Landscape Architecture Magazine USA - May 2020

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE VOID A pandemic empties the public realm

MARFA’S ROAD AHEAD Far West Texas braces for change

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

LAM 12 INSIDE 14 LAND MATTERS

FOREGROUND 20 NOW Montreal neighbors fight back over a destroyed “squatter’s” garden; graywater goes right to the soil on a Georgia campus; a landscape architect cautions against overthinking California’s Salton Sea; and more.

38 EDUCATION

The River and the Real World A Cornell studio meets the streets when Josh Cerra, ASLA, has his students tackle Hudson River towns. BY JONATHAN LERNER

50 GOODS

Nothing but Fun Play structures built for adventure. BY EMILY COX

EVERT NELSON

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

“ OUR WORK IS NOT ABOUT JUST CREATING MORE BLACK LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS.” —KENDRA HYSON, ASLA, URBAN STUDIO, P. 60

FEATURES 60 ON-RAMPS, ON TIME Talk about diversifying the profession and capturing young talent is plentiful. Some landscape architects are making bigger moves. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

76 BIG BEND IN THE ROAD In Far West Texas, people are willing to travel a lot of miles for art and nature—as well as for plentiful oil and gas and a clear path to the border with Mexico. A road project by Texas DOT has people thinking about the costs of a busier future in the state’s last wild place. BY JENNIFER REUT

THE BACK 100 ONE MARCH DAY Finding a way to be together, far apart, at Rittenhouse Square in the early days of social distancing. PHOTOS BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

114 BOOKS

Rooted in Place A review of Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson. BY JULIAN RAXWORTHY

134 ADVERTISER INDEX 135 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY 148 BACKSTORY

Stand Up and Stand Out Pascale Sablan’s Beyond the Build Environment won’t settle for visibility. BY ANJULIE RAO

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020 / 7

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

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Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia on March 21, 2020, page 100.

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ON THE COVER

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Brian Barth; Jared Brey; Jessica Bridger; Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA; Jonathan Lerner; Jane Margolies; Zach Mortice; Timothy A. Schuler; Alex Ulam; James R. Urban, FASLA; Lisa Owens Viani EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE Falon Mihalic, ASLA / Chair Jeanne M. Lukenda, ASLA / Vice President, Communications Camille Applewhite, ASLA Benjamin Boisclair, Associate ASLA Elizabeth Boults, ASLA Conner Bruns, Associate ASLA Corry Buckwalter, ASLA Farah Dakkak, International ASLA Ujijji Davis, ASLA Ron Henderson, FASLA Brian Jencek, ASLA Dalton M. LaVoie, ASLA Maren McBride, ASLA Charles Kene Okigbo, ASLA Kathleen Trejo, ASLA Yutian Wang, Student ASLA EDITORIAL 202-898-2444

Landscape Architecture Magazine (ISSN 0023-8031) is published monthly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 200013736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 2020 ASLA. Subscriptions: $59/year; international: $99/year; students: $50/year; digital: $44.25/year; single copies: $7.

Landscape Architecture Magazine seeks to support a healthy planet through environmentally conscious production and distribution of the magazine. This magazine is printed on FSC® certified paper using vegetable inks. The magazine is also available in digital format through www.asla.org/lam/zinio or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.

TRUSTEES Aaron A. Allan, ASLA Shawn Balon, ASLA W. Phillips Barlow, ASLA Robert D. Berg, ASLA Jonathan Bronk, ASLA Kevin W. Burke, FASLA David H. Contag, ASLA Amy Cupples, ASLA Jitka Dekojova, ASLA Patrick F. Dunn, ASLA Michele Elfers, ASLA Scott V. Emmelkamp, ASLA Melissa M. Evans, ASLA David Flanagan, ASLA Jonathon Geels, ASLA Nick Gilliland, ASLA Tina Gillman, ASLA Thomas A. Hall, ASLA Gail L. Henderson-King, ASLA Jonathan Henney, ASLA Chester B. Hill, ASLA Jim Jackson, ASLA Lucy B. Joyce, ASLA Jenn Judge, ASLA Omprakash M. Khurjekar, ASLA Randy Knowles, ASLA Joy M. Kuebler, ASLA Marieke Lacasse, ASLA Timothy W. May, ASLA Bradley McCauley, ASLA Danny McElmurray, ASLA Baxter E. Miller, ASLA Cleve Larry Mizell, ASLA Jennifer Nitzky, ASLA Holley Bloss Owings, ASLA Jeff Pugh, ASLA John D. Roters, ASLA John P. Royster, FASLA Cheri Ruane, FASLA Jan Saltiel-Rafel, ASLA Stephen W. Schrader Jr., ASLA Jean Senechal Biggs, ASLA Brian H. Starkey, ASLA Judith Stilgenbauer, ASLA Adam A. Supplee, ASLA Robert B. Tilson, FASLA Patricia M. Trauth, ASLA Thomas J. Whitlock, ASLA Andrew Wickham, ASLA LAF REPRESENTATIVES Barbara L. Deutsch, FASLA Stephanie A. Rolley, FASLA NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Tyler Richburg, ASLA NATIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Jacoby E. Gonzales, Associate ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Kay Williams, FASLA

8 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

SAHAR COSTONHARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

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LAM

INSIDE

/

CONTRIBUTORS JESSICA LUTZ (“Big Bend In the Road,” page 76) is a photographer based in Marfa, Texas, and the borderlands. Her work can be seen in the New York Times and Texas Architect, among other publications; on CNN; or in her studio in Marfa. You can follow her on Instagram @jessicalutzstudio.

“Similar to the focus of my documentary work, this piece sheds light on the region as a whole, from the art mecca of Marfa to the border town of Presidio, with a humble bow to the land itself.”

CORRECTION

ANJULIE RAO (“Stand Up and Stand Out,”

page 148) is a Chicago-based journalist and critic focusing on the built environment. You can follow her on Twitter @AnjulieRao. “I was both surprised and not surprised to hear that Pascale Sablan spends so much time convincing diverse designers that their work is worth featuring. It makes me proud to see so many of these amazing designers stepping forward to be recognized.”

The March Backstory article “New Coordinates,” about establishing water levels in the Galápagos Islands, suggested that a collaborator, Michael Luegering, is a civil engineer. He is a senior associate at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and a licensed landscape architect in the state of New York. We regret the error.

JULIAN RAXWORTHY (“Rooted In Place,”

12 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

page 114) is a landscape architect based in Dubai and an honorary associate professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland. His most recent book is Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by the MIT Press in 2018. Find more of his work at julianraxworthy.com.

At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an area of interest you’d like to see covered, tell us! Send it to [email protected].

“There’s a tension between the desire to talk respectfully and insightfully about indigenous people and their landscape practices—with the contemporary discourse around the poles of intersectionality at one end and identity politics at the other. But one must do so nonetheless.”

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @landarchmag and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ landscapearchitecturemagazine.

Visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org.

LAM is available in digital format through landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/ subscribe or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA.

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LAND MATTERS

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A NEW NOW N

ot much good is coming from this parlous time, as the novel coronavirus floored just about everything people normally rely on, and with shocking speed. Some strands of hope, should they hold up with time, have appeared amid the desperate confusion. There is an odd but significant reassurance in how quickly so much of daily life buttoned up early on. That progress has been uneven, depending not least on brands of leadership. But once the severity of the situation everywhere became clear, enough people took heed of the stayhome advice that the numbers of holdouts thinned quickly if, alas, not to zero. Everything can change fast. The public compliance, the mass cooperation, happened without much pronounced role for the police, whose jobs have grown steep with new danger, like the work of all public safety professionals. Having everyone stay apart is the only way to contain the crisis. Each infection avoided supports the health care and public health community, who offer societies the only chances of stopping loss and getting through it all. For landscape architecture, there’s a deep paradox. The bad part is that there is pain, and will be more pain as this business contracts along with everything else. The profession is looking into a future far more unknowable than during the Great Recession a decade ago, when it lost a generation of new landscape architects, and some not so new. Total employment in the profession, federal data shows, fell from 22,000 in 2006 to 15,750 in 2012. Membership in ASLA fell to 15,000, from 18,000 before the economy collapsed; it never

14 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

bounced back. For emerging designers during the recession, there was no path forward, no new jobs, and many jobs lost. Interns had no place to get the office time they need to qualify for licensure. They went elsewhere. We are still feeling it. The good part during this crisis is that landscapes for people have seldom seemed as vital and as visible. People have had to stay apart, but also keep their sanity. They’ve turned to parks in droves as a first resort, so much so that keeping parks open quickly became a point of contention. In Italy, hit hard soon into the crisis, the city of Milan closed its parks in mid-March. Across the United States, park officials at first ventured to keep parks open but keep them, and their staffs, safe. Some found they couldn’t. And not everybody has a park, meaning the environmental disparities have shown all the more clearly. The soul of what landscape architecture does could not be more apparent—this should be a reminder in all the discouragement. This profession has to hold on to every partisan for public life that it can. It has new challenges, ones we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. But one salutary thing everybody should share in a time of surprise confinement is room to move outdoors. It has always been our mission to make it possible.

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FOREGROUND

SALTON SEA

Indigenous knowledge could be brought to bear on California’s inland sea, in NOW, page 20.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020 / 19

FOREGROUND

/

NOW

EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

SQUATTER’S RIGHTS, GARDEN DELIGHTS? THE BATTLE OVER A VACANT LOT IN MONTREAL LEAVES A COMMUNITY GARDEN IN RUINS. BY ZACH MORTICE

ABOVE

An evening gathering at Carré Casgrain in Montreal, before it was destroyed.

minimize one’s trash footprint. Monarch butterflies were frequent guests as well. But for Cassini, “the fun part is that besides those more organized events, it also took off as an informal space, [where] you could just walk from work and see a couple neighbors having a drink there, hanging out,” he says. But the good times came to an end in October 2019, after three seasons of planting and harvesting, when Albino Del Tedesco, the owner of the vacant lot the community garden sat on, sent out a backhoe to tear the garden apart, raking over the one-and-a-half-foot mounds with a diesel engine. “The bulldozer was really out of scale,” Cassini says. “It felt like a demonstration of authority and anger.”

It all went pretty much according to plan. As a landscape designer, Cassini says his role has been “offering a bigger vision” and sketching out simple plans for the 2,000-square-foot garden. Planting mounds extended into the rectangular site from concrete blocks painted with playful depictions of plants and produce, smiling carrots, and stacked bowls. There’s open space for event programming, and lights and festive flags are strung overhead, all typical of the block-level intimacy community gardens employ to beguile. Earlier that year, Cassini and his neighbors had introduced themselves to the local community Cassini and his neighbors, calling themselves “Le Carré et sa councils and gotten on the radar of Montreal Ruelle” (French for “The Square and Its Lane”), grew cherry District Mayor Francois Croteau, who represents tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and strawberries. They hosted the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. The BBQs, movies, concerts, and even a lecture about ways to group was encouraged by the city to clean up and

20 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

ALEXANDER CASSINI, ASLA

T

he reasons that Alexander Cassini, ASLA, got involved with the Carré Casgrain community garden in the Little Italy neighborhood of Montreal are as common as such green spaces should be. It was a chance to get to know neighbors, “foster a feeling of belonging,” and a way to “feel rooted in something real,” he says. Since the fall of 2017, Cassini, a landscape architect with Claude Cormier + Associés, has worked with a group of a half-dozen neighbors to plant, maintain, and program the space.

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FOREGROUND

/NOW

TOP

A sketch plan of the garden by the landscape architect Alexander Cassini, ASLA. INSET

Last fall, the property owner leveled Carré Casgrain with a backhoe, inspiring the city to take action.

“Our status is kind of ‘squatting,’” says Cassini. “That informal aspect allowed us to, in a quick amount of time, get on the map, get exposure, and be seen by the city. We didn’t feel clandestine because we were constantly getting positive feedback from the city.” In April 2019, the city and Le Carré et sa Ruelle began the process of establishing the garden as a real estate reserve, which would transfer ownership of the property to the city, to be managed by the community members who rehabilitated it. The real estate reserve process had been more often used to establish sites for public housing, but two sites in Croteau’s borough have used this method to develop green spaces. Similar to eminent domain in the United States, the real estate reserve process assigns a fair market value to a site and gives this money to the owner in exchange for the property, whether they are willing to sell or not. That’s a prospect that makes Del Tedesco angry. He says he’s being bullied by the city into selling, and complains of loud parties at Carré Casgrain going late into the night. “This is called extortion,” he says. “The city has wanted this property from the beginning, and they’re doing everything possible to take it away from me. What is this? A Communist country?”

22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

Croteau sees it differently, and isn’t particularly concerned about the potentially litigious and lengthy process of getting control of the site. “We know we’re going to win in the courts,” he says. For him, the real estate reserve process is a way to encourage self-determination and reward proactive and progressive community involvement. “To change the culture of the borough, we decided to let citizens get the initiative and the power to change it,” he says. “It’s really a big success. Citizens want more power to transform their neighborhoods.”

ALEXANDER CASSINI, ASLA, LEFT; LE CARRÉ ET SA RUELLE, RIGHT

maintain what had been a derelict lot for more than a decade. A building, owned by Del Tedesco, that had originally been on the site was condemned by the city for being a public safety hazard. “Since then, he’s done nothing,” Croteau says.

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Special Thank You

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Florida Host Chapter Leaders

Wendy Miller, FASLA Wendy Miller Landscape Architecture, PLLC

Host Chapter Co-Chairs Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA Jose Alvarez, ASLA

Tom Mroz, FASLA SmithGroup

Gina Ford, FASLA Agency Landscape + Planning Todd Hill, ASLA DTJ DESIGN

Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA 2GHO

Elizabeth Kennedy, ASLA Elizabeth Kennedy Landscape Architect, PLLC

Jose Alvarez, ASLA EDSA

Glenn LaRue Smith, ASLA PUSH Studio LLC

Robb Berg, ASLA Design Workshop - Denver

Juanita Shearer-Swink, FASLA Triangle Transit (Retired)

Duane Border, ASLA Duane Border Design

Steven Spears, FASLA GroundWork Development Company

Kevin Burke, FASLA Atlanta BeltLine

Michael Stanley, ASLA Stanley Design Group, LLC.

Susan Cohen, FASLA Susan Cohen Landscape Architect

Ernie Wong, FASLA Site Design Group, Ltd.

Chad Danos, FASLA Duplantis Design Group, PC

David Yocca, FASLA Conservation Design Forum, Inc.

