Ground 23 – Fall 2013 – Site by Ground Magazine

Landscape Architect Quarterly 08/

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Round Table Layers of Legibility Features Common Ground Visualizing the Invisible

Publication # 40026106

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Beyond Site

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Sites of Value Fall 2013 Issue 23

Contents

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Up Front Information on the Ground Site:

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Common Ground An investigation into meaning COMPILED BY DANIEL WATERS

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Round Table Layers of legibility MODERATED BY NANCY CHATER, OALA

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Visualizing the Invisible Seeing a site again, for the first time TEXT BY DR. ROBERT D. BROWN

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Beyond Site The Ganaraska Forest reborn

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

Site development is a core function of landscape architecture. Like a rite of passage, every landscape architect must explore the tools needed to create a successful site. I have found that a good approach is to consider the site as a living organism, wholly connected internally and externally to its surroundings, a place to be experienced by sentient beings. Sounds mystical, but this approach is based on using all senses to understand the potential and ultimate enhancement of a site.

Site means many things to many people. Popularly, the term has come to refer to a page on the Web, but for landscape architects in particular, the word returns to a collection of physical meanings: a place, a plot, a corner, a country, a careful and yet still contested delineation of habitat area.

I have worked with many landscape architects in this capacity; some have been truly inspiring in their methods of site analysis, creative programming, and ultimate design development. I am reminded of Jack Copeland, who has just recently passed away (see In Memoriam on page 32). When one walked a site with Jack for the first time, you just knew he was absorbing all the subtle influences: visual, aromatic, auditory, tactile, topographical, hydrological, vegetative, climatic, and seasonal. These influences would later be woven into an appropriate design expression, notable for the exact fit of the site to its use and context.

TEXT BY KAREN MAY

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Sites of Value Designating modern cultural landscapes in Ontario TEXT BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAND

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Notes A miscellany of news and events Artifact When site is territory TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON AND NETAMI STUART, OALA

While extremely challenging to teach, this skill can be communicated to talented students, interns, clients, and a willing public in the right setting: workshops, charettes, open house forums, etc. My hope for our Association is that this holistic and artistic approach to site design and development is retained—similar to that of a sculptor who removes all but the finished masterpiece from the stone—and that this approach is carried forward to future generations of landscape architects for the benefit of our environment. With the universities opening their doors to new and returning students this autumn, I encourage those already in practice to stop in at the closest school of landscape architecture to witness the efforts being put forth by our colleagues and their charges in the academic world. We on Council and Executive Committee wish you all a successful fall season. JOANNE MORAN, OALA PRESIDENT@OALA.CA

You could say, as Nancy Chater suggests in her opening to this issue’s Round Table, that “landscape architecture is deeply and primarily concerned with reading—and retelling its reading—of sites.” This is absolutely true. We spend so much time and energy investigating and reciting stories about the world, that to do this, we naturally compartmentalize ideas based on sites. It’s useful, in that case, to take a step back and consider this enigmatic little word that has such big impact on design philosophy. We can see that a deep understanding of some site elements will travel with us from project to project, but that revealing a site in one way all the time can be like putting blinders on. Dr. Robert D. Brown, in his wonderfully sharp and concise play-by-play of site analysis says, “Every element of a landscape is familiar on one level, yet can be totally invisible on another.” The interpretation of site has a great deal to do with context and also complexity. How does the value of a site change if we consider what’s around it? In this issue, Michael McClelland writes about the fascinating domino effect that occurred after a 1960s landscape designed by Sasaki Strong Associates was given protected heritage status, with ad hoc improvements and master planning in an ongoing back-and-forth dialogue. In her article about the Ganaraska Forest, Karen May moves this question into the wild, extending the notion of site to not just a description of natural features, but to natural processes, too. From an individual approach to a collective one, you’ll find that in these pages we’ve travelled around and staked out some conceptual territory. But, if we’ve left you still feeling as if the word “site” has something bigger to offer, you’ll find a glossary showing nineteen different takes on it from across the membership and into our allied professions! Have a marvellous read. DENISE PINTO CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD

Fall 2013 Issue 23

Masthead

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Editor Lorraine Johnson

2013 OALA Governing Council

Photo Editor Todd Smith

President Joanne Moran

OALA Editorial Board Nancy Chater (on leave) Eric Gordon Adrienne Hall Jocelyn Hirtes Karen May Leslie Morton (on leave) Kate Nelischer Denise Pinto (chair) Maili Sedore Lisa Shkut Todd Smith Brendan Stewart Netami Stuart Victoria Taylor Dalia Todary-Michael

Vice President Morteza Behrooz

Art Direction/Design www.typotherapy.com

Associate Councillor—Senior Inna Olchovski

Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181

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Cover Deforestation in Southern Ontario led to widespread desertification. See page 20. Credit: E. J. Zavitz, Archives of Ontario (RG 1-448-1), courtesy of Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published four times a year by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Ontario Association of Landscape Architects 3 Church Street, Suite 407 Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2 416.231.4181 www.oala.ca oala@oala.ca Copyright © 2013 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects All rights reserved ISSN: 0847-3080 Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106

Treasurer Sarah Culp Secretary Doris Chee Past President Glenn O’Connor Councillors Alana Evers Jonathan Loschmann Moreen Miller

OALA

About

About the OALA

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and provides an open forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to the profession of landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca. Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions. The views expressed in the magazine are those of the writers and not necessarily the views of the OALA and its Governing Council.

The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects works to promote and advance the profession of landscape architecture and maintain standards of professional practice consistent with the public interest. The OALA promotes public understanding of the profession and the advancement of the practice of landscape architecture. In support of the improvement and/or conservation of the natural, cultural, social and built environments, the OALA undertakes activities including promotion to governments, professionals and developers of the standards and benefits of landscape architecture.

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Advisory Panel Andrew B. Anderson, BLA, MSc. World Heritage Management Landscape & Heritage Expert, Oman Botanic Garden John Danahy, OALA, Associate Professor, University of Toronto George Dark, OALA, FCSLA, ASLA, Principal, Urban Strategies Inc., Toronto Real Eguchi, OALA, Eguchi Associates Landscape Architects, Toronto Donna Hinde, OALA, Partner, The Planning Partnership, Toronto Alissa North, OALA, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto Peter North, OALA, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto Nathan Perkins, MLA, PhD, ASLA, Associate Professor, University of Guelph Jim Vafiades, OALA, Senior Landscape Architect, Stantec, London

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Up Front

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01 CHILDREN

back to nature The disconnect between children and nature has received broad attention and has given rise to an international grassroots movement aimed at reconnecting kids and their families with nature. Concurrent with the rise of the children and nature movement, a number of organizations in the United States have adopted a Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights (COBR) aimed at recommending a fundamental list of outdoor experiences that nourish children’s physical, social, and emotional development and help connect them to the wealth of resources available at the local and regional levels. The COBR serves as an advocacy tool and helps focus attention

on opportunities for children and families to engage in outdoor recreational activities. In Ontario, an organization called the Back to Nature Network (B2N) has rallied more than 80 organizations, all unified in their objective to raise awareness and motivate action in support of reconnecting children and families with the outdoors. B2N is co-leading an effort with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to develop a similar tool to the COBR for Ontario with a

number of key partners including Parks and Recreation Ontario, Royal Botanical Gardens, Biodiversity Education and Awareness Network, Ontario Nature, KidActive, the Fish and Wildlife Heritage Commission, and the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport. (Landscape architect Marianne Mokrycke, OALA, is the OALA’s representative on the Back to Nature Network.) The name of this B2N project is the Ontario Children’s Outdoor Charter. Drawing on the momentum created by the movement in the United States, Bill Kilburn, a biologist and educator who is a passionate advocate of the outdoors here in Ontario, has been leading the charge on behalf of B2N to develop a Children’s Outdoor Charter by engaging with counterpart organizations in the United States and initiating broad public consultations with Ontarians, as well as other stakeholder groups and organizations, to ensure that the Charter responds to the needs of Ontarians in the most inclusive way possible. The input of children is also integral to the Charter’s development.

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Ontario’s Back to Nature Network seeks to reconnect children with the outdoors.

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Jennifer Kilburn

Up Front

While COBR documents produced by organizations in the United States employ the term “Bill of Rights,” which is strongly associated with the individual rights and freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the reason that the term “Charter” is being employed in Ontario is that it aligns more closely with terminology more commonly used in Canada.

