEWPORT RESTORATION FOUNDATION/ASHLEY BRAQUET

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND

The original shoreline of Newport, Rhode Island, as detailed in a plan from 1777. Today much of the bay has been filled in, yet flooding remains a serious threat to the city and its historic character.

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POINT NEIGHBORHOOD: IMPERVIOUS SURFACES AND GREEN SPACES

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Contours Building footprints NRF building footprints Land parcels 74 Bridge Street location Parks and open space Impervious surfaces Historic shoreline

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy sent floodwaters into many of the Point neighborhood’s historic homes, including 74 Bridge Street, a red-painted, two-story house originally built in the late 1720s. The basement flooded up to the first-floor framing and the kitchen took on at least seven inches of water.

Two years later, the Newport Restoration Foundation (NRF), a nonproit preservation group founded by Doris Duke in the 1960s, purchased the house at 74 Bridge Street. As the house of one of Newport’s most notable cabinetmakers, a Quaker named Christopher Townsend, it had sat for years at the top of the NRF’s list of most desirable historic Newport properties. It was an important acquisition for the NRF, which currently owns 78 properties throughout the city and helps fund their upkeep. But the organization also knew that 74 Bridge Street would flood again.

“It’s in the lowest point in the Point neighborhood —literally, the lowest topographical point,” says Shantia Anderheggen, NRF’s former director of preservation. With sea levels on the rise—and in Newport they already had risen 11 inches over the past century—it was a statistical certainty that what happened in 2012 would happen again. And

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it wasn’t just the Townsend residence. The entire Point neighborhood, which has one of the highest concentrations of colonial-era structures on the continent, was under siege from the sea.

Since the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, preservation decisions have tended to be made, out of necessity, case by case in response to speciic and often urgent threats.

But the regulations that govern historic resources make little provision for a changing environment. “Increasingly, we’re going to have to make decisions on such a large scale that our current practice of assessing each case individually is just not going to be practical anymore,” says Anthony Veerkamp, the director of programs for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab. “We’re going to need more clarity, and that’s likely going to mean more flexibility.”

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Impervious surfaces in and around Newport’s historic Point neighborhood exacerbate flooding.

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The Townsend residence at 74 Bridge Street, originally built in the 1720s, was flooded during Hurricane Sandy.

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Contours Bathymetry Building Footprint Land Parcels 74 Bridge Street Parks and Open Space 1-foot sea-level rise 3-foot sea-level rise 5-foot sea-level rise

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At the moment, owners of historic properties ind themselves caught between conflicting regulations.

In response to recent storms and rising sea levels, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been updating its flood maps. Properties that were not previously in a floodplain are now sometimes well below FEMA’s base flood elevation.

To qualify for flood insurance (or a mortgage, which requires flood insurance), the property may need to be elevated. But doing so could threaten the property’s place on the National Register, a distinction that can also make property owners eligible for crucial rehabilitation tax credits. Of course, equally important in a place like the Point is the urban fabric, which could be signiicantly disrupted by piecemeal resilience eforts.

In 2016, the NRF organized a conference called Keeping History Above Water. It took place over four days at the Newport Marriott two blocks from 74 Bridge Street. More than 400 people representing nearly 20 disciplines attended, some from as far as Iran. At the Townsend property, the NRF mounted an exhibition examining the threats the neighborhood house faced, as well as the problems that adaptation measures might cause.

At the heart of the conference was a single question: How do you weigh the need to adapt to the future against the imperative to preserve the past?

Or as Teresa Crean, a planner with the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center, put it, “How do you manage those structures with the fact that the floodplain is changing? Do you focus

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on making sure they’re flood-proof while preserving some aspect of historic integrity? Or do we say historic integrity is more important, they’re going to flood, and that’s just how it is?”

For the preservation profession, sea-level rise is a new and confounding problem, one that complicates an already complex decision-making matrix.

“We’re used to how water gets into buildings from the sky,” says Anderheggen, who now owns the consulting irm Preservation Strategies. The issue also has brought an army of new disciplines, such as climate science and oceanography, into the mix. “We’re used to dealing with developers, economists, architectural historians,” she says.

This tension is being felt throughout the preservation world, as sea-level rise, exacerbated by global climate change, threatens to damage and even erase coastal historic resources. In Newport alone, there are 548 buildings that are either listed or eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places that are also in a flood zone, according to the Coastal Resources Center. For many, there is an acute sense that history itself is at stake. An individual building can be fortiied or moved, but what about the historic landscape? What about historic downtowns or entire neighborhoods like the Point? It’s one thing to propose that communities retreat from the coast.

It’s another to accept that when they do, they won’t be taking their history with them.

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Sea-level rise is also a multifaceted threat: There is, yes, the danger that creeping floodwaters bring, but there is also the challenge posed by adaptation measures themselves. To make a building or landscape more resilient often necessitates some degree of change to the historic fabric or landscape character. How much change can a property endure before it no longer retains its historic signiicance? And should changes brought

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Historic coastal properties like 74 Bridge Street are highly susceptible to flooding caused by storm events and sea-level rise.

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In Newport, there are 548 properties that are listed or eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places that are also located within a flood zone.

on by resilience eforts be weighed diferently the past one and a half centuries. Not a single from those proposed for other reasons? board remains from the original wood structure, however. By 1890, Atlantic City was already on Randall Mason, an associate professor of historic its fourth iteration of the walkway. Many of the preservation at the University of Pennsylvania boardwalk’s now iconic elements—for instance, School of Design, says his ield has undergone a the wood decking’s herringbone pattern—weren’t fundamental shift in recent years, in part owing added until 1916. “It’s been destroyed and rebuilt to these types of challenges. “It’s the diference numerous times, but it always serves the same between objects and systems,” Mason explains. cultural function,” Mason says.

“Objects are supposed to stay the way they are, and if they’re broken, you can ix them. Systems Of course, there are landmarks, like the Statue of are always changing. And landscapes, by their very Liberty, that will be preserved at all costs. But in deinition, are always evolving, always changing. So many places, Mason says, “there’s going to have the approach that more progressive historic preser- to be a give-and-take between the cultural values vation thinking adopts is about managing change.” and the ecological and economic values.”

Mason points to his hometown of Atlantic City, New Jersey, as an example. The boardwalk that runs most of the length of the barrier island city has existed in some form or another for

Around the country, landscape architects are inding themselves in the midst of, and often guiding, these negotiations. This past November, CMG Landscape Architecture was selected as part of

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transit systems, and other critical infrastructure will almost certainly sufer signiicant damage.

To prevent such a catastrophe, the Port of San Francisco is undertaking a huge, multiphase reengineering project, led by the Netherlands-based consultancy Arcadis and CH2M, with CMG in charge of urban design. The team is also in charge of retroitting the Embarcadero to respond to sea-level rise.

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a team to redesign a portion of San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a three-mile-long waterfront district that includes a number of historic piers and wharf buildings, several of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The area is vulnerable not only to rising sea levels but future earthquakes, which threaten to compromise the existing seawall, the foundation of the entire waterfront. If the seawall fails, roads, buildings,

Disconnected Areas > 1 Acre

San Francisco’s Embarcadero includes historic piers and wharf buildings.