Chris Della Vedova, ASLA Confluence

Field Session Co-Chairs Deena Ruth Bell-Llewellyn, ASLA Rituparna Simlai, ASLA ASLA/ACE Mentor Program Legacy Project Chair Ebru Ozer, ASLA Host Chapter Booth Co-Chair Abigail Reimel, Associate ASLA Kelsey Trujeque, Associate ASLA Public Relations Chair Dominic Mack, Associate ASLA Women in Landscape Architecture Walk Committee TJ Marston, ASLA

FOREGROUND

/NOW

GETTING BY ON ITS OWN SUPPLY GEORGIA TECH’S KENDEDA BUILDING TAKES THE STRAIN OFF THE REGION’S FRAGILE WATER RESOURCES. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

ABOVE

Any graywater used by building occupants is filtered through a series of planted wetlands. TOP RIGHT

The system uses the site’s topography to direct water toward an existing oak grove, one of the few places it could be safely infiltrated.

The building is designed to draw zero water from Atlanta’s strained resources (in 2007, the city nearly ran out of water) and return what water it does use to the Chattahoochee River in a cleansed state. Erin English, who co-leads the integrated water strategies practice at Biohabitats, says the

26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

project is meant as a proof-of-concept for regenerative development in the Southeast. “Being able to produce all of your own water, which is what we’re doing at Kendeda, puts a stake in the sand that says this building doesn’t impact the fragile watershed in which it lies,” she says. But the project, with landscape and water-reuse systems designed by Andropogon and Biohabitats, also shows how hard it can be to employ natural stormwater infrastructure in urban areas. From a design perspective, treating graywater via constructed wetlands and other landscape strategies is relatively straightforward. The challenge, English says, is finding locations where infiltration is possible—and permissible. Nearly every municipality in the country requires that treated graywater be discharged into areas of undisturbed, native soils, which naturally further filter the water. In dense, urban areas, however, where much of a site might be fill, such soil conditions are increasingly rare, limiting opportunities for groundwater recharge. “That is the number one challenge to doing Living Buildings in urban areas—being able to put that water back into the ground,” English says.

JUSTIN CHAN PHOTOGRAPHY, LEFT; ANDROPOGON, TOP RIGHT

I

n 2015, the Kendeda Fund, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization that works on a range of environmental and equity issues, including gun violence and climate resilience, committed $30 million toward what would become the Kendeda Building, a 37,000-square-foot research and education facility at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which opened in January 2020. Intended as a demonstration of regenerative approaches to energy, water, and waste, the building is targeting certification through the Living Building Challenge and is expected to be the first Living Building of its type in the Southeast.

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FOREGROUND

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This makes it all the more important to identify healthy native soils early on so that they can be preserved, English says. “One of the first things you should [say] as a landscape architect is that some soils are going to be good for this kind of disposal, so let’s be sure not to build on them. Let’s do a soil conservation plan that looks at where water wants to go, and where it’s best put back into the soil.”

28 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

José Almiñana, FASLA, a principal at Andropogon, says projects like the Kendeda Building, which will undergo 12 months of testing before being certified a Living Building, are possible only if owners and design teams are in lockstep. This was his experience working with Georgia Tech. “As a landscape architect,” he says, “this was a dream come true.” TIMOTHY A. SCHULER, EDITOR OF NOW, CAN BE REACHED AT TIMOTHYASCHULER @GMAIL.COM AND ON TWITTER @TIMOTHY_SCHULER.

ANDROPOGON

At the Kendeda Building, designers were clued into the potential presence of native soils by a grove of mature oaks at the north end of the site. Surveys conducted by a soil scientist confirmed the design team’s suspicions. Now, all graywater (100 percent of which is captured rainwater) is filtered via a series of wetlands that use gravity and the natural topography to direct the flow of water. Water is pumped from a collection tank in the basement to a concrete-lined planted wetland near the building’s entrance, then flows into each subsequent planting area before being infiltrated via a drainfield near the oak grove.

FOREGROUND

/NOW SALTON SEA SOS A BATTLE BETWEEN NATURE AND ENGINEERING PLAYS OUT IN A RECEDING LAKE BED. BY LISA OWENS VIANI

W

As the sea shrinks, agricultural runoff has created conditions for emergent wetlands. BELOW

Using a hydrophone, Hans Baumann has heard brine shrimp pulsating beneath the sea’s surface.

The water body is an important refuge for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway, but now it is disappearing too. As freshwater inflows have been siphoned off for urban centers and agriculture, the sea’s only freshwater source is wastewater—mostly agricultural drainage, which dumps onto the former shoreline, surrounding the shrunken sea like a rim of salt. And yet this wastewater has had a surprising benefit, says Tom Anderson, an assistant refuge supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agricultural runoff has created wetlands that serve as habitat for federally endangered species such as the pupfish and the Yuma clapper rail. The only

30 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

problem is that this habitat may conflict with the state’s plans for the sea. With no outlet and little fresh water coming in, the sea accumulates salts and contaminants such as selenium, which can bioaccumulate in the food web, and dust from the exposed playa, which causes respiratory problems for local residents. These ecological challenges have caused some to deem the sea “dead.” Others, like Anderson and Hans Baumann, a landscape architect, say it is still full of life. For years, the state has been developing plans to minimize dust and selenium bioaccumulation by blending several sources of agricultural runoff to create a series of engineered saline habitats consisting of ponds or open water impoundments without any selenium-accumulating vegetation. Anderson worries about the cost of heavily engineered fixes, however. “There’s the drawback of needing a lot of maintenance, pumps, etc., which raises a lot of questions about who’s going to manage and pay for it,” he says. “The thing about these marshes is that they came in on their own. With a little design you can make them work with nature and they will last a long time.”

require a certain amount of infrastructure, such as levees and outlets, but less than would be needed for the engineered ponds. “They should design for natural processes to occur,” he says. “Instead of forcing a system to live up to specifications, let nature do the management work.” Baumann has pored over the state’s plans. “So many of the ideas are extreme,” he says. “Building a wall to create a lake at the northern end, for example,” which would leave miles of playa exposed. He says the new wetlands are free, functional, and should be left alone. (The state did not respond to requests for comment.)

Baumann is currently collaborating with the Cahuilla to document changes to the lake over time. Thomas Tortez, the tribal council chairperson, fears the sea cannot restore itself on its own. “The lake has come and gone over hundreds of years, and our tribe always adapted to that. Our elders remember when it was still a place where you could fish or swim. Whenever it flooded, it naturally brought fish—that was our livelihood. As it receded, we adapted to that too.” Baumann, tribal elders, and natural resource managers hope the state will Anderson says preserving and ex- take action soon to save the sea before panding the natural wetlands would all that remains is a mirage.

CHRISTIAN SCHONEMAN, TOP; PAMELA J. PETERS, BOTTOM

TOP RIGHT

hen the Colorado River flooded and burst through an irrigation canal in 1905, it created California’s largest inland lake, the Salton Sea. It filled what had been the lower basin of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, which had disappeared hundreds of years earlier. Both the original lake and today’s “sea” are part of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian tribe’s territory: They fished in both water bodies, and many of their ancestral songs and stories revolve around them. Today, the tribe still owns sections of the Salton Sea, along with government agencies and irrigation districts.

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FOREGROUND

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THE BATTLE OF FORT GREENE NEIGHBORHOOD ACTIVISTS PUT A HALT TO NEW YORK CITY’S PLAN TO MAKE A PARK MORE ACCESSIBLE. BY TOM STOELKER

T

he stated goal of the New York City Parks Department’s Parks Without Borders initiative is to make parks safer and more accessible. But the program’s latest project, a revamping of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, has been stymied by a New York Supreme Court decision that halts what some see as a ham-handed effort to ram through the $10.5 million redesign. At issue is the park’s design heritage, which is as diverse as the neighborhood. The site was a military stronghold during the Revolutionary War, and became a park in 1847. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted created a meandering design in 1867, establishing one of Brooklyn’s first designed parks. In 1908, a redesign by the architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White overwhelmed the Olmstedian design with a wide, formal stair

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For generations, the towering trees in the northwest corner have sheltered the outdoor celebrations of residents from the New York City Housing Authority apartments located directly across the street. “This is the reason I stayed in Brooklyn,” says Stacy Williams, who has lived in the Ingersoll Houses for the past 28 years. Nearby, her granddaughter played on Bye’s mounds. “Any function, this is the park to go to.” Fort Greene is undoubtedly one of the city’s more imposing parks. Retaining walls surround nearly every side of the grounds, creating a fortress-like effect. The parks department’s plan is to tear down the walls, remove Bye’s mounds, and fell more than 50 mature trees in the park’s northwest corner to run a primarily concrete boulevard down the square’s axis. The formal design would be more at home in an American city aspiring to be a part of the City Beautiful movement than

TOP LEFT

A.E. Bye Jr.’s grasstopped mounds have been used as a play area for generations of neighborhood children. BOTTOM LEFT

A city proposal would remove the mounds for a pedestrian thoroughfare, creating space for vendors and events.

COURTESY NEW YORK CITY PARKS

that leads to a 150-foot-high Doric column, which marked a crypt for prisoners who died on British ships during the Revolutionary War. In 1969, Berman, Roberts, and Scofidio (later of Diller Scofidio + Renfro) transformed the northwest corner with lawn-topped mounds supported by cobblestones, a design conceived by the landscape architect A. E. Bye Jr. The team also buffered the noisy city corner with honey locusts and a thicket of Norway maples.

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21st-century New York, said plaintiffs in the lawsuit, a group that includes Friends of Fort Greene Park, City Club of New York, and the Sierra Club. “It’s a lazy design,” says Ling Hsu, the president of Friends of Fort Greene Park and an alumna of the nearby Pratt Institute. “It was proposed in 2017 in a diverse neighborhood where the uses may have changed, but as the environment and society evolve, the design should evolve with the surroundings and the users instead of going backwards.” Initially, the parks department produced handouts explaining that the trees slated for removal were invasive and nearing the end of their life span. However, documents attained by Hsu and the other plaintiffs through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that 49 out of the 58 trees identified for removal are in fine health, Hsu says. Instead, their location didn’t fit within the new design intent. Hsu and her colleagues say that the community board and the Landmarks Preservation Commission were given incorrect information on the tree health, thereby avoiding environmental review—that is, until the issue made its way to the New York State Supreme Court.  When asked about the complaint, Nicholas Paolucci, the director of public affairs and press secretary for the city’s law department, wrote in an e-mail that his department “filed a notice of appeal to preserve our right to appeal, but the city is considering its options.” Back in the park, as her granddaughter played atop the grass-topped mounds, Williams was dismayed that the landforms would be replaced with concrete to accommodate farmers’ market vendors and events. “If you’re going to do something for the park, upgrade the park,” she said. “Build a ramp for people in the wheelchairs. Fix that. Fix the little cracks, everything. The park don’t really need this glamorous thing you’re putting in it.”

34 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

LEFT, TOP

The circular plaza in its current state with Bye’s mounds in the distance. LEFT, BOTTOM

The proposed renovation would expand circular plant beds and add a water feature at the center of the circle.

COURTESY NEW YORK CITY PARKS

Michael Gotkin, a landscape preservation consultant to Friends of Fort Greene Park, says that every designer up until now has respected that Olmsted made the entrance off-axis and oblique. “The formalist element at the core is intentionally revealed only upon entering the park.”

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FOREGROUND

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EDUCATION

THE RIVER AND THE REAL WORLD

CORNELL STUDENTS BRING VISIONS FOR CLIMATE ADAPTATION DOWN TO THE HUDSON SHORE. BY JONATHAN LERNER

Ossining’s narrow waterfront evolved as a mixed-use zone, without master planning. INSET

Josh Cerra, ASLA, far right, and the 11 students from last fall’s Climate-Adaptive Design studio.

T

38 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

logical and Environmental Engineering. To assess the studio’s benefits, Cerra is collaborating with a Cornell researcher who studies behaviors and conservation management. Their inquiries, he says, include “how working with engineers or other technical partners may enhance learning innovation” for landscape architects. And then there is the studio’s value to the towns, which are gifted with provocative visions for their futures. This past fall, Cerra’s studio—11 third-year MLA candidates—focused on Ossining, on the east shore of the Hudson about 30 miles north of Manhattan, where the topography is especially steep. A rail line to the city traces the bottom of the bluff. Circulation on the waterfront and to the town center is constricted. Only

JOSH CERRA, ASLA, TOP; KEVIN KIM, BOTTOM

TOP

the tides and storms of a changing climate. They’re getting help from Josh Cerra, ASLA, the director of graduate studies in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. With collaboration from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuary Program, he has been bringing community-based he Hudson River is tidal, gaining “Climate-Adaptive Design” studios a mean elevation of only two feet to Hudson River towns. for 150-plus miles inland from the Atlantic. It is flanked, almost with- The studio has obvious pedagogical out interruption, by bluffs and cliffs. value. Students learn site research Most communities along it have only and engagement skills, and to ima slender strip of land at river level. bue design with climate science. Historically, industries and infra- Meanwhile, it lets Cerra pursue an structure were sited below, with more interest in applied education and salubrious parts of towns built up the cross-disciplinary experiences. In deslopes. Most industry is gone. Com- veloping their concepts, his students munities want to reinvent their river- get “consultants”—other students, fronts, which means contending with from Cornell’s Department of Bio-

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FOREGROUND

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OSSINING WATERFRONT LIZ FABIS, STUDENT ASLA

two streets cross the railway, over narrow viaducts. On the river side, a single street parallels the tracks; its sides are often crammed with commuters’ cars, more like a parking lot

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than a right-of-way. Visual chaos is away on the opposite shore. One accentuated by a lot of vine-tangled, park, quite small but in good shape, rusted chain-link fencing. was built along with the apartment building; the larger one, an acre, is The land-use mix in the roughly uninspired in design, run-down, and mile-long study zone between the at one point narrows to the width of tracks and the river is typical. Ves- a single footpath. During Hurricane tiges of industry remain: a working Sandy, in 2012, the storm surge at oil transfer facility, a historic, if archi- Ossining was about nine feet, and tecturally unremarkable, brick fac- nearly all of the current waterfront tory building. There are a couple of including the rail line was flooded. restaurants and private marinas and (Using the FEMA terminology for a wastewater treatment plant. Several describing flood events, Sandy would features are not so typical of Hudson be considered a 1 percent or 100-year River towns, including the original storm.) compound of the famous Sing Sing state prison; it’s barely used since The semester in Ossining was the the facility expanded uphill, but still studio’s seventh iteration. Early on, off-limits and taking up space. There selection of locations was fairly inis also the dock for a cross river ferry, formal. In fall 2015, the first was one of only two now regularly operat- conducted in Catskill, just across ing north of New York City. And at the river from Hudson, where I live. the water’s edge stands a 188-unit I went over to view the students’ fiapartment house completed in 2016. nal designs, met Cerra, and brought About a third of a mile of shoreline is him back to see our waterfront. Like composed of two parks separated by that of just about every town along a public boat club and launch. These this magnificent river, Hudson’s spaces give a glorious view toward waterfront is both daunting and enthe steep wooded ridge two miles chanting. He was enchanted, but

LIZ FABIS, STUDENT ASLA

N

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FOREGROUND

/EDUCATION STEP BACK, STEP UP, MOVE FORWARD

ECOLINE, DEFINING THE NEW WATERFRONT

MARK SCHRADER

MAIN PLAN2050

ABOVE

Zikun Zhang’s concept envisions circulation on boardwalks that will appear to float as waterfront transitions to wetland. TOP RIGHT

Mark Shrader proposes cut and fill to leverage higher ground as a line of defense.