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not-too-distant future, when the medical profession will once again prescribe a few days in the country or time spent in nature to cure a whole host of ailments. TEXT BY JENNIFER MAHONEY, OALA, A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WHO SHARES HER TIME BETWEEN TORONTO AND WATERLOO.

which consults for developers and architectural and landscape architectural firms. She is also the Senior Urban Designer at Novatech, an Ottawa-based planning and engineering firm.

The development of Ontario’s Outdoor Charter began with an environmental scan of COBR initiatives, followed by the creation and distribution of an electronic survey intended to collect ideas, gauge the level of interest, determine feasibility, and gather support. Based on survey results, B2N tabled a report that includes recommendations for moving forward with the Charter’s development. It is expected that the structure of the Charter will include a brief statement outlining the need for children to experience the outdoors, as well as a list of fundamental activities that all children should experience by the time they reach their teens, such as: exploring nature, catching a fish, and camping under the stars. The list of activities will be strongly representative of the belief that a connection with nature is fundamental to the experience of being outdoors. Once the Charter is officially adopted (the launch is imminent as we go to press), there will be numerous opportunities for its implementation. The Charter team envisions the tool being used in schools to influence curricula, as well as by local and regional organizations in sectors including health, planning, early child development, environmental stewardship, and active living. According to Howard Frumkin, director of the U.S.-based National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control, nature experiences have undeniable benefits for healthy child development and adult well-being. “In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he says. Like Frumkin, Bill Kilburn believes that urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects are ideally positioned to optimize the health benefits of outdoor places, and even envisions a time, in the

03 STORYTELLING

writing the landscape

“Storytelling is a way to express the landscape,” says landscape architect, planner—and now author—Janis Fedorowick, OALA. Fedorowick is the Principal of Wavefront Planning and Design, a company she founded 10 years ago,

As she reflects on the relationships between her many vocations, Fedorowick notes that her training and work in landscape architecture motivated the six-year part-time writing process that led to the publication of her historical novel, The Silent Canoe, under the pen name J. Philip. The work spans the period from 1773 to the War of 1812, an important time in the growth of Toronto and

Up Front

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interactions between Devins and Simcoe, that allowed Fedorowick more creativity in shaping important characters.

Ontario. The story follows the life of main character Issac Devins who, along with his wife Polly, was the first settler in Emery Village and one of the first in Toronto when he arrived in Upper Canada aboard Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe’s ship, the Mississauga. Published in 2012, The Silent Canoe coincides nicely with nationwide commemorations of the War of 1812. The novel began to take shape after Fedorowick completed a Historic Interpretation Landscape Master Plan and 15 corresponding historical signs, in collaboration with Terraplan Landscape Architecture, for the Emery Village BIA. The five months of research conducted in preparation for this project, which included accessing more than 200 sources of information, led to a substantial collection of work—some of which could not be used in the Master Plan. “I thought, 90 percent of the research I’ve done is sitting on my computer and it’s going to die if I don’t do something with it,” remembers Fedorowick. At first she contemplated writing a nonfiction work, but quickly realized that a historical novel would allow her to reach a different, and broader, audience and express the story in a more compelling way. Fedorowick credits her experience in design as one of the factors leading to this decision. “I was intrigued by the feeling of stepping into someplace completely unknown. How do you build a city? This interest related to my background as an urban designer.”

“I don’t find a similar fact and fiction struggle in landscape architecture,” she explains. “Landscape architecture is a completely truthful experience. Even in a fantasy landscape, there’s a truthful aspect.”

Speaking to her unique position as a novelist and a landscape architect, Fedorowick can easily identify the parallels between the disciplines. “I found the writing process similar to my approach to designing a landscape,” she says. “You start with a broad picture, but then things change because you uncover new information and must resolve different issues. But then at some point you must go back to the broad picture and marry the two together so it all makes sense in the end. A design continues to evolve. It requires that process of slowly working it out.” Thanks to her extensive research, Fedorowick is able to provide readers with factual details about the founding of Toronto and the province, but through the eyes of a semi-fictional character. Although Issac Devins did exist, there is a 10- to 15-year gap in available information about his life. To speak to this timeframe, Fedorowick explored what was happening in that era and took cues from what typical life would have been like for someone in Devins’ position. It was the fictional aspects of the work, such as the invented

As The Silent Canoe is her first published work, Fedorowick is quick to point out that while writing the novel she was also learning how to write a novel. She reflects on moments of lost motivation, struggling to refocus and complete her work with her 2012 release date in mind, and always trying to maintain the right balance between the facts and her own creative freedom. “The same way as in a landscape, in the novel there’s some sort of formula you need to stick to in order to make it successful,” she notes. “For example, there needs to be failure and tension, a journey that leads to a climax, and then a conclusion. The same process exists in landscape architecture. The same things need to be considered in every landscape—such as safety and accessibility. You stick to the formula, but you also go beyond and express the landscape.” Now lecturing to various historical societies on how the War of 1812 defined Ontario, Fedorowick envisions a life for the novel in the Ontario high-school curriculum. “My main goal was to have people learn from the book, and really enjoy it,” says the author. “I was interested in the founding of Toronto, as well as the personal aspects. What did it feel like? What decisions did you make? Where did you go? What did you think? The history of the city goes along side-by-side with personal stories.” THE SILENT CANOE IS AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.COM AND FROM WWW.THESILENTCANOE.COM. TEXT BY KATE NELISCHER, WHO WORKS IN DESIGN COMMUNICATIONS FOR THE PLANNING PARTNERSHIP AND IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

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Cover of the novel written by landscape architect Janis Fedorowick

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Courtesy of Janis Fedorowick

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Isaac Brock, a military leader in the War of 1812, is a character in The Silent Canoe.

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Courtesy of Toronto Reference Library

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A map from the period covered in Janis Fedorowick’s novel

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Courtesy of Jarvis Collegiate

Common Ground

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COMPILED BY DANIEL WATERS

What do we mean when we refer to site? Do all professions and practitioners use the word in the same way? Ground decided to investigate, and what we found reveals some interesting commonalities and divergences…

Steve Arney, police officer: A place where an incident has taken place, where evidence may be located to prove the authenticity of what has occurred through collaboration of different sources. A place where the truth can be found. Chris Barker, real estate agent: The site determines the true value of the property. The building can be modified, but location, neighbourhood, and exposure cannot be changed. Matt Bernstein, OALA, landscape architect: When I think about “site,” I think about a canvas (physical or metaphysical) onto which a design program may be applied. Attendant to the site are all the constraints, challenges, and opportunities that impact the program and ultimately the design. This can range from protecting the site and what it contains to intensive development. Site is the starting point and ultimately the end point, too, as design is always reinventing site.

An investigation into meaning

Eric Brace, civil engineering student: A place of work, usually away from the office. Melissa Coderre, landscape architecture student: Site is that little piece of real estate where our creative visions find home. Emily Hansen, Ecological Farmers of Ontario: When considering the landscapes of agriculture, we think of the characteristics and features that both bound and define the farm site. Those who farm know that site is far more than what is contained within the fences and above the skin of soil. The farmer’s perspective is broad: reaching up to the life-giving sun, down through the foundations of soil and rock, and out into the rivers and lakes that quench the thirsty landscape. Carmen Hui, OALA, York Region Streetscape Program Manager: A clearly defined parcel of land where something is to be located, be it a park, building, commercial or plaza space. Its footprint and size can vary from small to large scale.

Common Ground

Linda Laflamme, OALA, landscape architect: In the day-to-day practice of landscape architecture, from my personal experience, the word “site” is used in various ways but always refers to a specific geographic location relating to land or water. The word itself does not reflect the scale or spatial area/size of the geographic location; in other words, site could mean a lookout along the Bruce Trail or a construction site where many hectares of development is proposed or under construction.

John Pryzner, arborist: The site becomes our workplace. When we evaluate a site, we are identifying safety hazards and targets, ensuring safety of place, of others, and of our employees. The site determines the valuation of our quote.

Adam Leger, recent BLA graduate: A site is a bound place waiting to be explored, discovered, and transformed. A site holds a tremendous amount of potential if you choose to see it. With vision and effort, this bound place can burst at its seams and invigorate the greater context it lies within.

Janet Rosenberg, OALA, landscape architect: A three-dimensional space either inside or outside that can be manipulated through movement by adding or taking away properties.