It is currently being retrofitted to better withstand a seismic threat, as well as sea-level rise.

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Project area for the Embarcadero seawall retrofit, showing the peninsula’s original shoreline.

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COURTESY PORT OF SAN FRANCISCO

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THERE IS THE DANGER OF CREEPING FLOODWATERS. THERE IS ALSO THE CHALLENGE POSED BY ADAPTATION MEASURES THEMSELVES.

COURTESY PORT OF SAN FRANCISCO

Already, certain areas are inundated during abnormally high tides, known as king tides. The task is to develop a more resilient waterfront that also retains the integrity of its historic fabric. How to do both is the question, says Kevin Conger, FASLA, a founding partner of CMG. “We don’t have the answers,” he says. “There are going to be trade-ofs, inevitably.”

How to balance those trade-ofs is something property owners and preservation professionals will need help with in coming years. Thus far guidance has been limited. The planning frameworks and design guidelines that do exist are often geared toward private property owners and focus on historic structures, ignoring landscape elements and the cumulative impact of individual adaptations. Of course, a one-size-its-all approach is at odds with the most basic premises of historic preservation, and to some degree every climate adaptation plan will be unique. But city oicials and policy makers are also going to need new tools if they are going to respond to sea-level rise in culturally sensitive ways, Conger says.

Three thousand miles away in North Carolina, a researcher named Erin Seekamp thinks one of those tools might just be an algorithm.

Seekamp is an associate professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University. She is also the creator of the Optimal Preservation Model, or OptiPres, a tool designed to help municipalities and government agencies like the National Park Service (NPS) balance preservation values with the realities of sea-level rise and thinly stretched budgets. Seekamp got the idea for OptiPres after realizing that NPS had a method for assessing a landscape’s vulnerability to sea-level rise but no way to determine how adaptation measures will afect the integrity of its historic and cultural resources.

According to NPS, $40 billion worth of cultural resources and park infrastructure is at risk from sea-level rise. Given that the agency already faces a backlog of deferred maintenance, park managers will have to decide which resources to save and

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which to let wash away. OptiPres allows for an informed sort of triage. It works by using an optimization algorithm to evaluate the impact of every possible climate adaptation action—including elevation and relocation—on a particular resource’s historic signiicance. Each scenario is evaluated over a speciied planning horizon and budget, and the result is a series of data visualizations that provide the “optimal” approach for each building modeled—in other words, those actions that will provide the most resilience but do the least damage. Seekamp spent two years developing the framework with input from NPS, the U.S.

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Geological Survey, and state historic preservation TOP AND OPPOSITE oices from around the country, developing quan- Intense tropical tiiable metrics for a historic resource’s character, storms and sea-level rise threaten historic condition, and potential use.

In 2017, OptiPres was piloted at Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina, a chain of barrier islands that is home to herds of wild horses as well as two historic villages that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The islands are managed by NPS and, according to an assessment conducted by a team at Western Carolina University, are at extreme risk from sea-level rise.

districts at North Carolina’s Cape Lookout National Seashore.

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A researcher at North Carolina State University is using an algorithm to evaluate adaptation measures for historic buildings.

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OptiPres was used to analyze 17 historic buildings over a 30-year span. Initially, Seekamp had planned to include every cultural resource within the national seashore’s boundary, but as she and the team developed its framework, assigning values and weights to everything from a resource’s uniqueness to its spatial signiicance, they kept having to scale it back. “We got to the two historic districts, and then we couldn’t include the landscape elements because it takes so much to build the model,” she says. The districts were too large still, and the team eventually selected a representative sample of buildings within them. Even at 1 CASABLANCA

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that scale, Seekamp says, the model requires a supercomputer. “It takes three days to run the model on one budget scenario,” she says.

At Cape Lookout, OptiPres provided NPS with a breakdown of when and how best to take action for each of the modeled buildings. One thing that surprised Seekamp was that the action “Document and Monitor”—essentially letting nature take its course—was never recommended by the model. “It has such a negative impact on signiicance across the landscape to lose a building,” she says. This summer, Seekamp is taking OptiPres to Gulf Islands National Seashore in Florida, to test how well the model performs in a diferent context.

In general, planners and preservation oicers seem to be undergoing their own adaptation processes, evolving to handle the newfound challenges of their own profession while also responding to the needs of LIFESAVING the other. If resilience planners want STATION more flexibility in adapting historic resources, preservation professionals want greater consideration of their community’s cultural heritage. Madeleine Helmer, a planner and historian at AKRF in Philadelphia, is more optimistic. “There doesn’t have to be this tension,” she says emphatically. “Integrating cultural heritage and adaptation planning can lead to more holistic, place-based, and effective adaptation eforts. Our adaptation strategies can be marks upon the landscape that will become meaningful in the future.”

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a heck of a lot more planning and thinking about adaptation strategies than actually implementing them,” says Veerkamp, of the National Trust. But a project in Saint Augustine, Florida, initiated as far back as 2001, ofers some lessons in how to balance these competing needs. It also shows how doing so might just produce a landscape that is greater than the sum of its parts.

There are few places more historic and more susceptible to sea-level rise than Saint Augustine.

Founded by the Spanish in 1565, it is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United States. In fact, the city’s form is so historically signiicant that the original town plan is a National Historic Landmark. But the low-lying city is also highly susceptible to coastal flooding, which puts it at ground zero for the potential obliteration of historic treasures at the hand of sea-level rise. In 2001, long before sea-level rise entered the public consciousness, a 100-foot section of Saint Augustine’s Avenida Menendez seawall collapsed in the Still, completed flood-mitigation projects that also wake of Tropical Storm Gabrielle. The city hired preserve historic resources are few. “There’s been Halback Design Group (now Marquis Latimer

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A portion of the original coquina seawall in Saint Augustine, Florida, which was preserved in situ.

CITY OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

In other words, the role of the designer really hasn’t changed. Turning the various constraints of a site into assets—one by one—has long been the landscape architect’s job. Rising sea levels and the dangers they pose are just another set of constraints. At the same time, sea-level rise has put the profession’s proile on a similarly upward trajectory, and the specter of more frequent flooding has only made green stormwater infrastructure and other landscape interventions all the more sensible, especially given their unobtrusive nature. A bioswale in the backyard or along the street is less disruptive than elevating the street or the properties along it. On a larger scale, landscape restorations, such as that of the Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve, part of the historic landscape along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia, become doubly important, bringing a much-diminished ecosystem back to what it once was and creating a more resilient and regenerative landscape bufer in the process.

CITY OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

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In 2014, a new seawall was constructed roughly 12 feet out from the original, creating a new, wider waterfront promenade.

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The original seawall (at right) now serves as an artifact and seating wall.

+ Halback) to develop a conceptual design for historic preservation oice would have to sign the stretch of waterfront in question, including of on whatever the team proposed. Halback’s a new seawall. solution was to preserve the existing seawall in situ and build a new, higher seawall roughly 12 The old seawall, however, which remained intact feet seaward, creating a new waterfront promalong a portion of the waterfront, was a historic enade, with the old seawall visible and serving artifact, constructed by West Point cadets in the as a seating wall.

