Leah A. Kahler MLA Portfolio

L E AH A . K A H L ER MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 2021 University of Virginia

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SE L ECT E D WO RK

climate justice

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public seating

just transition

garden of memory

STUDIO

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page 10

page 14

page 21 Reed Hilderbrand

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PLAY

exhibits

Voith & Mactavish Architects

PROFESSIONAL

page 26 fieldwork

MVVA

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page 62

INDUSTRIAL SWAMP SUBLIME Wetland Revitalization and Worker’s Justice in the Crescent City This proposal calls for the revitalization of New Orleans’ periurban Central Wetland Unit through wetland assimilation, a process which utilizes treated municipal effluent to treat sewage contaminants and enrich marsh grasses and swamp hardwoods. Through a series of a community-governed, state-partnered work “krewes,” Industrial Swamp Sublime centers the Ninth Ward’s labor class, creating a vision of New Orleans’ future that sees labor rights, racial justice, and green infrastructure as part and parcel to a livable urbanism.

When MRGO, the canal nick-named “Hurricane Highway,” was closed following Katrina in 2005, the EPA mandated a $2.9 billion wetland restoration plan. That plan was never built. Industrial Swamp Sublime responds to historical injustices of infrastructural negligence and uneven racial geographies of flood mitigation.

Instructor: Mary Velez

New Orleans, LA

Fall 2020

WASTEWATER ASSIMILATION

URBAN WATER CYCLE

The proposal connects seemingly disparate parts of the urban water cycle.

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Wastewater assimilation jumpstarts peri-urban wetland regeneration by using treated municipal effluent as fertilizer. Hypoxic-zone forming nutrients are filtered through the wetland’s metabolism.

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MARSH RESTORATION

In places where the elevation is not high enough to allow for forest regeneration, levee spoil banks are cut to introduce freshwater and marsh grasses reestablished.

CYPRESS-TUPELO SWAMP RESTORATION The Cypress-Tupelo hardwood forest is kickstarted by applying treated municipal effluent. Krewe members place plugs once salinity levels become suitable.

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TAKING WORK TO THE STREETS

The project calls for worker-led social infrastructure that would provide much needed work opportunities and enhance existing ecological knowledge in New Orleans.

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HARDIN ELEMENTARY DETENTION PARK Stormwater detention ponds mark the former locations of buildings at Hardin Elementary, a public school decimated by the flooding and subsequent neglect in 2005.

SUBLIME OPERATIONS Rather than hiding stormwater infrastructure to make way for the latest suite of green infrastructure, the proposal finds sublimity in the embrace of the machine in the garden.

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A PLACE TO SIT A Disruptive Public Seat for Lingering at the Edge The spontaneous spirit inherent to Halprin’s 1973 design has been violated by the encroachment of private business. Local alcohol codes and racialized fears have resulted in the installment of chains and antiloitering signage, while poorly sited trash receptacles interrupt Halprin’s sculptural fountain+stair sequence.

This seat in Lawrence Halprin’s Downtown Mall is a site for small, humble acts of reconciliation. Following the removal of exclusive signage and obstructive site accessories, the broken boulder provides a place to linger in direct public view.

Patrons and workers occupy the boulder’s edges in act of spontaneous defiance of public-private divisiveness. Split face and sawn granite builds upon the site’s existing material vocabularies, offering formal sitting and informal scrambleperches. A singular line of mica inlay connects the boulder’s pieces, enforcing the exploded connection between the parts. The human body serves as the precious material that through movement, mends cracks between the once whole form of the seat, the once whole space of the mall.

Instructor: Beth Meyer

Charlottesville, VA

Fall 2019

MANY BODIES, MANY POSTURES This seat’s ergonomics is designed for a diversity of postures, bodily abilities, and body shapes.

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LINGERING AT THE FISSURES

The proposed seat welcomes visitors via an intentional disruption of the plinth’s existing rhythms. It is a chance to sit with that which doesn’t belong.

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MATERIAL ASSEMBLY

Mica is inlaid into the fissures of the seat to enhance the edges, to value that which once connected the seat.

