After two years of construction, St. Patrick’s Island Park in Calgary, Canada, by Civitas and W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, recently opened to the public. In these two short videos by Civitas, some of the project designers talk about the main components of the project, such as a tall hill called the Rise that opens views of downtown Calgary and doubles as a giant sledding hill in the winter, and why they are so important to creating the island oasis at the heart of the city. A large path, called the Transect, cuts across the island through four different ecosystems, creating a strong architectural element in the design, and acts as the stage for a bike-cam spin through the park in the second video. For more information, please visit here.

This month, we have a few big stories that take you back a ways before bringing you back to the present. After decades of re-do schemes in Pershing Square in Los Angeles, and a tense year of competition that just ended with yet another redesign by Agence TER and SALT Landscape Architects announced as the long-awaited winners, we will see what becomes of the new design, and all the things a design needs to back it up, like services and programming. In New York’s barren Battery Park City in the 1980s, a  small, subtle, and safe harbor came to life as a work of art, rather than a park, by Susan Child, FASLA; Stanton Eckstut; and Mary Miss, and it continues to mature and season handsomely. In the Netherlands, Room for the River, a nationwide project has been reworking the country’s four major rivers in anticipation of greater floods in the future for more than 20 years. Finally, in the small town of Bruton, near London, is the artist’s heaven of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, with maximal garden designs by Piet Oudolf.

In the departments: the building momentum of separated bike lanes means safer routes for cyclists, in Streets; and three landscape architecture student journals create a window into the design culture of their universities, in Education. And, as ever, don’t miss our regular Now, Species, Goods, and Books columns. The full table of contents for June can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating June articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Better Luck This Time,” Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects; “Still Here,” Lexi Van Valkenburgh; “There’s Room,” Your Captain Luchtfotografie/www.luchtfotografie.com; “So Happy Together,” Heather Edwards, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; “Cycle Away,” Jennifer Toole/Toole Design Group; “Class Consciousness,” Michelle Hook.

BY NATE BERG

Agence Ter has won a bake-off to redesign Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles for the fifth or sixth time. Or is it the seventh?

From the June 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

On a warm May weekday morning, Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles was, as usual, a bit of a hybrid wasteland. Office workers crossed through as homeless people sprawled across concrete benches. Half the park was closed off for a row of plywood vendor booths related to an upcoming event. A father and son played alone in one of the park’s newly built playgrounds. People walking dogs veered toward the small patches of dirt that break up the park’s vast expanse of sun-baked concrete.

In the middle of the park, under a sheet of black fabric, stood the park’s potential future, a product of an eight-month international design competition. The winning design, unveiled for a crowd of about 75 people, reimagines the park as a wide-open public plaza, with large grassy areas, plentiful shade trees, and a large constructed canopy stretching the entire length of the space. It would be “a timeless design able to grow with a changing community and city,” Henri Bava, a founder of the Paris-based lead of the winning team, Agence Ter, told the crowd. “We will make sure that Pershing Square will become, once again, the dynamic heart of Los Angeles.”

History alone would seem to dictate that Pershing Square is due for a demolition. It’s a predictable cycle for the once and perhaps future central park of downtown Los Angeles, which has undergone dramatic redesigns and renovations about once a generation since its original designation as public space in 1866. At least five times the park has been significantly reconfigured, if not completely torn down and rebuilt anew. Each remodel has been a reaction to the changing face of downtown, but also yet another prescription for what downtown can become.

Its latest redesign, completed in 1994 and financed mostly through taxes on surrounding property owners, has been widely criticized for missing the mark of what the downtown of the mid-1990s could become. It is a five-acre space of hardscape highlighted by bold architectural features, designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta with what was then the landscape architecture firm Hanna/Olin of Philadelphia. A 10-story purple campanile rises above grassy areas segmented by concrete. Thick, perforated walls and angular structures enclose a perimeter of rooms that form a barrier between the park and the city around it. The park is hard to see into or out of, built atop an underground parking lot and bordered on all sides by automobile ramps, and it has become a gathering place for the city’s large homeless population and various social challenges. A park security guard recently told me how her morning shift required interventions with a man who’d dropped his pants to urinate in the middle of the park, and another man who was pleasuring himself underneath a blanket on one of the park’s benches. Among many insults, Pershing Square has been called “awful,” “a perplexing failure,” and “the worst public space in America.”

And so, about a quarter century since it was last torn down and redrawn, Pershing Square has once again become the focus of a high-profile redesign. This effort, like those before it, is an attempt to reform the park to keep pace with the current trajectory of downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood undergoing a remarkable economic revitalization, a residential population boom, and a re-emergence as the dominant core of a city with many centers.

The four finalists’ master plans for Pershing Square.

The current design competition, formally initiated in September 2015, was launched by Pershing Square Renew, then a year-old nonprofit entity set up through the office of the city council member representing downtown L.A. in conjunction with MacFarlane Partners, a major downtown developer. The city’s Department of Recreation and Parks committed $1 million toward the park’s future, and MacFarlane Partners kicked in another $1 million to seed the new nonprofit. More than 50 teams of designers from around the world responded to the request for qualifications in late September, and by late December, Pershing Square Renew had narrowed the field down to the conceptual visions of four finalists—SWA Group with Morphosis, James Corner Field Operations with Frederick Fisher and Partners, wHY with Civitas, and the eventual winning team, Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects.

“Ever since the first phase of the competition we were attracted by the specific condition of Pershing Square and downtown in general,” Bava of Agence Ter told the crowd during the unveiling of the winning design. “This is a space of possibilities, of many challenges, but certainly also of dreams.”

Aside from the $2 million pledged so far—plus a grant of monetary and technical support from Southwest Airlines valued at $200,000—there’s not yet any real funding for this potential redesign. Developers such as MacFarlane Partners, who are fueling downtown’s building boom, have a clear interest in the future of Pershing Square. So do the growing ranks of downtown residents. To get built, a new design will have to balance the demands of these very different interests. What such a public space will look like—and who will pay to build, maintain, and operate it—remains to be seen.

Winning master plan by Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects. Credit: Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects.

José Huizar, a Los Angeles City Council member, has been leading the effort to redesign Pershing Square since a redistricting in 2012 put much of the newly redeveloping downtown under his jurisdiction, along with Pershing Square—and all the complaints about its design and management. “Pershing Square has the potential to be a town square for the city of L.A. And that’s our hope,” Huizar says. “But with the design that exists now, it would be very difficult to get there.” Huizar’s term ends in 2020. He quickly made the park one of his office’s top priorities.

He was nudged along by Gensler, the global design firm, which moved its offices from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. in late 2011. As part of a firmwide initiative looking at the role of public spaces, a group of volunteer designers engaged in a nine-month study of Pershing Square to begin rethinking how it fits into a changing downtown. “At that time, no one was really paying attention to it,” says Brian Glodney, an associate at Gensler who led the Pershing Square effort.