1830s out of coquina stone, a soft material made out of crushed clam shells. Besides the wall’s This is what was eventually constructed, though own historic signiicance, the project site also it took more than a decade to be realized (and fell within the boundaries of the Saint Augus- by then Halback was not involved in the inal tine Town Plan Historic District. Because the design). Interestingly, it was the seawall’s historic coquina seawall would continue to degrade, it signiicance that prompted the creation of the was determined that a new seawall was needed. promenade. Had the seawall been just any kind But Fred Halback, FASLA, a senior principal of concrete retaining wall in a less historic part at Marquis Latimer + Halback, also knew that of the city, Halback says the city likely would the area’s landmark status meant that the state have built the new seawall on the alignment,

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RESILIENCE PLANNERS WANT MORE FLEXIBILITY IN ADAPTING HISTORIC RESOURCES.

Seventeen years after Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the original Avenida Menendez seawall is celebrated even as a new seawall protects it—and the city—from degradation. Halback’s irm is continuing to navigate the tensions between historic preservation and sea-level rise, most recently on a new mixed-use project within Saint Augustine’s historic downtown, where the design team helped mitigate potential flooding to such a degree that FEMA permitted the building to be built at an elevation a foot lower than recommended so that it would better blend with the historic streetscape.

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COURTESY PORT OF SAN FRANCISCO

especially since expanding seaward required permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies. In fact, many people originally told him the plan was infeasible. “But our whole premise was that we have to move the seawall out because it’s the only way that we can protect the artifact,” Halback says. “And we used, quite candidly, the fact that we had this historic artifact that we wanted to preserve and enhance and interpret as our rationalization and our argument for ultimately getting all the diferent regulatory agencies to allow us to move the seawall out.”

THE EMBARCADERO

A king tide tops the seawall along San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The district is currently undergoing a major redesign.

Both projects are demonstrative of the pivotal role that landscape architecture can play in protecting historic resources from sea-level rise. “Landscape architects should be at the forefront of this discussion,” Halback says. “Because it’s not just about a building floating in space.”

CMG Landscape Architecture is at the beginning of a long journey toward its own inevitable reconciliation. Funded by a $425 million bond expected to pass this coming November, the irst phase of the Embarcadero project could set the bar for resilience planning in San Francisco. Conger has many questions, but he is not dissuaded. He says his job is to synthesize the needs and desires of the community with the technical requirements of the engineering.

“And then we’re going to ind a solution that tries to do it all,” he says. “We have to make it seismically safe, and protect it from sea-level rise, and make a fantastic urban waterfront, and protect the historic resources. We have to do it all. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

TIMOTHY A. SCHULER WRITES ABOUT DESIGN, ECOLOGY, AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. HE LIVES IN HONOLULU.

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COURTESY ALEXANDER ROBINSON, ASLA

Alexander Robinson’s Rapid Landscape Prototyping Machine (RLPM) is a highly complex instrument.

Using an array of analytical and modeling technologies, including digital scanning and robotic sand modeling, the RLPM investigates opportunities for designed landscapes. Robinson, ASLA, an assistant professor in the landscape architecture and urbanism program at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, has worked on speculative projects for the Los Angeles River and Owens Lake in southeastern California. His forthcoming book, The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles, is a wide-ranging analysis of the lake’s landscape futures. Robinson’s mobile version of the RLPM, seen here, generates surprisingly artful landscape prototypes of dust mitigation strategies for Owens Lake. It also makes “speculative postcards”—a tool for engaging the public in the design process, which Robinson calls “a fun public outreach component.” It’s kind of a contraption, but in the best way.

Look for it on tour this fall.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 125

THE BELGIAN ARTIST LISE DUCLAUX’S BROOKLYN RESIDENCY REVELS IN THE FREE SPIRIT OF UNLOVED PLANTS.

BY TOM STOELKER

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© LISE DUCLAUX 2018, COURTESY GALERIE LMNO. WORK WAS CREATED BY DUCLAUX IN RESIDENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO & CURATORIAL PROGRAM FROM JANUARY 1 THROUGH JUNE 30 AND SPONSORED BY LA FONDATION POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN CLAUDINE ET JEAN MARC SALOMON.

THE FREEDOM OF WEEDS

LEFT

WILD CARROT (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN), INK ON PAPER, 2018

W

HEN LISE DUCLAUX ARRIVED for a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York, it was a particularly harsh winter. Nevertheless, the artist frequently walked the streets of the industrial neighborhood bordering Newtown Creek, a designated Superfund site.

mix and change. For me these [drawings] are images of tolerance, of acceptance, and of diversity.”

Duclaux photographed weeds along her walks, then would go back to her studio and execute detailed drawings of the captured images, including trash that wove its way into the composition.

She researched the form of the roots beneath the concrete and then used Copic ink and Posca paint to record it all. She would often send the images to Uli Lorimer, the curator of the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

She says that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the irst laws written to forbid invasive plants also happened to coincide with laws that limited immigrants from entering the country.

To Duclaux, weeds are not unlike her, a visitor from a foreign land. Though the Belgiumbased artist had no intention of overstaying her residency, which ended in June, she found the scrappy plants representative of an age-old debate that America returns to now and again: the foreigner who is at one point welcomed, but later considered a threat.

Weeds decide for themselves where they will grow, like homesteaders settling in undesirable areas, or hardscrabble New Yorkers making do.

“It’s really fashionable to do the native garden right now, which is a little bit strange for me, especially in New York,” she says. “We accept that people mix together, but we don’t accept that plants can

She calls the weeds “spontaneous,” “autonomous,” and “cosmopolitan.” She notes, though, that few weeds can be found amid the canyons of Manhattan during the winter.

“I want to work with plants that are not behind the fences, like they are in jail, where humans decide where they want the plants, which can stay, and which must go,” she says.

“We all the time speak about freedom, freedom of speech, and then the plants can’t have the freedom?” she asks. “We know that it’s a weed, and we decide that it’s not pretty. In a way, nobody looks at these as wild plants. But who decides what is pretty?”

TOM STOELKER WRITES ABOUT ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND ACADEMIA. HE LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY.

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© LISE DUCLAUX 2018, COURTESY GALERIE LMNO. WORK WAS CREATED BY DUCLAUX IN RESIDENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO & CURATORIAL PROGRAM FROM JANUARY 1 THROUGH JUNE 30 AND SPONSORED BY LA FONDATION POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN CLAUDINE ET JEAN MARC SALOMON.

COMMON REED AND OTHERS WITH GARBAGE (ALIEN, INVASIVE, COSMOPOLITAN), INK AND PAINT ON PAPER, 2018 RIGHT

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RIGHT

WHITE OLDFIELD ASTER WITH GARBAGE (NATIVE), INK AND PAINT ON PAPER, 2018

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 129

ABOVE

WHITE MULBERRY (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN), INK ON PAPER, 2018 RIGHT

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© LISE DUCLAUX 2018, COURTESY GALERIE LMNO. WORK WAS CREATED BY DUCLAUX IN RESIDENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO & CURATORIAL PROGRAM FROM JANUARY 1 THROUGH JUNE 30 AND SPONSORED BY LA FONDATION POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN CLAUDINE ET JEAN MARC SALOMON.

