EXTENTS 2020: REUNION by UW Landscape Architecture + UWASLA

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Reunion is not the recreation of a lost state of affairs. Once ruptured, the relationships between things never return to what they once were. The reuniting parties are transformed by the period of separation. Instead, reunion is an opportunity, a chance to renegotiate the terms on which each part relates to the whole. Reunion may honor the past, but also asks us to contemplate the future. Reunion may be cause for celebration or it may mean a hostile reconciliation, a collision of disparate pieces, or an exclusion of others. Joyful or fraught with conflict, reunion means no going back.

EXTENTS IV TEAM Publication Manager Lead Editor

Alexandra Burgos

Editors

Ellie Murray Heather Parker Tim Spenser

Lead Layout

Emma Petersen Kate Wellens

Layout

Outreach + Fundraising

EXTENTS

Jake Minden

Jude Brown Jackie Donovan Shihui Liu Meghan Obernberger Dani Slowik Jude Brown Erin Irby

We are on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, and more specifically, the Duwamish Peoples, a people who are still here. We honor the Duwamish Tribe of past and present and honor, with gratitude, the land itself, a land that should be rightfully returned.

I am excited to present the fourth issue of EXTENTS, the University of Washington’s student-led publication from the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments. Presented before you is a showcase of student work that aims to exemplify different forms of reunion. Whether through memory, ecology, or culture, the selected projects exhibit the different ways that ecosystems and peoples’ ways of life can come back together once separated. This is not to say, however, that reunion means things go back to the way they once were. Rather, it is a spotlight on the ways they have adapted and will continue to adapt. Furthermore, this is a showcase of the imagination of a group of people who are able to reckon with the issues of the past and present, and design for a better future. This is the beauty we seek through landscape architecture: to be able to imagine new worlds and shift paradigms, without shying away from being political or using our voice to challenge current oppressive structures. Thank you to the students who have welcomed us into their relationship to the world and presented us with their visions. EXTENTS would like to give a very special thank you to our professional reviewers: Rich Desanto, Sandy Fischer, Deb Guenther, Ken Gifford, Myles

Harvey, Lindsay Hawks, Audrey Maloney, Nina Mross, Allison Ong, Alfredo Rosas, Andrew Prindle, Shawn Stankewich, Philip VanDevanter, and Nicholas Zurlini. You helped bring this issue to fruition; we are grateful for your time and valued critique in reviewing student submissions. Thanks to Rebecca Bachman, Jackie Donovan, Peter Samuels, and Jocine Velasco for providing valuable feedback, and to Assistant Professor Catherine De Almeida, our faculty advisor, for your guidance. We are living in unprecedented times. A time of immense solitude, trauma, and collective grief, but also resistance. When deciding on the theme for this year’s issue, the optimism within all of us envisioned a different circumstance, one where the release of this year’s magazine would find us all together, in person. However, as I write this, we are now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a light that has been dim through our darkest days. Regardless of the fact that we still have not had the reunion we so desperately desire, I hope that however this issue finds you, there is a brighter day upon the horizon. I hope that you have taken the time to find the beauty around you and, most importantly, within you. On behalf of the EXTENTS Editorial Team, Alexandra Burgos

EXPLORE 3 Study Abroad

Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Peru, Sweden

By Hand

Alexandra Burgos Brian Deck Emma Petersen Jocine Velasco Robby Lai

Ecotones Blanket

Alanna Matteson

CULTURE 21 Travis + RĀwhiti Landings

Sarah Lukins, Jake Minden, Jocine Velasco

Art Node

Laura Keil

On Healing

Alexandra Burgos

ECOLOGY 37 Defining Edges

Zoe Kasperzyk

The Messy Mosaic

Stephanie Sells

Flora Flux

Claudia Sackett Hennum

Back to the Future

Ry Yahn

Citizen Site Analysis

Heather Parker

MEMORY 55 River of Spirits Andrew Walker

Henoko Delta Matt Grosser

Grounded Cinematic Emotion Ellie Murray

CAPSTONE 71 First, Let Us Look Together Bennet Song

Desert Child Lauren Iversen

Rainforest, Airport, Park Hope Freije, Rhiannon Nueville

Acequias

Raphael Montoya

Landmark Refugia Lihui Yang

Marking Risk and Response Peter Samuels

DARKSIDE 97

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explore This section of the magazine is a showcase of the different ways that students have familiarized themselves with the environments around them and have expanded their understandings of the world. Through exploration, whether it be by traveling the globe, experimenting with hand drawing and watercolors, or working with new materials, students have learned and discovered different passions and practices. Although these explorations include new places or media, they foster personal reunions in which students learn and relearn the ways they understand the systems around them.

Exploring | 3

Study Abroad The UW Department of Landscape Architecture offers a multitude of study abroad opportunities. Students jumped at the chance to leave their studio desk behind and jet set to a new country. From twoweek exploration seminars to full academic quarters abroad, this section is just a glimpse into several students’ outstanding experiences around the world.

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japan

The fluid matrix of social life, transportation networks, and urban spaces clearly distinguishes major Japanese cities from their North American counterparts. Students experienced three dynamic cities during this study abroad trip to Japan. Full exposure to the complex juxtaposition and overlay of movement, activities, scenery, and space gave insight into how cities of East Asia support the everyday lives of millions of residents and visitors. Through walking tours and visual journaling, the traveling seminar engaged in a close-up examination of the urban landscapes of Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo, three of the most famous cities in Japan. Visual capturing presented a way of interpreting, reading, seeing, and documenting the city. Through on-site documentation exercises, students explored the everyday landscapes of Japan and their iconic structures and spaces. This seminar allowed students to better understand how cities embody and reflect their distinct urban cultures and subcultures, and how they function as complex spatial systems.

Photos by Ellie Murray

Explore | 5

NEPAL

InterAction Nepal is an immersive, interdisciplinary study abroad program that brought together students from landscape architecture, human- centered design, civil engineering, and cinema. The program challenged students to delve into contemporary issues surrounding urban development in the Kathmandu Valley to respond at a local scale through communitybased participatory design, implementation, and impact assessment. The UW group worked with local students and individuals from Bhangal, an underserved community located in the foothills, to both design and construct a small-scale intervention, and to evaluate project impacts on human and environmental health. After several workshops with the Bhangal community, the residents requested a design for a community road. The students then designed a paved road, a drainage system, covered seating areas, and plantings. After a series of design iterations and voting sessions, the community and students together began construction on the site. With the support of municipal representatives and non-profit organizations, along with the leadership of community members, the project came to fruition and students and community members forged lasting friendships.

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Photos by Alexandra Burgos, Kari Bergstedt, Ben Spencer

new zealand

The te reo Māori concept of tiaki speaks to the practice of guardianship and stewardship over the land. During the Winter Quarter of 2020, a group of landscape architecture and urban planning students explored the concept of tiaki while participating in a study tour and design studio in Christchurch, New Zealand. With the generous guidance of many New Zealand designers and community members, the group envisioned designs for access points, or “landings,” along the Ōtākaro Avon River in Christchurch’s Residential Red Zone, an area of the city deemed unsuitable for residential use after Christchurch’s devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Inspired by projects throughout New Zealand, students’ designs considered the human experience, resilient green infrastructure, and the ecological evolution of the river over time. In their proposals, students wove together ecological processes and cultural practices over time within the framework of tiaki.

Photos by Zoe Kasperzyk, Alanna Matteson

Explore | 7

peru

A once-in-a-lifetime experience brought a group of students to Iquitos, Peru, where they engaged with the social, political, and environmental implications of rural to urban migration and topics of human and ecological health. Students got a glimpse into the everyday lives of people and animals in the Peruvian Amazon. The program began with an excursion to one of the last primary forest ecosystems in the Amazon rainforest, where students explored unique flora and fauna in an environment with little human impact. Students then spent a week exploring human and ecological health in peri-urban communities before spending two weeks in the city of Iquitos, where they learned about the impacts of urbanization on health and ecosystems from landscape architects, ecologists, and health professionals. Students also visited built projects that are leading efforts to mitigate problems associated with urbanization, and learned tools to assess ecological, environmental, and social health in urban conditions.

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Photos by Rebecca Bachman, Austin Bidman, Alexandra Burgos

sweden

During the summer of 2019, an interdisciplinary group of students from the University of Washington, other U.S. universities, and a local craft school collaborated with local residents of all ages, including a significant proportion of Syran newcomers to reimagine a public park in Dals Långed, Sweden. Building on student work from the previous summer, students designed and constructed a children’s adventure playscape, a gathering pavilion, and a swimming area. Throughout the design process, students engaged with community members in public meetings and children’s workshops as they created a space informed by and responsive to community needs. The group designed a space meant to cultivate new and diverse social networks in a community shaped by ongoing social migration —a place for cultural exchange that newcomers and more established residents alike can call home.

Photos by Kendra Klenz, Sidney Greenslate, Daniel Winterbottom

Explore | 9

explore bY HAND In an increasingly digital world, students sought to represent their understanding of landscape through hands-on processes like watercolor painting, sketching, and photography.