Gensler’s team issued an internal report that made a case for “the prospective creation of a true public space with all the sociocultural rewards that accompany a well-used town square.” Given that the downtown residential population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013 to more than 52,000, the need for public space is growing. The report estimates that nearly 14,000 people now live within a five-minute walk of the park. More than 500,000 come to work downtown every day.

With these statistics and some ideas for ways to improve shade, pedestrian access, and the visibility of the park from the surrounding streets, Gensler passed the report on to Huizar’s office, and he used it to support an effort to begin rethinking Pershing Square. In the summer of 2013, a task force was formed to explore a new vision for the park.

“The park itself is underutilized and not fulfilling its intent, which is to be an open space that’s inviting to everyone. And a lot of that was partially due to the park’s design,” Huizar said recently. “So that coupled with the surging revitalization of downtown L.A. and people’s demand and need for more public open space. We recognized that the timing was right to move forward with an open visioning process.”

The winning design, by Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects. Credit: Agence Ter with SALT Landscape Architects.

But a new park—or even a new vision—is not free. Downtown developers, keen to link a renewed park to proposed megadevelopments, quickly pledged support. In early 2013, the Anschutz Entertainment Group, then hoping to build a new stadium downtown, offered $700,000 to this visioning process. The stadium project eventually fell through, and with it the money. MacFarlane Partners, not unrelatedly developing a 600,000-square-foot multifamily residential and retail project adjacent to the park, soon jumped in with its $1 million to support Pershing Square Renew’s redesign effort.

Downtown L.A.’s resurgence is a big part of the push to redesign the park. The Downtown Center Business Improvement District estimates that nearly $14 billion was invested in new residential, mixed use, and commercial construction downtown between 1999 and 2014. More growth is on the way. There are currently 10,000 residential units under construction. The downtown skyline is a forest of construction cranes.

Eduardo Santana, a real estate consultant who works with MacFarlane Partners, has been hired to lead the nonprofit Pershing Square Renew. “The more attractive and appealing we can make the downtown area, the better these properties will perform,” Santana says. He doesn’t shy away from the connection between downtown’s development interests and the push to redesign the park. In fact, the whole redesign effort is relying on a public–private partnership model to go forward. “It’s a new vehicle for realizing the potential that’s there,” Santana says. “It’s an opportunity to bring forth resources that don’t regularly invest in public spaces.”

Some people have concerns about private interests’ leading the charge for a redesign of the public park. Huizar and Santana both say the park will remain a public space guided by the desires of Los Angeles residents. The conceptual vision boards presented in December by the competition’s 10 semifinalists suggest that Pershing Square can be a vibrant, walkable, engaging, and lively park once more. All of the finalists’ designs emphasized the need to improve pedestrian access to the park and create more space for a diversity of uses, both recreational and revenue-generating. Exactly how the park will make this potential transition is still unclear—designers were instructed to assume a roughly $50 million budget for the redesign, not including the park’s ongoing operations and maintenance. But there’s almost unanimous agreement that something has to change in Pershing Square.

A rendering from the finalist James Corner Field Operations with Frederick Fisher and Partners. Credit: James Corner Field Operations with Frederick Fisher and Partners.

On an empty table at the end of the Pershing Square farmers’ market one bright December day, three of the founding members of the Pershing Square Restoration Society roll out a large photocopy of what they call the ideal design for Pershing Square. It’s the 1910 plan for Pershing Square designed by the architect John Parkinson. He would eventually go on to design Los Angeles City Hall and a number of other significant buildings throughout the city, but Pershing Square was his first major work in Los Angeles. His plan for the park is simple: grass, trees, and other plants fill the rectangular block from edge to edge, with hardscaped semicircle entry points at each of the corners, diagonal pathways crisscrossing the length of the space, and an elaborate fountain at the center.

This was the park for nearly four decades. In 1951, the automobile era inspired the city to reuse the space beneath the park for a three-level subterranean parking garage of nearly 2,000 spaces, which could also double as a nuclear fallout shelter. The parking garage, according to the Pershing Square Restoration Society, was the downfall of the park.

“None of the basic elements of public space building exist in this park,” says a society cofounder, Richard Schave. This iteration of Pershing Square, he says, is completely unfriendly both inside and out. Its aggressive pavement and lack of shade make it an unpleasant place to visit, and there’s little seating that isn’t taken up by homeless people. The architectural elements of the park create separated and closed-off spaces, and its walls make it difficult to see both into and out of the park. And then there are the underground garage’s ramps, which surface on all four sides of the park, creating a moat of driveways that eliminates all but a few points where pedestrians can actually get into the cloistered interior. Schave is not alone in thinking the ramps make access to the park far more difficult than it should be, and that they’ve had a hugely negative effect on the space.

Along with his wife, Kim Cooper, and a biographer of John Parkinson, Stephen Gee, Schave formed the Pershing Square Restoration Society in 2013 after city council member Huizar began pushing to re-envision the park. Through a Facebook page and an online petition, they have gathered more than 2,000 signatures calling for the city to formally consider restoration of the park instead of going down the road toward a redesign. When the design competition was launched, Cooper says she asked if restoration or a no-build option could be included, but was declined. The society wrote an open letter to the competition’s 10 semifinalist teams asking that they consider restoration in their proposals. Only two teams wrote back, Cooper says, one in the form of a comment on the society’s Facebook page, with a smiley-face emoji included.

Schave says the society will continue to call for restoration of Parkinson’s 1910 plan. “We don’t say this out of nostalgia. We say this because the design works,” he says.

“Until they rip it up,” Gee says, “it’s not a dead idea.”

A rendering from the finalist SWA Group with Morphosis. Credit: SWA Group with Morphosis.

“The park’s not finished, in our view,” says Laurie Olin, FASLA, of the Philadelphia-based firm OLIN.

The widespread criticisms of Pershing Square are not lost on the landscape architect behind its latest design. His original proposal, designed with Legorreta, called for more programming in the park, with wide, open corners and various pavilions near the park’s openings that could serve as shops and café spaces to make the space more welcoming and lively. Those pavilions, he says, were deleted from the plans during construction. The programming never quite happened. The structures around the park’s perimeters got built too big and impassable, and the park took on the feeling of a fortress.

Olin says the entire park was a victim of neglect. “By the time the park was completed, its management was in total disarray, if there was any. It didn’t really have an advocacy group to speak of, and it began to decline. Probably from just about the second week,” he says.

Olin and his firm were brought onto the project largely because of their previous work on another troubled urban park, Manhattan’s Bryant Park. Over decades of deterioration, Bryant Park had become a magnet for drug users, sex workers, and the homeless. Hanna/Olin’s renovation in the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on cleaning up the site, improving access, and implementing varied programming. Coupled with the establishment of a nonprofit corporation to manage and maintain the park, the renovation of Bryant Park is widely considered a model for successful urban parks.