GOOSEGRASS ROOTS BIRD’S EYE VIEW (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN), INK ON PAPER, 2018

LEFT

COMMON REED AND OTHERS WITH GARBAGE #02 (ALIEN, INVASIVE, COSMOPOLITAN), INK AND PAINT ON PAPER, 2018

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 131

ABOVE

FOXTAIL GRASS WITH GARBAGE (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN, INVASIVE), INK AND PAINT ON PAPER, 2018

ABOVE

SEASIDE GOLDENROD (NATIVE), INK ON PAPER, 2018

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© LISE DUCLAUX 2018, COURTESY GALERIE LMNO. WORK WAS CREATED BY DUCLAUX IN RESIDENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO & CURATORIAL PROGRAM FROM JANUARY 1 THROUGH JUNE 30 AND SPONSORED BY LA FONDATION POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN CLAUDINE ET JEAN MARC SALOMON.

LEFT

GOOSEFOOT WITH GARBAGE (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN), INK AND COLORED PENCILS ON PAPER, 2018

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 133

GOLDENROD AND OTHERS WITH GARBAGE (NATIVE, COSMOPOLITAN), INK AND PAINT ON PAPER, 2018

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© LISE DUCLAUX 2018, COURTESY GALERIE LMNO. WORK WAS CREATED BY DUCLAUX IN RESIDENCE AT THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO & CURATORIAL PROGRAM FROM JANUARY 1 THROUGH JUNE 30 AND SPONSORED BY LA FONDATION POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN CLAUDINE ET JEAN MARC SALOMON.

LEFT

RIGHT

WILD CARROT, BIRDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EYE VIEW (ALIEN, COSMOPOLITAN), INK ON PAPER, 2018

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 135

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/

BOOKS DREAMS AND REGRETS SHOPPING TOWN: DESIGNING THE CITY IN SUBURBAN AMERICA

BY VICTOR GRUEN, EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY ANETTE BALDAUF; MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2017; 325 PAGES, $29.95.

REVIEWED BY KELLY COMRAS, FASLA

V

ictor D. Gruen (1903–1980) was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, a powerful visionary who combined social criticism, persuasive charm, ambition, and talent. Known as the father of the shopping mall, he envisioned a cure for the banality of postwar American suburbia and neglected city centers that profoundly altered the landscape of postwar city development. He suggested “shopping towns,” new community centers that would contain a rich mix of civic and commercial spaces and activities, and the introduction of pedestrian zones within the core of older city centers. Later in life, he criticized that his ideas had been co-opted by developers, commercialized by economic, political, and cultural forces beyond his control, which thereby emerged on the postwar landscape as an unintended archetype: the enclosed, inwardfacing, single-purpose, multilevel, two-anchor-departmentstore shopping center.

of her discovery of Gruen’s memoirs (housed in the Library of Congress) and explores the context of consumerism and suburbanization during the postwar era in which he worked.

Gruen’s memoir is a combined autobiography and account of his perceptions about architecture, urban planning, and the environment. Born Viktor David Grünbaum in 1903, Gruen grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the city of Vienna. He played a prominent role in the socialist youth movement in the early 1920s and was part of a radical cultural environment that sought social change. From 1926 to 1934 he became deeply involved in the Political Cabaret, a theatrical troupe that wrote and performed political satire as a form of social critique. During this time Gruen developed a successful architectural practice remodeling apartments and designing shop fronts and interiors, and he began thinking about what role architecture might play in “the development of a comGruen has left us with an impressive number of writings munity and creative life.” about his work (including the well-known The Heart of Our Cities), and two pertinent books have tackled appraisals of his After Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Gruen work—Alex Wall’s Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City and his irst wife, Alice (Lizzie) Kardos, fled to the United (2005) and M. Jefrey Hardwick’s Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, States. Once there, he kept his promise to fellow Political CabaArchitect of an American Dream (2004). But Anette Baldauf’s ret refugees and resurrected their Viennese theater group on new translation from German of Gruen’s dictated memoirs, Broadway in New York. The Viennese Refugee Artists Group Shopping Town, presents us with the rare opportunity to read was a success, but Gruen’s irst architectural commission in this icon’s own end-of-life account and assessment of his America, a design for the Lederer store on Fifth Avenue in legacy. In her preface, Baldauf provides a fascinating account 1939, had recently drawn praise and shown Gruen that “there

136 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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INSTEAD OF CREATING COHESIVE COMMUNITIES, HIS IDEALISTIC VISION FOR THE SHOPPING MALL ULTIMATELY FAILED ITS ORIGINAL INTENT.

was a lack of individuality, originality, and inventiveness in the ield of retail and commercial construction.” He determined to pursue architecture.

ABOVE

Victor Gruen in 1946 with a model for Milliron’s department store in Los Angeles.

Over the next decade Gruen partnered with the talented interior designer Elsie Krummeck. They married and relocated to Los Angeles, where they worked together on 11 branches of the California clothing chain Grayson’s, then went on to design a number of department stores for R. H. Macy’s, Joseph Magnin, and Milliron’s, and commercial buildings for Tishman. Their business flourished, owing in part to innovations contributed

by Krummeck, including an original submission to Architectural Forum in 1943 for a grand interpretation of a future postwar city. By 1948 they had two children, and Krummeck was less involved with their practice. The marriage foundered.

Gruen continued exploring ideas about the possibilities of designing an all-encompassing city plan. He realized he would

138 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

Gruen’s next project, Southdale, became his most famous.

Developed by the Dayton brothers, this was a fully enclosed, climate-controlled, indoor shopping center with 72 shops and two anchor department stores. Plentiful parking surrounded the center. The exterior of the building was without windows, and all activity was focused inward. Stores were located on two levels with escalators, which densiied the shopping experience. A central garden courtyard was flooded with natural light from upper north-facing windows, making it possible to plant large trees. A goldish pond, an aviary, and a garden café further enhanced the area. Public reception was sensational. But within a decade Gruen ruefully acknowledged that what had once been a “new building type...became common worldwide.”

Gruen saw the suburban shopping mall become ubiquitous.

In the ifth chapter of his memoir he analyzed the reasons why: Instead of creating cohesive communities, his idealistic vision for the shopping mall ultimately failed its original intent.

COURTESY GRUEN ASSOCIATES

need to build his business to include an interdisciplinary team of architects, planners, engineers, artists, and business professionals who would work together, and he began looking for an extraordinary client who could make his ideas possible.

In the early 1950s he designed an open-air shopping center called Northland near Detroit for J. L. Hudson’s. The center was conceived as a core for surrounding homes, oices, hotels, and shops. All were to be developed under the control of Hudson’s, including strict tenant controls and installation of original sculpture to assure a look of quality. Gruen also advocated for cooperative arrangements with local transportation authorities to improve traic. All amenities were designed to improve the quality of life for residents in the surrounding suburban areas.

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/BOOKS

HIS WIVES WERE A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION AND SUPPORT FOR HIS PROFESSIONAL AMBITIONS.

Victor Gruen’s whimsical sketch of the architect/client relationship, 1959.

BELOW

Elsie Krummeck and Victor Gruen in Los Angeles, circa 1941.

140 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

and some of his projects, such as Faneuil Hall in Boston, were unquestionably successful.