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Alexandra Burgos An exploration of a superfund site on the Duwamish River and the toxins that affect the land and water. Top: Toxic Dredge. (Watercolor and ground coffee) Bottom: Polychlorinated Biphenyls. (Watercolor, candle wax, and alcohol)

Explore | 11

Brian Deck Brian Deck’s master’s thesis, Contemplating Sanctuary Contemplative Design Strategies for a Wastewater Treatment Park as an Urban Retreat, explores design strategies that engender a sensuous experience of cleansing and temporal water. Top: A Courtyard Perspective. Water gardens and rammed earth architecture frame industrial and natural landscape scenery. (Watercolor) Bottom: Well Return. Wastewater flows outward into the landscape before returning as reclaimed water for reuse. (Watercolor)

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Emma Petersen A collection of double exposure images taken throughout New Zealand on a 35mm camera. Top: Rock collecting on the shores of Hokitika and inland at Lake Pukaki yielded a wonderful collection of skipping rocks—some reunited at the bottom of the lake, some reunited as towers teetering on the edges of logs, both rudimentary and pure types of landscape architecture. (35mm Film) Middle: Maori carvings symbolizing water found in the Te Papa National Museum in Wellington are reunited with the real thing at Whakaraupo/Lyttleton Wharf outside of Chirstchurch. (35mm Film) Bottom: Skies from the West and East reunite on Tiri Tiri Matangi—a bird sanctuary off the coast of Auckland. The forest is upright and the ocean upside down, creating a cloud like fog over the forest and a new type of sky. (35mm Film)

Explore | 13

Jocine Velasco A series of studies about the people who have volunteered their time to reforest New Zealand’s native bush landscape. Top: Painting of Pou. (Watercolor) Bottom: The Travis Wetlands. (Watercolor)

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Robby Lai A series of hand sketches in urban spaces during an exploration seminar in Japan. Top: Sketch of Shinsekai, Osaka. (Pen) Bottom: Sketch of Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto. (Pen)

Explore | 15

E C O T O N E S B l a n k e t Alanna Matteson

Ecotones is an exploration of materials using wool and dye derived from native New Zealand plants. The pattern of the knitted blanket follows an idealized transect across the Canterbury Plains beginning with colors derived from plants native to the mountains and ending with those found near the coast. While colonial settlement unraveled the seamless transitions between native plant communities, the plants remembered in this blanket once grew through the plains and can grow there once again. The combination of wool from the sheep that now graze the land and dye from the plants that have been displaced finds itself at the tension between reality, memory, and the future.

An idealized transect across the Canterbury Plains drawn by landscape ecologist Colin Meurk.

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Top: Yarn dyed with harakeke, kowhai, ti kouka, and totara Middle: Raw wool prepared for a bath with dye derived from plants Bottom: Collecting dye plants with landscape ecologist Colin Meurk and fellow student Andrew Walker

Explore | 17

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Plant harvesting locations: beech forest, totara and matai forest, kanuka woodland, river terrace, kahikatea forest, wetland, salt marsh, sand dunes

Explore | 19

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CULTURE A cultural reunion initiates a coming together of land, people, and cultural practices. It can facilitate a uniting of communities with their ancestral lands and practices, a creation of space that allows cultural experiences to flourish, or the uniting of artists against waves of gentrification. A cultural reunion can unite people with a new place or different culture, fostering growth.

Culture | 21

Travis + RĀwhiti L a n d i n g s G r o u n d s t o M e e t, G r e e t + E at

Sarah Lukins, Jake Minden + Jocine Velasco Manaakitanga is the Māori word for hospitality. Travis and Rāwhiti landings intend to exemplify manaakitanga by creating an accessible and legible spatial plan to meet, greet, and eat for both human and non-human members of the Christchurch community. Harakeke, īnanga, kererū, and human visitors interact in these landings as parts of a diverse ecosystem. The river is shaped to create nooks and riparian edges crucial for mahinga kai and social resources. The proposed designs for Travis and Rāwhiti landings are meant to be considered as a whole. Travis Landing centers the Māori concept of mahinga kai, where a cultural center embeds the idea of a mahinga kai exemplar into a permanent fixture on the Ōtākaro Avon River. Rāwhiti landing becomes a public space that prioritizes foodrelated events to boost economic revitalization along the Wainoni and Bower corridors. This project is about reuniting Māori communities with the river and landscape that once fed, clothed, and educated them. By returning unceded Indigenous land to Indigenous communities, we are working toward reuniting Indigenous epistemologies and reckoning those ways of being with Western land ownership and Western ecocultural paradigms.

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Phasing diagram illustrating the river, the stopbanks, and the stormwater wetlands at intervals of 10, 40, and 100 years

Culture | 23

Travis Landing schematic plan

Travis Landing section showing Hangi pit, covered public space, and community center

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Sea level rise renderings of Travis Landing at varying river level conditions

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A R T

N O D E

Laura Keil In response to displacement of the artistic community in Seattle due to rapid urban development and gentrification, this project focuses on redesigning the Civic Center ‘Pit’ block between the Downtown and Pioneer Square neighborhoods in Seattle with live/ work studios to foster art accessibility. Historically, Pioneer Square has been an active art center in Seattle, and in 1981 it was the first neighborhood in the US to establish monthly art walks. With the development of the SR 99 Tunnel in the mid-2010s many artists were displaced from their residences in Pioneer Square. The 619 Building was a self-governing artist colony that was more accessible than the average whitewalled gallery. Rather than retrofitting this building to withstand tunnel construction, it was torn down. “The stripping away of the process is the stripping away of community,” (Chris Sheridan, 619 Building resident).

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This project is driven by strong uniting forms and the desire to reimagine downtown as a 24/7 accessible art neighborhood in line with its historical context. Art Node reunites artists with their land and art with democracy. Art itself cannot fix everything. However, intersectional collaboration between governmental committees, local artists, designers, and communities can co-create welcoming and transparent public artworks and spaces. The central location of the Art Node between the Seattle Art Museum and the Civic Center provides the perfect opportunity for this partnership. Art is not about control or influence but rather about opportunity and connection facilitated by the shaping of space and program. Art is a catalyst that fosters social interaction. The Art Node amplifies the previously displaced and hidden voices of artists and provides transparency into the artistic process, inviting the public to join in the making.

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on healing

stories from BIPOC landscape Architecture students

Collected by Alexandra Burgos

I’m Yingjie.

I am an international student who grew up in a predominantly agricultural town in the middle of China. I got my bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture and I started my graduate studies in agricultural science. I wanted to find the connections between these two subjects, so that’s why I came here to the UW, to find the connections. I had to cancel my plans of going back home this summer, but I really miss my family. It’s been a year since I’ve seen them. To focus on something other than the feeling of homesickness and the stress of school, I have started rattan weaving, which has been a great distraction from unhappy things. I get time to focus on every weaving and find joy when I finish a rattan project. As an international student of color with a different cultural background who speaks a different language, I feel proud of myself and the things I have been able to achieve. Although I feel helpless and perplexed from time to time, I also feel lucky. My friends and family support me, and my classmates always encourage me. That’s something to cherish.

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my name is isabela gregoria noriega. My father is from Colombia, and my mother is from El Salvador. I was born in the United States, and I identify as a mix of all of these places. I am originally from West New York, an urban, working class neighborhood that’s predominantly Latin American. Walking through the streets, you’d hear bachata, cumbia, merengue, and salsa blasting from cars or playing at gatherings. It was a lively and special place to grow up. I currently study both architecture and landscape architecture. The reason I chose to pursue both disciplines comes from a simple place: a goal to design beautiful places for people to enjoy together. Everyone should have access to beauty and to spaces that inspire them, and I would like to be part of creating and building that for people. Of course, we’re designing under preexisting conditions that have historically, and continue to, exclude certain populations from beauty, but most importantly, from essential resources. Like in most fields our [BIPOC] perspectives are underrepresented and mentors of color in the academic setting are few. The courses are taught through a Western perspective and the way that we [BIPOC] have shaped the American landscape is not part of the dominant narrative. I am still processing this experience, but it has been a great deal of self educating and self reflection. The platform I use to heal is making. What I make is mostly functional: furniture, utensils, and jewelry. I use different types of materials. At the moment I’m experimenting mainly with textiles, wood, and metal. These processes of making involve a union of body and mind working together. It’s a very sensual experience to make. You touch materials, listen to the sounds of machines run as they cut or plane. You smell burnt metal or wood shavings. It’s very immersive, and healing is an experience that I believe starts with engaging the body. It’s empowering that my hands have made what I have made. I can’t think of anything more powerful than bringing something beautiful into existence. I’m also a woman in shop spaces which are male dominated. Femininity isn’t necessarily associated with craftsmanship or working with tools, and it’s powerful to challenge these stereotypes. Culture | 31

my name is jocine. I am Philippinx from Northern Luzon in the province of Laguna in the Philippines. I was also raised in the American South, in the Gulf Coast of Florida in a small, working class town called Port Richey. I relate landscape architecture to my heritage from my parents. They taught me to live close to the land. My mom is an avid kitchen gardener who grew malunggay (moringa), calamansi, sili (bird’s eye chiles), papayas, and tropical ornamentals. She inherently knew that landscapes are associated with our emotions, histories, and identity. My dad deep-sea fished when he lived in the Philippines and pier-fished in Florida. He had a poetic eye to the natural world that I deeply appreciated. For most of my adult life I’ve worked outside, which is great because I love being in the land and growing plants in a healthy way. I have that perspective to offer in the field of landscape architecture, that experience of labor; there are actual people that build these projects and I hope knowing that can shift how and what we design. I’ve had enough life experiences being a working class person of color that I know what I want to design for and what I don’t want to design. For example, I’m not going to design prisons and I’m not going to work on a project that will be built by slave labor. Never. As a working class person of color, sometimes you hang on to a set of ethics from your lived experiences and that’s a good compass to have in landscape architecture. Anything to do with land has everything to do with power. I always thought that expressing oneself in creative ways is for everyone, no matter who you are, and however you do it. It’s a liberatory practice to express yourself, your struggle, and your pain through art. For me, the most healing has been the art of growing plants. It’s helped me through a lot of hard times. It’s given me stillness of mind and strength and my resolve to keep fighting. It’s also something I share with my ancestors, being tied to the land and tending to my plant relations. It’s really about speaking to my ancestors through growing plants.