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A SEAT FOR MANY

The resultant form is climbable, playable, sit-able, and lean-able. Rather prescribing an obvious and regimented postures, this seats asks for improvisation and inclusivity.

[1]whole

[2]crack

[3] expand

[4] rotate

ITERATIVE FORMS

[5]inlay

The seat’s form is derived from a whole sphere, split iteratively into many fragments, each forming a disparate part to the whole.

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RECONCILING GROUND Alternative Perceptual & Management Frameworks for the Tulare Lake Basin The Ground Reunification Crops was established in January 2020 as a subagency of the California Natural Resources Agency, tasked with addressing the economic decline and environmental degradation facing the Tulare Lake Basin.

It is specifically attuned to common concerns of local communities about the declining oil industry and shrinking viability of large-scale irrigated agriculture—the two economic pillars for the region. The GRC’s goal is to work with a wide range of industry stakeholders, community groups, and public and private partners to help the Tulare Lake Basin pivot toward new forms of economy and livelihood.

The GRC has a two-pronged approach: 1) Physical demonstration sites incubate and experiment with regenerative land management practices, while 2) An interactive in-person and online data community generates knowledge and catalyzes a sense of care for the ground.

2020 ASLA Student Award: Communications Category In collaboration with: C. Brennan, J. Lee, + L. Needham Spring 2020 Instructors: Cantrell, Hansen, Ezban

California Central Valley

THE CORPS

Through a suite of alternative, incentivized management strategies, outreach, and job creation, the GRC proposes a new landforward agency for the Tulare Lake Basin.

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RESPONSIV

Through the responsive de landowner’s d to increasing

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VE DESIGN GUIDES

online platform, esign guides guide decisions in adapting gly salinated soils.

JOB CREATION

The GRC allocates government funding to those who need it most through work opportunities such as the seed collectors’ program.

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SONIFICATION OF THE OIL-URBAN EDGE

Oil field info guides help residents who live in close proximity to the petrochemical extraction know their risks and rights.

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“SEEING” THE BASIN MORE CLEARLY The GRC’s data platform is designed to develop an increasingly more precise and accurate image of the basin based on a diversity of crowd-sourced data.

IMPLEMENTATION SCENARIOS

Scales of implementation of the GRC’s ground-based strategies will vary according to landuse policy, public buy-in, and funding structures at the federal level.

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WEAVING MEMORY An Evolving Dye Garden for Charlottesville’s Historic Silk Mill For the majority of the last century, what is now referred to as “Ix Art Park” served as the major employer of Charlottesville’s mixed-race labor class, but this history is suppressed by a hodge podge distribution of nonprofits, public sculpture, makers spaces, and coffee shops.

Weaving Memory proposes a new future for Ix that exposes its interwoven histories and publics. Through a stepped garden boasting native dye plants of Virginia and animated by processes that suggest the site’s history, Weaving Memory seeks to telescope traces of those damp, productive working conditions into the present.

Ultimately, this project intends to contest the ways in which Charlottesville’s existing public spaces treat memory, which are centered around singular elevated monuments of the Great Men of History. This site of memory forgoes this belligerent legibility, invites multiple and contested narratives of the past, and embraces the shared temporality inherent to the landscape medium and memory alike.

Instructor: Beth Meyer

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Charlottesville, VA

Fall 2019

SECTION THRU UPPER ENTRANCE

The gardens’ upper entrance is marked by the last in a series of hip-hopping Musclewood bosques, a line carried from Central Place.

TIERED GARDEN ROOMS

United by a single rill of water that cascades down each terrace, the garden is composed of a series of microclimate rooms.

SEASONALLY SHIFTING DYE PALETTES

Plants that produce pigment or dye shift the garden’s center of activity according to their staggered harvest times.

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URBAN CIRCULATION PATTERNS

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Each of the threads in this concept model corresponds to a different member of the Charlottesville public.

Their circulation patterns weave together at the project site.

SITE IMPRESSIONS + MILL RIVERS Early investigations and site photos reveal hidden histories of industrial use during the silk mill days, and Charlottesville is revealed as only the latest of river towns home to IX silk production.