Merriam-Webster dictionary: 1a : the spatial location of an actual or planned structure or set of structures (as a building, town, or monuments) 1b : a space of ground occupied or to be occupied by a building 2a : the place, scene, or point of an occurrence or event 2b : one or more Internet addresses at which an individual or organization provides information to others (merriam-webster.com/dictionary/site)

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Lisa Rapoport, architect: A place is a territory that is established, or has a culture that is recognized. A site identifies a territory that is not yet a place—it is a space of potential or opportunity for engagement and design.

Don Russell, artist: Site inhabits, defines, and reflects a specific space. The cultural, social, and geographic components to a site are those that give it importance and relevance, often combining to create profound meaning. UNESCO Definition of Cultural and Natural Heritage Sites: Works of man or the combined works of nature and man, and areas including archaeological sites which are of outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view. (whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/) Daniel Waters, recent BLA graduate: A site is a place of transition, something waiting to become something more. The job of a landscape architect and designer, as I see it, is to find the true value of a site and, through the transformative process of design, ameliorate the lives of current and potential users—whether those users are people, plants, or animals.

Devon Waters, environmental scientist: A site is a geographic location, usually defined by coordinates, at which work is undertaken. The type of work conducted at a site can vary widely, from excavation to construction and even simply site inspections. Holly Waters, interior designer: A site is the flame that ignites creative process. Stan Zippan, architect: If the project DNA (i.e., the design brief, client desires, functional program, space requirements) is like a seed, then the site is the fertile ground in which the seed lays down its roots and which, through all of its characteristics (such as orientation, context, topography, views, soil composition), nourishes the design until it grows into a living thing. BIO/ DANIEL WATERS IS A RECENT BACHELOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE GRADUATE WHO EARNED HIS DEGREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH. HE IS PASSIONATE ABOUT TEMPORAL SPACE AND SPACE EVOLUTION IN THE URBAN CONTEXT.

Round Table

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Mouth of the Creek Park, in Toronto, is a project by PUBLIC WORK that deals with the complex layering of ecological and cultural meaning.

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PUBLIC WORK

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Round Table

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MODERATED BY NANCY CHATER, OALA

Our Round Table panellists explore the multiple narratives that frame responses to sites

Round Table

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moment or a node or a part that makes up the site—different places, different scales, sequences of exterior rooms, including circulation routes, all of which combine to make the larger site.

02 BIOS/

PETER CARRUTHERS HAS WORKED WITH ARCHAEOLOGICAL SERVICES INCORPORATED AS A SENIOR ASSOCIATE FOR THE PAST 12 YEARS. PRIOR TO THAT, HE WORKED FOR 30 YEARS IN THE ONTARIO HERITAGE CONSERVATION PROGRAM. HE SPECIALIZES IN ARCHAEOLOGY, HERITAGE PLANNING, LEGISLATION, AND REGULATION, AND CURRENTLY DOES FIELD WORK THROUGHOUT ONTARIO. NANCY CHATER, OALA, IS AN ASSOCIATE WITH THE PLANNING PARTNERSHIP AND IS ON LEAVE AS AN EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER OF GROUND. RUTHANNE HENRY, OALA, IS AN ARBORIST AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WORKING FOR TORONTO PARKS, FORESTRY AND RECREATION, SPECIALIZING IN POLICY AND STRATEGIC PLANNING RELATED TO URBAN FORESTRY AND COORDINATING CAPITAL PROJECTS WITHIN PARKS, SUCH AS JAMES GARDENS AND GLEN STEWART RAVINE. AS A MEMBER OF THE OALA, SHE PARTICIPATES ON THE STEERING COMMITTEE FOR THE GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE ONTARIO COALITION. RUTHANNE IS ALSO COMPLETING A MASTERS IN SPATIAL ANALYSIS AT RYERSON UNIVERSITY AND IS A MEMBER OF THE RYERSON URBAN FOREST AND ECOLOGICAL DISTURBANCE RESEARCH GROUP. RUTHANNE'S CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS ON THE THEMES OF URBAN SPRAWL, SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, AND LAND RECLAMATION HAVE BEEN SHOWN AT HART HOUSE, PROPELLER CENTRE FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, THE PAPER MILL GALLERY, GALLERY 1313 IN TORONTO, AND THE LOFT GALLERY, CLARKSBURG. JAMES A. ROCHE, OALA, IS THE DIRECTOR OF PARK DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION AT WATERFRONT TORONTO. A GRADUATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, JAMES HAS WORKED AS A DESIGNER FOR SEVERAL U.S. AND CANADIAN FIRMS, INCLUDING CHILD ASSOCIATES, HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES, BROWN AND STOREY ARCHITECTS, QUINN DESIGN, AND JANET ROSENBERG ASSOCIATES. HE IS CURRENTLY DIRECTING THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF SEVERAL LARGE URBAN PARKS ALONG TORONTO’S WATERFRONT, INCLUDING CANADA’S SUGAR BEACH, SHERBOURNE COMMON, DON RIVER PARK, UNDERPASS PARK, AND THE QUEENS QUAY REVITALIZATION. JAMES CONTINUES TO TEACH SESSIONAL CLASSES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, WITH A FOCUS ON DESIGN STUDIO, SITE ENGINEERING, AND REPRESENTATION COURSES IN THE MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM. MARC RYAN WAS EDUCATED AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND URBANIST, AND HIS DESIGN PRACTICE FOCUSES ON THE INTERSECTION OF THESE DISCIPLINES. FOLLOWING MORE THAN 12 YEARS OF PRACTICE IN CANADA, THE UNITED STATES, AND EUROPE, HE CO-FOUNDED PUBLIC WORK, A TORONTO-BASED URBAN DESIGN AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDIO. MARC BRINGS DIVERSE EXPERIENCE IN PROJECTS AT MULTIPLE SCALES TO GUIDE PUBLIC REALM DESIGN, PLANNING, AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS SO THEY RELATE POWERFULLY TO THEIR CONTEXT AND ENHANCE THE QUALITY AND EXPERIENCE OF URBAN LIFE. PRIOR TO CO-FOUNDING PUBLIC WORK, MARC WAS STUDIO DIRECTOR OF WEST 8 TORONTO AND SERVED AS DESIGN DIRECTOR ON SOME OF WEST 8’S MOST SIGNIFICANT COMMISSIONS IN NORTH AMERICA, INCLUDING THE GOVERNORS ISLAND PARK AND PUBLIC SPACE MASTER PLAN IN NEW YORK CITY AND TORONTO’S CENTRAL WATERFRONT.

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Spiral Jetty is a site-specific earthwork constructed in 1970 by American artist Robert Smithson.

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Denny Mont, Creative Commons

Nancy Chater (NC): Landscape architecture is deeply and primarily concerned with reading—and retelling its reading—of sites. We interpret a site as a way of understanding place—everything from ancient spiritual notions of genius loci through to a more scientific rationalism approach to site analysis that came to prominence in the 1970s through Kevin Lynch. Is there a difference between interpreting a place and interpreting a site? Peter Carruthers (PC): In my field, an archaeological site is a place where careful techniques of excavation and analysis teach us about past cultures, and the word site can be code: a really interesting place that a colleague has found and they want to talk about it or show you or get your opinion about it. Every discipline uses the word site in a different way; it will continue to evolve. And the beauty of it is that it’s such a simple word but also very powerful. Ruthanne Henry (RH): I think of site as a more neutral term, whereas place, placemaking, and sense of place all have an emotional evocative edge to them. Site is more like a clinical term, and whatever discipline you are coming from, you put layers on it. James Roche (JR): I think of place in some ways as a moment within a larger site. Where site begins and ends is difficult to peg down. There is a power of place and there is power of site. I think of site as being a powerful notion that covers different fields, different facets. Place can be a