42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

N

undaunted. I offered to organize lo- impacts and the students’ ideas. Last cal support, and Hudson became the year the state issued an RFP for a next venue. consultant to help one town take elements from the studio proposals and Nowadays, Cerra and the Estuary Pro- move them toward implementation, gram select towns not just for their offering a $125,000 fee. So strong waterfronts’ interesting challenges was the response that they ended up and potential but also for communi- making two such awards for concepts ties’ demonstrated progress toward devised during studios held in Kingswise planning. They solicit candi- ton and Piermont. date venues with a detailed request for applications and a preapplication (I use “town” here generically for webinar. Once a locale is chosen, but anywhere the studio has focused, before the students’ first visit, there because New York legal terminology are meetings with officials to iden- is confusing. Every place in the state tify key resource people and water- is either a town—think township— front issues. Local participants now which can contain municipalities receive a 12-page guide describing called villages, or else it is a city. Hudthe studio process, expectations for son is a city, but of fewer than 7,000 their involvement, and suggestions residents. The Village of Catskill, for leveraging the studio to stimulate population 4,000, is in the Town planning momentum. After it ends, of Catskill. The Village of Piermont, the Estuary Program follows up to population 2,700, is in the Town keep the student propositions active of Orangetown. The City of Kingsin the local conversation, and pub- ton has 24,000 people, and hosted lishes a “lookbook” for mass distribu- the studio three times. Ossining is tion of projected local climate-change a town of 40,000 within which is

ZIKUN ZHANG, LEFT; MARK SCHRADER, TOP RIGHT

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FOREGROUND

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TRACING PLACE; SHIFTING SHORES MARCO RANGEL, STUDENT ASLA

Marco Rangel, Student ASLA, sees “using the manipulation of topography to trace shifting shorelines.” BELOW

Lingyi Hsu would elevate the rail line above floodable parkland.

A LATENT BUFFER FOR OSSINING LINGYI HSU

the Village of Ossining, a dense core including two-thirds of that population, the commercial center, and the waterfront.) The Town and Village of Ossining already had a strong record of initiative and collaboration on planning. Their joint letter of interest detailed current efforts. Those included, for the town, a new comprehensive plan with a sustainability and complete streets orientation, and a new master plan for the larger waterfront park, both in process. The village was moving forward on updating its comprehensive plan: inserting a mixed-use and mixed-income housing project on a moribund site just

inland of the tracks; extending the ferry pier to accommodate larger boats; and facilitating development of rental housing on sites next to what became the study area. A planned link to a statewide bike and pedestrian trail network would connect the riverfront and the upland business district. There was excitement—barely contained by the official tone of the letter—about the imminent opening of the Sing Sing Prison Museum in two historic structures, the facility’s former powerhouse and an 1825 cellblock. These projects and others, still fluid, meant that the studio could expect informed local engagement—and perhaps influence what got built.

Ossining was certainly aware of sea-level rise. Local regulations had been modified recently to address future flood events. The design of that apartment building was altered after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when a bulkhead built to prepare its site was overtopped by storm surge. Still, people in river towns may not fully visualize the anticipated severity of local impacts. They are, though, likely to be aware of local obstacles to change. Those might include political discord and lack of planning capacity, but also facts on the ground like valued historic sites or, ironically, recent investments—such as Ossining’s new apartment building and the museum, both intended to animate the waterfront, or its wastewater plant, which recently had nearly $15 million in upgrades. The students do become aware of such particulars. But they are involved in a learning exercise, using newly acquired design skills to dream up concepts. They are not constrained by politics and budgets, as they will be when in practice. So their concepts can seem abstract or radical to the point of impossibility to people in the towns. Even so, Cerra says, the proposals “inspire conversation about what they’re interested in and what resources they can bring to bear to push some of these ideas forward.

44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

MARCO RANGEL, STUDENT ASLA, TOP; LINGYI HSU, BOTTOM

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FOREGROUND

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RIVER GUARDS CATHERINE KANA

ABOVE

Catherine Kana’s plan draws focus to the confluence of Sing Sing Kill (creek) and the Hudson with a water-themed park and pedestrian plaza.

That’s building capacity, right there.” Still, raising awareness of risks and offering possible responses is not the same as actually building something to adapt a threatened waterfront. “We learned about setting up that expectation. You know these are not going to be constructible when we get to week 16.” At semester’s end, the students presented their concepts publicly at the Ossining library. All depicted enhanced access to the waterfront, with some vision of resculpted shoreline and floodable parkland that would evolve with rising waters. Where the concepts became unnerving was in addressing those big facts on the ground: if, and when, to dismantle the apartment building; and how to defend, or relocate, the wastewater plant. The third rail, so to speak, of all challenges was the train. Some students suggested elevating it by six feet on a berm or by 16 or even 30 feet on a viaduct; tunneling it under

46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

Cerra’s students had presented similarly in Hudson in 2016, attracting considerable interest. Four years later— blame political discord? lack of planning capacity?—the waterfront remains untouched, the studio a dim memory. Kingston, by contrast, has a planning department, a sustainability coordinator, and an active Conservation Advisory Council of citizen volunteers. Last October the city organized “Weaving the Waterfront,” a walking, biking, and boating tour of 10 current recreation and resilience projects. They included the studio proposal funded for further development, which would create a living shoreline of tidal wetland and beach. While Piermont has the smallest population of the studio towns, it has outsized capacity: the highest average household income—nearly three times that of Catskill or Hudson— and a Waterfront Resiliency Commission established following Hurricane Sandy (whose members include the Columbia University climate-change expert Klaus Jacob). Funding further development of a studio concept there seems an equally good investment.

Graham Harlan Smith, now an assistant landscape architect at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, was a student in Cerra’s Hudson studio. “A lot of academic work, you can get off into fantasyland. It was grounding,” he recalls of the public engagement aspect of the studio. “You see that there are parameters you don’t necessarily get from an academic setting—like, anything that’s too radical might be good for visioning but might not get much mobility. Practicalities about more than physical constructability, but ‘What can a social unit achieve?’” Smith, an Ossining native, attended all the public events of the recent studio there. “What struck me was how diverse the students’ projects were. There’s utility for the town with that, a variety of ideas to explore. But it’s a gnarly waterfront. There’s a lot going on down there that is beyond the power of a local municipality.” As the Ossining studio concluded, the village was interviewing to hire a professional planner, and the urgency of shoreline adaptation was broadly agreed upon. “We have a lot of issues to contend with as the Hudson starts to rise,” the Town Supervisor Dana Levenberg told the students that day at the library. “Thank you for helping us understand how to take an active role in planning. Of course, this is just a start.” CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JONATHAN LERNER SLOSHED AROUND THE CITY OF HUDSON’S WATERFRONT WHEN IT, AND THE RAILROAD TRACKS, WERE UNDERWATER.

CATHERINE KANA

the raised grade of a terraced park; or rerouting it altogether, inland alongside a highway. But the tracks hug the shore for 150 miles; this cannot be resolved within one community, and the cost of any move is unimaginable. The boldest, perhaps most realistic proposal was to abandon rail for a system of ferries—made feasible, the student designer pointed out, because with warming the river won’t freeze over.

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GOODS NOTHING BUT FUN NEW PLAY STRUCTURES, FULL OF SURPRISES. BY EMILY COX

Hedra Towers, a custom offering within the new Hedra collection by Landscape Structures, takes the playground off the ground. The structure pictured consists of an elevated climbing net and walkways, three towers with connecting tunnels, and a stainless steel tube slide. The geometric exterior of the towers includes polycarbonate panels and bamboo accents. Play components, materials, and color palettes can be customized as desired. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.PLAYLSI.COM.

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COURTESY LANDSCAPE STRUCTURES

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FOREGROUND

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ON-RAMPS, ON TIME LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS CAN DO MORE THAN TALK ABOUT DIVERSITY—THEY CAN ACT. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020 / 61

T

HE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS were pretending to be plants. They crouched in front of giant, wall-sized pieces of parachute cloth, china markers in hand, and slowly grew, black lines following suit. Recalling the movement of the prairie grasses just outside, they waved and swayed and curled in on themselves, a collective interpretive dance that evoked the native grasses and wildflowers that they had been studying all morning. Quickly a mass of black lines became a monochromatic prairie, a temporary mural inspired by the small patch of native grassland visible from the hallway window.

62 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

Leading the drawing exercise was Erin Wiersma, an artist and associate professor in the art department at Kansas State University. Wiersma is best known for her massive biochar “drawings,” which she makes by dragging huge sheets of paper across freshly burned prairie. The exercise at J.C. Harmon High School, located in the largely Hispanic Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood of Argentine, was part of Grassland Interview, an interdisciplinary art and ethnography project created in collaboration with the landscape architect Katie Kingery-Page, ASLA, the associate dean of Kansas State’s College of Architecture, Planning, and Design.

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GRASSLAND INTERVIEW

LEFT

Plants were gathered from the demonstration prairie on the J.C. Harmon High School grounds. BELOW

The students’ drawings were layered to create a temporary mural that was exhibited at the Kansas City Design Center. OPPOSITE

The students used various drawing exercises to study and observe their selected prairie plants.

KATIE KINGERYPAGE, ASLA

Grassland Interview was originally conceived as a way to expose and explore the fragile beauty of the world’s grasslands—nearly 90 percent of which have been destroyed, by some estimates—and it has grown to include a series of youth drawing workshops conducted at high schools around the state. At J.C. Harmon High School, freshmen in the school’s Architecture, Construction, and Engineering (ACE) Academy rotated through a series of activities with Wiersma, Kingery-Page, and Catherine Bylinowski, a horticulture educator with the University of Missouri Extension Service. They learned about the many ecosystem services that native plants provide, and picked a plant from the school’s emerging prairie to research, observe, and draw. For Wiersma’s exercise, students were asked to recall how the prairie grasses grew last year (“They were really fast!” “Everything was flooded!” “I’ve never seen the grass this tall be-

fore!”), then use their bodies to embody the growth of the plants. “My hope is that I can give them a moment to recognize their own being and create some empathy for their environment and maybe for themselves,” Wiersma says. While Wiersma worked with one group, KingeryPage led another in a more focused, observational drawing exercise in which students produced line-and-contour drawings of their plants. These eventually would join the more expressive drawings in a permanent mural. Kingery-Page says the drawing workshops emerged out of a desire to combine art and science as a way to help students in urban schools feel a sense of ownership over their environment. “When we talk about raising

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“ WE WANT TO INCREASE ACCESS TO OUR PROGRAMS AND HELP OUR PROFESSIONS BE MORE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SOCIETY THAT WE SERVE.” —KATIE KINGERY-PAGE, ASLA

awareness of the significance of grasslands, it’s really about raising awareness that we belong to grasslands. I want these youth to recognize that they also belong to a grassland,” she says. At the same time, “there’s also a message about your future and your career, and the power of landscape architecture.” The idea of bringing Grassland Interview into local high schools emerged out of a Kansas State design studio that reimagined J.C. Harmon’s campus. Over the course of the project, KingeryPage met David Bennett, a biology teacher in the ACE Academy and the person responsible for the school’s native prairie, as well as a recently restored wetland. “It was sort of an aha moment, honestly,” Kingery-Page says. “I thought, biology classes—and the kinds of kids who might get excited about a biology class—these could be our future landscape architects!” Both the workshop and past studios are part of a larger Kansas City Metro initiative, which links low-income communities, such as Argentine, with university resources. The goal is to use design studios and other programs to tackle pressing urban issues while also exposing students of color to the college’s various design programs. “We want to increase access to our programs and help our professions be more representative of the society that we serve,” Kingery-Page says. Right now, the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design is 72 percent white. J.C. Harmon is

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nearly the inverse, Kingery-Page says, with a student body that is 66 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black, and 13 percent white. The racial homogeneity of this country’s design and planning professions has been the subject of internal and external criticism since at least the 1960s, when Whitney M. Young Jr., then the head of the National Urban League, blasted the American Institute of Architects for its complacency in the fight for civil rights. Speaking to a nearly all-white audience—which just as easily could have been a gathering of the American Society of Landscape Architects—he condemned the profession for its “thunderous silence” and “complete irrelevance” to the civil rights struggle. Since then, progress has been incremental. According to ASLA data, only 10 percent of landscape architects—and just 4 percent of ASLA members—identify as Latinx, despite making up nearly 20 percent of the population. African Americans, who make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, comprise just 3 percent of the landscape architecture profession and 1 percent of ASLA membership. If there is a bright spot, it’s that the profession increasingly seems to acknowledge that its lack of ethnic and racial diversity is a liability. ASLA, alongside universities and other design organizations, is actively working to attract young people of color to the profession. In 2018, the society hired its first national manager of career discovery and diversity,

OPPOSITE

A more expressive drawing exercise was led by Erin Wiersma, an artist and associate professor at Kansas State University.

ERIN WIERSMA

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Lisa Jennings, who has worked on bringing existing resources under a single virtual roof and establishing or expanding partnerships with K–12 educators and other organizations. At the high school level, these outreach efforts often consist of straightforward, hands-on activities, career day presentations, or university campus visits. But some landscape architects are working outside their professional roles as practitioners or educators to pilot more intensive programs that they hope will help broaden the on-ramps into the profession.

communities of color who are interested in careers in design. It was founded by four landscape architects—Kendra Hyson, ASLA; Maisie Hughes; Daví de la Cruz; and Andrew Sargeant— who connected through the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. (Hyson was serving on the LAF board; Hughes, Sargeant, and de la Cruz were 2018–2019 Fellows.) The four designers eventually recognized that they shared an interest in creating a pipeline for students of color that would give them the skills, confidence, and support they The Urban Studio was launched in 2019 to help need to not just pursue a career in design, but to train and support high school-age youth from succeed. “This is not an easy profession to be in,”

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COURTESY THE URBAN STUDIO

URBAN STUDIO

students, drawn mostly from D.C.’s fifth and seventh wards, spent seven hours each Saturday learning the basics of landscape architecture and developing concept plans for two separate sites: a community recreation center near the National Arboretum, and a vacant lot in the historically African American neighborhood of Deanwood. Each student received a $500 stipend—a crucial benefit for young people who otherwise might work on weekends, Hyson says.