“We know today that building a park is not just about building a park,” says Lucinda Sanders, FASLA, the CEO of OLIN, who was involved with both the Bryant Park project and Pershing Square. “You have to take care of it. The investment, the dollars that you invest in the park, you’re going to spend again over the next 10 to 20 years in maintenance and programming. That information really wasn’t available 25 years ago.”

Part of the problem with Pershing Square, Olin and Sanders say, is that the programming and management haven’t been sufficient to make the park an attractive place where people feel comfortable. The city’s significant homelessness hasn’t helped. “Because parks are de facto public, they become bedrooms, toilets, and homeless shelters,” Olin says. “And so unless you actually work on both parts of the equation, managing a park and dealing with the people who will go to it if they have nowhere else to go, you’re going to have a problem with whatever you design for your new square.”

“I don’t want to say ‘mea culpa,’ but I also don’t want to say ‘non est mea culpa.’ Because we were there, we did it, we used our wits as much as we could, we worked hard, and it didn’t work,” Olin says. “And it’s heartbreaking.”

Both Olin and Sanders say it’s time for a new vision for Pershing Square. “If it doesn’t work, off with its head,” Olin says of failed designs. OLIN was invited to participate in Pershing Square Renew’s design competition—first as competitors, then as judges—but the firm has opted to stay out of the process. Olin and Sanders say they were pleased to see the high caliber of finalists selected for the last stage of the competition. But they also warn that good design can do only so much.

“The real question is not whether you’ll get a good design,” Olin says, “but who’s going to look after it and how are they going to program it?”

A rendering from the finalist wHY with Civitas. Credit: wHY with Civitas.

The next iteration of Pershing Square will most likely be run as a public–private partnership.

Donald Spivack is a former deputy chief of operations for the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles who helped shepherd a number of major downtown projects through the development process. “Public–private partnerships are more and more the way things are going to be happening, if for no other reason than that public funds are simply in very short supply,” Spivack says. The public–private partnership makes sense from a financial perspective, he says, but he argues that private interests shouldn’t outweigh those of the public.

Spivack, like members of the Pershing Square Restoration Society, thinks the current effort to redesign Pershing Square hasn’t involved enough of the public’s voice. “While they’re looking at some outreach now, it is late,” he says. “There should have been more participation in terms of whether people want the park changed.”

Huizar, the city council member behind the redesign effort, says the process was spurred by the desires of his constituency and has been transparent. Though private entities will likely be involved in the park’s future, he says it will always be a public amenity. “The governance of Pershing Square will remain with the city,” Huizar says.

Santana of Pershing Square Renew says the nonprofit’s board includes downtown residents to help ensure that the competition and the eventual redesign of the park are conducted in the public’s interest. But he also argues that there’s a lot to be learned from the experience of private companies and developments. He cites the ersatz town center mall developments, such as the Grove in Los Angeles and the Americana in nearby Glendale. They’re private projects, but with privately owned public spaces that have been incredibly successful in terms of attracting people. He wants Pershing Square to have that same cachet.

Santana says the finalists were asked to focus their designs on accessibility, visibility, pedestrian friendliness, and the parking ramps that have plagued the park’s edges since the 1950s. Indeed, all four finalist teams proposed cutting out all but two of these entry points.

Leading up to the selection of a winning design, the finalists’ ideas for the park had been limited to conceptual vision boards, which, following the competition’s guidelines, offered more of a narrative of the designers’ ideas for the park than actual designs. They called for “vibrant street life,” “porous edges,” “a sociocultural hub,” and a “world-class destination,” among other aspirations.

The finalists’ designs were revealed to the public and the competition’s jury in late April. After a few weeks of review and public comment—including feedback from roughly 1,300 people, Huizar says—the jury announced its winning selection in mid-May. It was reportedly a unanimous decision in favor of the proposal from the team led by Agence Ter, which proposes to tweak the parking garage and give the park a “radical flatness” that will improve access and sight lines across the space.

Santana says Pershing Square Renew and the city will work with the Agence Ter team to refine its design in the coming months. He’s hoping the winning design will be a “really great first draft.”

Fund-raising for the park is already under way. Santana is hoping to rely on some public funds but also heavily on corporate sponsors and the philanthropic community. A tax assessment district around the park is another likely funding source, as are various development-related fees already being generated amid the downtown boom. Huizar says the city and Pershing Square Renew will have to think creatively to generate the funding to build and maintain the park. “We know this is going to cost quite a bit of money,” Huizar says, “but we intend to find the money.”

Nate Berg is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

BY DANIEL JOST

A yearlong design campaign in Philadelphia promotes the value of recreation.

From the July 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Today, young children spend much of their time in schools and child-care centers, but these places rarely offer rich outdoor environments for unstructured play. That’s a problem, says Sharon Easterling, the executive director of the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children. Such play is not just a leisure activity. It’s how children learn. “Good early-
childhood education is really hands-on, play-based learning,” she says.

Over the past year, the association and the Community Design Collaborative in Philadelphia have partnered to bring attention to the important role that play—and thoughtfully designed play environments—can have on children’s intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development. As part of an initiative called Infill Philadelphia: Play Space, they created an exhibit, brought in speakers, hosted a charrette, and sponsored a design competition.

Their Play Space Design Competition, funded by the William Penn Foundation, sought ideas for outdoor play and learning environments on three sites in low-income neighborhoods with little park space. Each site was associated with a different type of facility that might serve young children—a school, a recreation center, and a library.

The competition was unorthodox in that it highly recommended that design teams include an educator or child-care professional, says Alexa Bosse, Associate ASLA, the design collaborative’s program associate at the time. Tavis Dockwiller, ASLA, a founding principal of Viridian Landscape Studio, says working with Tamara Clark from the Parent–Infant Center had a major influence on her team’s winning design. “She talked to us about how little kids need to manipulate everything,” Dockwiller says. The team, which was led jointly by Viridian, Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, and Meliora Environmental Design, proposed an art studio where kids could paint and draw on slate, chutes that kids could dump water through, and a nature play area for digging.

Another winning team, led by Julie Bush, ASLA, of Ground Reconsidered Landscape Architecture, didn’t just collaborate with an educator but with a whole class of children from Friends Select School. “The second-graders who were on our team all visited the site with us, and each did their own design,” Bush says. “They all tried to describe their design as if they were telling a story.” The exercise, combined with the site’s location next to a library, inspired an interactive play sculpture that resembles a narrative structure. The sculpture has an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Each part allows children to interact with it by crawling, hanging, climbing, or sliding.

Meghan Talarowski, Associate ASLA, of Studio Ludo and Charles Miller of Roofmeadow led the third winning team. Talarowski recently returned from studying the ways physical activity is associated with risky play environments in London and was inspired to explore similar features within the more restrictive regulatory environment of the United States. Miller, whose firm specializes in green roofs, brought that expertise to repurposing the concrete paving that covered the site of the Waterloo Recreation Center, the conditions of which are much like those of a roof. There’s no reason to spend money on removing pavement, he says. Instead, it can serve as a “useful foundation for a new hydrology.” Water flows as it might in a shallow groundwater system, resurfacing to create a brook.