Marc Ryan (MR): I think of site as a sort of raw state of the place. Place or placemaking implies a kind of transformation that occurs, and that’s the entry of the landscape architect or an intervention. The question of how you approach a site to make a place is how you apply your professional tools. There is a certain rigour we have within our discipline, and yet the making of place often holds a very personal and subjective aspect as well. There is a science, there is an art, there are so many layers to get to place from site. JR: Place becomes, through landscape architecture and related disciplines, the experience—it can be defined through planting, through different kinds of materials, the built forms, and through topography. There are a lot of layers of information— different kinds of ingredients—that inform the design process, in order to achieve that sense of place. RH: And some places don’t need that intervention. There might be vistas…I am thinking of views along the Niagara Escarpment, for example. As a profession we don’t have to insert ourselves into every site. JR: When different designers come to a site and gather information regarding the existing conditions through site analysis, it does not necessarily mean they are going to bulldoze that vista. You are going to enhance it or build upon it or create a sequence of spaces within the design…creating access or improving access to that experience of the site. Or perhaps you are just framing those views. NC: Sometimes a site is already a place, but we approach it with fresh eyes. There can be a kind of objectification of a place—like the way a surgeon has a body covered on the operating table and is just focused on a part. I know I am sounding critical of the process of site analysis but I’m just questioning the objectification that

Round Table

can happen if we don’t fully recognize the “placeness” that already exists in a given site, although analysis is a useful methodology. RH: Every practitioner works differently, uses different tools. For me, as a GIS specialist as well, I find the whole McHargian layering of the site useful. What are the relationships, how do they weave together? Starting with the physical and then the biological, then we reach the social and hopefully the cultural, the place-making part of it. I don’t think we have a lot of control over that part of it; we just try to set the stage or try to uncover the meanings. PC: Some places have so much power in and of themselves. They do not need any intervention or anything like that. NC: This leads into my next question, which is about the role of representation within interpretation, and how a site is variously represented through different discourses that we use to frame our understanding: whether we approach a site through science, such as geology, morphology, fluvial geomorphology, ecology, and then culturally through archaeology, history, religion, literature, or poetry, or through legal definitions, economics, planning, or urbanism, and so on. Each one offers a different lens for the representation of site through the narratives that they create, the mental images that they engender, and each discourse has an embedded set of values. All these discourses are ways of representing a site, making it legible. In your practice, what is your process of interpretation? What is most useful or inspiring to you as a method or process, and has it changed through your years of experience?

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NC: But is the process of interpretation ever really neutral? JR: I don’t think it is ever neutral. You are distilling information and that act becomes political and very charged. It is your interpretation of how a site should be kept or treated, changed, or altered in some way. We all have different ways of approaching a site but at a certain point you commit to a reading and you commit to an interpretation and a response to that reading. PC: We work a lot with First Nations, and one site that comes to mind is a registered archaeological site. It’s probably a 150metre-high sheer drop into the water. At the base of the site are rock paintings that have been done over many centuries but we can’t say how many years. The cliff is an amazing place. You don’t even necessarily see the rock paintings from across the lake, but when you go there and realise why they are there, it is awe inspiring. Yet, not being a First Nations person, I have no business interpreting it whatsoever. I can talk about the site, but to go into that political realm is very tricky. I think that interpretation can be a very negative thing to do.

And some can be very positive, when you open people’s eyes to see something they would not be able to see. MR: Our field is a spatial design field, so we have the benefit of using experience or design experience or immersive experience in a place, and that can often open up a range of interpretation that is really lived, that is in motion, and that’s tactile and sensory, and engages people at a much deeper level. JR: I think the challenge of landscape architecture is to reveal not just one set of experiences but to tap into the exponential possibilities, the layers of information that comprise a site or system. MR: When we do site analysis, it’s a question of diving deeply into context in the broad sense and unpacking the site within a constellation and system of all kinds of layers. JR: While teaching at the University of Toronto from time to time, when we do site analysis for studio or for representation class, you always have to say, okay, you can only go to this boundary for the sake of the project. And the students always say, “but there are things over here and over here.”

MR: The lens of interpretation is where very personal confrontations with a site can evoke really exciting tangents or directions that might suggest a design. So it is the initial confrontations with a site that are very instrumental because they allow you to jump over the neutral facts.

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Initially, most precontact settlements are invisible, sensitive to disturbance, usually complex, and detected by a scattering of artifacts near the surface. With modern archaeological techniques or as protected features in a larger landscape, they have much to teach us.

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Archaeological Services Incorporated

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More than 9,000 years ago, early Great Lakes hunters from Southern Ontario fashioned and used these spear points in a boreal landscape much different from our own.

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Archaeological Services Incorporated

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Fort York in Toronto is at the same time a public space, an historic site, an archaeological site, a cultural landscape, a gathering place, and an education centre.

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Kathy Mills

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lead to new models for participatory design/planning processes where community perceptions of site are more integrated into the process. MR: The engagement can be collective, can be provoked, and interpretive narratives can be shared or be personal. This is incredibly rich in terms of where it can go.

There is always the question of where you begin and where you stop. You put constraints on the design because you have to put constraints on the design. And if you didn’t have those constraints it would be a totally different design. NC: Yes, we work with an actual project and there is a limit to the work, but of course the site, and our understanding of its context, can expand way beyond that. For example, it’s a piece of a property but it’s within a watershed. MR: I think there is a certain auto pilot that happens when we use the phrase “site analysis.” Suddenly we zone out, and then run through a bunch of overlays. That’s the old way of thinking. Nowadays it’s more about the level of engagement with the site. PC: The most powerful tool is the human imagination. And that is the interaction between the person who is in that place imagining beyond what has either been left there or added to a place and the power of that. In landscape architecture, a challenge could be how not to get in the way of that and how to bring that to bear; to enlist the human imagination into the experience.

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In urban developments, there can be a tension between the site as “raw” and the site as a “place,” with a pre-existing identity.

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Sean Marshall, Creative Commons

NC: In a book of essays on modern landscape architecture, edited by Marc Treib, he credits land artists as being the catalysts for a renewed interest in landscape as an artifact of contemporary culture and for being site specific in their approach. The 1960s land artists’ earthworks involved the particularities of the site, its shape, its materials, its situation, as the context of the sculpture. It’s interesting that it was the artists who created a shift after the McHargian influence of mapping. RH: Robert Smithson, Christo, Andy Goldsworthy, and many others are examples of artists using the landscape as a medium for interpreting site. MR: There are amazing lessons from works of art because they are about how we can use an intervention to transform perception—how physical matter can be manipulated or warped to transform perceptions of place. RH: In Canada, Iain Baxter& is a contemporary artist working with these themes of transforming perceptions of place and environment. Also, with the changes in technology in both GIS and social networking, with crowd sourcing landscape features and use data, there are opportunities for site analysis to be far more engaging and interactive for communities. This could

PC: There was a very interesting example of this with a church in Toronto that was owned by a developer and was empty for ten years. The developer wanted to build a condo, and there was huge public discussion about what to do there. A church is a public space, people go into this space and they interact with one another. One very powerful suggestion that came up was to take the roof off, leave the building—a ruin, more or less—and have it become an internal park that people could come into and out of. People would have this wonderful sense of containment, security… There were landscape architects working on that, and it was a brilliant idea! But it was rejected. NC: It seems to me that we have shifted our orientation to site from an earlier period where it was seen as fundamentally ecological in makeup to site now being approached as fundamentally social. We can see this in a project like Superkilen Park in Copenhagen for which the design process was intensely consultative with a very diverse community. Designers are striving to engage and connect with the end users and to weave social meaning into the project at multiple levels. The social and cultural role of sites have taken on a new prominence in the design of places. And, of course, narratives of place change over time. MR: We have two projects right now where we are working with that complex layering of ecological and cultural meaning. One is at Fort York, which is a national historic site in Toronto, at the mouth of Garrison Creek. It’s one of the city’s lost rivers; the site is a founding location for Toronto. Our interest is in incorporating the narrative of the ravine—a 12,000-year geological narrative—and how the city was carved out of the river valleys, which are fundamental to the city’s structure and its

Round Table

settlement. How you can give a sense of that landscape, geology, and other forces that were at play in defining the site? The other project is on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto. We are working across a 26-km site, which is concerned with the public realm of the new LRT. On a larger scale it’s also about how to reconnect and rediscover the city’s ravines and river ecology and the potential of that as a resource—how to weave that back into city life even though it is far beyond our direct site. PC: There are former First Nations territories all along those rivers and ravines indicated by settlements of all sizes, some of them very large. NC: That’s a fascinating example of how narratives of place change over time. NinaMarie Lister writes that the only way to deal with complexity in landscape architecture and related fields is to create a narrative that is meaningful. MR: Yes, and often we are trying to uncover more of that narrative. Our task is to simplify, clarify, and give a kind of legibility to some of those layers, even when they go back 12,000 years and, of course, are very hard to understand. We are constantly trying to amplify the most essential elements and give anchors to some of those narratives in as clear and clean a way as possible to set in motion an open way of moving through and experiencing the site. JR: So those elements become the structuring ideas or forces that inform a way to organize the site, rather than simply placing a commemorative plaque to celebrate “this is where this was, which was this long ago, etc...” MR: Exactly. We use those as touchstones for a new category, a type of order… That’s what makes it all so rich, because in this case you have one of the most important historical places in the city and then you have one of its most dense communities emerging right at the doorstep which is craving a place for everyday amenities and activities. And how then to use the programmatic demands and embed them within what is actually a heritage interpretation