ABOVE

COURTESY THE URBAN STUDIO

A Studio South Central participant at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area studies the ecology of Southern California.

says Hyson, who also works as a senior planner for the Montgomery County Planning Department in Maryland. “If you’re not supported as a person of color, if you don’t have people around you who look like you and have gone through the experiences you’ve gone through, it can be really difficult.”

The nonprofit organization has three arms: Studio DC, run by Hughes and Hyson; Studio South Central, run by de la Cruz in Los Angeles; and Studio Digital, run by Sargeant, who lives in Austin, Texas, and works for Lionheart Places. Each OPPOSITE has taken a slightly different form. Studio DC’s Kendra Hyson, inaugural program was conducted this past fall ASLA, and Studio DC and funded through a Community Stormwater participants at Canal Solutions grant from the D.C. Department of Park, where they learned about designing Energy and Environment with additional support from Anova. The program consisted of a 10-week for stormwater management. intensive design program in which 12 high school

Studio South Central’s first cohort was made up of high school students from in and around Pueblo del Rio, the Los Angeles public housing project where de la Cruz grew up. Over 10 weeks in spring 2019, a group of five students used art and photography to document their communities and, in the words of de la Cruz, explore the “connection between storytelling and place.” The first Studio Digital program—a one-week intensive design program at Utah State University to learn about immersive technologies such as virtual reality—was planned for spring 2020, but was postponed owing to concerns over COVID-19. At barely one year old, future Urban Studio programs could take any number of forms, Hughes says. Currently, the founders are lining up funding and university partners to support the organization’s mission. They don’t want to rush it. “We could spend all of our time going after grants that are available, but we’re trying to change the game,” Hughes says. “We need to take a more

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“OUR MISSION IS TO ADVANCE DESIGN THINKING FOR EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE URBANISM. THAT MEANS PEOPLE OF COLOR WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES OF COLOR.” —KENDRA HYSON, ASLA

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ABOVE

Maisie Hughes teaches Studio DC’s inaugural cohort during one of 10 daylong sessions. OPPOSITE

Urban Studio’s founders say it’s important to compensate students, who otherwise might be working on weekends.

COURTESY THE URBAN STUDIO

offensive approach to this. We need to do a deep classes in contemporary art and mural-making to dive-in strategy and be really deliberate about the the young people of North Minneapolis, the largely kind of funding that we go after.” black community where both Roger and DeAnna spent their childhoods. In 2010, the organization One thing that is unwavering is the Urban Stu- established JXTALabs, paid apprenticeships or dio’s transformative potential. “Our work is not “labs” in graphic design, textiles and screen printabout just creating more black landscape archi- ing, public art, contemporary art, environmental tects,” Hyson says. “Our mission is to advance design, and community engagement and urban design thinking for equitable and sustainable planning (the last two of which fall under the urbanism. For us, that means people of color heading “tactical”). Apprentices must complete working with communities of color.” The driv- Juxtaposition’s visual art literacy training program, ing question, she adds, is, “How can we take or VALT, before applying to become apprentices. the skills that landscape architecture has given JXTALabs takes on client work, annually employus—this ability to think long term, to creatively ing up to 70 teens and young adults ages 14 to 21 problem-solve, to be resilient and think about to design and build real-world projects, including sustainability and green infrastructure and all of custom bicycle racks, parklets, and play structures. the multilayered aspects of the landscape—how can we take all of those things and pass them on One of Juxtaposition’s most recent projects is the to these young people?” Skate-able Art Plaza, 4,600 square feet of public open space that offers skate elements alongside Another organization working to equip young features designed for more passive recreation. people of color is Juxtaposition Arts in Minne- The need for more open space in the neighborapolis. The organization was founded in 1995 hood has long been a topic of conversation at Juxby Roger and DeAnna Cummings and Peyton taposition, Roger Cummings says. When one of Russell as a youth arts organization, offering free Juxtaposition’s buildings was deemed structurally

COURTESY THE URBAN STUDIO

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JUXTAPOSITION ARTS

RIGHT

Installed next to the skate plaza, this modular parklet was designed and fabricated by youth apprentices in JXTA’s Environmental Design Lab, in collaboration with Lazor Office.

oriented away from traffic, which is further protected by a grouping of five large boulders (the property has a history of automobiles crashing into it, says Niko Kubota-Armin, who leads the environmental design lab). A large mural creates a backdrop for performances, and rain gardens encircle the ramps, collecting stormwater from the plaza as well as adjacent properties. (The Mississippi Watershed Management Organization helped fund the project.)

“We wanted to find something to do with it,” says Kristen Murray, ASLA, Juxtaposition’s program director. “It seemed like an opportunity for a skate plaza, a space that would blend skating and activity and physical movement, as well as art and performance and enterprise.” Opened in June 2019, the skate plaza serves as a much-needed gathering place as well as a Located on the corner of a busy intersection in billboard for the work Juxtaposition does. MurNorth Minneapolis, right next to Juxtaposition’s ray says the neighborhood has claimed the space main building, the colorful, multipurpose plaza as its own to such a degree that Juxtaposition’s is largely the brainchild of apprentices in the en- leadership is rethinking its vision for the site. vironmental design, tactical, and public art labs. “It’s a really important space,” Murray says. “It’s Ramps and other skate features form a horseshoe not something [residents] want to see go away.

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JUXTAPOSITION ARTS

unsound, Juxtaposition decided to demolish the building to make way for a new building. Rather than leave the corner lot vacant, the nonprofit saw an opportunity to create a temporary public space—a space designed by and for local kids.

MISSISSIPPI WATERSHED MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION, ABOVE AND RIGHT

ABOVE

The skate plaza serves as public open space as well as a billboard for the nonprofit’s programs. RIGHT

The space was designed by youth apprentices, with input from professional skate park designers.

So I think that’s changed how we think about the design of the campus and how we make more spaces like that on the campus in the future.” Besides its paid apprenticeships, Juxtaposition also maintains a working relationship with the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and landscape architecture department, a partnership that was formalized in 2005 under the name ReMix, partly thanks to the efforts of Kristine Miller, a professor of landscape architecture, and Satoko Muratake, then a graduate student and now a landscape architect at TEN x TEN. The ReMix program, which is also how Murray

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In 2014, Juxtaposition launched its Pathways to College and Careers program, or PaCC, which provides apprentices who are close to aging out of the nonprofit’s programs (the program is for 14- to 21-year-olds) with mentors, career guid-

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ance, help writing résumés and applications, and opportunities for paid internships outside Juxtaposition. The program was started in response to needs identified by apprentices in a series of interviews conducted by Adrienne Doyle, a landscape architecture student and now the lead of Juxtaposition’s Tactical Lab. Doyle, a JXTALab alum, says many of the apprentices felt they lacked the resources, knowledge, and professional connections necessary to, say, mount an exhibition at a local gallery or land an interview with a design agency, especially relative to their white counterparts. PaCC works to remove some of those barriers and create a bridge from Juxtaposition to the professional world, providing assistance with such things as personal finance, writing a business plan, or travel to cities such as New York or Chicago.

JUXTAPOSITION ARTS

first became involved with Juxtaposition, is mutually advantageous. It benefits Juxtaposition’s high-school-age apprentices, who gain exposure to university-level design programs and access to faculty, as well as the university landscape architecture students, who get opportunities to work with Juxtaposition and residents of North Minneapolis. For the Skate-able Art Plaza, the grading and planting plans were done by Norman Palacious, a graduate student involved with ReMix who now works as a landscape designer for Asakura Robinson in Austin.

“ IT’S THE WAY THEY DID THE SKATEPARK, WITH YOUTH, WITH ARTISTS OF COLOR, IN A VERY PUBLIC WAY, THAT HAS AN IMPACT.” —KRISTINE MILLER

ABOVE

The skate plaza integrates rain gardens to manage stormwater. OPPOSITE

JUXTAPOSITION ARTS

Its success has prompted JXTA to reconsider the role of open space in its future campus.

Kristine Miller, the UMN professor, says Juxtaposition’s model puts the emphasis on the right places: on racial equity, and supporting youth leaders of color who can use design to make positive change in their neighborhoods. “A project is never going to do it,” she says. “I hope we learned that through urban renewal. It’s going to take people who are able to take their values, understand what they’re great at, build trust with each other, dismantle their own personal racism, and commit to working together over time. What you see then is that it’s the way they did the skatepark, with youth, with artists of color, in a very public way, that has an impact.”

the Urban Studio, or independent practitioners, working with young people or building new onramps into the profession is an effort that often falls outside the scope of their normal jobs, making the work difficult to sustain. “This has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but it is not always easy to frame it in the context of, for practitioners, billable hours or, as an academic, peer-reviewed scholarly research,” Kingery-Page says.

Other challenges include the fact that not everyone values diversity equally. “We know that in some spaces, we’re still having to make the case that this is necessary,” says ASLA’s Lisa Jennings. “And Juxtaposition has spent 25 years building its pro- that’s okay. We’re all coming to these conversations grams, partnerships, and reputation in North from different perspectives, and there needs to be Minneapolis. For fledgling organizations like room for all perspectives.”

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Andrew Sargeant, of the Urban Studio, says the pipeline of prospective landscape architects won’t look different until larger issues of representation and racial equity are addressed. He says there need to be coordinated efforts at every age and career step. It’s about, “How do you get kids when they’re young? And then how do you make sure that the education that they’re receiving reflects them? And then also, when they graduate and look for jobs, let’s get them jobs and let’s make sure that they’re comfortable.” Until all of that happens, he says, the profession will have a diversity problem. “They’re really focusing on the K–12, but no one is really talking about, where do you land?” OPPOSITE

Despite a limited footprint, the skate plaza provides the infrastructure for a variety of uses, including performances.

For Kingery-Page and her collaborators, it’s been remarkable to see the impact that even a simple drawing workshop can have. At J.C. Harmon, David Bennett, the biology teacher, says he was astounded at how calm, quiet, and engaged the students were during Wiersma’s more expressive exercise and that it “was like therapy” for some of them. One student in particular, who had expressed an early interest in design but who also has “outrageous amounts of energy,” Bennett says, was “totally at peace.” Bennett says he hopes Kingery-Page and Wiersma will continue to bring these drawing workshops to the school. By linking subjects like ecology to the students’ own neighborhood, and the prairie plants they see from the window each day, the activity has a better chance of resonating with the kids, he says, and is more likely to plant a seed about future career paths. “It’s pretty enriching, compared to going into a room and hearing somebody talk about their career,” he says. “It’s site-based, it’s connected to what they’re learning about, and it’s hands-on. The students are creating something. They’re making something that is self-expressive and individual but also collective.” It might just be a first step toward a future in design. TIMOTHY A. SCHULER WRITES ABOUT DESIGN, ECOLOGY, AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. HE LIVES IN HONOLULU.

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RYAN STOPERA

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JESSICA LUTZ

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BIG BEND IN THE ROAD

FOUR COMMUNITIES IN REMOTE WEST TEXAS TRY TO FIND A WAY TO MANAGE THE FUTURE BEFORE IT RUNS OVER THEM. BY JENNIFER REUT

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ABOVE

There are long stretches of open road along US 67 heading north toward Marfa and the Davis Mountains. OPPOSITE

The view from Highway 170, a farm-to-market road, also known as River Road where it follows the Rio Grande River.

In Texas, US 67 is a highway that runs from Texarkana to the border with Mexico at Presidio. It passes through Dallas and San Angelo, intermingling with other, bigger federal highways along the

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way, and finally gets loose on its own around Fort Stockton (population 8,356). From there it’s a sometimes rolling, sometimes clear shot through Alpine (pop. 6,065) and Marfa (pop. 1,772) to Presidio (pop. 4,099) and the border with Mexico. For much of the ride, especially south of Marfa, US 67 is a two-lane road with narrow shoulders, hemmed in by ranchlands or rocky buttes on each side. Ranch roads peel off occasionally but not often, so there’s no predictable place to pull over and turn around. Once you’re on, you’re on. Fortunately, it’s a jaw-droppingly beautiful drive through the northeast corner of the Chihuahuan Desert, which overlays 140,000 square miles of West Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. It’s a mountainous desert—the highest

JESSICA LUTZ, ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

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HERE ARE a lot of different kinds of roads in Texas. There are state and federal highways that pull truckers through long stretches of the state from one town to another. They tangle up briefly in urban and suburban streets before heading west. There are farm-to-market roads and ranch-to-market roads, so named because they connect rural people to towns where they sell their products, find education, and maybe find jobs. Roads in Texas, especially in sparsely populated areas of the state, were more than a way to get from point A to point B. They brought progress, change, newcomers, but also a way for people to leave for good. Texas was slow to adopt paved roads, and many of the farm- and ranch-tomarket roads weren’t paved until after World War II. Today these roads make up just over half of the 80,444 miles of roads managed by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).

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RAINER JUDD © JUDD FOUNDATION

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OPPOSITE

A view from the northeast in the Chinati Mountains, near Ayala de Chinati, one of the artist Donald Judd’s properties near Marfa, Texas.

elevation in Texas is Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet, and temperature and rainfall vary depending on where you are in the basin and range topography. About 70 miles east of Presidio is Big Bend National Park, the largest protected piece of the Chihuahuan Desert in the United States. It is one of the most biodiverse parks in the system, with more than 1,200 species of plants, including 60 cacti, 11 species of amphibians, 56 species of reptiles, 40 species of fish, 75 species of mammals, more than 400 species of birds, and about 3,600 species of insects. Life in the desert ecosystem clusters around water, and 118 miles of the Rio Grande River forms the park’s southern border with Mexico. The area has archaeological evidence of long stretches of human habitation that includes pictographs and petroglyphs, and is home to a dozen Native American nations. Big Bend is a popular site for birders and naturalists, with attractor designations such as a Globally Important Bird Area, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and an International Dark Sky Park, but it’s still a bit of a wallflower in the park system, with fewer than half a million visitors a year. On the stretch of US 67 from Alpine to Marfa, you’ll encounter some of the road’s trickiest bends, and at night, when the fog catches and settles into the passes between mountain ranges, it

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can be treacherous. From Marfa to Presidio, the landscape flattens out, revealing open grasslands punctuated by wide stretches of scrubby, sparse desert plants—creosote, ocotillo, and yucca are common—and open sky, hemmed by the shoulders of the Davis and Chinati mountain ranges. When driving that portion of the highway, time and space can feel off. Landscape features seem to crawl by rather than clip. Along straightaways, you’ll want to go fast, and maybe the few other people on the road will, too. Its landscape beauty is so hypnotic that you can watch YouTube videos of the drive set to house music.