As his retirement in 1968 from Victor Gruen Associates neared, Gruen “declared war on the automobile.” He saw that fragmented cities necessitated the proliferation of individual car ownership. As an architect who valued “ine-grained integration,” he made the case for reducing this “forced mobility.”

He also became an advocate for the architect’s place in environmental planning and established a foundation to further public education about this then-new concept. The foundation’s work and his consulting activities refocused in Europe, and he returned to live in Vienna until his death in 1980.

Gruen describes his autobiographical record as an ergography (from the Greek ergos), an accounting of his work. To the extent that his memoir focused on his career, Baldauf wisely saw it to include a supplemental chapter written by his son, Michael Gruen, which reveals personal and family details that link his father’s private and professional life. In an additional chapter, his daughter, Peggy Gruen, writes a gentle defense against Gruen’s harsh representations of her mother, Elsie Krummeck, Gruen’s partner and second wife, raising issues that Baldauf identiies as “delicate questions about the erasure of women from dominant storytelling—and from history books.” In 1962, Gruen’s third wife, Lazette van Houten, died suddenly. He married his fourth wife, Kemija Salihefendic, the following year. Gruen’s ergography lets us know that his marriages were intimately bound up in his working process and that his wives were a source of inspiration and support for his professional ambitions. But, as was his intent, the priority his memoir gives to his work leaves many unanswered questions about the individual roles each of his wives played in the development of his career.

COURTESY GRUEN ASSOCIATES, TOP; COURTESY PEGGY GRUEN, BOTTOM

ABOVE

He criticized developers for co-opting his original ideas and deleting noncommercial space, making malls into selling machines. He came to see these single-purpose centers, taking up great swaths of land and wholly dependent upon automobiles, as an environmental sacriice. He also realized that suburban malls actually hastened decentralization and fragmentation of the city centers, and blamed developers for building “gigantic shopping malls on the outskirts of cities [that] have made the city centers into empty shells.” And so he turned his eforts to a reexamination of urban renewal, laying out a core group of principles based upon memories of his beloved Vienna. In the irst of these plans, for the city of Fort Worth, Texas, these principles included the removal and rerouting of automobile traic from the city core to either underground or concentric ring roads surrounding the core; the repurposing of land in the core, which had previously been devoted to the automobile, to add amenities such as parks, squares, and promenades; and the introduction of local and express public transportation that would radiate out in all directions. Gruen included an analysis of the likelihood of successful revitalization based upon a comparison of actual projects within democratic, autocratic, and communist political systems (the United States, Iran, and Russia) and was forced to conclude that each project was subject to inancial, political, and public input in varying degrees. None worked perfectly well. While the weight of his disillusionment was palpable, his ideas concerning revitalization to invigorate moribund city centers remained influential,

/BOOKS

LEFT

An architectural model of Gruen’s Northland Center.

The mall, built in Southfield, Michigan, opened in 1954.

RIGHT

An interior view of Gruen’s Southdale Center mall in Edina, Minnesota, circa 1957.

Baldauf probes the myriad forces that shaped Gruen’s approach to architecture in her concluding chapter, “Consumed?” Given Gruen’s intelligence, talent, and humanitarian intentions, her careful analysis provides us with the context to understand the unintended consequences of his creation. She traces his early successes in the design of retail stores with arcades, transparency, and theatrical lighting where “he deined retail space as performance space,” and she reminds us of his commitment to the theater, which provided him a forum to expose discrepancies between social ideals and realities. We come to understand that a rich fabric of prewar urban life in Vienna propelled Gruen to search for a similar sense of place in his new American home, a place that ofered the pedestrian an experience of intimacy, cultural variety, and diversity of activities. And we learn how the translation of those ideals collided with postwar consumerism, fetishization of the automobile, suburbanization, racial segregation, gender isolation, and the disintegration of inner cities.

Noting that critics now call the shopping mall “the death knell of the city,” Baldauf rightly wonders why the archetype remains so popular and concludes that these malls of “containment, control, and consumerism” provide shoppers the opportunity to see and be seen and may provide opportunities for limited social interaction.

to public transit, and grappling with issues surrounding the hardening of income stratiication, such as afordable housing and housing for the homeless.

Baldauf’s translation allows us to see the intelligence, talent, and humanitarian intentions that Gruen brought to his original ideas about how to create vibrant civic and commercial spaces. These ideas, along with his analysis of the failures of imperfectly implemented plans and unintended consequences of his creation, are worth careful study. We should pay special attention to Gruen’s advocacy for “ine-grained integration” as we embark upon a reevaluation of the role of the shopping mall because the news is not all bad. Public reaction to the closure of a local mall in a Los Angeles Times headline, for example, recently proclaimed, “Once L.A.’s hottest mall, the Westside Pavilion is dying, and shoppers are bummed” (italics added). This smaller shopping mall is manufactured private commercial space, and it is a long way from Gruen’s idealistic memories of urban prewar Vienna, but it is located within walking distance from several surrounding neighborhoods, includes community amenities, and is adjacent to a diverse mix of commercial shops, restaurants, and a large park.

Dismayed supporters say that the mall functions as a cohesive center, and they charge that this valuable community asset is being The timing of Baldauf’s publication of Shopping Town could lost. They might be right. And if they are, so was Victor Gruen. not have been more apposite. The shopping mall as a major element within our collective cultural landscape is currently KELLY COMRAS, FASLA, IS THE PRINCIPAL OF KCLA. SHE PRACTICES IN PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA. HER BOOK ON THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT RUTH experiencing a signiicant reexamination. This reassessment SHELLHORN WAS PUBLISHED IN 2016 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS comes at a time when cities are reprioritizing commitments IN ASSOCIATION WITH LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE HISTORY.

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COURTESY GRUEN ASSOCIATES

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BOOKS OF INTEREST “PLANS SHOULD HAVE EXPIRATION DATES WHEN THEY NEED TO BE RENEWED OR COMPLETELY BEGUN AGAIN.”

RESILIENCE FOR ALL: STRIVING FOR EQUITY THROUGH COMMUNITY DRIVEN DESIGN

MAKING PLANS: HOW TO ENGAGE WITH LANDSCAPE, DESIGN, AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

BY BARBARA BROWN WILSON; WASHINGTON, D.C.: ISLAND PRESS, 2018; 232 PAGES, $35.

BY FREDERICK R. STEINER; AUSTIN, TEXAS: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2018; 208 PAGES, $27.95.

Often the people who could most beneit from community planning are the least served by traditional processes of community engagement. “The result is irrelevant public infrastructure at best, and resident displacement at worst,” writes Barbara Brown Wilson, an assistant professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia. Her book ofers alternative methods with case studies of community-driven projects in cities across the United States, including parklets in San Francisco, public art to brighten Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the post-Katrina restoration of a bayou neighborhood in East Biloxi, Mississippi.

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THE MOUNTAINS THAT REMADE AMERICA: HOW SIERRA NEVADA GEOLOGY IMPACTS MODERN LIFE

BY CRAIG H. JONES; OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2017; 358 PAGES, $29.95.