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program that also brings play, brings social aspects… It’s a pretty hard-core infrastructural context that has come on top of this amazing historical context. JR: I think that’s a very important point to make: sites are always evolving. PC: You just can’t freeze it. We are doing a Highway 407 interconnect with Highway 35/115, and the Ministry of Transportation has bought some land on which there are Native settlements. There are more villages than you could possibly dig up; there are thousands of artifacts in these villages where people used to live. They sort of still live there in a way, and the sites are open space. And we don’t have enough open spaces, so why not not dig it up and instead leave it as a park? This has been done in a lot of cases; sites and burials are protected in many places because it’s better to leave them and have them known simply as places of significance. I was working near a cemetery just last week where the stones and wooden crosses are all lying down, and you can see the sunken graves and the trees have grown up, and you wonder what’s going to happen in the long term. Fortunately, it’s not near Toronto so nothing is going to happen yet. But sometimes it’s just best to leave sites in place. There’s no reason why elements of the historical landscape cannot be part of a modern continuing landscape. NC: Landscape architecture’s relationship to site is inherently responsive. We learn a methodology of response on many levels to place: what it was, what it is, what it could become. Is that unique to our field? JR: I think that what we bring to the table for discourse with architects and engineers is our understanding of complex site issues. We, as landscape architects, get to bridge all those different fields, but we also think of the overall site holistically and that is our strength. RH: I think sometimes architects, planners, and artists can also integrate sites holistically. I don’t think landscape architects own that holistic view.

NC: The siting of a building on a site is an act of power that influences the outcomes significantly and this structuring of a project is not often exercised by the landscape architect. In an interview I did with Claude Cormier, he was talking about a residential development project, coincidentally on a ravine, for which he played a key role in siting the building to face the ravine. He emphasized the importance of landscape architects being instrumental in these decisions and the need sometimes to push for that role. Has that been your experience? JR: I think it’s a constant dialogue; I don’t think landscape architects site a building without understanding the program inside the building, so it’s a back and forth with the architects and engineers; there’s a lot more play there.

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Works of art in the landscape can be used as interventions to transform perceptions of place.

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Todd Smith

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Greenfields are often seen as sites awaiting transformation, rather than as places in their own right.

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Todd Smith

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The places outside of built form are primarily where publicness happens, it’s fundamentally social, and it’s the connective tissue of the urban matrix. What was seen as void is now understood as fabric. So that is a major shift in the view of the public realm within notions of site. PC: The public realm is a concept that the landscape architect can bring into the discussion. NC: To wrap up, I think the term site analysis has the ring of 1970s scientific rationalism. Is there a better term? MR: I am not against the term. It’s fundamental. But we tend to tune out and go neutral. Christophe Girot has written very articulately about an approach to site in his essay about four trace concepts, as he puts it, of landing, grounding, finding, and founding. I share his opinion that our first contact with a place is almost like landing, and it can really shape your perception. You may bring preconceived ideas, and then you meet a place for the first time and it can generate a very interesting tension that can be a source for the design intervention. How you rationalize those tensions is a subject for design. The site analysis is our research, it’s what we do professionally but also how we bring our own perspective as designers. That’s where we can generate something more unexpected.

NC: That’s why site analysis is very generative for other design disciplines as well. PC: I worked with David Crombie for several years on the Waterfront Trust, and in the mid-1990s, public realm wasn’t something generally talked about. It came into the discussion more and more until you began to get the feeling that public realm was a very important component in a site plan, especially along the waterfront as it has evolved. And public realm is now a major planning component. NC: That’s one of the ideas in the term landscape urbanism, the ascent of landscape architectural design of open space and the public realm that knits it all together.

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Elizabeth Simcoe’s 1796 painting depicts a view from the York Barracks at Fort York.

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Courtesy of PUBLIC WORK

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Design for Mouth of the Creek Park, Toronto

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PUBLIC WORK

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Rendering of Mouth of the Creek Park, Toronto, looking east

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PUBLIC WORK

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ecological design because that is how people create an attachment to a place. We form attachments to place and that is the basis of caring about that place and what happens to it over time. So if you want people to engage and care about ecological sustainability, it can’t just be scientific and rational and about the soil and water. Because we are human and social creatures, there has to be that mind/body connection.

PC: When we are excavating large sites, sometimes we are there for three years, and usually we are there four to six months of the year. You watch the clouds come and go, and the rainfalls, early snow, late snow, whatever it is. That’s how you get such a powerful sense of that place. Subjectivity is interesting, but objectivity has got to be part of your analysis. I think that both are really important factors in coming to understand a place. But landscape architects probably don’t have the option of being enslaved in this particular way in the middle of a field for three years! (Laughter) WITH THANKS TO KAARI KITAWI FOR TRANSCRIBING THIS DISCUSSION AND TO KATE NELISCHER FOR ASSISTING WITH THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ROUND TABLE.

That’s where we can go beyond the neutral, I guess, the kind of auto pilot. How it gets transformative or takes us to another layer, which is our aspiration, is where we engage on a deeper level and construct new narratives that resonate. JR: Every single site is different. Even on a small site, you think it’s going to be straightforward, and it never is the case. Every single project has its own complexities. You learn the basic analysis in school, like shadow analysis and such, but that only goes so far. Each site has its unique physical attributes or things you do not see until you go there a dozen or a hundred times. RH: The experience of site or place will be different with each individual and with each time they visit. NC: Elizabeth Meyer is a writer and landscape architect who is advocating for the role of the sensory, sensual, and physical experience of landscape within even

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Garrison lowlands, Mouth of the Creek Park, Toronto

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PUBLIC WORK

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Nexus of trails, Mouth of the Creek Park, Toronto

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PUBLIC WORK

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View to the northeast, Mouth of the Creek Park, Toronto

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PUBLIC WORK

Visualizing the Invisible

Seeing a site again, for the first time

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Visualizing the Invisible

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Walk with us as we enter a maple-beech forest. Our guide, Chris, reaches down and takes a pinch of root from a plant on the forest floor. He passes it around and everyone smells it, trying to imagine what plant it is. After a few guesses, it’s revealed as wild ginger. Chris tells an amusing story about a kid trying to guess the plant and walking backwards through his mind to a day that he was sick and his mom gave him “…Wait! I know it…ginger ale!”

TEXT BY DR. ROBERT D. BROWN

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Thermal images reveal information that is invisible to the unaided human eye.

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Robert D. Brown

Every time I meet a class for the first time I ask each student to tell me a memorable story about herself/himself. It helps me recall their names, but it also changes the image in my mind from “a class” to “individuals I know.” Similarly, when students learn the name and story of each plant in the landscape, their image of “forest” is altered and they start to see “individual trees they know.” Layer after layer is lifted from their eyes as they discover that each species has specific requirements for survival; different trees provide different functions in the landscape; and trees even communicate with each other (well, they eavesdrop on each other). A story unfolds for each element of the landscape. “Hills” become drumlins, eskers, and terminal moraine, each with specific characteristics that affect design. “Dirt” becomes soil, horizons are revealed through bore holes, and the texture of the soil becomes something you can determine by taking a Timbit-sized clump of b-horizon and rolling it around in your hand. Slowly but surely all components of the landscape come into focus, and a depth of understanding is achieved that will allow students to forever fit their designs into the natural processes of the landscape. There are many ways that the invisible landscape can be visualized. One powerful way is to view stereo-pairs of air photos. Before going to a site, we use stereoscopes to view the landscape in 3-D, as if we were floating overhead in a balloon. We walk around the site in our minds, orienting ourselves and becoming familiar with the different vegetation and landforms. After this virtual site visit, we conduct an experiential visit. We use all our senses to read the landscape, and we supplement our senses with instruments.