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Unless, that is, you’re going on a weekend, or around Easter, Christmas, or spring break. Or you’re heading across the border during rush hour to do some shopping or visit family along with the thousands of other families who are all trying to squeeze through the port of entry at Presidio to visit Ojinaga on the Mexican side in Chihuahua. An additional border patrol checkpoint between Marfa and Presidio further slows down the traffic. Then the enchanting two-lane road vanishes and becomes a parking lot, where cars can back up for miles. Emergency vehicles can’t get where they’re going. There are no roadside services. The wait can be several hours.

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PRESIDIO

This is what worries Chris Weber, the Alpine area engineer for TxDOT. The agency has made a big push to reduce traffic fatalities statewide as part of a safety campaign called End the Streak. Weber can rattle off the crash data for US 67—higher than for other rural roads and condensed around several hot spots—and all the unexpected ways certain sections of the road can be dangerous, like the spot where dropped cell phone coverage returns and drivers scramble for their phones. By his own admission, Weber is not like other transportation engineers. He’s outgoing, with big energy and a restless brain that jumps around but always comes back to his point. It’s clear when he talks about making the road safer that he really loves this place, the people, and the process. But in this part of Texas, US 67 is not just a road.

Mexico, but nothing like the crossing at El Paso, which brings in $18.4 billion to the state’s gross domestic product. Here, it’s mostly families and day-trippers. Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, ASLA, grew up coming back and forth on day trips from Chihuahua City to the United States in the The border crossing at Presidio is primarily pedestrian 1980s. “I remember it feeling like a —there’s some truck freight, and transmigrantes very remote and small place,” he says bringing goods from the United States to sell in of Presidio. Later, as a young design

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JENNIFER REUT, TOP; JESSICA LUTZ, BOTTOM AND OPPOSITE

MARFA

LIFE ABOVE AND BELOW I10 WAS TIED TO THE LANDSCAPE THE TWO REGIONS JUST HAD VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO IT. ALPINE

faculty member, he brought groups of students and architects from the Superior Institute of Architecture and Design of Chihuahua to Marfa, a practice he continued from the University of Texas at Austin and then the University of Arkansas, where he now teaches. During those visits, Marfa “felt very alive and festive. People were very welcoming and diverse,” though they seemed oblivious sometimes to the border nearby. Since then, he says, Marfa has become more expensive and exclusive, and the landscape more endangered.

In the late 1990s, US 67 was designated part of La Entrada al Pacifico, a proposed trade corridor from Texas through Presidio-Ojinaga to the port at Topolobampo, Mexico. The corridor was meant to move goods from Texas to global markets, but the idea had been around for a while—one local told me it goes back to the mid-19th century. It’s not hard to see how oil and gas concerns in Odessa might have eyed that stretch of US 67 and imagined how much more product they might move out if the road were wider, divided, and faster. Enacting La Entrada would have created an opening for widening the road and creating passing lanes, easing the way for more trucking and freight.

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A road is an abstraction on the land, imposing boundaries where none were sought, and here it was the dividing line. “Interstate 10 has become West Texas’ 38th parallel,” opined the Odessa Amer-

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ican during the controversy. “To the north: the mineral-rich Permian Basin, West Texas’ longtime industrial and trade hub, hoping to become an international distribution center. To the south: the rugged but charming Big Bend region, West Texas’ tourism boomtown rich with visitors soaking up Western ambiance where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson once filmed Giant.” There was some deafness on both sides of the controversy. The opponents of La Entrada pointed to the project’s detrimental effects on the area’s economic powerhouses of natural and cultural tourism, not always the most equitable engine, and the sup-

ABOVE

Marfa was founded as a railroad town, and artifacts of ranching and agriculture can be seen everywhere. OPPOSITE

The “ghost town” of Shafter (population 11) is one of the few stops along US 67 before the border. JESSICA LUTZ

The way the locals tell it, La Entrada wasn’t so much rolled out as it was slunk through. TxDOT held a few public meetings, in 2007 and 2008, and by most accounts they did not go well. Conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, allied with longestablished ranchers and residents old and new who prized the region’s remote and uninterrupted landscape views. They opposed La Entrada and the increase of trucking and traffic it would bring. Other residents saw opportunity and job growth, not just for Odessa and Midland but for Presidio, one of the poorest counties in the state, and one that has an interdependent economic relationship with Mexico.

below I-10 was tied to the landscape— the two regions just had very different approaches to its utilization.

JESSICA LUTZ

La Entrada was scuttled, perhaps because of the public pushback, or maybe because of a deal neighboring New Mexico made with the Mexican state of Chihuahua that offered an alternative route to the corridor. People I spoke to were frank in their assessments of the corruption they believed defined the project, but said that was business as usual in Texas politics. Although it went quiet, La Entrada al Pacifico did not go away, and the rough feelings around it have remained. porters sometimes sounded dismissive of the importance of landscape integrity to the regional character, which they referred to as “scenic areas.” Though all the affected towns were small, each place was complex and layered with distinct identities and cultures that sometimes overlapped and sometimes clashed. Military and border patrol mixed with ranchers, artists, university faculty, and conservationists; borderlands cultures overlaid clusters of oil and gas field camps and national parks and wilderness areas. But the life and work above and

In the spring of 2018, TxDOT posted a notice of a public meeting for the US 67 Corridor Master Plan, the first in a series of 12. The agency was seeking public input for improvements along 142 miles of US 67, from I-10 west of Fort Stockton to the Presidio-Ojinaga Port of Entry on the border. Meetings would be held in all four towns beginning that spring. On its website, TxDOT explained that the agency was undertaking a corridor study “to help determine the current and future transportation needs to best serve the communities along US 67.” The study was to see if there could be upgrades to the road that would improve safety and relieve congestion. Chris Weber, Alpine resident, was the local lead for TxDOT.

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PHOTO BY FLORIAN HOLZHERR, COURTESY THE CHINATI FOUNDATION, BOTTOM

OPPOSITE

The Chinati Foundation houses large-scale artworks, including Judd’s sculptures, 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980–1984, which can be seen on the right, just before US 67 cuts the landscape.

For many people in the region, the memory of the first go-round with La Entrada was quite fresh. Weber understood where they were coming from. “Ten years prior there was a study done on the same corridor,” he says. “Presidio was pitted against Marfa, Alpine, Fort Stockton. It was divisive.” This time it was being done with good intentions, but he understood that people wouldn’t be persuaded easily, given the region’s history. The artist Donald Judd first saw the Southwest desert from the window of a bus. As a young soldier headed to the Korean War, he traveled from Fort McClellan, Alabama, to Los Angeles through the heart of West Texas. Years later, an established artist in New York City and dissatisfied with the art world’s bounded approach to installing his artworks, he returned. He eventually settled in Marfa, a tiny town near Fort D.A. Russell primarily populated by Hispanic families. Buildings were cheap; company was infrequent. Judd bought his first properties in Marfa in 1973. Other properties followed over the next 20 years

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in what is now a nearly mythic art world trajectory. He bought more buildings around Marfa that became studios, living quarters, and offices, and filled them with his own and others’ art, a library, and a matchless collection of furniture, including his own designs. Judd’s entwined approach to architecture and landscape guided his hand in adapting the structures he acquired, which eventually included 40,000 acres and three houses that he named Ayala de Chinati in the Chinati Mountains. He avoided disturbing the land and elected to use what was at hand and to work within the vernacular of the buildings. “All ideas, seemingly simple and easy, are difficult for people to understand,” he wrote in the essay “Art and Architecture” in 1987. “One of the most difficult is the one of leaving the

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land alone: Leave it alone or return it to its natural state. The natural world seems not to exist for almost everyone.” In 1978, Judd bought, with the support of the Dia Art Foundation, two of the Fort Russell buildings and began adapting them for installing large-scale artwork. They now house the Chinati Foundation and operate as an independent art museum that includes works by several artists including Judd, Dan Flavin, Roni Horn, and Robert Irwin. (Sasaki did a master plan for Chinati in 2016.)

ABOVE

Much of Far West Texas is within the Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion, considered among the most biodiverse in the Western Hemisphere.

At the center of the Chinati complex, within two former artillery sheds, is Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–1986. In a meadow east of the main complex, Judd installed his 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980–1984, a series set along an arc that looks east across US 67 to the Chinati Mountains. Both works rely on the particular range and quality of light that is specific to the site—light that is affected by mass and shadow from buildings and landforms and by the degree of humidity and particulate in the air, including dust and vibration from US 67.

Judd died unexpectedly in 1994 and left his estate in disarray. His children, Rainer Judd and Flavin Judd, stepped in and began the process of determining what to do with the deteriorating buildings, cataloging the objects, and conserving the artworks and the landscapes. Judd’s vision of the way his art should be installed and experienced was uncompromising, or at least very clear, but it’s not easy to sustain over time, especially in the desert climate. The 22 buildings, which are organized as 12 spaces, required money and attention to preserve and maintain. Some of that came from an auction, held in 2006, of 36 artworks that contributed to an endowment. The placement of the land in a conservation easement helped provide funds to settle the estate and protect the land in keeping with Judd’s principles.

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FLARE ACTIVITY IN THE PERMIAN BASIN

NOV. 30, 2017

NOV. 30, 2018

“MOST OF US DOWN HERE HAVE A VERY STRONG SENSE OF PLACE.” COYNE GIBSON, BIG BEND CONSERVATION ALLIANCE

Marfa is a wedding destination now. The Hotel Saint George on Marfa’s main street, Highland Avenue, caters to this crowd and hosts conferences and meetings. It seems to be doing well. The Marfa Visitor Center reports 22,000 people

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came through in 2019 compared to 11,000 in 2014. There are now non-Judd galleries and arts organizations; the bilingual newspaper, the Big Bend Sentinel; and a theater. Independent directors shoot films around town. Marfa’s long-standing tourist attraction, the Marfa Lights (a supernatural phenomenon), now has to compete with Prada Marfa (an art piece) for tourist attention. Marfa Radio, an NPR affiliate, can be heard globally on the Internet. It’s still a part-time town, and many coffee shops and stores are open only Thursday to Sunday, but it’s changed from a whispered-about place to a hashtag destination, and that has brought a lot of money into the region, and gentrification. It would be difficult to estimate how much the investment by the Judd Foundation has benefited Marfa economically—

ABOVE

The nearby Permian Basin brings jobs to the region, but also environmental harm. Flaring, or the burning off of excess gas in fracking, has increased over the past five years.

NOAA

Today the Judd Foundation, led by Rainer and Flavin Judd, manages the buildings and gives guided tours of the nine spaces open to the public. There are plans to open more spaces in the future. It also conserves materials and archives and produces new programs, publications, and exhibitions, including the recent retrospective, the first in three decades, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Marfa, visitors see the spaces left as they were at the time of Judd’s death, not just the artwork, but the everyday objects and tools of an artist’s life. The experience is unsettling and confrontational, and it provokes questions about the temporal nature of art and place that are hard to shake. Judd framed and defined ways to see his spaces and their contents (the people who lived there are felt in absences between objects)—what to value, what to discard.

NOV. 30, 2019

NOAA

the foundation says it had 10,000 visitors in 2019, but there would be less Marfa tourism without Judd, for better or for worse. I asked one resident what accounts for the recent uptick in visitors and swank businesses that cater to them. “Beyoncé,” he responded. “When she posted that photo in front of Prada Marfa”—that was 2012, to be exact. “It’s become this bucket-list item.” In May 2018, not long after the US 67 Corridor Master Plan was made public, Rainer Judd posted a statement on her personal Instagram feed on behalf of herself, her brother Flavin, and the Judd Foundation. “This is a special place,” she wrote, “and it’s special because of the relationship between the people and the land, the way the houses sit in the hills, and the way the roads wind through the landscape.” She went on to make the argument that people live in West Texas because they like being far from the things you have at hand in cities such as Houston or Los Angeles. She wrote that they understood the safety issues but wanted to see the data that supported the effort. While road maintenance, new scenic overlooks, wildlife crossings, and a visitor center for Presidio

APRIL 2, 2020

would be welcomed, widening US 67 would not. She observed, as the New York Times had a decade earlier, that tourism was a significant employer in the region. “The percentage of the local economy due to the arts is 8 percent,” she wrote. “Mining, oil, and gas, by comparison, is 1 percent. It’s important the solutions to our problems fit the local landscape.” The Permian Basin, which includes the Delaware and Midland Basins, is the richest source of oil and gas in the United States. A company wishing to build a pipeline has no permitting requirements other than to file with the Railroad Commission within 30 days of construction for pipelines that are more than a mile long, with the exception of those that carry hydrogen sulfide or “sour gas” products. Any pipelines considered a “common carrier,” which includes those that transport oil, oil products, gas, carbon dioxide, salt brine, sand, clay, liquefied minerals, or other mineral solutions, are granted the right of eminent domain, as if they were a public entity. Land condemnation through eminent domain is a particularly sore point across the political spectrum in West Texas, and it colors the way residents feel about infrastructure projects. The vast majority of land in Texas is privately owned, so state-level protections are scant. An organization such as the Nature Conservancy can bargain to place easements on land, but that protection won’t hold off oil and gas leasing, and it won’t hold back eminent domain.

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Coyne Gibson is a volunteer and a member of the Big Bend Conservation Alliance (BBCA), an organization that came together in 2015 during the time that the Trans-Pecos Pipeline was going in and has participated in the US 67 public meetings. “Most of us down here have a very strong sense of place,” Gibson says, “and it’s hard for me

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to describe the sky, the landscape, the air, the clouds, the holistic nature of what this place is all about.” Today the Trans-Pecos Pipeline’s scars can be seen clearly as you drive down US 67, where it runs along the west side of the road. When the notice went up about the US 67 Corridor Master Plan, it touched not a nerve but an open wound. The first public meetings for the project were packed. Online forums filled up quickly, and comments at public meetings were telling: “We have a beautiful small town; we do not want trucks coming through it creating noise, traffic, odor. Our quality of life is important. Need a major bypass to keep trucks out of our town.” “A bypass would kill this town. DO NOT Bypass.” “Semi-trucks must be re-routed FAR outside of Marfa & other city limits! No oversized

ABOVE

Residents study the US 67 corridor at a public meeting. INSET

Chris Weber, an engineer with TxDOT, leads a bus tour as part of the public engagement for the master plan process.