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P ROF ES S I O N AL WO RK

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PROFESSIONA L WORK

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REED HILDERBRAND

LANDSCAPE FRAMEWORK PLAN

2020 Remote Summer Internship

West Feliciana Parish, LA

As the only member of the project team able to access the site, I conducted oral histories, coordinated with archaeological and site surveyors, and created and delivered client presentations for the first phase of the Live Oak landscape framework plan. Through a focus on the racialized topography and historical ecology of this 19 th century cotton plantation, our research revealed a fuller history of the site’s occupation by free, enslaving, and enslaved people.

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ATMOSPHERICS + POWER

Serial sections reveal overlapping regions of high, dry, and white, as well as low, wet, and black.

REGIONAL LAND + LABOR SYSTEMS Tracing the region’s predominant land use alongside labor systems call for new relations between land and labor.

LOGICS OF BLUFF TOPOGRAPHY Early forays into the site’s tectonics reveal a logic that sited the Barrow House at the steepest overlook of the loess bluff.

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A DIVERSITY OF PLANT COMMUNITIES

Site walks revealed a diversity of plant communities, organized by periods of inundation by Little Bayou Sara. Individual species are organized according to wetland designation, native status, and evergreen and deciduous categories.

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READING THE LANDSCAPE THROUGH SOCIO-BOTANY

This inventory of plants found on-site or in the archival record of Live Oak reveals two systems: the plantation economy and a system of healing and care for enslaved laborers growing a variety of native and introduced plants for healing and medicinal uses.

SITE CHANGE THRU TIME

Diachronic overlays of canopy cover, Little Bayou Sara, roads, circulation, and various buildings reveal areas of the site that have seen near constant change throughout its history, while others have seen less change.

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MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES 2019 Summer Internship

TEARDROP PARK REDBOOK

Brooklyn, NY

Charged with communicating the evolving form of Manhattan’s Battery Park City, I created a layered physical model, based off of 18 th century landscape designer Humphry Repton’s redbooks, which demonstrated existing and proposed conditions.

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SERGEANT’S WHARF COMPETITION

These hybrid renderings propose a new use for an industrial park at Boston’s Sergeant Wharf, including local fauna-themed playground and a large, sweeping lawn.

OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER

The Rooftop Children’s Gardens at OPC will provide ADA-accessible opportunities to grow and learn about food production.

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VOITH & MACTAVISH ARCHITECTS 2016-2018

VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS

Philadelphia, PA

The John and Joan Mullen Center for the Performing Arts serves as the professionalgrade performing arts center for Villanova students. The landscape consists of a plaza at grade which extends the architecture’s radial foyer into the high-traffic corner. A rooftop terrace is home to garden-side lingering during performance intermissions and a curvilinear limestone seat. As the sole designer on the landscape scope of VUPAC, I brought the project from Schematic into Construction Administration, in addition to writing architectural and landscape specifications.

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PL AY

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Image credit: L. Kahler Atlas of Material Worlds ed. Matthew Seibert

PLAY

FREEZE THAW POTENTIALS In collaboration with Z. Liu and P. Wang

Charlottesville, VA

Our team’s curious methods documented the thermal insulation qualities of various ground materials as they affected freeze-thaw cycles in Virginia’s Winter. We conducted site monitoring via plaster casts directly onto the earth that cracked at different rates according to vegetation cover, humidity, and solar radiation. Given our findings, we proposed a suite of soil profiles to amplify or diminish freeze-thaw cycles.

This suite of tactics, explored in model, work to avoid the churning of contaminated soil layers due to cryoturbation.

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OFFICE OF RECOVERY & RECONCILIATION October 2019

UVA School of Architecture

This exhibition uses selections from the archives of the US Army Corps of Engineers as a point of departure to explore the material and cultural consequences of flood management in the Lower Mississippi River Basin. Immersing viewers within internal debates that persisted throughout the 20 th century, this exhibition uses design speculation as the medium for historical investigation, meshing evidence with fabricated documents. I designed and fabricated new acrylic panels and performed repair work on the routed wood model panels.

Production Assistant to Matthew Seibert & Kristi Cheramie

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