We look at the bark of the trees and learn that Prunus serotina looks like it has burnt Corn Flakes stuck all over it, and that Fagus grandifolia looks like the leg of a very tall elephant. These images stick in our minds and provide a crutch for reading a forest even in the middle of winter. We stop occasionally and listen to the birds. We notice that bluebirds are only in the open meadow areas, blue jays tend to stay near the edges, while pileated woodpeckers are only deep in the middle of woodlots. When we don’t recognize a call, we pull out an iPod with a bird call app on it. While we have it out, we play the chickadee call and are mobbed by the curious local population. On sunny, windy fall days we seek out microclimates. We start by standing in the shade of a building but fully in the wind. Through shivers and complaints, measurements are dutifully taken. Reports come in. Air temperature: 5ºC. Wind speed: 4 m/s. Wall temperature: 5ºC. We’re freezing. A few welcome steps later and we’re out of the wind and in the full sun. New measurements are taken. Air temperature: 5°C. Wind speed 0.5 m/s. Wall temperature: 18ºC. Hats come off, jackets are shed, and we want to stay here for the rest of the afternoon. It’s balmy. If we didn’t have the instruments, we would have guessed that the air temperature was much higher in the second spot, but by using instruments we could clearly see that it was the reduction of wind and the increase in radiation that made us feel so much warmer. Apply those principles in designs for restaurant owners who want to extend the seasonal use of their outdoor cafés and you’ll have satisfied clients.

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Students learn about sites through close contact.

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Robert D. Brown

The wind is one of the most difficult parts of the landscape to characterize as it is always changing. High-resolution anemometers for measuring wind can cost thousands of dollars, but for less than a buck you can buy an app for your iPod. The apps use the microphone to estimate the speed of the wind. They’re far from perfect, but they’ll give you a quick idea of the relative wind speeds in different parts of a landscape. Back in the studio we plot wind roses to visualize the pattern of wind directions over different periods of time. When we plot the wind rose for Toronto in January, it’s clear that the winds blow mostly from the southwest and westsouthwest. This is valuable information as it allows us to provide a windbreak on the windward side of the site while still allowing solar access from the south-east to south. That outdoor café starts to become more realistic as you realize you can design a sun-catch that would allow people to enjoy a space to eat lunch outdoors even on chilly but sunny winter days.

But what if the design goal was to site a hospital, and to make sure that snow didn’t block the emergency entrance during snowstorms? If you used the same wind rose you’d be doing the worst thing possible. So we plot a wind rose that shows only the winds that bring heavy snowfall to Toronto and it looks very different. This wind rose tells us that a windbreak should be located northeast of the emergency entrance to capture the snow before it reaches the hospital. The surface temperature of essentially everything on earth is an indicator of the amount of terrestrial radiation it’s giving off. The hotter the surface, the more radiation. Sometimes it’s obvious—stand by a hot radiator and you’re being bathed in terrestrial radiation. There are invisible hot radiators lurking in the landscape, and we measure the amount of radiation they give off, and therefore their temperatures, using a thermal infrared camera. These cameras cost thousands of dollars, but for a hundred bucks you can buy a Black & Decker Thermal Leak Detector and use it to

Visualizing the Invisible

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measure the temperature of any surface in a landscape. On a sunny summer day, we take comparative measurements of two different lawns: the one with artificial turf has a temperature of around 55ºC (about the same as a newly paved asphalt parking lot—hot enough to cook an egg), while the one with real grass has a temperature of around 20ºC.

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Comparison thermal and visual images of a zoo enclosure

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Bethany Vlaming

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Comparison thermal and visual images of a building

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Robert D. Brown

People aren’t alone in experiencing the invisible microclimate. Zoo enclosures for tigers are often designed to look like their native habitat, but the rocks that look so real are often made of gunite. After being bathed in sun for a few hours, the surfaces of natural rocks will still likely be quite cool as the heat from the sun is absorbed into the mass of the stone. But the gunite rocks concentrate the heat at the surface and, as a result, the surface can be much hotter. Those hot surfaces emit so much terrestrial radiation that

tigers will avoid standing anywhere near them on a hot day. However, if carefully designed, these landscape features can provide welcome warmth in midwinter. Every element of a landscape is familiar on one level, yet can be totally invisible on another. It isn’t until we learn to see the landscape again, in a totally new way, that we can really understand, appreciate, and design appropriately. THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK DR. ESTHER FINEGAN FOR HER ASSISTANCE IN ACQUIRING THE THERMAL IMAGES FOR THIS ARTICLE. BIO/ DR. ROBERT D. BROWN, SALA, CSLA, FCELA, IS A PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH. HE RECEIVED THE CSLA TEACHING MEDAL IN 2007 AND THE OALA RESEARCH AND INNOVATION AWARD IN 2013.

Beyond Site

The Ganaraska Forest Reborn

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Beyond Site

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02 TEXT BY KAREN MAY

The creation of a physical design involves the abstraction and distillation of multiple understandings of a place. As such, designers grapple with how to define site, and are often bounded by technical and legal constraints such as ownership, zoning bylaws, client needs, and other considerations of an aesthetic and/or financial nature. I work for the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, and one of my tasks as a landscape designer was to develop interpretive signage for the Ganaraska Forest. Although design is sometimes conceived of as being in service of one truth about a site, I see it rather as an attempt to capture the many complex narratives of place. One of the most remarkable things about the Ganaraska Forest is that its story begins with the first act of landscape planning in Ontario that looked beyond site to consider natural features and processes in their entirety. The Ganaraska Forest is a place of great historical and ecological significance in the Ontario landscape, one that is little known outside of select groups of outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, local historians, and residents. It is the largest contiguous forest in Southern Ontario—11,000 acres, more than half the size of the island of Manhattan. Located near Peterborough, the forest is comprised of primarily red and white pine plantations, and many were planted in the 1940s. There is little information about the site before European settlement. Much of the known history of Ganaraska begins with the familiar narrative of colonization and settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries, the marginalization of First Nations peoples, and exploitation of the landscape. As in much of the “New World,” the arrival of Europeans saw a great increase in demand for land and resources, particularly timber.

Widespread clearing of the vast forests of Southern Ontario led to unprecedented levels of desertification across the region by the late 19th century. These wastelands were comparable to the creeping threat of America’s dustbowls in the 1930s. The Ganaraska River and headwaters were a part of these large wastelands that spanned across two counties, Durham and Northumberland. The majority of the forests were removed in less than a century. It soon became clear that the sandy soils of the 01/

The Ganaraska Forest, located near Peterborough, is the largest contiguous forest in Southern Ontario.

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Karen May/Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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In the late 19th century and into the 20th century, deforestation turned some areas of Southern Ontario into wastelands.

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E. J. Zavitz, Archives of Ontario (RBG 1-448-1), courtesy of Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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Interpretive signage tells the story of the Ganaraska Forest.

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Karen May/Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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1930’s

region were not suited to cropping, and large areas of land at the headwaters of the Ganaraska River began to wash away. Enter the quiet, unsung hero of the story: a young forester by the name of Edmund Zavitz. He changed the future course of Southern Ontario’s forests forever. With a simple, radical gesture— planting trees—of unparalleled scale and persistence, he began a movement to reforest Southern Ontario’s denuded areas. This campaign continued well into the 1980s, when the province celebrated the planting of its one-billionth tree. In 1942, after several decades of surveying, documenting, and disseminating information about the spread of wastelands in Southern Ontario, and the need for a comprehensive reforestation program, a report on the Ganaraska Watershed was issued by the Government of Ontario, Department of Lands and Forests (which would later become the Ministry of Natural Resources). Co-authored by V.B. Blake, a local historian, and A.H. Richardson, a colleague of Zavitz’s from the Department of Lands and Forests, the report proposed a large-scale reforestation program. It also included a call for new land-use management strategies led by government agencies. This would be the birth of the idea for conservation authorities in Ontario, and the first example of land-use planning that considered natural features and processes above property lines and political boundaries.

1960’s

Today

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A significant narrative of the Ganaraska Forest is its transformation from desertified wasteland to lush woodland.

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E. J. Zavitz, Archives of Ontario (RBG 1-448-1), courtesy of Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation (1930’s and 1960’s images); and Karen May/Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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The barred owl is one of the many species that inhabit the Ganaraska Forest.

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Bruce Parker

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Pine plantation, Ganaraska Forest

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Karen May/Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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Children participate in an educational tour of the Ganaraska Forest during the unveiling of the interpretive signage for the site.