KIM JOHNSON, BLANTON & ASSOCIATES

In 2015, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, planned to build a 143mile pipeline from a storage facility near Fort Stockton to Mexico. Because of Texas eminent domain laws, landowners and ranchers found out about it only when surveyors showed up on their land. Uneven development among Marfa, Fort Stockton, Alpine, and Presidio meant there was not universal agreement on the pipeline’s hazards versus its benefits, but anger over the eminent domain laws has brought together many West Texans who might otherwise find themselves at odds, and a recent documentary, Trans Pecos, tells this story poignantly. The TransPecos Pipeline went online in 2017.

ABOVE

JENNIFER REUT

Siblings and Presidio natives Vicky and Ramon Carrasco survey the construction of the new Presidio-Ojinaga rail bridge at the border.

HMSE! Wondering if this is a step to when she was growing up, Marfa was very differbring back La Entrada, which would ent. She knew about the Marfa Lights, and about enrage the community.” Judd, and the 1886 Presidio County courthouse, but “Marfa was just a small town we passed through,” Vicky Carrasco grew up in Presidio she says, on the way to the more exciting cities of before leaving to become an urban Pecos or Odessa. and regional planner. She spent her career in the Washington, D.C., area, Carrasco, along with Weber and Kim Johnson, working in natural resource manage- from Blanton Associates, the public involvement ment and public engagement. Her lead, helped direct the local community engagebrother Ramon Carrasco is a civil en- ment process for US 67. It was, by any measure, gineer and owns the firm Kleinman thorough. The team developed a public involveConsultants. When the US 67 Corri- ment plan that included virtual and public meetdor Master Plan project came online, ings, online forums, media outreach, bilingual they joined a team that included the materials, interviews, and small and large group engineering firm CDM Smith, the meetings. They formed committees of local judgenvironmental consultants Blanton & es, mayors, and other officials, and took people Associates, and CONSOR Engineers from various constituencies—ranching, arts and that was bidding for the public in- culture, conservation—on bus tours of US 67 to volvement contract. When they won show them the pinch points for traffic safety and the contract, Carrasco moved back get their input on improvements. They harvested to Presidio in 2017 and joined her public comments and, in one of the last meetings, brother’s firm full time. She says that CDM Smith brought in an augmented reality

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ABOVE

The lights of the border towns Presidio and Ojinaga at night.

JESSICA LUTZ

presentation to show potential street improve- When the final master planning docments, so residents could see what a new traffic ument emerged in November 2019, circle might feel like. it ran to 176 pages, not including several hundred pages of technical It was an overwhelming amount of attention for a appendices. It laid out the current project that TxDOT insisted was only for planning conditions along US 67 and outlined purposes, and it puzzled some people I spoke to projections for freight, tourism, and and made them a little suspicious. But the result economic development. The agency was that, as the residents became more informed also provided plans for bicycle and and less wary, they stopped showing up for the pedestrian infrastructure, which public meetings. Weber says he had to adjust his were often mentioned in public perspective a bit to see this as a win. “When you meetings, a reflection, perhaps, of a engage the public and you try to do it the right culture change in auto-reliant West way, and you try to be ultra-inclusive, less and less Texas. The whole project, of which people come to the meetings because they find the public engagement was just a what you’re doing is not controversial.” small part, took 28 months.

For residents unaccustomed to much state intervention, the corridor plan was an astonishing amount of resources directed at the region that many thought had been underfunded and overlooked for decades. Many of them welcomed the attention. Regional planning in West Texas is scattershot, and most towns don’t have a comprehensive plan or experience in successfully advocating for state resources. “This is a really good opportunity,” says Trey Gerfers, a former board president of the BBCA, who lives in Marfa and makes his living as a translator. “This corridor study is

a good opportunity to go after some funding, and we desperately need it. For so long, we were just excluded. We have a chance here to shape it and use it. If we ignore it, it’s not going to happen.” Change, even incremental, should be balanced with recognition of the precarity of the environment. Montemayor thinks a more integrated approach, for communities and ecosystems on both sides of the border, including a binational park along the Rio Grande, would be a start. “This is obviously a beautiful place. But it is threatened,” he says, by the oil and gas fields and pipelines, as well as by the commercial activity they bring. “Marfa has been gentrified; Alpine is in the process. This is a place where we could balance the arts and nature.”

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THE BACK

FOREST: STAY FOCUSED

FOREST

Apple App Store and Google Play, $1.99 When the developers behind Forest conceptualized the productivity app, their premise was straightforward: Motivate people to put down their phones and concentrate on a task by planting a virtual tree that grows as long as they stay focused. If they leave the app to scroll through social media or the web before the timer they’ve set expires, the virtual seedling will die. Those who make staying focused a habit earn coins to cultivate a lush forest containing seasonal species of trees and plants—cherry blossoms, mushrooms, a Rafflesia.

Aer the program’s initial release, SeekrTech’s Amy Jeng and Shaokan Pi received a suggestion: “Planting virtual trees is cool, but why not let us plant real trees?” Forest then partnered with Trees for the Future to make the game’s coins real-world redeemable for just that. The environmental nonprofit helps communities around the world plant trees through seed distribution and agroforestry training with an overarching goal of mitigating hunger and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. As of this writing, Forest users have planted 718,526 real trees in Kenya, Senegal, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Uganda.

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RITTENHOUSE SQUARE

On the last day before the stay-at-home order was issued, a couple adds protective gloves to their spring wardrobe.

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In the early days of the coronavirus shutdown, Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA, took her camera to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia’s Center City. The square is both a neighborhood park and a destination, and on an ordinary spring day, you could expect to see a few hundred people enjoying the park at any given time—walking their dogs, jogging, reading, and picnicking on the lawn. Restaurant patrons could be observed pouring out from the bistros that dot the perimeter of the park. This spring, a week or so into the pandemic, there were telling signs of the changes already at hand, with more to come, but visitors still managed to grab a bit of the season’s sweetness. PHOTOS BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

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OPPOSITE

Visitors spend time together, but on separate blankets.

A police car sits at the Rittenhouse Square park entrance at 18th and Walnut Streets.

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Once bustling restaurants transition to takeout or delivery service only.

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The restaurant industry has been hit hard by this pandemic, with even the most popular upscale restaurants in this affluent neighborhood shutting their doors.

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Large magnolia trees flank the entrances of the park.

OPPOSITE

Local florists have gied the park with floral arrangements that were meant for special events canceled because of the pandemic.

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Donated floral arrangements with a banner that reads “Is it over yet?” act as a spontaneous memorial.

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THE BACK

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BOOKS ROOTED IN PLACE LOTEK: DESIGN BY RADICAL INDIGENISM BY JULIA WATSON; COLOGNE, GERMANY: TASCHEN, 2019; 420 PAGES, $50. REVIEWED BY JULIAN RAXWORTHY

R

ecently I tried to find a citation for the expression “the same thinking that got you into a problem won’t get you out of it,” which is generally ascribed to Albert Einstein. But as I dug deeper I found the original impossible to trace. Einstein’s putative expression is pertinent to an important new book, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, written by the urban designer Julia Watson, ASLA, not only because she offers new, but old, thinking, but also because it’s about knowledge passed on by word of mouth, with mythological origins. Given a multifaceted environmental emergency pressing hard on human civilization, the modern thinking that caused these crises is indeed being mobilized again to fix them, and geoengineering, in particular, has the potential to precipitate an even bigger crisis. A key problem in this type of thinking is its singularity. It’s an attempt to analyze and work with factors that have been segregated by science into silos, but that actually interact in highly specific, complex ways that cross disciplinary boundaries, which is a common feature now of project and research teams. Watson’s beautiful book describes natural “technologies” used by indigenous people that comprise soil, water, climate, and, most important, culture. At first glance, these categories might provide a useful division for the book, but in fact all the technologies use all these ingredients, which shows in the first

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instance why “indigenism,” as Watson calls it, might be a useful approach in contrast to the singularity of modern solutions. When you plop open the rough, loose cardboard cover, you may wonder whether the binding is failing, though it is soon revealed that, no, the book’s construction is deliberate. On the inner pages you’ll find an index of elevation in meters (a rational measure) that calibrates the organization of the book into four sections—Mountains, Forests, Deserts, and Wetlands—with 18 sites that are a synthesis of place, culture, and what Watson calls “technologies.” This book is a clear change from the glossy, picture-based titles that one associates with Taschen— on people such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, Antoni Gaudí—because it was designed by Watson with the graphic design firm W–E Studio. The book is a careful example of what I call “propositional geography,” a mining of the real with an eye to its utility in design. It has a number of the tropes that are familiar to this time—CAD-drawn axonometrics drawn like aircraft emergency cards, illustrative sections—that verge on, but just hold back from, design speculation. A key evocative technology—the jingkieng dieng jri, or “living root bridges,” of the Khasi people of northeast India—could have prompted the book, as they instantly demonstrate its key themes. The bridges are the de facto emblem for the book,

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ABOVE

Watson’s drawing of the “living root bridges” is characteristic of a type of drawing that tries to redraw the everyday to make it available for design.

/BOOKS

appearing in most publicity for it because they are so recognizable and intriguing, but also because, as Watson notes in her introduction, the word “radical” in the subtitle of the book comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. They are made of the aerial roots of rubber trees planted along riverbanks that have been braided together over time to create bridges across the river for use in high water during monsoons. Hollowed-out betel nut trunks are used to encase the developing roots, which grow along them, taking many years to join. The roots naturally thicken as they do, creating bridges that are approximately 250 years old, and overlaid with rocks that act as stepping-stones and ladders for access. Watson notes the paradox that whereas conventional timber bridges decompose over time, cutting their life span, “By using living roots, over time the living root bridges grow stronger.” This type of approach typifies what I have called the “viridic,” which is a language for growth as a material in landscape architecture, and highlights a quality that the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragility,” wherein something gains strength over time rather than losing it. He contrasts this with resilience, a term he considers negative. This approach to growing material has also been a fascination for architecture for the past 10 years, such as

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in the investigation of “proto-cell architecture,” which seeks to overcome the inherent static quality of building materials. Watson’s focus on the use by indigenous people of these living materials as “technology” fits within the discourse of landscape architecture after landscape urbanism, which established a kind of “instrumentality,” as the landscape architect Richard Weller called it, that I would argue persists today in a contemporary fascination with metrics in the discipline. The framing of these practices as “technology” by Watson evidences a contradiction in Watson’s approach, because such a modern view (by another name) is exactly what she seeks to oppose, though she is careful to locate such technology in a cultural frame. In describing her aims for the book, Watson notes: “Lo—TEK is a movement that investigates lesser-known local technologies, indigenous cultural practices, and mythologies passed down as songs or stories…[to] extend the grounds of typical design.” This emphasis on mythologies as a part of culture is revealed throughout the book: The Khasi tribe is from the state of Meghalaya, which translates to “the abode of clouds,” which may help explain why the bridges appear in the first “Mountains” rather than second “Forests” section of the book, as their lush surroundings would suggest. The “TEK” in Watson’s “Lo—TEK” comes from the ecologist Fikret Berkes, and is an abbreviation for “traditional ecological knowledge,” part of a much larger discourse on “indigenous knowledge systems,” which UNESCO characterizes as “the understandings, skills, and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings.” On one hand, Watson’s recognition of cosmology

JULIA WATSON, ASLA

THE BACK

Sometimes we must bring the outside in.

Even though current circumstances have forced us indoors, we continue to contemplate the outdoors. We are still working to improve our parks and communities. Our mission is to make cities beautiful, but we recognize that cities can’t be truly beautiful without the people who inhabit them. We look forward to the days when we can once more enjoy these public spaces freely, but in the meantime we will forge ahead with optimism. mmcite.com / [email protected] / 704 995 1942

THE BACK

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TOP RIGHT

The practices of indigenous people in landscapes, like the Kayapó in the Amazon in Brazil, manipulate ecological systems to suit their needs.

The case of the Kayapó in the Brazilian Amazon, which is included in Watson’s “Forest” section, provides an interesting case, one that links to the recent fires in Australia, the place both Watson and I come from. The Kayapó use fire, or what Watson calls “pyrotechnology,” to create forest openings for agriculture spaces called apete, where layers of species above and below each other work in the way that we might now call permaculture, a web of microclimates, nutrients, and companion relationships. When I visited the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2010 to explore indigenous ethnobotany, I had expected a clear binary between forest and opening/village, but found a very dispersed series of different types of clearings in vari-

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ous states of development and abandonment, maturity, and regeneration. It revealed a much greater extent of influence than I’d imagined, and indeed contemporary LIDAR investigations are revealing the Amazon as a network of agricultural urbanism. Traces of villages are generally less than 300 meters apart, organized along river systems. This was a hypothesis that the anthropologist Phillippe Descola also put forward on the basis that the arrangements of plants in the forest mirrored the arrangements in gardens, suggesting to him that the whole forest was really a garden, or perhaps a park. He also showed how paths from hunting grounds and rivers crossed to areas that allow picking of fruits and foraging from these older garden remnants. In terms of indigenousness

ROB KROENERT

is both an important contextualization of the technology she discusses and a tonic to the implicit instrumentality of both the time and the book, which I shall discuss below. On the other hand, it has the potential to exhibit what has been called in anthropology “the denial of coeval,” which is where an anthropologist is talking about current people as if they occupy a different time to themselves, for example, as if their practices are ancient. This way of thinking permeates landscape architecture history, where indigenous approaches are located at the start of the histories, generally before Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids, for example. Such framing can seem respectful, though it also typifies “the denial of coeval,” and Watson negotiates this particular tension throughout the book. Does the liberal imagination deny indigenous people the right to be “present” in the present, as parts of the world, as it is now, owing to a nostalgia about the “ancient” or “untouched,” an otherness such as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “noble savage”? In these times of intersectionality, can indigenous people be hybrid, specific?