It’s unclear if any of these designs will be built. But just a few weeks before the competition’s winners were announced, Philadelphia’s mayor, Jim Kenney, stated plans for a $300 million bond issue for improving parks, recreation centers, and libraries. Easterling hopes that discussions will lead to more engaging play environments—and more unstructured play opportunities generally. “We’re really at the beginning of a larger movement that’s not only trying to reclaim space for play but trying to reclaim childhood for kids,” she says.

BY TOM STOELKER

At Paterson Great Falls, one of the newer national parks, Americans made many things, including history.

From the August 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Paterson, New Jersey, is a tough town. Gang violence is prevalent, teachers are being laid off, and about 30 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty. But the city’s got soul. On Market Street, the lively main thoroughfare, bachata music spills from 99-cent stores, and the scent of Peruvian food wafts through the air. Paterson has been a magnet for immigration since the 19th century, and the reason why is found nearby. Twenty minutes from the center of town is the Great Falls, now part of Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park, where the Passaic River makes a majestic drop of 77 feet off basalt rock cliffs before it continues its twisted path. These are the falls that made Paterson.

In 1778, Alexander Hamilton, General George Washington’s aide-de-camp, recognized the river’s potential to harness power for both manufacturing and geopolitics. Hamilton understood the young nation needed to grow its industry to be independent of Europe. Through a group he helped form in 1791, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM), Hamilton chose Paterson as the site of the nation’s first planned manufacturing development.

Gianfranco Archimede, who today directs Paterson’s Historic Preservation Commission, said: “At the end of the war, the king essentially said, ‘We’re done with this. Let’s pack up our things and go home. Good luck, you guys. His thought was, we couldn’t get far, because we really couldn’t make any money.”

The society drafted Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the site. This was not the aesthete L’Enfant we know from Washington, D.C.; this was a utilitarian L’Enfant, who sought to squeeze profits from a natural wonder. The plan included a waterway system that evolved into the raceways seen in the park today. The diverted water powered several different types of industrial and mill structures along the east side of the river—making silk, cotton, flour, buttons, paper. L’Enfant also suggested the layout of the nearby town. The manufacturing blossomed and remains part of the city’s identity.

The visitors on the footbridge have a dramatic view of the Great Falls near Mary Ellen Kramer Park. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

The city has maintained a dense population of 145,000, but it hit its height during the Industrial Revolution, continued strong through the Depression, and then started to shrink after World War II. In 1910, Paterson, once known as “Silk City” for its robust textile industry, had 300 factories that employed 18,000 people. After World War II, 34,000 people held manufacturing jobs in Paterson. But by the mid-1970s the city had lost 40 percent of those jobs, and another 50 percent were gone by the mid-1990s because employment had moved to the South and overseas, where labor and operating costs were cheaper. Manufacturing dwindled. Many mills and factories closed. Gone were the Rogers Locomotive factory, the Ivanhoe paper mill, and Allied Textile Printing.

That legacy left behind about 150 industrial buildings, of which 30 percent still stand in some form today in the park and the national historic district that surrounds it. These resources, along with the natural beauty of the falls, prompted city and state officials to lobby for the park’s preservation.

In 1967, the site became a National Natural Landmark, and in 2011, it became a National Historical Park. This past June, after several years of consulting with community stakeholders, the National Park Service adopted a 20-year general management plan that merges the park’s two great assets: its history and its natural landscape.

Credit: National Park Service.

Darren Boch, the park’s superintendent, admitted that initially the park service was not eager to add the Paterson Great Falls to its roster. It already had manufacturing history covered in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the well-regarded Lowell National Historical Park. But Paterson was arguably more knit into the country’s history than Lowell.

Boch was born in Paterson. He uses the pronoun “we” when referring to Paterson, with the kind of authority only a local could assume. His uncle was a batboy at Hinchliffe Stadium, the former Negro League ballpark that was recently incorporated into the park. His grandparents made men’s suits at a factory in town. His family moved to nearby Fair Lawn in the 1950s. He remembers the city’s decline. As factories closed, they left brownfields behind. History and natural beauty aside, Boch said restoring Paterson Great Falls is a massive undertaking.

“There was probably some concern about the sustainability of a park here. Not the socioeconomic problems associated—that exists in a lot of urban park areas. But with the current condition, it just seemed like a herculean task. And it is,” Boch said.

Part of the park’s charm is how deeply intertwined the natural and industrial landscapes are. One of the best views of the park’s most dramatic natural assets, the falls, are from the park’s center at Overlook Park. Even here, industry nudges in: Bridges crisscross the view, and a hydroelectric plant that powers 10,000 homes sits in the foreground.

A view from the falls at Mary Ellen Kramer Park looks south to the SUM Dam built between 1838 and 1840. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

“It’s fascinatingly utilitarian, and there’s a real beauty in that. The functional landscape can be just beautiful,” says Karen Tamir, a senior associate at James Corner Field Operations and the project manager for the park’s master plan. “I think we romanticize the past. At the time, I doubt anyone thought it was beautiful.”

Field Operations was brought to the site after winning a competition in 2006, administered by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which asked the New Jersey Institute of Technology to run the competition. The firm envisioned the site as a series of rooms, which was a way of organizing the site and making sense of a complex puzzle with historical fragments that span more than two centuries. There is an archaeology room, a river room, a forest room, and, of course, a Great Falls room. The plan brings the park experience down to the human scale, to encourage local use of the park’s 52 acres, while also defining the assets to appeal to a regional and national audience. The master plan’s approach has served as a guide for the park service’s general management plan.

Some of the park’s advocates would like to see the Field Operations plan adopted more fully. Leonard A. Zax, the president of the park’s nonprofit partner, Hamilton Partnership for Paterson, says that the Field Operations plan is “nuanced and masterful.” He says that the essence of any master plan is that there will be modifications along the way because budget and circumstances change.

“Another piece to this is politics and that human beings implement plans—and as shocking as it may seem, we have politics here in New Jersey,” he says wryly. “We don’t do this in a studio in Chelsea; we do this in the real world.”

The Passaic River continues toward the Valley of the Rocks and the mill ruins. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Today, the park feels like a work in progress. There are areas that are newly restored and where the plantings have yet to mature; in other sections, the overgrowth and deterioration seem to have progressed for decades. But the spectacular falls keep people coming—especially after a good rain, when the region’s residents know the falls are at their strongest.

The park is open to the city, and people can enter from many directions, but it seems logical for a tourist to start at the park’s center at Overlook Park, which is near the visitor center. It’s also where you can view the falls straight on and assess the lay of the land. Pamphlets provided by the park’s nonprofit suggest visitors walk west across the Great Falls Bridge and then retrace their steps east to the tiered landscape of the raceways, which are skirted by several red-brick factories built in the 19th century.