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Karen May/Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation

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Though Zavitz had first suggested the need for widespread reforestation as early as 1908, with special focus on the Ganaraska Watershed as an ideal case for testing, the timing was right in the 1940s for the Ganaraska Report, and reforestation efforts were begun, along with the creation of Ontario’s first government conservation body: the Ganaraska Conservation Authority. The Ganaraska Report spurred massive tree-planting campaigns that gave us many of our familiar forests, most of which are thought of as remnant forests but are actually recreated by humans— forests of Simcoe County, York, Durham, and Northumberland, as well as Norfolk County (home to the first major forest research centre in Ontario, the St. Williams Forest Station). By the time of Zavitz’s death in 1968, tree cover in Southern Ontario had tripled. Today there are only hints of the vast plantations that Zavitz and other important pioneers of the conservation movement fought so hard to get in the ground. Their legacy remains invisible, hidden in the forests that have once again become lush and diverse.

As I walk through the Ganaraska Forest with a group of school children as part of the celebratory unveiling of the signage, I find myself thinking about my role as a designer in telling a piece of this important history. The kids, Grade 5 students from a primary school near Cobourg, are learning about the forest and concepts that I now take for granted: biodiversity, photosynthesis, and food webs. Yet the magic of seeing the children discover these concepts and make connections leaves me with a feeling of humility in my role as a designer, storyteller, and environmental advocate. I recognize that the things I take for granted had to be learned, carefully, piece by piece through explanation and exploration of the world. Design is often like this. We pursue the many narratives that play out in a place, pushing and expanding the

boundaries of site, because the materials and processes we design with inherently extend beyond site. The way we define and understand landscapes, with ever-shifting boundaries and narratives, is neither static nor given. Site is always an evolving story, one we shape and share in order to give human meaning to landscape. THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK LINDA GIVELAS AND STEVE MCMULLEN AT THE GANARASKA FOREST CENTRE, THE WILLOW BEACH FIELD NATURALISTS, JOHN BACHER (AUTHOR OF TWO BILLION TREES AND COUNTING), AND MEGAN HUNTER, BURKHARD MAUSBERG, AND SARAH PETREVAN AT THE FRIENDS OF THE GREENBELT FOUNDATION FOR THEIR SUPPORT AND GUIDANCE. BIO/ KAREN MAY IS A GRAPHIC AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER WHO WORKS FOR THE NON-PROFIT FRIENDS OF THE GREENBELT FOUNDATION, PROMOTING HIKING TRAILS, LOCAL FOOD, AND CONSERVATION IN ONTARIO’S GREENBELT. SHE COMPLETED HER MLA IN 2011.

Sites of Value

Designating modern cultural landscapes in Ontario

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Sites of Value

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TEXT BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAND

This article is the first in a regular series in Ground that will explore significant designed landscapes in Ontario and the importance of protecting them. Our impetus for this series was the recent Toronto visit of Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the U.S.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation, and the foundation’s plan to hold a conference in Toronto. This is an outstanding opportunity to bring together all those in Ontario who are working to bring recognition to the province’s designed landscape heritage. As part of that effort, Ground will be publishing a series of articles that profiles under-recognized designed landscapes in Ontario that deserve wider recognition. We invite Ground readers to send suggestions of significant cultural landscapes to profile in this series; please send your ideas to magazine@oala.ca. In 2001 the Province of Ontario recognized a 1960s landscape designed by Sasaki Strong Associates as a significant landscape of cultural and heritage value. This was an important event because it appears that Sasaki’s Queen’s Park Complex may have been the first of his landscapes to be given protected heritage status. It was also important that Canada’s legal framework for heritage protection was able to designate a relatively recent cultural landscape. Each province in Canada has its own and different heritage legislation; and in 2001, there were no strong over-riding federal heritage policies or incentives, few heritage controls on federally regulated agencies, such as the postal service, and no National Register. In Ontario, the provincial government had enacted its own heritage legislation regulated by the Ministry of Culture. There was a loophole in the legislation regarding the protection of provincially owned heritage properties because the Ministry of Culture did not own property and could not control the portfolios of other ministries. This loophole was addressed by a protocol agreement that was modeled somewhat on the environmental assessment process. The protocol required consultation with the Ministry of Culture in the event of the alteration, sale, or demolition of a property. The limitations of this agreement were that it remained non-binding and had a forty-year cut-off date that excluded the protection of modern cultural resources. The recognition of the Sasaki landscape demonstrated, however, that the protocol could extend beyond its limitations if the circumstances were right.

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Historic renderings of the Sasaki Strong Associates design of the Queen’s Park Complex in Toronto

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

The Ontario Heritage Act delegated much of its authority for heritage preservation to local municipalities, stating simply that municipalities can protect properties of “architectural and historical value or interest.” However, the act gave municipalities limited powers. Two significant shortcomings were that the act lacked permanent demolition control and almost entirely ignored the conservation of landscapes. Cities like Toronto have used provincial heritage legislation as broadly as possible. Toronto City Council frequently designates recent properties, interpreting the act as applying to significant designs, landscapes or buildings, new or old, without regard to any stated age limit. In the mid-1970s, for example, Council designated the

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Original plan of the interior courtyard

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Rendering of the courtyard

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Courtyard as it looked soon after completion

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Courtyard in 1967

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Queen’s Park Complex facing Bay Street

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

1964 New City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square as a heritage property, about ten years after construction and as soon as the provincial act came into force. Municipalities like Toronto have frequently designated provincially owned properties even though municipalities can have no legal power over the actions of the province.

These roles of the different levels of government can be seen at work with the evaluation of Sasaki’s landscape at the Queen’s Park Complex. It is a provincially owned property built as the second annex building to the provincial legislature located in downtown Toronto and completed in 1971. In the early 1990s the Office of the Speaker of the House developed, without any prompting, its own heritage master plan for the legislature and its grounds. The Speaker did this as a direct attempt to ensure appropriate preservation measures for a significant provincially owned property. It may also have been intended to be a demonstration of responsible public stewardship acknowledging the lack of any legal obligation towards heritage preservation. Directly to the east of Queen’s Park is the first annex building, the Whitney Block, built in the 1920s. When it was slated for substantial alterations in the mid-1990s the Ministry of Culture requested the provincial protocol be undertaken, arguing partly on the basis of the building’s proximity to the legislature. The protocol was followed and a heritage master plan was adopted for the Whitney Block and its lands. It later became clear, however, that the Whitney Block’s heritage master plan was not catching all of the changes to the landscape in its vicinity. After the erection of a

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very large Police Memorial and proposed ad hoc landscape improvements to deal with skateboarders, vandalism, and tripping hazards, the Ministry of Culture again requested that the protocol be followed. This time the evaluation would look at the heritage value of the landscape surrounding the Queen’s Park Complex that abuts the Whitney Block. While the Queen’s Park Complex was not old enough to fall technically within the guidelines for the protocol agreement, its proximity to the legislature and its shared open space with the Whitney Block were sufficient to require the review.

The team of ERA Architects and Hough Woodland Naylor Dance Leinster, landscape architects, and Mark Laird, landscape historian, was asked to prepare the heritage landscape assessment before any of the repair work would occur. The assessment concluded that the landscape was a significant cultural resource, and the landlord agency, recognizing the importance of the design and the designers, agreed to the team’s recommended master plan. In order to follow the protocol, an advisory group was required, and the Ministry selected Docomomo Ontario, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, and staff from the City of Toronto’s Culture Division. The advisory group, along with Ministry of Culture staff, was instrumental in supporting the recommendations and was keenly aware of the value of promoting the conservation of a modern landscape.