THE BACK

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ABOVE

The system of acadja aquaculture of the Tofinu tribe in Benin creates paddocks within Lake Nokoue.

and time, the plants in the apete gardens have a cosmopolitan origin—for example, banana from Asia, corn from Mexico. Indigenous trading networks brought colonial spoils to otherwise “uncontacted” tribes, again demonstrating the denial of coeval and the bricoleur nature of indigenous communities. Questions about the old and the new, and about tradition and innovation, can put boundaries around how we view the hybrid Lo—TEK is an earnest and incredibly important book, both for habits of indigenous people. this current moment, when we need to find carbon-positive solutions that can, if not halt, at least mitigate climate change, but In her introduction, Watson draws a diagram of Berkes’s also for landscape architecture. Watson is a landscape architect, model of TEK in the form of a pyramid with “worldview” and though the book is directed more broadly. Her book shows that “social institutions” at the base, and with the “individual” at the idea of Lo—TEK, first in material and then in approach, the top, and “land and resource management systems” and presents huge opportunities. These broad technologies are old “local knowledge of land and animals” between. These place- and smart, and actually deeply embedded in the discipline, if ments suggest the ways customs provide knowledge to the only the discipline can modify its practice to suit them. Watson individual that are then deployed in working with the land, shows that they are separated from us by a type of thinking that developed through their own experience. This is a pertinent the semiotician Walter D. Mignolo argues started during the point to Australia and the recent catastrophic fires, which have Renaissance with its creation of a “zero point,” where everything elicited much discussion about Aboriginal land practices. The before and outside the Western was other. Watson’s book is a historian Bill Gammage has suggested that the appealing “park- rejoinder. Watson sidesteps issues such as decolonization, idenlike” condition of Australia at the time of colonization resulted tity politics, and intersectionality. This is both a strength and a from Aboriginal fire management practices, which balance danger of the book, a manifesto for change and a future going the knowledge of animals with land management, as Berkes’s forward by looking back, but actually in the present. model describes. Gammage used colonial accounts to show that small, carefully timed and located fires created abundant “green JULIAN RAXWORTHY IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT BASED IN DUBAI. HIS MOST pick,” as my mother called it, for kangaroos, while keeping fuel RECENT BOOK IS CALLED OVERGROWN: PRACTICES BETWEEN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND GARDENING, PUBLISHED BY THE MIT PRESS IN 2018. loads low and protecting forest and habitat from major fires.

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© IWAN BAAN

Watson notes that designers privilege the concrete, the built, over ephemeral practices, despite their being more tied to the inherent nature of landscape. At the moment, in the wake of the fires, there is a recognition that people must return to Aboriginal land practices to rethink the ways Australia manages fire, something my friend, the landscape architect Gini Lee, told me she thought was more than a little ironic, as up to this point the Australian treatment of indigenous people has been abhorrent, yet now we expect they will sort out this problem for us. That Watson chose to use an Amazonian precedent for fire management rather than an Australian one strikes me as an omission, and indeed, although included in a few maps, Australian cases are generally omitted.

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THE BACK

/BOOKS

BOOKS OF INTEREST JEWELL’S FRAMEWORK OF “WOMEN IN PLANTS” ALLOWS HER TO FEATURE WOMEN FROM MANY LESS VISIBLE CULTURES AND PROFESSIONS.

THE EARTH IN HER HANDS: 75 EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN WORKING IN THE WORLD OF PLANTS BY JENNIFER JEWELL; PORTLAND, OREGON: TIMBER PRESS, 2020; 324 PAGES, $35.

“W

hat does it even mean to be a woman in plants?” asks Jennifer Jewell in the introduction to this delightful book, a question she endeavors to answer through profiling 75 women from the United States, England, Ireland, Wales, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan. Mindful of the traditionally white Eurocentricity of gardens and horticulture, Jewell’s framework of “women in plants” allows her to feature women from many less visible cultures and professions. Garden and landscape designers are well-represented, as well as horticulturists, urban farmers, entrepreneurs, historians, soil scientists, and educators, just to name a few of the many titles assumed by the women featured. Each figure is given an opportunity to list other women who have inspired or supported their work, expanding the scope of extraordinary women to be discovered in this book.

122 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

A NEW COAST: STRATEGIES FOR RESPONDING TO DEVASTATING STORMS AND RISING SEAS BY JEFFREY PETERSON; WASHINGTON, D.C.: ISLAND PRESS, 2019; 408 PAGES, $45.

Peterson’s book on coastal strategies comes at a significant moment, when policy change and new programs can still be enacted to protect U.S. coastlines and communities. Peterson spent 40 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, including the Office of Water, where he was well-placed to evaluate existing policy flaws and formulate new initiatives to address climate change. This dense and highly informative book takes readers through the science of sea-level rise projections, the scale of disruption ahead, the weaknesses in existing federal programs, and the business and community challenges that will be faced. The final chapter, “A Campaign for a New Coast,” pulls no punches in its call for a radically re-envisioned approach to coastal management.

©2018 GAF 12/18

Make color cooler. In every way.

Studies show that kids are more active in brightly colored spaces. They also show that protecting pavement against UV rays extends its life, and can help reduce ambient temperatures and heat islands. That’s what makes StreetBond® Coatings so cool. The vibrant solar-reflecting colors of StreetBond® Coatings protect the playground while making it more… playable. Plus, low -VOC acrylic StreetBond® Coatings are safe for groundwater, can provide LEED® credits, and contribute to a school’s sustainability mission. For cooler color, choose StreetBond® Coatings. Note: LEED® — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design™ — is a registered trademark of the U.S. Green Building Council.

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1-800-531-GROW (4769) LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020 / 125

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OU TDOOR SE ATING IS A LOK . Who says outdoor seating has to be made of metal? The aluminum bleachers at most stadiums get uncomfortably hot in the summer and can cool in the evening to an icy cold. Not to mention the racket from foot-stomping crowds. That’s why architects and landscape designers are turning to VERSA-LOK retaining wall systems for outdoor seating. Economical, comfortable and . . . quiet. That’s the VERSA-LOK promise. To find out why design professionals prefer VERSA-LOK, call (800) 770-4525 or visit www.versa-lok.com.

Freestanding Walls

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126 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

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ASLA ONLINE LEARNING

CONTINUE YOUR EDUCATION Browse an archive of webinars providing information on new and evolving practices and techniques. The ASLA Online Learning Series provides convenient and

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development hours (PDH). Presentations are recorded and made available for ondemand viewing.

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Lexington Marriott City Center, Lexington, KY; Hanover® Porcelain Pavers

Available in 16 standard colors! Tools Included: † (1) Phillips Screw Driver † (1) Standard Screw Driver † (1) 6” Crescent Wrench † (1) 10” Crescent Wrench † (1) Metric Hex Key Set † (2) Lever Tire Tools † (7) Stainless Steel Cable Assemblies

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132 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

The Cultural Landscape Foundation presents

Robert Royston Oral History

Now Online

tclf.org/royston

Meet a Pioneer of Modernism This new video oral history features California native Robert Royston, who worked with Modernist masters Thomas Church and Garrett Eckbo. This is the sixteenth installment in the ongoing Pioneers of American Landscape Design® Oral History Project series. Over the course of 21 short clips, Royston discusses his influential six-decade career. The oral history includes Royston’s biography, design philosophy, and built works, which range from private residences and gardens to playgrounds, parks, and larger-scale projects.

Introducing the Subject of the Seventeenth Pioneers Oral History - Pamela Burton The award-winning Pioneers Oral History Project has documented the work of consequential landscape architects, including Lawrence Halprin, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, and Laurie Olin. This Fall, the seventeenth Pioneers Oral History will be released featuring the noted and influential practitioner Pamela Burton. To view the Royston oral history and all of the others in the series, log on to: tclf.org/oral-history Season Sponsors

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THE BACK

/ADVERTISER INDEX

ADVERTISING SALES 636 Eye Street NW Washington, DC 20001-3736 202-216-2325 202-478-2190 Fax [email protected] SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER Sarah Strelzik 202-216-2341 [email protected]

ADVERTISER ANOVA ANP Lighting APE Studio c/o Richter Spielgeräte Aquatix by Landscape Structures ASLA EXPO Promotion ASLA Host Chapter Info ASLA Professional Practice BCI Burke Co. Inc. Bison Innovative Products by UCP Campania International, Inc. Canterbury Designs Cell-Tek Geosynthetics, LLC Columbia Cascade Company Country Casual Teak DOGIPOT Doty & Sons Concrete Products DuMor, Inc. Earthscape Envirobond Products Corporation Ernst Conservation Seeds Eurocobble Ex-Cell Kaiser Form and Fiber Forms+Surfaces Gale Pacific, Inc. Gothic Arch Greenhouses greenscreen Gyms For Dogs - Natural Dog Park Products HADDONSTONE Hanover Architectural Products, Inc. Huntco Supply, LLC Iron Age Designs Ironsmith, Inc. Kafka Granite LLC Kornegay Design Landscape Forms Landscape Show Ltd.

WEBSITE www.anovafurnishings.com www.anplighting.com www.archplayground equipment.com www.playlsi.com www.advertise.asla.org/expo www.asla.org www.asla.org www.bciburke.com www.bisonip.com www.campaniainternational.com www.canterbury-designs.com www.celltekdirect.com www.timberform.com www.countrycasual.com www.dogipot.com www.dotyconcrete.com www.dumor.com www.earthscape.ca www.envirobond.com www.ernstseed.com www.eurocobble.com www.ex-cell.com www.formandfiber.com www.forms-surfaces.com www.galepacific.com www.gothicarchgreenhouses.com www.greenscreen.com www.gymsfordogs.com www.haddonstone.com www.hanoverpavers.com www.huntco.com www.ironagegates.com www.ironsmith.biz www.kafkagranite.com www.landscapeforms.com www.landscapeforms.com www.landscapeshow.co.uk

Landscape Structures, Inc. Madrax Maglin Site Furniture Inc. Millstones mmcité 7 LLC Most Dependable Fountains National Park Service - HALS Challenge Nitterhouse Masonry Products, LLC Oldcastle Architectural, Inc. Paloform Partac Peat Corporation/ Beam Clay Permaloc Aluminum Edging Petersen Concrete Leisure Products Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc. Planters Unlimited Salsbury Industries Shade Systems, Inc. Shelter Outdoor Siplast - StreetBond Sitecra Sitescapes, Inc. Soil Retention Products Solus Décor, Inc. South Coast Wholesale Spectraturf Spring City Electrical Mfg. Co. Star Roses and Plants Stepstone, Inc. Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging Techo-Bloc Corp. The Cultural Landscape Foundation The J.D. Russell Company Thomas Steele Tournesol Siteworks Tree Stake Solutions, LLC Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock Turf & Soil Diagnostics U.S. Green Building Council Unilock, Ltd. Unmei LEDs Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System Vestre Victor Stanley, Inc. Walpole Outdoors LLC Water Odyssey Wausau Tile Wickcra Boardwalks

www.playlsi.com www.madrax.com www.maglin.com www.millstones.com www.mmcite.com www.mostdependable.com www.nps.gov/history/hdp/hals www.nitterhouse.com www.oldcastleprecast.com www.paloform.com www.partac.com www.permaloc.com www.petersenmfg.com www.americaspremierpaver.com www.plantersunlimited.com www.mailboxes.com www.shadesystemsinc.com www.shelteroutdoor.com www.siplastgreen.com www.site-cra.com www.sitescapesonline.com www.soilretention.com www.solusdecor.com www.southcoastwholesale.com www.spectraturf.com www.springcity.com www.starrosesandplants.com www.stepstone.com www.surelocedging.com www.techo-bloc.com www.tclf.org www.jdrussellco.com www.thomas-steele.com www.tournesolsiteworks.com www.treestakesolutions.com www.carderock.com www.turfdiag.com www.usgbc.org www.unilock.com www.unmeileds.com www.versa-lok.com www.vestre.com www.victorstanley.com www.walpolewoodworkers.com www.waterodyssey.com www.wausautile.com www.wickcra.com

134 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

PHONE 888-535-5005 800-548-3227 212-213-6694

PAGE # 17, 136 43, 138 48

763-972-5237 202-216-2326 202-219-2369 202-898-2444 920-921-9220 888-412-4766 215-541-4627 323-936-7111 410-721-4844 800-547-1940 240-813-1117 800-364-7681 800-233-3907 800-598-4018 877-269-2972 866-636-8476 800-873-3321 877-877-5012 847-451-0451 888-314-8852 800-451-0410 407-772-7900 251-471-5238 800-450-3494 800-931-1462 866-733-8225 717-637-0500 503-224-8700 206-276-0925 800-338-4766 715-316-2792 877-252-6323 800-430-6205 440-20-7821 -8221 800-328-0035 800-448-7931 800-716-5506 404-310-6490 704-576-2224 800-552-6331 202-208-3818 717-267-4500 844-495-8210 888-823-8883 800-247-2326 800-356-9660 800-832-7383 800-334-8689 866-282-5705 323-846-6700 800-609-6066 855-768-4450 469-995-2200 800-221-1448 402-421-9464 760-966-6090 877-255-3146 800-326-7256 800-875-5788 610-948-4000 800-457-1859 800-572-9029 800-787-3562 877-832-4625 202-483-0553 800-888-7425 800-448-7931 800-542-2282 903-676-6143 301-365-2100 855-769-4231 202-552-1369 416-646-3452 647-478-3993 800-770-4525 212-634-9658 301-855-8300 800-343-6948 512-392-1155 800-388-8728 800-244-9177

113, 142 146-147 25 24 31, 139 127 C2-1, 141 21 141 136, C4 56 131 136 29, 137 18, 139 53 141 4-5, 140 131 129 9, 137 39, 137 125, 142 57, 138 139 45 130 126 112, 136 98, 136 49, 139 27 2-3 143 10-11, 140 119 121 137 117 132 145 36 35, 140 37 142 16, 138 132 33, 140 125 137 15 142 124 47 137 131 127 141 132 123 58, 142 128 139 13, 140 133 131 138 23, 141 142 141 132 144 115 138 126, 136 41 138, C3 129 142 55, 140 128

THE BACK

/ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY

ASSOCIATION/FOUNDATION

BCI Burke Co. Inc.

920-921-9220 31, 139

STREET FURNISHINGS AND SITE AMENITIES

ASLA EXPO Promotion

202-216-2326 146-147

Columbia Cascade Company

800-547-1940 136, C4

ANOVA

888-535-5005 17, 136

ASLA Host Chapter Info

202-219-2369

25

DOGIPOT

800-364-7681

Canterbury Designs

323-936-7111

21

ASLA Professional Practice

202-898-2444

24

Earthscape

877-269-2972 18, 139

Doty & Sons Concrete Products

800-233-3907

136

Landscape Show Ltd.

440-20-7821-8221 143

Gyms For Dogs - Natural Dog

800-931-1462

DuMor, Inc.

800-598-4018 29, 137

Ex-Cell Kaiser

847-451-0451

131

Form and Fiber

888-314-8852

129

140

Forms+Surfaces

800-451-0410

9, 137

142

Gale Pacific, Inc.