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my name is andrew. I am a Black landscape architecture student. My introduction to landscape architecture came from a deep love for outside spaces and plants. Prior to studying landscape architecture, I studied music composition and theory, with a focus on cello. The different moods, textures, temporal scales, and colors of natural spaces inspire the musical pieces that I write and similarly my designs for landscape architecture. I think about landscapes in relation to musical qualities, rhythm, and choreography. Being a Black person in the field of LA can feel isolating at times and uplifting at others. It’s a field influenced by white colonialism that has harmed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; I hope that my future as a landscape architect will consist of designing spaces of freedom, safety, and healing for every type of person, because landscape architecture should be about bringing all people together in spaces rather than perpetuating segregation. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have been carrying many generations of grief. We continue to see the safety of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people compromised by police brutality, white supremacists, climate change, and systemic racism. As a Black, queer person living through a collective grieving, I have felt the need for self healing. One of my tools for healing is my cello—it’s an essential part of my life with which I have a deep relationship. Every cello has unique qualities of timbre, color, and feel and it’s in this uniqueness that I find myself feeling safe and that I can be my complete self. It is therapeutic to tune my cello, then play long open bows and feel my cello reverberate through my body, eventually leading me to a state of meditation.

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ecology An ecological reunion brings manipulated or severed ecological systems back to harmonious, multi-faceted function, resulting at times in the creation of new networks. This reunion could bring water, habitat, wildlife, agriculture, or people together in restored contexts, entangling them in an invigorated, balanced system. In the face of climate change, how can we reunite with traditional ecological practices to create resilient communities of the future?

Ecology | 37

D E F I N I N g e d g e s Zoe Kasperzyk Edges serve to either divide or connect space. In the case of Cal Anderson Park, they have historically served as a physical and conceptual barrier, reinforcing a division between the commons and the street, between the park’s ecosystem and the concrete streetscape. These design solutions for Capitol Hill’s 2030 EcoDistrict planning process are grounded in the vision of porous boundaries. This design focuses on enhancing the edges of Cal Anderson to improve accessibility to the park, while enhancing neighborhood stormwater systems in a way that

Telling a Water Story, Telling a Neighborhood Story

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bridges a disconnect between social and ecological design in a distinctly urban setting. The design improvements will allow people to flow through the park alongside stormwater that will move, infiltrate, and pool in public spaces. The boundaries between public life and stormwater infrastructure are blurred, demonstrating that ecological design can address the social and emotional needs of our community. By addressing the ways that water and people flow through the park, we are offered a path toward the reunion of human and ecological systems.

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Ecology | 41

T H E m o

m e s s y s a i c

Stephanie Sells

Barton Woods is a diverse landscape with social and ecological systems that are interwoven, complex, and ever-changing. Layers of existing businesses, separated wetlands, impervious surfaces, topography, and the roar of I-5 all work to disrupt crucial wildlife corridors. With the site nestled above North Seattle College, phased interventions can slowly build a healthy and more cohesive city environment. This design is a linkage between intricate tiles of ecosystems. Through phasing, it aims to shape

new connections between plants, animals, and humans by stepping away from the site’s lost history and reimagining a more resilient future that renegotiates and evolves our connections to the land. As time progresses, this phased mosaic of forest, wetland, and prairie ecosystems is able to get progressively messier, with tiny nooks to hide in, debris that feeds the soil with nutrients, and a greater abundance of all life forms.

Phase 1

| 2020

FROM

TO Parking lot

WITH

Forest + felling

AND Pathways

Joined wetlands

Tree plantings Connected wetalnds Pedestrian bridge

CONIFER

Felled trees

CARPENTER ANT

DEAD TREE FELLING Nesting

Fo od so ur ce

ti n g

ne Fo o d s o u r c e

Shelt

elt

Shelte

er i n tr ee c avi

Nes

Elevated pathways

PILEATED WOODPECKER

er dead material

SQUIRREL

WOOD DUCK

r in tree cavities

ties

Forested Habitat The goal of the project’s first phase is to deconstruct and connect. By transforming the campus parking lot with entirely new tree saplings, joining existing wetlands, and developing a network of elevated pedestrian pathways that protect sensitive habitats, the site can grow and adapt to fit the needs of all beings.

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Phase 1

The Knowledge Generator

| 2020

The first phase also creates a living laboratory, where a domed greenhouse is used as a space to teach about plant propagation, self-reliance, and resilience to climate change.

WITH A 5,000 sf greenhouse

CULTIVATING PLANTS

GREENHOUSE

TESTING PLANTS

ion

EATING PLANTS

Te a c h i n g p r o p

Te a c h i

ng self-reliance e Adapting to climat

chang

Phase 2 WITH Fo

rc sou

e Plac

hide es to od

sou

W E ST E R N P O N D T U RT L E

les

adpo for t rce

rch

Wetland Restoration and Mima Mounds

| 2050 AN D

Aquat ic plant s

AN D Mima mounds

F loat ing wet lands

Aquatic plantings Mima mounds Hid

Fo o

d so ur

Floating wetlands

ing

TROUT

PACIFIC CHORUS FROG ce

CATTAIL WATER LILIES

ALGAE

Phase 3 WITH

| 2080 AND

Pre s c r i b e d b u r n s

Pra i r i e pl a nt i ngs

GOLDEN PAINTBRUSH Fo o n

Nec

df or lar

r adults tar fo

Reg

era

g th e ag in M an s wo od

CLEARED AREAS TOLMIE’S STARTULIP

Prescribed burns and prairie plantings

The second phase aims to rehabilitate and assemble. Aquatic plants provide sustenance for endangered species, berms of different sizes increase moisture with variable surfaces, and floating wetlands work to improve water quality. This is especially important given that the site functions as the headwaters for Thornton Creek.

Prescribed Burning and Prairie Plantings The third phase further regenerates and integrates. Controlled burns and reintegrated prairie plantings are used to manage the forest, reviving the lost prairie ecosystem.

TAYLOR’S CHECKERSPOT BUTTERFLY

CONTROLLED FIRE

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F LO R A

Claudia Sackett Hennum

Nestled on a local regenerative farm spanning 21 acres, the focus of this project is an educational garden for diverse student groups to experience through after-school programming, field trips, and summer camps. Embedded within it are many opportunities for learning about the history, ecological impacts, and potential of agricultural lands. In order to serve afterschool programs and repeat visitors, the design layers multiple frameworks for storytelling, education, and curriculum development. The paths crisscross in a reference to estuarine systems and their contributions to fertile farmlands. This allows for education around the flow of nutrients and the impacts on farmland of channelization. The central path is planted with North American meadow grasses and a wide variety of flowers for year-round blooms. As the seasons progress, the flowering zone shifts along the path, promoting a visceral sense of seasonality, ongoing floral interest, and an opportunity to learn about plant phenology and zone shifts.

f lu x Flora Flux seeks to bring visitors into (re)union with regenerative landscapes. One of the fundamental splits in land use is the separation of productive landscapes from leisure and conservation-oriented landscapes. I believe that bringing these practices back together is necessary for climate change mitigation and adaptation. As an educational farm, which serves students from many different urban and peri-urban school districts, 21 Acres is in the process of rebuilding the connection between people, land, and food. This design is intended to serve that purpose, while also holding embedded lessons. As climate change progresses, plants and insects that depend on each other for survival at very specific points in their life cycle are becoming out of sync. The seasonally flowering path heightens visitors’ sense of plant phenology, allowing for lesson planning around fluctuating systems and reunions gone awry.

The proposed youth garden weaves together land use typologies from the surrounding landscape to provide a variety of experiences and lessons. In the center is an outdoor classroom that allows for views of different activities and landscape typologies in the garden.

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free play

working spaces

instructional spaces storage

raised beds

annual beds

ADA paths

ADA path + future ADA path

The outdoor classroom affords views across the site and is located along the primary ADA path. It is surrounded by several species of lavender and covered in hardy kiwi.

paths

raingardens

site usage

The site plan includes raised beds and ADA paths to increase accessibility, and includes spaces for instruction, hands on learning, and free play.

The wash station is located between the annual production beds and the outdoor kitchen. Runoff collects in the naturally occurring wetland on the youth garden site, which is augmented into a rain garden with wetland plants and gentle grading. At three feet wide, the annual beds are narrow enough for young people to access.