The raceway system still defines the park on the east side of the river. Visitors who walk from the upper to the middle raceway can see former wheelhouses of the mills. However, the water was diverted from the raceways in 2010. The wheels of the wheelhouses that once captured the water have been removed. Landscape ghosts abound. Brickwork on the facade of the Ivanhoe Wheelhouse indicates where a wheel once turned, and grasses grow where water once flowed.

Back at Overlook Park, reached via the middle raceway, visitors cross the Great Falls Bridge or take in the entire vista from the Great Falls Lawn View, where the park service plans to include an amphitheater for which the falls will serve as a backdrop. The park service is also creating a $4.3 million great lawn next to the mill ruins, and $750,000 will go toward clearing overgrowth near Overlook Park, providing views to passing cars and new access points for pedestrians. Both the great lawn and the amphitheater were in the Field Operations plan. And just last month, Zax proposed a $19.7 million visitor center at Overlook Park designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.

Credit: James Corner Field Operations.

Across the bridge on the north side of the river is Mary Ellen Kramer Park. The recently completed park is somewhat utilitarian. Plantings are few. The lawns are patchy. The furniture consists of standard-issue benches and picnic tables. But the park features a restored stone wall with a low rail that brings visitors tantalizingly close to the falls.

The park is named for the wife of former Mayor Lawrence “Pat” Kramer; she fought to prevent a highway from plowing through the site in the late 1960s. Today, the diverted highways created a spaghetti pattern of highways near Paterson’s downtown that contort to avoid running into the park. In June, the county completed a circulation study to cut traffic congestion in and around the park, which is a result of overflow from the diverted highways.

The park service discourages its parks from accepting brownfields. As a result, the ownership of the Paterson Great Falls is a bit of a patchwork. It’s more cost-effective to do the remediation and then turn the land over to the park system section by section, as was the case with Mary Ellen Kramer Park. This will continue to be the case as sections are completed by the city with funds coming primarily from the city, state, county, and the Hamilton Partnership.

The newly restored Mary Ellen Kramer Park brings visitors to the falls’ edge. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Next to Mary Ellen Kramer Park is another park asset, the 10,000-seat Hinchliffe Stadium. It is said to be the only stadium in the National Park System and one of the few sites to explore sports history. The field, which was incorporated into the park in 2014, is a storied home of baseball Hall of Famer Larry Doby, who broke the American League color barrier in 1947. People from all over Paterson came to the games, Boch said. “The players were segregated, but the fans weren’t,” he said. “In the stands, they desegregated themselves.”

When Theodore “T. J.” Best was in high school, his freshman class was one of the last to play on the field before it closed in 1997. The field is still owned by the city’s school district. Today he is the director of the Board of Chosen Freeholders, the county’s governing body. The school district can’t afford to run the field, let alone raise the $25 million to $35 million it might take to restore it.

“Despite its historic and architectural significance, the price tag associated with it is pretty steep,” Best said. “Considering the city’s and the school district’s many needs, without any real private investment, we might lose it.”

A short distance from the stadium is the Valley of the Rocks, a path that drops about 90 feet below to the falls, and an area informally known as “The Beach.” Today, kids pitch rocks into the water, yell, and curse as they have for years.

“That was me,” Best said.

The path through the Valley of the Rocks is home to a hardwood forest of white oak, sycamore, Norway maple, and white ash. But according to the Field Operations plan, invasive species and a weak understory have left the area with “no rare or valuable species growing on the site.”

Across the river, next to Overlook Park, are the mill ruins of the lower raceway. The area is fenced off from the public, not that the fence stops anyone from going there, as the elaborate graffiti murals attest. With each passing day, the mill ruins continue to crumble. Thieves steal the brownstones of the Colt Gun Mill, as well as the chain-link fence that guards them. The graffiti seems a tame affront in comparison.

Graffiti might remain in parts of the park, as it could be considered part of the cultural landscape. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Best said he remembers the excitement of discovering this forbidden zone. He made a distinction between the two graffiti styles, labeling one “domestic,” or local, and the other “imported.” Best says that the imported version is probably the work of artists drawn to the area by the Paterson Art Factory, a recently shuttered artist cooperative that closed over safety violations and unpaid taxes. Boch says that although he would never consider graffiti acceptable on the park’s historic landmarks, he didn’t rule out leaving room for graffiti murals in certain areas of the park, as they represent yet another layer of the area’s cultural and artistic heritage.

“We don’t look at it positively, but, to be frank, there’s some graffiti that’s quite beautiful and can be considered a part of the cultural landscape in some ways,” he said. “The Great Falls has been a haven for various forms of art. Performing and visual artists of all sorts have always been inspired here. These graffiti artists could just be modern versions of those being inspired in different ways and different forms.”

Paterson and its Great Falls continue to inspire artists and poets, as they inspired William Carlos Williams’s five books of poetry titled Paterson and the photographer George Tice’s monographs of Paterson photographs from 1972 and 2006, titled Paterson and Paterson II. And this fall, director Jim Jarmusch will release Paterson, starring Adam Driver as a character named Paterson. The movie should make new audiences aware of the park and the city, and making people aware of Paterson seems to be at the top of everyone’s priorities.

Walking trails now follow the Upper Raceway, only hinting at the scope of industry that was once here. Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

Low rents and the proximity to New York City, about 45 minutes away, continue to draw immigrants to the city. “Even though Paterson is economically depressed and is no longer a manufacturing center, the city still has this lure of first-generation Americans coming here and raising families to get their slice of the American dream,” says Vincent Parrillo, a professor at William Paterson University and the director of the Paterson Metropolitan Region Research Center. “Everything is relative—being poor in Paterson is not like being poor in Mexico or Bangladesh.”

Last year, the National Parks Now competition, organized by the Van Alen Institute and the National Park Service, selected Paterson as one of its challenge sites. A group called Team Paterson won with Great Falls, Great Food, Great Stories, a plan to map the city’s foodways and drive visitors to the city’s restaurants, which are rich in Peruvian cuisine, but also in Colombian, Dominican, Jamaican, Syrian, Turkish, and Lebanese.

“We need to enlarge the audience for national parks because they are for everyone and could invite new audiences who have been less inclined to take advantage of these resources,” said Team Paterson’s leader, June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture.

Leonard Zax, the head of Hamilton Partnership for Paterson, expects that people will increasingly come to appreciate that Peruvian food is not only excellent but is available within a 10-minute walk from the falls. “Our mantra,” he said, “will always be that the park is the city and the city is the park.”

Tom Stoelker writes about art, architecture, and academia in New York City.

At LAM this month, we’re deep into Louisiana—with a jog over to the Mississippi Delta—as we get ready to head to New Orleans, where several thousand landscape architects and our friends will be gathered for ASLA’s Annual Meeting & EXPO from October 21 to 24. We’re looking at the state from many angles. So much progress has been made in New Orleans since 2005’s life-altering blow from Hurricane Katrina, it can be hard to get a clear picture as the city reconstitutes itself.