407-772-7900 39, 137

Huntco Supply, LLC

503-224-8700

126

Kornegay Design

877-252-6323

27

Landscape Forms

800-430-6205

2-3

National Park Service - HALS Challenge 202-208-3818

145

The Cultural Landscape Foundation

202-483-0553

133

U.S. Green Building Council

202-552-1369

144

131

139

Park Products Landscape Structures, Inc.

Partac Peat Corporation/ Beam Clay

800-328-0035

800-247-2326

10-11,

DRAINAGE AND EROSION Iron Age Designs

Ironsmith, Inc.

206-276-0925

112,

PAVING/SURFACING/MASONRY STONE/METALS

136

Envirobond Products Corporation

866-636-8476

53

Eurocobble

877-877-5012

4-5,

Madrax

800-448-7931

119

140

Maglin Site Furniture Inc.

800-716-5506

121

130

Millstones

404-310-6490

137

800-338-4766 98, 136

FENCES/GATES/WALLS Versa-Lok Retaining Wall System

800-770-4525

Hanover Architectural Products, Inc.

717-637-0500

126,

Kafka Granite LLC

715-316-2792 49, 139

mmcité 7 LLC

704-576-2224

117

136

Nitterhouse Masonry Products, LLC

717-267-4500

Petersen Concrete Leisure Products

800-832-7383

132

Oldcastle Architectural, Inc.

844-495-8210 35, 140

Salsbury Industries

323-846-6700

137

Pine Hall Brick Co., Inc.

800-334-8689 33, 140

Sitecra

800-221-1448

47

Siplast - StreetBond

469-995-2200

124

Sitescapes, Inc.

402-421-9464

137

Soil Retention Products

760-966-6090

131

Thomas Steele

800-448-7931

138

Spectraturf

800-875-5788

132

Vestre

212-634-9658

41

128

Victor Stanley, Inc.

301-855-8300 138, C3

GREEN ROOFS/LIVING WALLS greenscreen

800-450-3494 57, 138

LIGHTING

36

ANP Lighting

800-548-3227 43, 138

Stepstone, Inc.

800-572-9029

Spring City Electrical Mfg. Co.

610-948-4000

123

Techo-Bloc Corp.

877-832-4625 13, 140

Unmei LEDs

647-478-3993

138

Tri-State Stone Co. for Carderock

301-365-2100

141

STRUCTURES

Unilock, Ltd.

416-646-3452

115

Gothic Arch Greenhouses

Wausau Tile

800-388-8728 55, 140

LUMBER/DECKING/EDGING Bison Innovative Products by UCP

888-412-4766

127

Permaloc Aluminum Edging

800-356-9660 16, 138

Sure-Loc Aluminum Edging

800-787-3562

139

The J.D. Russell Company

800-888-7425

131

Wickcra Boardwalks

800-244-9177

128

OUTDOOR FIRE AND WATER FEATURES Paloform

888-823-8883

37

Solus Décor, Inc.

877-255-3146

127

OUTDOOR FURNITURE Country Casual Teak

240-813-1117

56

PARKS AND RECREATION APE Studio c/o Richter Spielgeräte

212-213-6694

48

251-471-5238

125, 142

Shade Systems, Inc.

800-609-6066

15

PLANTERS/SCULPTURES/GARDEN ACCESSORIES

Shelter Outdoor

855-768-4450

142

Campania International, Inc.

Walpole Outdoors LLC

800-343-6948

129

215-541-4627

C2-1, 141

HADDONSTONE

866-733-8225

45

Planters Unlimited

866-282-5705

125

Tournesol Siteworks

800-542-2282 23, 141

PLANTS/SOILS/PLANTING MATERIALS Cell-Tek Geosynthetics, LLC

410-721-4844

141

Ernst Conservation Seeds

800-873-3321

141

South Coast Wholesale

800-326-7256

141

Star Roses and Plants

800-457-1859 58, 142

Tree Stake Solutions, LLC

903-676-6143

142

Turf & Soil Diagnostics

855-769-4231

132

WATER MANAGEMENT AND AMENITIES Aquatix by Landscape Structures

763-972-5237

113, 142

Most Dependable Fountains

800-552-6331

132

Water Odyssey

512-392-1155

142

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020 / 135

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BUYER’S GUIDE

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140 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

To learn more and inspire your outdoors, visit playlsi.com/shade.

engineered modular paving

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BUYER’S GUIDE

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Carderock Stone ®

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CAM PAN IA PROJECT

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BUYER’S GUIDE

Groundcover Roses Made for Landscapes

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Custom Motorized Louver Roof Pergolas

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855.768.4450 | [email protected]

www.GothicArchGreenhouses.com

Gathered together Reveling in the joy of play. Where watery wonders Excite us Unite us And invite us to set our imaginations free.

To learn more, visit aquatix.playlsi.com. ©2019 Landscape Structures Inc.

Creating fun ways to spray & play!

512.392.1155 | www.waterodyssey.com

142 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2020

Oh, the endless days!

Landscape

Tuesday 22 & Wednesday 23 September 2020

THE INDUSTRY TRADE SHOW

THE TRADE EVENT FOR QUALIFIED GARDEN AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNERS & CONTRACTORS

The trade event dedicated to bringing the landscape industry together by introducing its visitors to the latest products, services and techniques.

LANDSCAPE exhibitors include manufacturers and suppliers RIHYHU\WKLQJIURPYDVHVSRWVDQGÀDJVWRQHVWRIXUQLWXUH and conservatories, water features and sundials. Our exhibitors provide architectural iron work, planters, sheds, turf, sculpture, soil, plants and paving as well as lighting, heating, trees and tools.

Our international visitors include Garden Designers, Landscape Designers & Contractors, Architects, )DFLOLWLHV0DQDJHUV*URXQGVPHQ 3DUNV2I¿FHUV(YHQW Florists, Creative Directors, Garden Centres, Contract Gardeners, Hotels and Interior Designers.

Register for your FREE tickets to attend at www.landscapeshow.co.uk

The LANDSCAPE Show is supported by over 70 leading media titles and trade associations including the American Society of Landscape Architects.

'HÀQLQJWKH SURIHVVLRQRI VXVWDLQDEOH ODQGVFDSH GHYHORSPHQW Used by landscape architects and others to align land development and management with innovative sustainable design. Demonstrate your expertise and become a SITES Accredited Professional. Learn more at VXVWDLQDEOHVLWHVRUJ

Pine Ranch, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HALS AZ-4-5

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:

JULY 31, 2020 AWARDS PRESENTED: OCTOBER 2-5, 2020 AT THE ASLA CONFERENCE ON LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN MIAMI BEACH The mission of the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) is to document historic landscapes of the United States. For the eleventh annual HALS Challenge, we invite you to document vanishing or lost landscapes. Many historic American landscapes are under threat or have been lost. Threats include development pressure, neglect, and climate change.

For information on how to prepare a HALS short format history visit NPS.GOV/HDP/COMPETITIONS/HALS_CHALLENGE.HTML To learn more about HALS visit ASLA.ORG/HALS

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

SUPPLIER TECH MATTERS TO LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS Performance, aesthetics, and price are not specifiers’ only considerations. Vendors who are technologically proficient have the edge. BY RUSS KLETTKE

ˊ&"%7"/5"(&(0&4505&$)/0-0(*$"--:130ʵ$*&/5 4611-*&34

Executive Summary

Designers and specifiers have sophisticated software tools at their disposal for communicating to clients what completed projects will look like and what they will cost. The advantage skews to the suppliers whose products and documentation easily integrate into those tools.

▶ ASLA survey shows landscape architects’ use of tech is rising rapidly. ▶ Technological compatibility makes designers’ jobs easier. ▶ Use of EXPO tech tools sends a message.

T

here are many, too many, questions yet to be answered in how the coronavirus pandemic will change our world. Landscape designers and industry suppliers are learning to work from home. Such things as in-person lunchand-learns from vendors may be a distant memory. Projects might well be stalled due to the disruption. Normalcy may or may not return in time for the Annual Conference on Landscape Architecture and EXPO in October. But one thing is certain. Outdoors places – parks, streetscapes, campuses, and nature conservancies,

where people can safely leave the confines of their homes – have never been more valued. We are heavily leaning on technology to keep us functioning. Virtual meetings bring us together via platforms that might become more commonplace in the future. Landscape architects’ increased use of technology is already on a trajectory, as the ASLA Digital Technology Professional Practice Network identified in its September 2019 survey report ()5514GXX5)&'*&-%F"4-"F03(X̍̋̌̔X̋̔X̍̑X %&4*(/B40ˎ8"3&B4637&:B3&46-54X). The pandemic may well drive designers to expand their use of technology in all that they do. But are industry vendors keeping pace? And how do landscape architects perceive them if they do not?

That’s the perspective of Matt Wilkins (PLA, ASLA, APA and LEED Green Associate), an associate and senior landscape architect with KTUA in San Diego. He has a rich variety of experiences in hospitality, streetscape, and education projects, and now focuses largely on parks and recreation and large scale planning. Wilkins serves on ASLA’s Digital Technology Professional Practice Network. This PPN surveyed landscape architects about the technologies they use to operate effectively and efficiently. From 480 responses to a number of questions – ranging from the types of drafting and rendering software to what technological skills are expected of new employees – it is clear that practitioners are migrating to a digital future. Now or in the near future they expect to increase use of drones, Building Information Modeling (BIM), augmented and virtual reality, three-dimensional

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

available to them to enhance the return on their investment – and demonstrate they are in the game: Connect app. Downloaded to the smartphone of virtually every Conference attendee, this tool is valuable at both the EXPO itself as well as after landscape architects return to their hometowns as a searchable contacts directory. But while it was actively used by almost 100 percent of the nearly 6,500 attendees in 2019, exhibitor use of the various functions was relatively low. That disconnect seems like a missed opportunity. Participation in the app is included in the exhibitor package; data is entered from registration information provided by exhibitors (i.e., there no additional cost to use it).

EPNAC PHOTOGRAPHY ©2019

printers and scanners, parametric modeling and artificial intelligence. Regarding staffing, more than half (55 percent) recruit people based on specific technology skill sets, and more than 60 percent expect employees to self teach, such as with online tutorials. Wilkins says in his own practice he always tries to choose products that best fit the client needs. “But from a practitioner’s standpoint, in a competitive market, suppliers who provide digital documentation that we can easily import into a 3D rendering or AutoCAD can make that the deciding factor,” he says, adding how similar capabilities on the customer service side are noted and appreciated. Use EXPO technologies to send a message

ASLA’s Emerging Technologies PPN survey in 2018 shows clear intent by landscape architects to increase their use of several newer tools in their work. Industry vendors are advised to make their own products and customer services compatible with these trend lines. Image by Benjamin George, ASLA, Utah State University.

Wilkins says tech compatibility and proficiency are a mixed bag among the companies he specifies into projects. But it’s clear he wants to see more vendors move in that direction, as do his colleagues in the industry. Which suggests vendors need to communicate what capabilities they have at every opportunity. In the coronavirus era, that probably means many more virtual meetings. At the Miami Beach EXPO in October, exhibitors have three technological tools

Experient SWAP lead retrieval scanners. Available at a premium, these devices and the databases they produce have become standard fare at trade shows everywhere. Usage by ASLA EXPO exhibitors has risen from about 50 to 70 percent in just the past three years. The scanners enable booth staff to focus on conversations instead of business card trading – a common benefit of moving from analog to digital technologies. Badge Buster scan game. Cash prizes incentivize Conference attendees to visit the EXPO booths on Sunday; this feature is most popular with emerging professionals. Stay abreast of EXPO technologies this summer Organizers of the 2020 EXPO will apprise exhibitors of specific features and functionalities of the Connect, SWAP and Badge Buster tools this summer. Be sure to watch for updates in the monthly EXPO newsletter from Michelle Mobley, show director, and the Exhibitor Kit and Resources found here: https://www.aslaconference.com/expo/ for-exhibitors/. At any point exhibitors are strongly encouraged to contact their sales person with questions.

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THE BACK

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BACKSTORY STAND UP AND STAND OUT BEYOND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT IS INSPIRING EVERYONE TO LIFT WHILE THEY CLIMB. BY ANJULIE RAO

ABOVE

Say It Loud on display at the United Nations Information Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

In that moment Sablan was concerned for kids, because when kids hear about something they might like to do—maybe architecture, or landscape architecture—“they google it first,” she says. To find out why so many white men would appear in that search, she contacted Google and was told that there was not enough content created, referenced, or cross-referenced that had addressed the contributions of the myriad women or people of color in design. She thought, What about those architects, landscape architects, and urban planners practicing right now? Where is their library of greatness? Sablan’s nonprofit organization, Beyond the Built Environment, is now bringing diverse designers to

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the forefront. “We’re focusing on designers who are using their talents to combat social injustices in policy and the built environment, designers who are engaging communities to solve problems that people wouldn’t think design can solve,” she explains. “We are elevating talented designers who are making the profession an amenity to the community rather than just to developers.”

Say It Loud also populates a weekly Instagram takeover called “Elevate,” which is a means to inspire designers to claim their excellence. “We want our audience to see our faces, hear our voices, and feel our impact, empowering people to know they’re great,” Sablan says. Since the Instagram takeover began in 2018, she has highlighted several landscape architects, including Elizabeth Kennedy, ASLA; Kofi Boone, ASLA; and With this “lift while you climb” ethos Angelica Rockquemore, ASLA. in mind, Sablan has created a traveling, city-specific exhibition called “Angelica started to talk to me about Say It Loud, which features diverse landscape as a way of maintaining practitioners from each host city. history and culture in Hawaii,” exThose individuals’ stories are col- plains Sablan, who met Rockquelected into Sablan’s Great Diverse more at a social justice design conDesigners Library—an online cata- ference in New Orleans. “She spoke log that can be shared, referenced, about teaching local kids about how and cross-referenced. nurturing plant life has importance in their history and culture. It blew One of the biggest challenges, Sablan my mind.”  says, is convincing these designers to submit their work. “I spend a lot You can read more about Beyond of time telling people they’re worthy the Built Environment’s programs at of praise and elevation, debunking www.beyondthebuilt.com. the misconception that they should be principals to be celebrated and ANJULIE RAO IS A CHICAGO-BASED JOURconvincing them to claim their con- NALIST AND CRITIC FOCUSING ON THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT. tributions,” she says. 

UNITED NATIONS

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ne day, Pascale Sablan sat down at her computer and googled the phrase “great architects.” Dozens of architects’ names appeared on the screen, and to her surprise, very few of them looked like her. “There was one woman—Zaha Hadid—and nine people of color,” says Sablan, an architect at S9 Architecture in New York. Hadid, holding two boats, also accounted for one of those nine.

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