Ecology | 45

BACK TO THE F U T U R E t owa r d a dy n a m i c & r e s i l i e n t w a t e r f r o n t c o n n e c t i o n Ry Yahn The Puget Sound is a complex network of land and water that has been dramatically altered by white settlers through development and extraction. The Sound has been carved by glacial drama, modified by plant, animal, and human communities, and has a long-rooted history of displacement. Due to pollution and extraction, the Puget Sound is seeing reductions in biodiversity and habitat that not only threaten keystone species, but also creates a fertile ground for invasive species and disease. Pier 48, nestled at the nexus of migration, recreation, and transportation, is a true palimpsest. This project

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seeks to reconcile the many layers of history on the pier that are often at odds with each other, looking toward the past to envision a new future, one that addresses the challenges of today. This design, inspired by the historic water lines of the Duwamish River, strives to enhance lost but essential ecosystem services through experimental interventions such as eelgrass gardens, floating wetlands, oyster armature, and sea kelp forests. Community engagement with these interventions will serve to educate people about a rich past, an uncertain future, and the actions necessary to adapt.

Human activities threaten delicate ecological networks in many interconnected ways, as shown here. These impacts will be amplified into the future with climate change, increased populations, and pollution.

Ecology | 47

A view from the water facing southwest. The slanted oyster armature can be seen in the foreground, transitioning into the water and changing with the tides.

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citizen site a n a l y s i s S t r a t e g i e s f o r b u i l d i n g b e lo n g i n g n e s s i n a pa n d e m i c

Heather Parker In site analysis, we are landscape detectives. We follow strands of stories, of histories, weaving them together until they create a tapestry of place. We sift through data, sorting disparate pieces until we find a narrative. We walk slowly through a landscape, tracking processes while also stooping to observe the most minute: the tiny buds on the dogwood, the zigzagging cracks in the pavement. Through these exercises in observation and exploration, we connect with a landscape. We ground ourselves in a place. In our profession, we use site analysis to uncover the context, the histories, and the opportunities in new places. Through site analysis, we can learn to know a place with which we were unfamiliar. But what about the landscapes we feel we already know? Especially in this year of pandemic, where our worlds have shrunk to the few-block radii around our homes, what tools can we use to better understand our neighborhoods and our places within them? In this time of the hyperlocal, I argue that the skills we have learned in site analysis hold great power in reconnecting us to our most immediate landscapes: our homes and our neighborhoods. Where we live is intrinsically tied to how we experience the world and our current pandemic, and the tools that we use for site analysis can be adapted to help us 50 | EXTENTS

make sense of these spaces. They can facilitate a reunion of a person to a place, reacquainting us with landscapes that we know intimately but may not truly understand. Ultimately, this is also an exercise in better understanding ourselves: our perspectives, our privileges, and our personal geographies. During this COVID-19 pandemic, I have walked the streets of my neighborhood innumerable times, observing, photographing, and tracking changes. I have noted the colors that shift with the seasons, mentally mapped my local alleyways, photographed the eccentric materiality of my neighbor’s yard. I have reconnected with memories of this place and with parts of my own personal history that I had forgotten. These exercises, I’ve realized, have all been part of my personal journey in hyperlocal site analysis. And though my findings are low-tech, messy, and unscientific, they are still instructive. There are a million ways to document a neighborhood and to conduct a personal site analysis, none of them better or right. However, here I mention four strategies that I have used to better understand my own neighborhood and my place within it. These exercises are simple and are certainly not exhaustive, meant more to inspire than to instruct.

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(Re)Walking Transects

Mapping assets

discovering details

Through walking, we can come to know a place. With our feet on the ground, we are, quite literally, connected to a landscape. We move across it unhurriedly, step by step, a slow locomotion that allows for looking and listening. By walking transects—defined and systematic routes through our neighborhoods—we can better acquaint ourselves with the spatial characteristics of our homes. How do the spaces and buildings we observe change as we move along our chosen route? Where do we see the highest concentrations of street trees? How do colors change when we re-walk our transect in another season? These observations, easily recorded by pen and paper or camera, can be illuminating when considered within a larger spatial context. They can expose trends, patterns, inequities. Perhaps most importantly, they can reveal opportunities for change.

What do we value in our neighborhoods? Begin with a pen and paper, and draw a few-block radius around your home from memory. Note the spaces that you see as assets—spaces that hold value. Now ground your map in truth, walking through these spaces. Is your map accurate? What assumptions did you make? Which places did you (and did you not) mark as assets? Through mapping activities such as this, we can begin to explore both the geographies of our neighborhoods and our values within the context of these local landscapes. We can learn to recognize our own spatial biases and consider how this impacts the ways in which we interact with and within our immediate landscapes.

What stories can we uncover in the details? In my own neighborhood explorations, I have reveled in the small but thoughtful details I have found in neighbors’ yards: tiny dinosaurs hidden in a rock wall, waiting for a child to find them; a whimsical roof on a Little Free Library; chalk art along the sidewalk. As you travel through your neighborhood, sketch or photograph the details that catch your eye—the materials, the plants, the little pieces of art. Then lay them out and consider them as a whole. What conclusions can you draw about your community, its priorities, and its history? What narratives can you piece together from the moments and details you’ve captured? How might the sum of these tiny details impact your own perspective and experiences of place?

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memory Through memory, we rediscover and reunite with past places and knowledges. We reconnect with spaces that have held meaning for ourselves or for our predecessors, once again exploring and advocating for their significance. We are reminded of past knowledge, events, and epistemologies, and allow them to guide us as we move forward. We bring these memories with us into the future.

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River of spirits: l G B T Q I A + Andrew Walker River of Spirits is an urban memorial and soundscape designed for LGBTQIA+ youths who have passed away due to suicide or homelessness. The site is adjacent to the Lambert House, a queer youth shelter in Seattle. In King County, 22 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQIA+, and in Washington State, the rate of suicide for these individuals is more than double that of heterosexual youths. River of Spirits was designed to bring this ongoing issue to light and also to choreograph the embodied experiences of

these youths through the use of form, light, sound, and material. The memorial emerges from a forest of trees as an earthen berm cut by a sinuous river of glowing stones. As they traverse the memorial, visitors are guided through a dark labradorite tunnel and back into the light at the top of the berm. In each space, visitors are greeted by a soundscape of distinct chimes that evoke the memorial’s main concepts: the journey from darkness to light and the metaphor of light trapped beneath the surface.

The memorial takes the form of an earthen berm, which is cut through to create the soundscape sculpture.

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Fully immersed in the sounds of the mask chimes, a single refraction of light offers hope. The intervals of sound created by the mask chimes are tuned to tritones, which create the mood of being trapped below while wanting to move upwards.

Walls of labradorite tower above visitors as they make their way into the cut of the earth. Chimes in the form of large masks, each representing a youth who has passed away, hang from above and flood the space with sound as wind flows through the tunnel.

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At the top of the memorial, bells chime, creating higher pitches with a brighter timbre. Large metallic tubes, connected to the masks below, rise out of the surface so that visitors can still hear the tritones of the mask chimes, though they have a distant quality.

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H d

e n o k e l t

o a

Matt Grosser Okinawa’s social and biotic ecologies have long been subjugated to the extractive forces of colonial and military development. The United States military resides on one third of the island’s landmass. This presence will only grow larger with the development of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Henoko Base expansion, and traces of historical military presence remain across the island. Throughout Okinawa, military development is compounded by rapid commercial construction. Riverbanks and coastlines are often seen as ecotones that must be tamed through hardscaping, while mainland financial interests continually speculate on high-end resorts for wealthy tourists. During storm events, the disturbance from these invasive construction activities releases an opaque slurry 60 | EXTENTS

of Okinawan red clay runoff that increases coastal turbidity, suffocating the island’s diverse seagrass and coral ecosystems. Sited where the waters of the Henoko River meet the sea, this project utilizes the distinctive red clay of the island as a metaphor for the Okinawan protest movement, while also acknowledging the island’s extractive history of colonial and military development. Through the proposal of an active sediment channel and delta reconstruction, the powers of accretion and collective action are revealed, creating an arena for the reclamation of land lost to extractive forces, and providing an ever-evolving waterfront experience where users can come to reflect, remember, and rebel.

Sediment Capture Strategies A series of sediment capture strategies retain Okinawan red clay sediment on site, contributing to the delta’s reconstruction

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Delta Section At a lookout point along the delta, visitors can witness the accretion of sediment against the Disarmed Armatures and within the Gushiku Flood Channels.

Vantage Point The site’s intertwined military and ecological histories are visible from a vantage point atop the vertical wings of a decommissioned B-52 Bomber.