This book serves both as a deep dive into how the Sierra Nevada range was formed (Jones is a geology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and the mountains’ importance in American history (the Gold Rush, the preservation of Yellowstone and Yosemite, and more). It also contains the occasional odd, personal anecdote: Once, on a mountain trail, Jones says, he left a note about forgotten gear for hikers behind him by writing on Tootsie Roll wrappers with a pine needle “pen” using “ink” made from dampened dust.

Frederick R. Steiner, FASLA, has written this book, aimed at students and other novice planners, as a stepby-step, illustrated guide with an emphasis on his own work in Austin, Texas. He breaks down the tasks of planning into discrete steps: setting goals, understanding the landscapes, and discovering constraints, among others. One important point Steiner makes is that wise planning must incorporate eventual change.

“Plans should have expiration dates when they need to be renewed or completely begun again,” he writes.

“This is my kind of plan: a framework that adjusts to what goes awry, but helps move us forward to a better future.”

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/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 Acker-Stone Industries Inc. American Sports Builders Association Amish Country Gazebos AMP c/o Volt Lighting Aquatix by Landscape Structures ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO ASLA EXPO Promotion ASLA Online Learning Berliner Play Equipment Corporation Campania International, Inc. Cell-Tek Geosynthetics, LLC Classic Recreation Systems, Inc. Columbia Cascade Company Country Casual Teak DeepStream Designs Dekorra Products DOGIPOT Doty & Sons Concrete Products DuMor, Inc. Earthscape Easi-Set Buildings emuamericas, llc Envirospec, Inc. Equiparc Ernst Conservation Seeds Eurocobble Exterus Outdoor Fermob USA Forms+Surfaces GAF - Streetbond Goric Marketing Group Inc. Gothic Arch Greenhouses Green Theory Design Inc. Greenfields Outdoor Fitness Greenform LLC greenscreen HADDONSTONE Hanover Architectural Products, Inc. Holm/Hunter Huntco Supply, LLC Hunter Industries Incorporated International Society of Arboriculture Invisible Structures, Inc. Iron Age Designs Ironsmith, Inc. Kafka Granite Keystone Keystone Ridge Designs, Inc. Kichler Landscape Lighting Kornegay Design Landscape Forms Landscape Structures, Inc. Livin the Dog Life Longwood Gardens Madrax Maglin Site Furniture Inc. McNichols Company Meteor Lighting Most Dependable Fountains Otterbine Barebo, Inc. Paloform Permaloc Aluminum Edging Petersen Concrete Leisure Products Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc. Plant It Right Planted Earth Landscaping Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice Planterworx Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

QCP Salsbury Industries Shade Systems, Inc. Sitecra Sitescapes, Inc. Soil Retention Products Sterling Lighting Sternberg Lighting Structureworks Fabrication Superior Concrete Products Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging Tensile Shade Products, LLC Thomas Steele Tiger Deck Tournesol Siteworks/Planter Technology Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock TUUCI USA U.S. Green Building Council Unilock, Ltd. Victor Stanley, Inc. Volt Lighting VORTEX USA Walpole Outdoors LLC Water Odyssey Waterplay Solutions Corp.

Wausau Tile Whitacre Greer

158 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

WEBSITE www.ackerstone.com www.sportsbuilders.org www.amishgazebos.com www.amplighting.com www.playlsi.com www.aslameeting.com www.advertise.asla.org/expo www.learn.asla.org www.berliner-playequipment.com www.campaniainternational.com www.celltekdirect.com www.classicrecreation.com www.timberform.com www.countrycasual.com www.deepstreamdesigns.com www.dekorraproducts.com www.dogipot.com www.dotyconcrete.com www.dumor.com www.earthscape.ca www.easisetbuildings.com www.emuamericas.com www.envirospecinc.com www.equiparc.com www.ernstseed.com www.eurocobble.com www.exterusoutdoor.com www.fermobusa.com www.forms-surfaces.com www.gaf.com www.goric.com www.gothicarchgreenhouses.com www.greentheorydist.com www.greenfieldsfitness.com www.green-form.com www.greenscreen.com www.haddonstone.com www.hanoverpavers.com www.hunterindustries.com www.huntco.com www.hunterindustries.com www.isa-arbor.com www.invisiblestructures.com www.ironagegates.com www.ironsmith.biz www.kafkagranite.com www.keystonewalls.com www.keystoneridgedesigns.com www.kichler.com www.landscapeforms.com www.landscapeforms.com www.playlsi.com www.livinthedoglife.com www.longwoodgardens.org www.madrax.com www.maglin.com www.mcnichols.com www.meteor-lighting.com www.mostdependable.com www.otterbine.com www.paloform.com www.permaloc.com www.petersenmfg.com www.americaspremierpaver.com www.plantitright.com www.plantedearthlandcaping.com www.hooksandlattice.com www.planterworx.com www.poligon.com www.quickcrete.com www.mailboxes.com www.shadesystemsinc.com www.site-cra .com www.sitescapesonline.com www.soilretention.com www.sterling-lighting.com www.sternberglighting.com www.structureworksfab.com www.concretefence.com www.surelocedging.com www.tensileshadeproducts.com www.thomas-steele.com www.tigerdeck.com www.tournesolsiteworks.com www.carderock.com www.tuuci.com www.usgbc.org www.unilock.com www.victorstanley.com www.landscapelightingworld.com www.vortex-intl.com www.walpolewoodworkers.com www.waterodyssey.com www.waterplay.com www.wausautile.com www.wgpaver.com

PHONE 800-258-2535 866-501-2722 717-951-1064 813-978-3700 763-972-5237 202-898-2444 202-216-2326 202-216-2444 864-627-1092 215-541-4627 410-721-4844 800-697-2195 800-547-1940 240-813-1117 305-857-0466 888-635-8585 800-364-7681 800-233-3907 800-598-4018 877-269-2972 800-547-4045 800-726-0368 716-689-8548 800-363-9264 800-873-3321 877-877-5012 800-367-7429 678-884-3000 800-451-0410 973-628-3000 617-774-0772 251-471-5238 604-475-7002 888-315-9037 310-331-1665 800-450-3494 866-733-8225 717-637-0500 760-304-7216 503-224-8700 760-304-7216 217-355-9411 800-233-1510 206-276-0925 800-338-4766 715-687-2423 800-747-8971 800-284-8208 886-558-5706 877-252-6323 800-430-6205 800-328-0035 800-931-1462 610-388-5439 800-448-7931 800-716-5506 813-212-3828 213-255-2060 800-552-6331 800-237-8837 888-823-8883 800-356-9660 800-832-7383 800-334-8689 720-990-3705 443-956-0779 760-707-5400 718-963-0564 616-399-1963 951-256-3245 323-846-6700 800-609-6066 800-221-1448 402-421-9464 760-966-6090 800-939-1849 847-588-3400 877-489-8064 817-277-9255 800-787-3562 520-903-9005 800-448-7931 503-625-1747 800-542-2282 301-365-2100 786-532-2498 202-552-1369 416-646-3452 301-855-8300 813-978-3700 514-694-3868 800-343-6948 512-392-1155 800-590-5552 800-388-8728 800-947-2837

PAGE # 37, 164 146 166 156 13 145 170-171 169 25 C2-1, 165 164 147 53, 160 59 148 157 157 160 47, 160 4, 167 152 149, 161 164 33, 161 166 65, 164 166 41, 161 9, 160 67 30, 163 137, 166 5, 165 27, 163 151, 165 14, 162 61 155 56 152 55 143 139, 164 43, 160 78, 160 49, 165 C4 69 150 21 2-3, 23 17, 163 163 141 35 75 153 162 156 148 77 124, 163 156 57, 165 162 153 146 149 150 11 161 24 51 161 156 154 63, 162 166 157 163 68 162 162 19, 166 164 31 168 39 161, C3 29 36 154 151 147 45, 165 73

THE BACK

/ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY

ASSOCIATION/FOUNDATION American Sports Builders Association

866-501-2722

146 145

DOGIPOT

800-364-7681

157

Earthscape

877-269-2972

4, 167

DuMor, Inc.