To lead things off, Elizabeth Mossop, ASLA, a practitioner and professor long based in New Orleans, captures the strategy for new water infrastructure, among other systems, in the city. The transformation in large-scale thinking alone is bracing, centered on recognizing water as the city’s greatest asset rather than its greatest threat. Another effort at structural change in New Orleans, the Future Ground competition, sought ways to deal with the expanses of vacant urban land, post-Katrina. Timothy Schuler, a LAM contributing editor, reports on the difficulty of reprogramming such a vastly changed environment and the disillusion of several design teams named finalists by the sponsors, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and the Van Alen Institute. Farther south in Louisiana’s coastal zone, the residents of Isle de Jean Charles—considered to be among the first climate change refugees in the United States—are facing the simultaneous threats of sea-level rise and land loss. Brian Barth visited the community to learn how the New Orleans landscape architecture firm Evans + Lighter is helping residents manage a relocation effort inland, for which the federal government has awarded $48 million. Our cover story this month, by Brett Anderson of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, is about the work of Forbes Lipschitz, ASLA, on the landscapes of catfish farms in the Mississippi Delta region. The region’s aquaculture holds benefits beyond providing fish to dinner tables. It’s economically important to a region where poverty rates are high, and it also serves as feeding grounds for migratory birds. Among landscape architects in Louisiana, perhaps none are so recognized for knowledge of its atmosphere as Jeffrey Carbo, FASLA. LAM staff writer Katarina Katsma, ASLA, visits three sites Carbo and his firm have designed to learn what he sees between the lines of his state.

There is much more in the Now section and other departments. And in the Back, don’t miss the critique Thaïsa Way, ASLA, delivers of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale or the review Gale Fulton, ASLA, writes of Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies, by Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann. See you in New Orleans! The full table of contents for October can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating October articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “New Orleans Owns Its Water,” H+N+S Landscape Architects; “Grounded,” New Orleans Redevelopment Authority; “Let’s Beat It,” Julie Dermansky; “Catch of the Day,” Forbes Lipschitz, ASLA, and Justine Holzman, Associate ASLA; “Homing Instincts,” Chipper Hatter; “Life and Limb,” LandDesign/Denise Retallack; “Open Invitation,” Dredge Research Collaborative and Public Lab; “Water All Over Again,” Courtesy CPEX.

On Monday, the Aga Khan Foundation announced its 2016 awards for architecture, honoring six projects from a short list of 19 named as semifinalists in May. The award honors architecture of the Islamic world every three years. Among the projects is the Superkilen (“Super Wedge”) park in Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, Topotek 1, and Superflex. In its award announcement, the jury (which included Suad Amiry,  Emre Arolat, Akeel Bilgrami, Luis Fernàndez-Galiano, Hameed Haroon, Lesley Lokko, Mohsen Mostafavi, Dominique Perrault, and Hossein Rezai), cited Superkilen’s ability to integrate disparate ethnicities, religions, and cultures in a vibrant public space. LAM featured the project on its cover in July 2013. Following is our story on the park.

BY JESSICA BRIDGER

In Copenhagen, Superkilen rolls out a half-mile mash-up of global culture.

From the July 2013 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

A neighborhood at the margins of the mainstream and beset by the problems of poverty: Arriving at Nørrebro Station is a bit of a shock for anyone who’s been in central Copenhagen’s pristine fairy tale. From Tivoli, the city’s famed historical amusement park, to the perfectly maintained metro stations that still look brand new years after construction, a perfect urbanism seems to be the project here. Yet Nørrebro Station is completely covered in graffiti. The layers of paint obscure the windows, something more out of New York City in the 1970s or present-day Detroit. The streetscape in Nørrebro is less shocking and perhaps looks more like central Copenhagen, just a little more down at the heel. After all, this Scandinavian country has a robust social support network and provides housing, health care, and basic subsistence to all its residents.

Yet graffiti in a train station is a maintenance issue, and, stewardship notwithstanding, efforts are made citywide to improve the city fabric, the quality of life in urban public space. That perhaps Nørrebro has more room for improvement is unsurprising, and in recognition of this the city has made efforts tailored to the area. Nørrebro is home to Superkilen, a new park in this area north of Copenhagen’s city center. Superkilen (“super wedge” in Danish) was designed by the landscape architects at Topotek 1, the architects at Bjarke Ingels Group, and the artists of Superflex. The park occupies a narrow stretch of land between 1980s housing projects and old neighborhood fabric. Nørrebro has a relatively high crime rate—high enough that the American embassy in Copenhagen warns travelers about the area, a surprise in peaceful Denmark—and its share of gang activity. The violent crime in the area is bad enough that, before Superkilen was built, the area the park occupies was known as the “shooting gallery” for the number of violent incidents, many presumably related to drug use, in what was essentially an extended abandoned lot and small derelict green space. As with most European public space projects, the designers were chosen through a competition. The competition brief asked entrants to address the immense challenges of the site. A park alone cannot solve complex social problems, but it can elevate an area, render visible things otherwise unseen, and bring simple pleasures to what was once a no-man’s-land.

Parks are not neutral. Parks reflect their context—their time, their place, their political and economic conditions. The best parks distinguish themselves as radical answers to their context—be it their immediate setting or the milieu that will become their birthplace in history. One need only look back to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, one of the first parks, created out of the sooty filthy desperation of the first industrial revolution. Laying open the establishing elements of the park and proffering even controversial topics, taking the visuality to a degree of relevance outside aesthetic fashions, a park might create within it a polemic, a position that public space communicates. This mode of design as argumentation is expressed at Superkilen with forms and elements that escape any single cultural norm and instead vividly present a radically multicultural pastiche. Here, landscape architecture—and ultimately urbanism—is about the recognition of difference. It celebrates the hypervisual and public participation for everyone.

Credit: Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Kristian Skeie.

The framework for the design is simple: Three narrow spaces form a half-mile-long linear site, each with a distinct character. A large open red square connects the park with the heart of the north-central Copenhagen neighborhood at Nørrebro Station. A black square figured in striped and torqued asphalt, dense with program, serves as the heart of the park, and a stretch of artificially rolling green invites “big” recreation with a basketball court/skatepark hybrid. All three sections endorse an open-ended program by including special objects and unique landscape elements, chosen by the public and curated by the designers. Although the wedge-shaped park is clearly defined in form, it can be seen as a smorgasbord of ideas.

Markers, reminders, and mementos. The stuff of our past, the stuff of our cultural background, has immense power. The designers of Superkilen strove to activate this force. As the site is located in one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods of Copenhagen, this ambition made the park design into a celebration of difference. The inclusion of the people who live nearby in choosing items and furniture created a direct reflection of their cultural backgrounds. The design team solicited the residents of Nørrebro to suggest site furniture that would represent their home countries, their ancestry. This selection includes more than 150 objects from more than 60 countries, all present and accounted for by metal plaques that identify their origins. The objects represent the pleasure of cultural memory, things once lost and now found.

Credit: Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Kristian Skeie.