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G R O U N D E D C I N E M A T I C E M O T I O N E l i z a b e t h U m b a n h o wa r I n c o n v e r s at i o n w i t h e l l i e m u r r ay o n landscape architecture through film Elizabeth Umbanhowar is a licensed landscape architect, senior lecturer, and PhD student in the UW College of Built Environments interdisciplinary PhD in the Built Environment program. Her research investigates the history and representation of urban form and the technologies that reflect and influence the human experience, as well as phenomenology and the role of art in exploring the relationship of time, movement, and the body to city form. She emphasizes the use of film and digital media as research, teaching, and design tools. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ellie: Our theme for this issue is “reunion”, with a focus on how the field of landscape architecture can interpret or reinterpret the intersection of different themes. With this in mind, how do you see film uniting with landscape architecture? Elizabeth: One of the things that really fascinates me about film and it’s connection to landscape is the way in which it captures our subjective experience of space and of life in ways that, I think, many other forms of communication do not. Yet on the other hand, not all screens are alike, and some create this sort of weird separation from the body. So, I’m interested in this intersection of how we experience landscape and how we communicate it, and what technology does in terms of our perception and in terms of how we view nature and the city. Obviously, the technologies that we use to communicate and document the spaces around us also influence, in turn, how we think about them. For me, it seems kind of logical that cinema, city, and experience come together in landscape architecture. I 64 | EXTENTS

think back to one of the first films I remember seeing, Star Wars, in 1977. I remember getting in the back of our neighbor’s pickup truck and going to the movie theater, and just being blown away by what I saw on the screen-not just what I saw but what I heard-and, you know, I just remember my heart beating and then being excited, being in a shared space with other people. So, I think that had to be a really deep, deep experience. Film interests me because it has this really interesting way of conveying multisensory experience, which is strange. That was actually something that I looked at during my master’s thesis. I started thinking about film and then, well, how does film operate on our psychology? And I began reading a lot of studies about how the things that we watch on screen, our brains are automatically taking the sound and the image, and translating it into this embodied experience. Depending on what you do on screen, as well as with a soundtrack, you can give the sensibility, because that’s the way that our brains work, that you’re also having

this sort of haptic or bodily or tactile experience. So that’s one of the parallels that I see between film and landscape as well. We deal with time and movement and light, and those are the three components of film. And those again converge not only to tell stories, but to give us this embodied documentation that I think is compelling. And that changes over time. Ellie: Yeah, when you put it that way, it makes perfect sense. Has this view influenced your work as a landscape architect and even how you exist in the world as a human being?

which to me is a really sort of nebulous quality and condition but certainly something that we strive to achieve as designers. So, with respect to thinking about populations that we’re designing for, really understanding diverse and divergent experiences and really being able to put yourself in the shoes of others is something that hearing those stories from other people does.

Going back to that idea of the tools that we use to communicate our ideas, those tools are not objective. Certainly, if you look at different ways landscape has been represented, from hand drawing to digital tools, and even within hand drawing or digital, there are Elizabeth: Yeah. Lawrence Halprin talked about different stylistic approaches or ways that we render landscape architecture as a way of shaping plant material, entourage figures, or even who we experience of space and he talked about it in terms represent in our spaces. You know, we no longer just of choreography, and that really show white males in our vignettes! struck home for me. There are So again, who gets represented in the other aspect of controlled factors that can be the spaces that we think about designed for and uncontrolled film that I think is has a lot of parallels in film itself factors that can either be valuable from the and who gets represented on discerned through conversations human perspective, screen. and written documents but also, I but also certainly think, can be understood through Ellie: I’m sure, then, this has from a landscape cinema, whether it’s fictional also had an influence on how perspective, is or documentary. And I think you teach. Can you share more the ways in which that subjective and emotional about how you’ve used film or it can offer the experience is really important as other digital media as a tool for opportunity to see we think about who we are as research and education? through the eyes of human beings, because ultimately others. we’re emotional beings. We bring Elizabeth: It’s about storytelling, with us our own experiences, sorts and we think of landscapes as of cultural values and patterns, for stories, and not necessarily linear good but also in negative ways. Certainly, as we have stories and once-upon-a-time-they-lived-happilyseen very explicitly in the past year, built environments ever-after stories. But, I think, you have caught yourself can also imbed extremely negative values. And as saying, I was walking down the street and this thing we’re looking at systemic violence against people of happened, and it was just like in a movie! Or watching color, we can see how built environments can embed the unfolding national politics saying, oh my god, this those values, which are subjective but, in terms of is like the worst disaster film! So I think we have these lived experience, very palpable. touchstones in terms of our own experience and so, The other aspect of film that I think is valuable from the human perspective, but also certainly from a landscape perspective, is the ways in which it can offer the opportunity to see through the eyes of others. As such, it’s also a tool for really sort of couriering both perspective and perhaps even empathy,

clearly screen media plays a deep role in both who we are as people but also how we think about design.

I think there’s a long, long history of architecture looking at cinema as a way of understanding the design process. Some of the questions I was asking in my thesis were centered around not just theoretically how is it that we can look at human experience as being Memory | 65

reflected in film or impacting our own experience, but only valuable in terms of building empathy and at a much more pragmatic level, how can you use video seeing other perspectives and experiencing other as a really accessible, compelling, and legible way of spaces at a very literal level, but also I think there’s simply documenting space? And can filmmaking be a collective therapeutic aspect-therapeutic in terms used as a design tool? And to my mind, it still has a of the subject around grief and more specifically lot of opportunities to cross over with other design environmental grief, in the sense that there’s some software, but that sort of cinematic approach to using benefit in both approaching a very difficult topic and, models is a way of design exploration which I think even more so, broaching it collectively. I think that’s is really valuable. Oftentimes we use the fly-through really where the observation of how people express as a way of communicating what’s happening in our grief and grievance differently in different cultures, space, not just having static images. Though they are privately or publicly, is interesting to me, but also acts compelling at some level, on the other hand, they are as a mechanism of saying, how do we talk about this? really sort of highly cinematic in much the same way How do we document it? What is this emotion and that you see the opening shot of a Marvel film. But culturally, how can we think about it as a component that’s not really how we actually experience space. I of landscape? And as we think about landscapes think the digital models borrow as being therapeutic spaces in language from cinema, which to the now, and about the various Can you design a me is interesting. traumas, whether emotional, space to hold that physical, and/or social that people experience, that’s where I grief? And thinking From a very pragmatic, objective see that intersection of emotions, level, it [3D modeling] is a of grief as not therapy, space, and screen great tool for understanding something that you technologies as being interesting. space better, but my own fix or THAT you talk interest remains grounded in through, but really that conveying of emotional Ellie: Right. Therapeutic spaces, thinking about it experience of space, whether emotional landscapes, these as something that it’s existing conditions or it’s themes all seem important to we are going to propositional. So I’ve also used the exploration of environmental continue to face. digital media at a much more grief. The way these emotions experiential level. How do you and therapy can be linked back convey the quality of materiality? to film is really intriguing. How long does it take to walk across the space? What is the sound of three quarter inch minus aggregate Elizabeth: Yeah, and I began to elude to thinking versus concrete? I think that’s valuable feedback as about film as a therapeutic tool that has overlaps with well in terms of how film can be used. landscape. What is that spatial, multisensory quality of film that is akin to landscape, right? How do shared Ellie: Interesting. So there are qualitative and experiences help us deal with difficult topics? A couple quantitative aspects to using film in a classroom years ago, I taught the urban environmental history setting. And you touch on this idea of lived experience course in which I really wanted to tackle the subject of in landscapes and in film, which leads me to my next where we are now with respect to climate change and question regarding the studio you taught this past the Anthropocene, and how people have historically fall about environmental grief. Can you tell me more dealt with impending or experienced disaster. So we about the themes discussed in that course? looked at a series of urban histories in which climate played a role, whether it was through natural causes or human induced causes-massive displacements Elizabeth: One of my hypotheses-which is none of populations through both human agency and too radical-is that I wanted to suggest that watching natural disasters. And part of what came out of that films together, a sort of shared storytelling, is not

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was thinking about, how do people endure? How do civilizations withstand these buffets, again, caused by human greed and ignorance but also environmental causes? And that led to the questions of, what is climate change? How do people deal with this emotionally? How do people go on? Ellie: Those are big questions and big emotions. Is there a term you use to hold this conversation? Is this where the theme of solastalgia came into this class? Elizabeth: I didn’t really have a word for it myself but one of the things we talked about in that environmental grief studio was, existentially, how do we deal with this? How can we use history to understand this and what disaster looks like? This is when I stumbled across the work of Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher from Australia. He’s the one who coined this term, solastalgia. And it’s a neologism, a new word that plays off the idea of nostalgia, which is looking back to a time that didn’t exist. It’s like people talking about how great the 50s were; it’s the whole conceit behind make America great again. Hmm, yeah that’s the fantasy. Solastalgia, the way that Albrecht describes it, is a homesickness you have when you’re still at home. He also talks

about it in terms of this pain or distress, this incapacity to find solace because you’re not connected to the place that you’re in in the way you once were or your home environment is changing, literally. That also led me to look at the work of Ashlee Cunsolo, who is a sociologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is looking at environmental grief, or ecological grief, from the perspective of experiencing the loss of non-human bodies, nonhuman spaces, and non-human places. You know there’s a cognition that is deep-seated, not just anxiety, but of loss, and I think that’s also coupled with the idea that even though we’ve read the science and know, we also can’t imagine it. So we have this tension in our thinking that we know it’s coming, it’s here, but we also don’t know how to take in what’s going to happen. That’s pretty, in terms of an existential sense of loss, profound. I think that shifted too as I thought about how the knowledge, non-human species, and places we have lost are a result of the impacts of climate change, and what does that look like in landscape? Film became this way of saying, how do we record this? What does this look like? But part of it was also to say, what is a landscape of environmental grief? Can you design a space to hold that grief? And thinking of grief as

A compilation of stills from Elizabeth’s short film, Senescence, about elemental decay and affective landscapes