800-598-4018 47, 160

emuamericas, llc

800-726-0368 149, 161

ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO

202-898-2444

Goric Marketing Group Inc.

617-774-0772 30, 163

Equiparc

800-363-9264 33, 161

ASLA EXPO Promotion

202-216-2326 170-171

GreenďŹ elds Outdoor Fitness

888-315-9037 27, 163

Fermob USA

678-884-3000 41, 161

ASLA Online Learning

202-216-2444

169

Landscape Structures, Inc.

800-328-0035 17, 163

Forms+Surfaces

800-451-0410

9, 160

Livin the Dog Life

800-931-1462

152

International Society of Arboriculture

217-355-9411

143

Longwood Gardens

610-388-5439

141

U.S. Green Building Council

202-552-1369

168

DRAINAGE AND EROSION

163

PAVING/SURFACING/MASONRY STONE/METALS

Huntco Supply, LLC

503-224-8700

Keystone Ridge Designs, Inc.

800-284-8208

69

Kornegay Design

877-252-6323

21

Acker-Stone Industries Inc.

800-258-2535 37, 164

Landscape Forms

800-430-6205 2-3, 23

Cell-Tek Geosynthetics, LLC

410-721-4844

164

Madrax

800-448-7931

164

35

Iron Age Designs

206-276-0925 43, 160

Envirospec, Inc.

716-689-8548

Maglin Site Furniture Inc.

800-716-5506

75

Ironsmith, Inc.

800-338-4766 78, 160

Eurocobble

877-877-5012 65, 164

Petersen Concrete Leisure Products

800-832-7383

156

GAF - Streetbond

973-628-3000

QCP

951-256-3245

11 161

GREEN ROOFS/LIVING WALLS greenscreen

800-450-3494

162

McNichols Company

813-212-3828

153

IRRIGATION

67

Hanover Architectural Products, Inc.

717-637-0500

155

Salsbury Industries

323-846-6700

Invisible Structures, Inc.

800-233-1510

139,

Sitecra

800-221-1448

51

164

Sitescapes, Inc.

402-421-9464

161 162

Kafka Granite

715-687-2423 49, 165

Thomas Steele

800-448-7931

Keystone

800-747-8971

Victor Stanley, Inc.

301-855-8300 161, C3

C4

Hunter Industries Incorporated

760-304-7216

55

Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc.

800-334-8689 57, 165

Plant It Right

720-990-3705

162

Soil Retention Products

760-966-6090

156

STRUCTURES

Superior Concrete Products

817-277-9255

157

Amish Country Gazebos

LIGHTING

Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock

301-365-2100

164

AMP c/o Volt Lighting

813-978-3700

156

Unilock, Ltd.

416-646-3452

39

Holm/Hunter

760-304-7216

56

Wausau Tile

800-388-8728 45, 165

Whitacre Greer

800-947-2837

Kichler Landscape Lighting

886-558-5706

150

Meteor Lighting

213-255-2060

162 154

Sterling Lighting

800-939-1849

Sternberg Lighting

847-588-3400 63, 162

Volt Lighting

813-978-3700

Classic Recreation Systems, Inc.

800-697-2195

147

Easi-Set Buildings

800-547-4045

152

Gothic Arch Greenhouses

251-471-5238

137,

Poligon, A Product of PorterCorp.

616-399-1963

166

73

150

Shade Systems, Inc.

800-609-6066

24

Campania International, Inc.

Structureworks Fabrication

877-489-8064

166

165

Tensile Shade Products, LLC

520-903-9005

68

Walpole Outdoors LLC

800-343-6948

154

215-541-4627

C2-1,

Dekorra Products

888-635-8585

157

Green Theory Design Inc.

604-475-7002

5, 165

124,

Greenform LLC

310-331-1665 151, 165

Permaloc Aluminum Edging

800-356-9660

163

HADDONSTONE

866-733-8225

61

Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging

800-787-3562

163

Planters Unlimited by Hooks & Lattice 760-707-5400

146

Tiger Deck

503-625-1747

162

Planterworx

718-963-0564

149

Tournesol Siteworks/Planter

800-542-2282 19, 166

OUTDOOR FURNITURE

166

PLANTERS/SCULPTURES/GARDEN ACCESSORIES

29

LUMBER/DECKING/EDGING

717-951-1064

Technology

Country Casual Teak

240-813-1117

59

Paloform

888-823-8883

77

PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS

TUUCI USA

786-532-2498

31

Ernst Conservation Seeds

800-873-3321

166

Planted Earth Landscaping

443-956-0779

153

WATER MANAGEMENT AND AMENITIES Aquatix by Landscape Structures

763-972-5237

13

Most Dependable Fountains

800-552-6331

156 148

Otterbine Barebo, Inc.

800-237-8837

VORTEX USA

514-694-3868

36

Water Odyssey

512-392-1155

151

Waterplay Solutions Corp.

800-590-5552

147

OUTDOOR KITCHENS Exterus Outdoor

800-367-7429

166

PARKS AND RECREATION Berliner Play Equipment Corporation

864-627-1092

25

STREET FURNISHINGS AND SITE AMENITIES Columbia Cascade Company

800-547-1940 53, 160

DeepStream Designs

305-857-0466

148

Doty & Sons Concrete Products

800-233-3907

160

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 159

BUYER’S GUIDE

DECORATIVE GRATING Fits most widely used drain bodies

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www.TimberForm.com Columbia Cascade 160 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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162 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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BUYER’S GUIDE

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 163

BUYER’S GUIDE

Experience the Style Acker-Stone Difference.

www.AckerStone.com 800­258­2353

Lower your cost to elevate & level rooftop pavers.

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164 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 165

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166 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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www.asla.org/HALS

learn.asla.org

earthscapeplay.com

1-4PageAd_Professional Practice.indd 3

FOLLOW THE FIELD ASLA PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE NETWORKS’ BLOG

Exchange information Learn about recent work and research Stay up-to-date on current news and events

Membership to Professional Practice Networks (PPN) is open to all members of ASLA. There are 20 PPNs that cover a wide-range of practice areas.

Learn more about the water saving specifics of the ASLA green roof in a recent Water Conservation PPN blog! image: EPNAC

thefield.asla.org

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018 / 167

BUYER’S GUIDE

Dream •Design •P lay

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EXPO 2018: Better Booth Designs Landscape architects have a discerning eye for environments. Attract more attention by making your EXPO booth eye-pleasing, interesting, and educational.