These artifacts bring a visual or decorative reference into the park and also activate in public various unique kinds of recreation. This is “crowdsourcing” and participation beyond a mediocrity that often arises from group efforts. This park is not “groupthink.” It is group things. The designers acted as curators of these suggestions, adding items of their own to augment the selection. Most of the objects are copies of the originals, fabricated in Denmark—translations of sorts. One of the best-loved parts of the park was also a favorite of the design team: A large octopus, originally from Japan and cast in concrete, is a slide and a playhouse. Craftsmen from Japan came to Copenhagen to build the immigrant octopus—granted permanent residency by concrete of course. The park does not claim to be a space for the assimilation of objects or, more important, of people. It acknowledges their differences.

At Superkilen, the manifestation of culture is as diverse as the inhabitants of Nørrebro. There are neon signs from Russia, Turkey, and beyond that advertise dental care, nightclubs, or restaurants that don’t really exist at Superkilen. A towering sign for “Donuts” with a puffy, golden-brown wonder promises a delicious goodie that can’t be bought for love or money. There’s something a bit wistful in this advertised narration. This creates an atmosphere where culture becomes shared. People are drawn into the park to take a share of its novelty and participate in its oddity. Thai boxing, a sport seen and misunderstood by some as a vicious excuse for violence, comes into the open at Superkilen. The regulation Thai boxing ring is a favorite of many park visitors, of both the fighters who use it and the spectators who watch. Not least among them are kids passing by who are ready for a kiddie bout. A new Thai boxing course is offered in the adjacent recreation center, itself transformed from a once-derelict train depot, for those casual users who want to transform passion into competitive expertise.

Credit: Courtesy BIG and Topotek 1.

The freehearted clash of character and identity brings something wholly new to Nørrebro, and to the more general idea of cultural sharing in public space. The mishmash park is a polemic; it is in itself a conception of what a park is meant to do and what people are meant to do in a park. It can be seen as an exercise in pushing back against given assumptions, be they of trash cans that are the standard specification in one city or another, or whom a park is for by the signals it sends. A gigantic tower of speakers, originally from Jamaica, is meant to invite visitors to share their music with the park, bringing the noise out of headphones or car radios and into the public sphere. There is something hedonistic about Superkilen and its seemingly permissive environment—anything goes, as long as you can do it in public.

You find little precedent about what to do at Superkilen or how to behave. The spaces are open for interpretation, for the invention of new games, new ways of using each area and the objects within it. Yet Superkilen as a park in the canon of landscape architecture is not without historical precedent beyond its response to context. It is a spectacle, following in the tradition of the 19th century landscape gardens—where follies (as translated from China, Greece, or Italy) lent drama to a carefully choreographed version of nature—and in this sense, Superkilen brings drama to the city. Here, the appearance of the topographically morphing landscape itself also holds a certain fascination. Its twisted ground plane, with three parts in three dominant colors—red, black, green—is just as present and seductive as the skin of the latest architectural wonder, but it is fully haptic and inviting. The landscape, in all degrees from urban to rural, is both a reflection of and a backdrop for culture, and at Superkilen it is transformed into a literal profusion of signs and symbols remixed into a single—and singular—space.

Credit: Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Kristian Skeie.

Opened to the public in late 2012, Superkilen has quickly gained resonance beyond disciplinary boundaries. Inside the discipline it has excited, delighted, and irritated some; outside the discipline it has invited comment and interest in the concept. The lack of polite neutrality, appropriate to the site, is also a magnet for attention. One can do a bit of gawking at Superkilen, and not because it has an excessive price tag like some of the more notable landscape projects of recent memory. The budget for Superkilen was small, but the idea is big, and like any good 21st century capitalistic symptom it is scalable, global, and sexy. As well, it is emphatically urban and unmistakably landscape architecture.

We don’t often question the basic stuff of the place we’re in, especially in the landscape or a park—the average urban dweller in the United States or Europe is simply glad for the bench or the trees: We simply accept public spaces as given. Rarely are spaces so literal a translation of other places, and this also brings attention to Superkilen—far beyond the neighborhood of Nørrebro, beyond the city limits of Copenhagen or Denmark’s borders.

Credit: Courtesy BIG and Topotek 1.

It would be easy to sit in a living room in Detroit or Tehran or Seoul and project yourself into the park space of Superkilen, to become a user by fantasy, to participate by proxy through your projections. Imagine running up the striped hill, swinging on the swings, breezing down the red bike corridor with the colors of the park flying past. The park’s appeal lies in its coy ability to be of anywhere, yet to be possible only in its highly specific site context—thanks to its users’ active participation in its conception. Its genetic mix is global yet fully local.

Even the plant life at Superkilen has a multinational heritage. The discussion of native, invasive, and ornamental species with plants is usually presented as something that bears the weight of a moral or ethical dilemma. Topotek 1, however, prides itself on understanding vegetation as part of our ever-shifting biotopes and included it as one of the items up for community suggestion and designer specification. Plants immigrate nearly as freely as people: borne by winds or birds, adapted but not assimilated into their new contexts. Some, like the Araucaria from South America, are quite happy living in Copenhagen at Superkilen. As plants have the wonderful ability to reproduce, one wonders whether, slowly, parts of Superkilen will integrate into greater Copenhagen.

Credit: Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Kristian Skeie.

Much has now changed in the space that Superkilen has come to occupy, if not the more complex problems nearby. The life of the city passes through the park, as an important bike lane, part of the Copenhagen Green Cycle Route, runs the length of the site. On my numerous visits to the park in cold weather, it hummed with activity; a recreation center and café to one side of the red square provided extra activity spaces and a sense of a fixed public presence on site. On one particularly gray day, two boys in early adolescence progressed through the park, making up their own games: hopping from stone backgammon table to table, taking the time to teach each other the “right” way to approach benches originally from the Czech Republic, for example—evidently, leaping from the top was much preferable to leaping from the seat. The park can be taken quite like an amusement park, in fact—and the two boys were clearly amusing themselves in a circuit of fun.

Credit: Courtesy BIG and Topotek 1.

Projects like Superkilen hint at a new way for designers to work with the public. By engaging the local population and acknowledging the true complexity of urban environments in design, we can get beyond aesthetic questions and beyond even questions of use and program. Design in the public realm must respond to broad cultural and social inputs, remixing our notions of global and local, client and stakeholder. In a project like Superkilen there is an inherent mediation set up by the designers between the user groups adjacent and the larger cultural context. Nørrebro’s complex situation—a demographic island of heterogeneous minorities in a homogeneous country—has forced new thinking for how a public space could be a participative element in urban culture. The park presents a strong position about who should feel welcome in a park, and how even mundane cultural objects can communicate a tendency toward assimilation in something seemingly neutral like a park if presented in homogeneous force. Getting beyond the received notions of who belongs in the city, and in turn whom it belongs to, can sometimes begin with questioning something as simple as a park bench.

Jessica Bridger is an urbanist, landscape architect, and journalist based in Berlin.