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not something that you fix or that you talk through, but really thinking about it as something that we are going to continue to face. Climate change is not going away, what then do we do with this feeling? So part of this studio dealt with asking the questions of are there landscapes of environmental grief and are there places where we can mourn together? And what good does that do? Can there be some space of shared loss that has some productivity to it? You might think of cemeteries or memorials as places of grief but what we were asking was deeper. How do we identify spaces in which environmental grief manifests in ways that are unconventional? Ellie: The way that you frame grief really hits home, as something that doesn’t really go away. And I think we’re all experiencing some degree of solastalgia during this pandemic and political environment as well. Elizabeth: Yeah, I think that also came into the present moment even more so with the murder of George Floyd and thinking further about environmental loss and environmental denial as a form of grief. I was really struck by a headline that read ‘Black Lives Matter Protests are Public Mourning’. Clearly, the built environment embeds values and impacts people’s lives in profound ways. And so again, as part of the studio, we looked at Seattle and this erasure of the histories of Indigenous genocide, but also this erasure and invisibility of the systemic violence that has been perpetrated on other populations. What are the ways, as landscape architects, that we can bring this loss to the fore for both public awareness and redress? In addition to looking at Lichton Springs Park, which is one of the first Indigenous landmarks in Seattle, we also examined Cal Anderson Park, which was going through a process with Seattle Parks. The bigger question surrounding Cal Anderson was, what happens now? What does this space become in terms of honoring this experience? So, we looked at it through this lens of environmental grief in terms of the ways in which the environment has again wreaked havoc on people’s lives. In doing so, I think we expanded the idea of ecological grief to encompass environmental justice.

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We’re still chewing on this idea of what a landscape of environmental grief entails because, as landscape architects, our desire is to make people feel better; but as we think about what resilience means from a sustainability perspective, from an emotional and human perspective, these spaces that center more on collective acknowledgement of what has been and what will come may be more appropriate. Ellie: Right, and how do these spaces provide for multiple people with different backgrounds and experiences within those moments? Elizabeth: Absolutely and again the way I think film came into that was by giving students both the creativity but also a potent tool, above and beyond the tools that we already use, in conveying site conditions and site experience. But I think that was one of the hardest pieces, both in terms of thinking about who we are as emotional beings as designers and how we confront, on a daily basis, our charge in terms of acknowledging not just these histories but these stories in the present moment and these futures. Some of the most powerful pieces that came out of the studio were the conversations that were sparked by this collective therapy. Ultimately, when we design landscapes, we’re designing landscapes for people with cultural meaning and experience in mind. Like James Corner has said, as landscape architects, we’re not just moving dirt and water, we’re actually imbuing significance and cultural values into spaces. And, to me, that has a very cinematic ring.

Ellie: What are a few of your favorite landscape scenes from film? Elizabeth: Oh boy! So many, so little time!

blade runner

Blade Runner stands out in my mind as being absolutely formative in terms of the possibilities of imagining a dystopian world. It thought about what Los Angeles in 2019 could look like with climate change and corporate greed. It’s really the opening scene of that movie which constantly plays in my mind when I think about what urban conditions will look like. Image: Blade Runner, Ladd Company/Warner Bros, 1982

cléo from 5 to 7

Another film that really stands out to me is a 1960s French New Wave film called Cléo From 5 to 7, filmed by the director Agnes Varda, who was a French feminist. Through the film you have this sense of being immersed in the city. It’s just a beautiful film in black and white that gives you a sense of a changing Paris at the height of modernization. It’s this beautiful document of a real place but also the experiences of that time. That’s something that stands out to me. Image: Cléo from 5-7, Ciné-Tamaris/Rome Paris Films, 1962

stalker

I guess the other film, in terms of a landscape that’s not an urban landscape, is by one of my favorite film directors, the Soviet Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s a film called Stalker. The scene that comes to mind is when this one character takes people into this area called “the zone”, where strange, mysterious things happen. Up until this time, the film has been in sepia. Then, suddenly, they’re in “the zone” and it turns color, all green and blue. And there’s this breathtaking, magical transformation, you know, dream-like disorientation. Image: Stalker, Mosfilm/Goskino, 1979

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capstone Capstone projects reunite students with their landscape passions through deep, thorough exploration, resulting in culminating projects that push the boundaries of the field and provoke innovative visions of the future. This section explores the work of seven graduate students who investigate cultural, ecological, and memorial reunions through rigorous research and design methods.

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First, let us look t o g e t h e r t h r o u g h f o r e s t s , t r e e s , w o o d , a n d b u i l d i n g

Bennet Song This thesis began as an inquiry into wood as a building material. Small diameter timber emerged as a point of focus because its problematization today contrasts its historical prevalence as a building material. Its traditional use in Korean and Coast Salish architectures indicates a broader set of relationships between wood, trees, and forests. Traditional ecological knowledge illustrates how social and ecological resilience has been a product of these relationships and their ability to adapt across multiple generations. New uses of small diameter timber may be able to have a positive impact on how we manage forest health and ecological complexity. However, its material story is part of a larger trend of reducing the diversity of our relationships to productive landscapes in exchange for economic efficiency. As the world

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continues to urbanize, a city’s public landscapes have a responsibility to facilitate positive relationships between people and nature. Historically, this has largely been as a form of respite. Today, it is a vehicle for bolstering a site’s socio-ecological restoration and resilience. Additionally, I advocate for the diversity of productive uses that urban parks may provide to local communities. The proposed design model facilitates small-scale interventions that are a result of materials yielded on site and that can amalgamate over time to form a larger park experience. The model also proposes a focus on community participation and flexibility to natural and imposed changes in the landscape. The intention is to leverage parks as public testing grounds and to imagine catalysts for enriched relationships between people and the landscapes we all share and inhabit.

Extended Ridge Trail

. As Douglas-fir are selectively removed to extend the ridge top planting zone, additional spaces will open up that can become exploratory design | build sites

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figure 33 . Section of the Ridge trail figure 34. Diagrams of prototype structures to be built from site materials

Forest health fifteen years. connect the r the park’s up

Forest health and management are reassessed every 15 years. The design goal for the first cycle is to connect the ridge trail to all accessible portions of the park’s uplands. [ 77 ]

figure 30 . Phasing of the southern portion of Swan Creek park

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Utility and Bike Path

. The utility and bike path is a twelve foot wide circulation path that connects the southern and northern portions of the site and also serves as utility access for forest management

[ 79 ]

figure 31 . Section of the thinned upland edge and recreation and service path figure 32 . diagram of different density thinnings

Storehouse and Work Zone

. The storehouse is a tool shed and stocking area for small diameter branches, limbs, and poles. The associated work zone is a 25’ x 50’ clearing where design | build project components can be prefabricated to be assembled on site

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figure 35 . section of temporary work zone clearing figure 36. diagrams of programming potentials after storehouse has moved

Transition to Oak Woodland : The lower field will be transitioned from a scotch broom monoculture in 1/2 acre parcels. This will ensure proper care and removal of the broom but also flexibility in future plantings. This first iteration proposes an Oak woodland, however, future proposals could vary depending on die off or disturbances

Co-development of the site

. The cyclical building of the storehouse creates onsite value out of the material removed in the forest thinning and field zone transition

[ 85 ]

figure 37 . Diagram of forest transitions and the resulting material use

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DESERT CHILD Unearthing Landscape Narratives for Creativity and Connections to Nature

This graphic rendering represents the combination of ecological habitats with play through built structures. Intermixed are children’s gardens, fully manipulated, adopted, and designed by children.

Lauren Iversen How do stories to which children listen and read come alive in the landscape? How can the human connection to story become a tool to improve the child-nature connection? Children are increasingly growing up in more urban areas and their access to “wild nature” is limited, hindering a healthy conection to the native environment. Stories represented through children’s literature are archetypal landscapes intended to create a sense of place. Within these stories, children internalize and bring to life the locations, shaping their views toward places in their own lives. These imaginative landscapes become creative tools to develop their 76 | EXTENTS

hopes and desires for the spaces in which they spend time. This project aims to understand the connections between stories and land to increase children’s creativity and relationships with nature. Storytelling and creation become the vehicle for engaging deeply in the wonder and awe of local ecosystems. To employ these methods, a design framework is developed and applied to a proposed landscape intervention in Las Vegas, Nevada. In this future vision, an integrated model of childcentered design and place-based storytelling unite to create an immersive environment in the Mojave Desert.

CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS

Water Narratives VIEWING RAMP

WATER SYSTEM BRIDGES

WATER EXPLORATION

SUNKEN GATHERING SPACE

DESERT MAZE

CLIMBING WALL

GEOLOGY CAVE

Geological Narratives IMMERSIVE TRAILS

Ecological Narratives

CACTUS PLAY GARDEN

POLLINATOR NATURE SLIDE

The design reflects three stories unique to the Mojave Desert. While presented as separate, the stories intermingle and flow across the site as one, teaching and engaging children about the systems at play. This shift from parts to the united whole builds a sense of place in the desert and allows for a connection to nature through story.