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Queen’s Park Complex fountain

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Whitney Block

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Key plan

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

The Cultural Value of the Sasaki Landscape The Queen’s Park Complex landscape was developed as a master plan by Sasaki Strong Associates, with Hideo Sasaki credited as the designer. Sasaki Strong Associates was a Toronto branch office of the Sasaki organization which was formed in 1962 in partnership with Richard Strong as the local Canadian associate. The association continued for about five years during

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the major work on the complex, and Richard Strong Associates completed the final phases of the project. Strong was a prominent landscape architect in his own right as one of the founders and the first chairman of the University of Toronto’s Department of Landscape Architecture, and his project manager, Gerry Englar, stayed with the project from 1964 until 1971 when the last work was completed. Both Strong and Englar played major roles in the development of the landscape architecture profession in Canada. The assessment considered both the landscape and its urban context. The Queen’s Park Complex landscape is at the eastern end of a large series of linked and informal open spaces that meander through the city and include the University of Toronto lands and Queen’s Park. This extended network is possibly the most important grouping of open spaces within the downtown core of the city. The northeast corner of the site was found to be one of the most intact areas. It is a heavily used plaza at the busy intersection of Bay and Wellesley streets. Its design is carefully integrated and balanced with the architecture, and there is extensive use of commissioned public art. The central fountain piece was colourfully illuminated at night and operated during the winter months to create an ice sculpture. Public art was a major component of the landscape throughout the complex, giving the province its first major collection of outdoor art. The heritage study’s recommendations were that the plaza should be fully restored to its original appearance. The landscape on the north side of the building provides a narrow band of trees with surface limestone paving leading to a main entry of one of the towers. Again, full restoration was recommended. With the exception of the northeast plaza, the quite naturalistic grounds of the Queen’s Park Complex are mostly built on roof slabs. This naturalistic quality of the grounds with contoured mounds and large-caliper trees demonstrates a state-of-the-art knowledge of 1960s roof-garden technology. When the landscape was originally designed, no one anticipated the high degree of usage the area would receive and, as a result, the landscape became severely degraded. The assessment team argued that the original design should guide the rehabilitation of the site, but that there would need to be specific modifications to respond to the increase in pedestrian usage. These modifications would include recognizing desire paths, providing better lighting, and restoring some but not all of the dense plantings. It was agreed that exactly restoring the original landscape and restricting access ran against the more important intent of free-flowing public access around the building. The south and western end of the landscape forms a large square court directly south of the Whitney Block. Sasaki’s first design in 1964 was to construct a large limestone plaza that would be twinned with an equally large new limestone plaza to be constructed in front of the legislature. This grand move, which was never executed, would have very clearly and simply illustrated the relationship between the legislature and the annex buildings. This design was significantly

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Model of Whitney South

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Historic aerial view of northeastern portion of the complex

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Model/photograph of the complex

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Courtesy of ERA Architects

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Details of the Queen’s Park Complex as it appears today

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Lorraine Johnson

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The Ontario Heritage Act was revised in 2005, but Canada still requires stronger legislative tools and stronger financial incentives to encourage preservation. In this 2001 case, the protocol ensured that the Province of Ontario recognized the Queen’s Park Complex as a significant landscape of cultural and heritage value and as the first Sasaki landscape to be given protected heritage status. The restoration work outlined in the heritage master plan was undertaken between 2002 and 2004 under the direction of Ian Dance, OALA, and David Leinster, OALA. Today, visiting Sasaki and Strong’s mature and restored Queen’s Park Complex landscape is a rare and rich experience. What would we have lost if this landscape had been removed or significantly altered? Too many designed landscapes suffer a fate of gradual degradation due to inadequate maintenance and insensitive alterations. Too often, the lifespan of these landscapes is cut short when their degraded state renders them undervalued and invisible and without a constituency when a redevelopment plan surfaces.

changed, however, in 1967 and what was constructed was a much more modest and understated design with an informal parklike setting and with simple but elegant plantings. The change in design provoked considerable discussion in the evaluation team, and in the end it was argued that the later design, strongly influenced by Strong and Englar, may have reflected a growing understanding and response to the site and context and a greater appreciation of the value of the legislature grounds as they were.

An ironic shortcoming of the assessment process, especially with a design in which the integration of the building and landscape was the heart of the scheme, is that the interior courtyard of the Whitney Block was initially excluded from the landscape evaluation. However, the team recommended that the courtyard was in need of restoration and maintenance. The process of evaluation, appreciation, and protection of Sasaki’s collaborative design illustrates a successful and quite Canadian form of action. It was based on advisory groups and non-binding protocols, working with very little legislative regulation, and resting almost entirely on consensus and consultation, with an understanding that there may be different objectives in play. The result was that a significant cultural resource was recognized and there was an agreed-upon course of action to restore, maintain, and protect it.

Of course, not every designed landscape deserves protection, but in all cases it is easy to lose sight of the quality, performance, and cultural value of the original design when these are masked by decades of decline. Heritage protection is one tool at our disposal, but landscape architects also have a duty as a profession to educate the public about the cultural significance of our practice and our practitioners, and to educate ourselves as well. BIO/ MICHAEL MCCLELLAND IS A FOUNDING PRINCIPAL OF ERA ARCHITECTS IN TORONTO, A FIRM SPECIALIZING IN HERITAGE CONSERVATION AND CULTURAL PLANNING. ERA ARCHITECTS WAS PART OF THE TEAM THAT PREPARED THE HERITAGE LANDSCAPE ASSESSMENT OF THE QUEEN’S PARK COMPLEX.

Notes

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Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events

honours

exhibitions A massive collaborative exhibition, Land|Slide: Possible Futures, opens at the Markham Museum on September 21 and runs to October 14. Curated by Janine Marchessault, the project involves 35 artists, along with local agencies, non-profit groups, educators, activists, and developers, in transforming the historic Markham Museum site into an interactive landscape, including art installations and participatory performances. For information, visit landslide-possiblefutures.com 01/

The Line, from Land|Slide: Possible Futures

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Patricio Davila and Dave Colangelo

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Brook McIlroy collaborates with Aboriginal groups in many projects, such as the Spirit Garden in Thunder Bay.

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David Whittaker

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South elevation of Iroquoian longhouse at Crawford Lake in Halton

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Brook McIlroy

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John (Jack) Copeland

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Courtesy of OALA

Brook McIlroy has received the Progressive Aboriginal Relations (PAR) Committed designation—the first architectural, urban design, planning, or landscape architectural practice in Canada to be recognized with the designation—for its support of Aboriginal communities and groups. The PAR Committed certification represents the firm’s past, present, and future working relationships with Aboriginal communities in the collaborative development and implementation of successful projects, plans, and designs. The Spirit Garden—a unique landscape feature and “headland” on Thunder Bay’s revitalized waterfront— demonstrates the application of a collaborative effort between the Brook McIlroy design team and local Aboriginal communities. Officially opened in December 2011, the Spirit Garden is being actively used as a gathering space for storytelling, ceremonies, concerts, and contemplation.

ponds John Hicks, OALA, is the author of The Pond Book: A Complete Guide to Site Planning, Design and Management of Small Lakes & Ponds, recently published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside. Written for both professionals and the general public, the book explores the wide variety of pond ecosystems in Canada and the U.S., and covers all aspects of design and construction, including wildlife management techniques, control of algae, and the health of fish populations. This handy guide for landscape architects is available from bookstores.

in memoriam John Copeland, OALA The OALA is sad to report the loss of a pillar of the landscape architecture profession. John (Jack) Copeland, OALA—proud father and grandfather—passed away suddenly in August, leaving his family and many colleagues and friends in deep sorrow at this news. Jack, a graduate of the School of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University, practised for five decades in the Ottawa area. Jack was a perpetual volunteer in the landscape architecture profession, promoting the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects through mentoring and proctoring a steady stream of students and associates during his years of practice. Jack was well known for his mastery of site development through elegant and succinct design solutions. He was honoured for his contribution to the profession when he was inducted into the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects College of Fellows in 1999. His most recent award-winning work greets travelers to the Ottawa core as they pass the Museum of Nature grounds on Argyle Street. With his passing, Jack has left a legacy and also a large path where he once stood.

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Artifact

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01 TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON AND NETAMI STUART, OALA

Every site is ripe for interpretations, and one of the most meaningrich sites in Ontario—perhaps in all of Canada—is Victoria Island. Unceded Algonquin Territory, this island on the Ottawa River, between Ottawa and Gatineau, is of great spiritual importance to the Algonquins and has had a long history of cultural significance as a meeting place for Algonquin, French, and English peoples. It is here, within view of Canada’s Parliament Buildings, that Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence held her hunger strike during the rise of the Idle No More movement. Architect Douglas Cardinal has been working on a project to build a First Nations centre on Victoria Island for many years. The concept is to make “A Circle of All Nations and a Culture of Peace”—a healing, teaching, and cultural centre for First Nations and their settler neighbours. Victoria Island—past, present, and future—is a potent reminder to landscape architects that sites are also often territory.

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Victoria Island, on the Ottawa River, is unceded Algonquin Territory and the site of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s protest during the rise of the Idle No More movement.

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Netami Stuart

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