By Russ Klettke

Exhibitors at the annual ASLA Meeting and EXPO put meaningful amounts of time, efort, and money into being there. Ater all, this is a singular chance each year for companies in this industry to make a good impression and grow their businesses.

• “Engaging visuals with good graphics and product displays matter; it shouldn’t look like an aterthought.”

So the form and function of that booth better be good. he audience is made up of designers, people with a native and educated sense for irst impressions. hey are also pragmatic: In a short period of time, while walking the EXPO aisles, they need to connect on aesthetics, ideas, processes, and feasibilities (costs). Exhibits and exhibitor concepts that connect best on these points will make more friends – and sell more products.

Of course some products – playground equipment, anyone? – speak louder (visually) than others (professional and digital services, for example). It’s part of the challenge but need not be a barrier.

Particularly with emerging professionals (those with less than ive years in the industry, including students), booth design matters. Some comments made at the 2017 EXPO in Los Angeles: • “he visuals of the booth are what get my attention.”

• “Dated logos don’t attract me. I like minimalist graphics, a conservative use of color, and a hierarchy of design.”

“Our product is more functional than aesthetic,” says Mike Riehm, president and founder of Envirobond (Organic-Lock) landscape pathway materials. “But we are aware that the aesthetic value of our products are still important in the eyes of the landscape architects.” Riehm says that live demonstrations in the booth are a great educator, but that they don’t try to load up attendees with every single product characteristic and feature. “We understand that the human brain can’t process more than two or three attributes in a short period of time before losing focus.”

he strategy with Planters Unlimited, is to impress upon show attendees their large indoor and outdoor planters and site amenities. “We have a large diversity of products and options,” says Larry Domingue, a business unit director for the company. He incorporates LEDs that complement colors and inishes (which also serve as safety or wayinding elements in client projects). But the complete product line is not in their booth – that wouldn’t be possible – so they use iPads as a supplement to visitor conversations.

Uriah Bueller, CEO of Parasoleil, a maker of precision cut, hand-inished artisan architectural panels, has it easy in certain respects: hey have tall, lat, intricately-designed panels with patinainished patterns that immediately catch one’s attention. But if that were all it did, he wouldn’t be making the most of the EXPO. “It should grab attention, but people should walk away with a good sense of the company, not just our booth design,” he says. he booth is supplemented with an architectural model that allows attendees to play with light and shadow. “It’s a fun part of the conversation.”

ASLA PHL2018

Annual Meeting and EXPO October 19-22 Philadelphia

#ASLA2018

Note too that sustainability is part of the conversation on booth design.

Michelle Assadi at Hunter Industries uses interchangeable (reusable) booth kiosk elements to convey their irrigation and outdoor lighting products. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sustainability is a core company value, so we strive to minimize our environmental footprint in all aspects of our business,â&#x20AC;? she says.

Other exhibitors have increased their use of fabrics to minimize shipping and drayage expenses. And in many cases, use of monitors and iPads sufficiently replace having some larger items at the EXPO. )0504A -&Ë&#x17D; 50 3*()5 1. $$03%*/( 50 3*") 6&--&3 0' "3"40-&*-A l8& $3&"5& 41"$&4 5)"5 1&01-& 3&"--: 8"/5 50 #& */Fm Ë?& #005) *..&%*"5&-: .",&4 5)"5 *.13&44*0/F 2. -"/5&34 /-*.*5&%j4 %*41-": "-40 */$-6%&4 " l,&(&3"503Am */4*%& 5)& 53&& 536/, 5011&% #: " #3"44 #08- 1-"/5&3F .1-& 41"$& */ 5)& #005) "--084 '03 7*4*503 */5&3"$5*0/F 3. /7*30#0/%j4 03("/*$A 8"5&3B1&3.&"#-& "((3&("5& 1"7&34A "/ "41)"-5 "-5&3/"5*7&A "3& %&$*%&%-: (3&&/F 0 7*4*5034 Ë&#x2C6;345 /05*$& 5)& #005) 45"Ë&#x2020; */ #3"/%B $0-03 $003%*/"5&% $-05)*/( */ -*.& (3&&/ "/% #-"$,F ˤF 6/5&3j4 $-&"/A $-&"3-: #3"/%&% (3"1)*$4 %3"8 7*4*5034 "-0/( 8*5) 7*%&0 4$3&&/ ,*04,4 */45&"% 0' "$56"- 130%6$54A "--08*/( 4&-'B "/% 45"Ë&#x2020;B%*3&$5&% 5063 015*0/4F

01 5&/ 5*14 0/ &Ęł&$5*7& #005)4 '30.

9)*#*503 "(";*/& his trade publication surveyed respected booth designers to develop a checklist of considerations: 1. Stop traffic with your design, the way a print ad does (many exhibitors use in-house or agency creatives to design their booths).

2. You need to afect the viewer within seconds.

3. Simplify the architecture to allow the audience to focus on the brand or product message.

4. Booth should be appropriate (to the product) and engaging.

5. Form follows function.

6. If your booth, stripped of your logos and products, could easily accommodate a diferent company, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too generic and needs creative adaptation.

7. he experience should be sufficiently memorable such that visitors will spread the message to others.

8. Be creative: In a design-oriented industry, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s critical.

9. he exhibit is one of several tools to push the brand forward: other tools are your booth staf, products, orientation to conversations, etc.

10. Your booth should feel like a home away from home, where customers feel at ease and might even want to stick around.

THE BACK

/

BACKSTORY

TOWER POWER A SILO TRAIL CELEBRATES RURAL HISTORY.

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

W

hen the Melbourne street artist Rone sought local subjects for two silos in the Australian town of Lascelles, Victoria, he turned to the town’s 48 residents for suggestions. Geoff (pictured below) and Merrilyn Horman, whose supersized portraits now gaze across vast expanses of dryland farm, have family connections going back four generations. More than 50 years ago, the couple were married in Lascelles, where they have continued the family tradition of wheat farming with their two sons.

The Lascelles grain silos date from 1939; their age and shape presented painting challenges. A base sealer was needed, as the concrete was incredibly dry and soaked up paint. The curved surface made images prone to distortion, and Rone admits to “stuing a few up and learning a few lessons” along the way. Paints were selected in colors that blended with the existing concrete tones.

Rone says the artworks are helping people “experience the landscape diferently by just changing the way people drive around.” Tourism to see the artworks has been hugely popular among Grey Nomads, the nickname of Australia’s caravantraveling retiree population. “Some people just need the tiniest excuse to drive a diferent way and they’ll take it,” says Rone. “And that can make a big diference to a town.”

GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA, WRITES ABOUT LANDSCAPE AND DESIGN FROM CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.

RONE

Grain silos are an iconic feature of the regional Australian landscape. Today, many are relics from family farms that sustained life in small communities for generations. As farms have grown bigger, heavy drought conditions and the closure of railway lines have left many of these older structures crumbling and abandoned. The new Silo Art Trail in regional Victoria uses these icons as canvases for enor-

mous murals that relate rural town heritage. The trail connects silo artworks in six farming communities, taking visitors on a 200-kilometer journey through Victoria’s agricultural heartlands.

172 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JULY 2018

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