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Play Play CreateCreate LearnLearn Wonder Wonder SenseSense

Climb Climb

Maze Maze

Formation Formation

Stack Etchings Stack

● Climbing walls that look like nearby stone ● Maze that mimics canyon ● walls Climbing walls that look like stone ● nearby Caves with stacked layers

squeeze points ● and Mazesizes thatof mimics canyon and wallsledges ● Caves with stacked layers and sizes of squeeze points and ledges ● Walls that make a maze without a clear ending, encouraging creativity and curiosity ● Walls that make a maze without a clear ending, encouraging creativity and curiosity ● Geologic layers carved into concrete teach about time and rock formation

● Water erosion stations to witness affects of water on different types of stone

Touch See Feel See

CANTILEVERED VIEWING DECK BOULDERING WALL MADE TO LOOK LIKE SANDSTONE BOULDERING WALL MADE TO LOOK LIKE SANDSTONE

● Smooth concrete, rough sandstone, grains of sand ● Enclosed and exposed ● Viewpoints Smooth concrete, rough ● sandstone, grains of sand

Section A

SHADY CAVE WITH SEATING INTERPRETIVE WALLS WITH ETCHINGS SHADY CAVE WITH SEATING INTERPRETIVE WALLS WITH ETCHINGS

● Enclosed and exposed ● Viewpoints

SenseSense CreateCreate LearnLearn Wonder Wonder Play Play

GEOLOGICAL NARRATIVES GEOLOGICAL NARRATIVES Platforms

CANTILEVERED VIEWING DECK

Section A

● Use rocks, stones, boulders as building materials in the children’s garden and habtitat building ● Use rocks, stones, boulders as ● building Layers etched onto materials inpaper the using crayon materials children’s gardenfor andart habtitat building crayon materials for art

Feel

CONCRETE MAZE AND PLAY

GATHERING SPACE/TIERED AMPHITHEATER WITH MULTIPLE STAGE PLATFORMS GATHERING SPACE/TIERED AMPHITHEATER WITH MULTIPLE STAGE PLATFORMS

● Water erosion Geologic layersstations carved to into witness water on and concreteaffects teach of about time different types of stone rock formation

Etchings ● Layers etched onto paper using Touch

CONCRETE MAZE AND PLAY

● Stepping stones at different water heights

0’

25’

50’

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50’

MULTIPLE PATHWAY OPTIONS

● Human powered water pumps that create ● Stepping stones at different Platforms sprinklers water heights

Splash

Scale

● Human powered water pumps that create sprinklers ● Bridging over water at different heights ● Touching cool water on a hot day ● Bridging over water at ● different Rainbowsheights after a storm or sprinkler ● Touching cool water on a hot day

MULTIPLE PATHWAY OPTIONS DENSE WETLAND VEGETATION

DENSE WETLAND VEGETATION

● Rainbows after a storm or sprinkler

Measure

● Rain gauge to measure yearly, daily, and monthly rainfall

Farm Measure

● Water harvesting systems used by Ancient Puebloans for ● Rain gauge to measure yearly, agriculture daily, and monthly rainfall

Farm

● Water harvesting systems used by Ancient Puebloans for agriculture

Desert wetland Desert wetland

BRIDGING THE DRAINAGE

●Reeds and wetland plants for creating mazes and to be used as building materials

BRIDGING THE DRAINAGE

● Larger than life sculptures ●Reeds and wetland plants for hidden in wetland trials that creating mazes and to be used inspire and incite curiosity as building materials

EXPLORATORY PLATFORMS

● Larger than life sculptures hidden in wetland trials that inspire and incite curiosity

EXPLORATORY PLATFORMS

Touch Hear

● Cool water

Smell Touch Hear

● Wet earth and the change in ● humidity Cool water

Smell

● Wet earth and the change in humidity

● Water rushes over rocks

WATER NARRATIVES WATER NARRATIVES

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50’

0’

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Sense Sense CreateCreate Learn Learn WonderWonder Play Play

Sculpture

Sculpture Stumps

Stumps Scale

Scale Habitats

NATIVE PLANT GARDEN WALK

● Play in and on animals and plants ● Native plants and gardens are adopted and designed ● by Playchildren in and on animals and plants ● Logs used for balance, ● boardwalks, Native plantsclimbers, and gardens and are adopted and designed seats by children ● Logs used for balance, climbers, and ● boardwalks, Play structures are enormous, seats putting the child into the scene of the desert as a desert creature

NATIVE PLANT GARDEN WALK

ELEVATED ELEVATEDTRAILS TRAILS

● Play structures are enormous, putting the child into the the desert as aand ● scene Playfulof representations desert creature real examples of animal homes

LOG CLIMBER

● Interpretive garden walks with emphasis on reciprical relation ● of Playful representations plants and animals ofand the real examples of animal homes Mojave

LOG CLIMBER

Habitats Desert Interpretive garden walks with ● Interpretation of plants and adaptations emphasis onand reciprical their human animalrelation uses

GARDENS FOR ADOPTION BY CHILDREN

STUMPS PLAY

GARDENS FOR ADOPTION BY CHILDREN

STUMPS PLAY

LOG BALANCE BOARDS LOG BALANCE BOARDS

PLANT/ANIMAL SCULPTURES

SHELTER

PLANT/ANIMAL SCULPTURES

SHELTER

of plants and animals of the Mojave

Desert ● Interpretation of plants and adaptations ● their Children’s desert garden:uses human and animal Desert garden Desert garden

Touch

SAND PIT

designed and maintained by any child that wants to join

● Plants used for food, ● construction Children’s desert garden: material, designed and maintained imaginative games withoutby any child that wants join consequence fortoremoving them ● Plants used for food,

construction material, imaginative games without consequence for removing ● them Hundreds of native plants

Smell

● Spring blooms, rainfall on leaves

Taste Touch

● plants ● Edible Hundreds of native plants

Smell

● Spring blooms, rainfall on leaves

Taste

● Edible plants

SAND PIT

BALANCE GARDEN

ECOLOGICAL NARRATIVES ECOLOGICAL NARRATIVES

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WONDER: VISUALIZE THE WATER SYSTEM AS IT DEMONSTRATES THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES

CREATE: IMAGINATIVE PLAY WITH GRASS AND WETLAND MATERIAL FOR CONSTRUCTION

SENSE: TOUCHING THE WATER NO MATTER THE LEVEL IT IS AT

WATER NARRATIVES

LEARN: NAMES AND USES FOR WETLAND PLANTS

This rendering represents possibilities for play and exploration in the desert wetland. A gradient from mesa, cliffs, and wetland provides an exemplary transect of the desert watershed.

Capstone | 79

R a i n fo r e st, A i r p o r t, P a r k extractive entanglements: i n f r a s t r u c t u r a l a n d e c o lo g i c a l f u n c t i o n i n I qu i t o s , P e ru

museum plaza

market plaza

performance plaza

education plaza

Hope Freije + Rhiannon Nueville Urban landscapes have become characterized by static, impervious systems, disconnected from nature. In Iquitos, a city of half a million in the Peruvian Amazon, attempts to replace natural systems with engineered infrastructure have yielded unhealthy conditions for both the human residents and the surrounding ecology. Dense settlement has been encouraged within Iquitos, while ecological systems have been pushed outside of city limits. This partitioning strategy does not acknowledge the impacts of pollution and resource extraction outside of these defined boundaries. As Peru unrolls a national initiative to build commemorative bicentennial parks, we envision 80 | EXTENTS

this as an opportunity to revive an economy that has suffered from boom-and-bust cycles of extractive industries. This thesis explores the relationship between conventional city infrastructure and natural systems in the Amazon region across spatial and time scales to answer the question, how can urban parks serve as critical infrastructure to support the local economy, address human and ecological health, and celebrate cultural identities? This design looks to create a park as infrastructure to support both human and ecological health. By blurring the lines between the ecological and the urban, a more layered functionality is created, fostering more resilient urban growth.

Site analysis of surrounding context

The proposed design reimagines the area currently occupied by the airport. By creating a variety of spaces throughout, numerous ecological benefits are integrated with other health, industry, and cultural benefits.

Capstone | 81

Ecological systems are fully integrated with urban systems across the site.

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The versatile sunken plazas scattered across the site can host numerous activities and provide flexible space

Capstone | 83

A c e q u i a s Building Social Resilience in E s p a ñ o l a , N e w M e x i c o

Acequia: The city’s existing acequia infrastructure can be utilized in several ways.

Raphael Montoya Facing decades of debilitating social issues and a changing climate, this design research explores the historical importance of acequia systems in Española, New Mexico, to help reimagine the future of the city. Española currently experiences poverty and a lack of economic opportunity caused by years of land use, urbanization, and shifting economies poorly suited for its unique culture. This investigation utilizes the city’s existing acequia infrastructure to propose a connecting network of open spaces. The final design proposal consists of nine total nodes connected by the acequia trail network, ensuring that up to 90 percent of city residents are within a 10-minute radius of any node. Each node in the proposed system places emphasis on moving the community toward food, water, and energy security to establish a sustainable community, ecologically and economically. The Plaza de Española is a particularly important node in the 84 | EXTENTS

proposed connector and node system. The historical significance of the Plaza that has made it the civic center of Española also makes it a catalyst site for the proposed system. The proposed Acequia Community Hub within the Plaza becomes the heart of community agricultural services and a place to engage with living traditions. The Plaza de Española redesign takes cues from traditional Spanish plazas to become a civic center better suited to the region’s climate, culture, and people. As a guiding framework, the research investigates the traditional acequias landscape and permaculture to reinterpret acequias as a catalyst for a new community hub. Through the knowledge and values of the acequias, new opportunities are created for healing, learning, growth, and resiliency in Española, New Mexico.

With 12-foot easements flanking the acequia, the trail network becomes a shared space, and leaves room for annual maintenance and for vegetation to grow. Only when there is a need to enhance pedestrian security is the trail emphasized.

A plaza creates flexible space that can accommodate a wide range of activities from outdoor markets to low rider shows.

Capstone | 85

Sections A and B: A community orchard, gardens, and composting facility are introduced to provide for community-based needs and improve hydrological function on the site. The proposed Acequia Community Hub becomes the heart of community agricultural services and a place to engage with the living traditions.

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Capstone | 87

l a n d m a r k r e f u g i a A n U r b a n B i r d S a n c t u a ry f o r t h e Christchurch, NZ C athedr al Rebuild

An education center features a viewing tower, ecology exhibition room, and classrooms. Birds can be seen from the bird blind balcony.

Lihui Yang Located in the city of Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand, Christchurch Cathedral is a widely recognized symbol of the city that bears its name. The South Island is also where an endemic endangered species, the black-billed gull, breeds on braided riverbanks. Frequent flooding after recent earthquakes has pushed the gulls to move their colonies to the city area near Cathedral Square, on the columns and beams of earthquake-damaged building foundation ruins. However, the existing gull colony is slated to be cleared for forthcoming new construction, which gives reason to make the nearby Christchurch Cathedral into an alternative relocation site for the black-billed gull colony. The ongoing work of the cathedral deconstruction and restoration

88 | EXTENTS

provides an opportunity for building viable gull habitat on the church property. The design concept is to provide space for both birds and humans. A main objective of the design is to create an urban bird sanctuary that can be publicly viewed without disturbing the nesting birds. This is done by integrating the architectural forms of the cathedral and reusing construction materials to create new structures and features. By reuniting the broken pieces left by the earthquake and restoring the value of the cathedral, the design aims to create a site that can become a sanctuary where both birds and humans can reside in healthy coexistence.

In the first design phase, an interim nesting site is created by retaining rainwater. Stones from the deconstructed cathedral can be used in the pool as nesting surfaces. In the second phase, a sanctuary is created by integrating groundwater, building nesting sites from new and old materials, and limiting access during breeding season. The gull sanctuary is adjacent to public space for visibility and enjoyment.

The Waimakariri River and the city of Christchurch were forever altered by the 2011 earthquake. This forced black-billed gulls to relocate from native river habitat to the city, changing the way birds and humans interact in an urban context.

Capstone | 89

In addition to showcasing history, cultural heritage, and spiritual importance, Christchurch’s landmark cathedral becomes important for its ecological value, expanding its identity as a sanctuary for its distinctive new black-billed gull colony.

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Capstone | 91

Marking Risk and Response Citizen Science Monitoring of the Tr ans Mountain Pipelines

Peter Samuels How can community-based monitoring create much-needed visibility and oversight of buried tar sands pipelines that traverse human and nonhuman communities? The Trans Mountain Pipeline conveys up to 12.6 million gallons of diluted bitumen per day from the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta to ports in Vancouver, Canada and Washington State, with construction underway on the Trans Mountain Expansion, a second, paralleling pipeline that triples capacity. Meanwhile, the communities through which these pipelines invisibly pass possess little knowledge about how these pipelines are monitored or the results of that monitoring, despite an extensive history of harmful spills. In a world of increasing access to affordable technology and grassroots-initiated social networks,

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there is untapped potential for citizen science practices to play greater roles in landscape and community stewardship, including in the monitoring of critical infrastructures like pipelines. As participants in citizen science, landscape architects can be agents of change, where landscape-responsive design subverts dominant socio-political narratives and fosters more holistic intimacy between people and the environments they steward. This project therefore asks how landscape-based design might amplify citizen science activities associated with pipeline landscapes, encouraging community-based oversight of these buried infrastructures. The resulting adaptable design framework imagines a landscape architecture practice that contributes to citizen science monitoring through systems thinking, community engagement, and physical design.

Watersheds and watercourse crossings of the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Capstone | 93

ities and Conditions

l to develop a design language for ecific citizen science activities and their ite conditions.

Reported Trans Mountain Pipeline spills from 1961 to 2019, with locations of repeat spills disaggregated

f wayfinding elements differentiate ection sites, where shorter icate data collection at reference terventions indicate data collection at ions.

TREATMENT (PIPELINE) SITES

differentiates different activities or w indicates presence of pipeline, cal conventions for color coding oil Blue marks citizen science activity on). Red signals alert, such as presence ot fully resolved, biotic data that ential pipeline integrity issues such eak, or long periods of time elapsing cements of in-line integrity testing

attention to the often unclear extents ight-of-way (the “prescriptive zone”), te and foster discussion about land zones. At present, the National Energy requires landowners and other public to gain permission from pipeline ivities that cause ground disturbance the “prescribed zone,” which extends her side of the pipeline centerline. n the interest of safety but have ations for public agency over the lands e pipeline passes.

CONTROL (REFERENCE) SITES

CALLING ATTENTION

PIPELINE INTERSECTION

ONGOING DATA COLLECTION

DIFFERENTIATING DATA COLLECTION SITES

DIFFERENTIATING ACTIVITIES/CONDITIONS

PIPELINE RIGHT-OF-WAY

PLANTINGS

DELINEATING RIGHTS-OF-WAY

Heights of wayfinding elements differentiate types of data collection sites. Color differentiates between various activities or conditions.

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MACROINVERTEBRATE SURVEYS

FALL

WAYFINDING + PIPELINE DATA INTERVENTION

WINTER

SPRING

SUMMER TRAIL STEWARDS OR BIRDING GROUP WATERSHED PROTECTION GROUP

PIPELINE RIVER CROS

K-12 STUDENTS LOCAL ARTISTS

STORAGE LOCKER / ANALYSIS TABLE

RIGHT-OF-WAY BORDER PLANTINGS

Many community members steward salmon-bearing waterways and associated riparian habitats through involvement with local or regional watershed protection groups. PIPELINE RIVER CROSSING

FALL

WINTER

SPRING

SUMMER LOCAL CYCLISTS ADVENTURE TOURING CYCLISTS LOCAL ARTISTS

WAYFINDING ON FORMER TRAIN TUNNEL WAYFINDING ON FORMER TRAIN TUNNEL

RIVER CHANNEL TRACKING WINDOW + WAYFINDING

Within sparsely populated alpine river valleys, cycles of temperature change, snowmelt, and geological and hydrological shifts cause landslides, rockslides, and flooding, which can expose and impact pipelines, increasing the risk of spills.

DATA POLE

FALL

WINTER

SPRING

SUMMER ANTI-PIPELINE ACTIVISTS NEIGHBORHOOD STREAM STEWARDS AREA RESIDENTIAL LANDOWNERS FAMILIES

MARKING SOIL SAMPLING

Storage facilities and pump stations are critical in the story of pipeline risk.

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DARK SIDE While traditionally thought of as joyful occasions, reunions can also be negative occurrences. In some cases, there may be barriers preventing some from reuniting at all. We refer to this as the dark side of reunion: a way to recognize the sometimes violent collisions or hostile reconciliations that occur during acts of reuniting. This is manifested by the powerful geologic forces of tectonic plates. Always slowly moving beneath our feet, two plates meet and slide past each other. On the surface, we are faced with what can often be the mass destruction of an earthquake. Over time, the collision of these plates is so strong that it results in mountains. As we are living through a global pandemic, we think ahead to brighter days of safely reuniting with our friends and family. But what happens when those who can no longer wait reunite too soon, perpetuating this deadly virus? Does reuniting, then, become a dangerous rather than joyful occasion? In the first chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were mandated to stay home, putting our entire lives on pause. However, nature did not stop. She thrived in our silence, and while this respite was brief, she flourished with a lessened burden of our constant damage. We saw a glimpse of cleaner air and oceans, and more wildlife in our own yards. But as we seek a sense of

normalcy, we are actively disrupting nature’s brief reprieve. In our desire to reunite with one another, to go back to what once was, we return to our calamitous onslaught on the Earth and continue to disregard the knowledge held by Indigenous peoples on how to respectfully tend to the land. As we think deeply about the dark side of reunion, let us also consider those who do not have the privilege to reunite with something which was lost or wrongfully taken from them. The displaced and dispossessed come to mind, and more specifically, the peoples whose lands we currently stand on—our Native American neighbors who have been fighting for the rights to their stolen land have thus far been barred from reuniting with what is rightfully theirs. The fortified barricades of white supremacy and colonization actively prevent this reunion. Let us think too of the children who have been separated from their parents at the imperialist, militarized border. When will they be allowed their joyful reunion with their parents? There are a multitude of examples of those forcibly separated, ripped apart, or struggling to return to what they know and love, up against powers greater than themselves. All this is to say, there is a tension to be found within the word reunion, and this tension, dark as it may be, cannot be ignored.

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Making the cover

A few members of Extents reunited in our studio at Gould Hall to create the cover by photographing converging shapes, each representing a section of the magazine. The shapes were printed on transparent paper and reoriented to celebrate newness, composed of previously disparate parts. Like these shapes, our team is greater than the sum of us as individuals.