Project Credits
Client City of Copenhagen and the Realdania Foundation, Copenhagen. Landscape Architect Topotek 1, Berlin. Architect Bjarke Ingels Group, Copenhagen. Artist Superflex, Copenhagen. Site Construction Lemming & Eriksson, Køge, Denmark. General Contractor Aarsleff, Copenhagen. Asphalt Colas, Glostrup, Denmark.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A recent design competition promised novel ideas for vacant land in New Orleans. It ended with some very unhappy participants.

From the October 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine

On Friday, March 6, 2015, the city of New Orleans posted more than 1,700 properties online and began auctioning them off. Most were vacant lots. The city was hoping to attract investors who could put these properties back into circulation, so to speak, in part to raise tax revenue and also to continue chipping away at the scourge of blight that had afflicted New Orleans since well before Hurricane Katrina.

Today, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 lots sit vacant in New Orleans, about the same number as before the levees collapsed but significantly fewer than the 43,000 tallied in 2010. The city has employed a number of strategies to bring that number down, including these online auctions, a strategy later adopted by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA), a public agency that owns close to 2,500 vacant lots in the city.

Despite the lack of implementation, Future Ground has informed the city’s approach to vacant land, including the creation of a Strategic Acquisition Program. New Orleans Redevelopment Authority

Auctions can be good for a city’s bottom line. They generate revenue and reduce maintenance costs—NORA’s lots are typically mowed about every three weeks, which means the agency is responsible for some 45,000 maintenance visits over the course of a year. But a series of proposals produced by the winning teams of the Van Alen Institute’s Future Ground competition suggests that some vacant lots are worth holding on to. In certain areas, cities should even consider purchasing additional properties to create larger parcels, which are required by job-creating industries like manufacturing. “This kind of physical economy is really important and is really very tied to our land use policies,” says Amy Whitesides, Associate ASLA, a studio director at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, which led one of the winning teams.

The notion of strategic acquisition is just one of several revelatory strategies that came up as part of Future Ground. Launched in 2014, the competition emerged out of conversations between Jerome Chou, Van Alen’s director of competitions, and Jeff Hebert, NORA’s executive director, who in 2014 was appointed the city’s chief resilience officer.

After Katrina, NORA’s role in rebuilding New Orleans expanded significantly. It was charged with selling 5,000 city-owned vacant lots and overseeing the Lot Next Door ordinance, which allowed property owners to cheaply purchase adjacent lots. As a result, the agency began focusing on redevelopment strategies that were larger in scale and driven by data, consulting experts from around the country and implementing a number of green infrastructure projects across the parish to help create a more amphibious city.

With Future Ground, Hebert, who resigned his position at NORA when he was named deputy mayor and chief administrative officer by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu in 2016, wanted to go further. He was interested less in design strategies for individual lots; the city already had the requisite rain gardens and the low-maintenance wildflower meadows. Rather, Hebert wanted to know how the city should think about vacant land.

Over the course of six months, three teams of architects, landscape architects, urban designers, lawyers, economists, and experts in land use policy and real estate identified a number of novel solutions for New Orleans, many of which subvert conventional wisdom and can be adopted by
municipalities across the United States. Some already have jumped Louisiana’s borders.

Participants, however, say Future Ground also raises serious questions about the responsibility of organizers to design professionals and cities like New Orleans, which, since Katrina, has become a repository of shelved, stalled, and failed plans. “That was a sensitivity in New Orleans from the beginning,” Whitesides says. “There have been a lot of people planning things in New Orleans” and a history of “things not happening.”

It is not clear what exactly happened between Van Alen’s original RFQ and the conclusion of the competition, but team members recall what they describe as an aggravating and duplicitous process. The Ohio State University landscape architecture professor Kristi Cheramie, who led another winning team, says the competition was “significantly botched.”

“We left the competition with a very, very bad taste in our mouth[s],” she says.

From the beginning, it was an ambitious enterprise. According to the RFQ, Future Ground would generate “flexible design and policy strategies that forecast and accommodate changes in density, demand, climate, and landscape over the next half-century in New Orleans.” Van Alen encouraged a mix of local and national talent and required that teams be multidisciplinary, and in 2014 it and NORA selected the winning teams: Team NO/LEX (New Orleans Land Exchange), led by Cheramie; Team Stoss, led by Whitesides and Chris Reed, FASLA; and Team PaD (Policy as Design), led by the architect James Dart of the design firm DARCH.

Jonathan Tate, the principal of an architecture and urban design studio in New Orleans and a member of Team Stoss, says the competition provided teams with an opportunity to bring ideas that had not yet been tested in the city. He and Ann Yoachim, who has 10 years of experience working in New Orleans, helped Stoss vet ideas for their sensitivity to the local context but also for their originality. “We were there to say, look, somebody’s already done this, this has already been investigated, let’s try to coax out something that feels new,” Tate says.

The Stoss team focused on the role that land plays in job creation. By combing through national economic data, it homed in on the link between lot size and the types of employment opportunities. “A lot of middle-wage jobs, especially middle-wage jobs for people without college degrees, are in the physical economy,” says Teresa Lynch, a principal at Mass Economics who has worked with Stoss in both Detroit and Atlanta. “They involve making things, moving things, fixing things, or storing things. So you need land.” Specifically, between two and four acres of it, Lynch found—a size ideally situated for light industry. Because the majority of vacant lots are a tenth of an acre at most, Stoss recommended that NORA suspend land auctions until it can devise a strategy for assembling these lots into larger parcels.

Stoss identified opportunities to assemble and aggregate lots into parcels of one acre or more. Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Land assembly can be a slow, onerous endeavor, however, and Stoss suggested aggregation as a quicker, easier way to group parcels. Building on its work with the Detroit Future City plan that was released in 2013, Stoss proposed that scattered sites be bundled together and treated as a common economic and social unit. For Whitesides, it reframed the way even she thought about vacant land. “At Stoss, we talk a lot about productive landscapes,” she says. “But we don’t think about them as job-producing landscapes.”

Equally unorthodox was NO/LEX’s proposal, which took as its starting point the missions of local organizations rather than the presence of vacant lots. Cheramie’s team leveraged the city’s somewhat lax legal squatting law, also known as acquisitive prescription, which requires a squatter to occupy a property for just three years before he or she can claim legal right to it (in other cities, the requirement is often 7 to 10 years). They contacted community groups not typically interested in land ownership and proposed land use agreements that would allow them joint use of a particular parcel.

NO/LEX mapped the places where organizations’ interests and vacant land overlapped and identi ed areas of the highest concentration of vacant lots. NO/LEX

“If we take vacant land out of the equation, but look at the space as a package of resources that people might be interested in, what it does is allow you to start looking at disposition strategies that may not be single-owner dispositions, where you’re trying to identify one person or one organization that’s going to take over the title of that place,” Cheramie says. Instead, cities can look at means of legal access for multiple parties and uses. Evacuteer, for instance, is a hurricane relief organization that hosts regular educational events throughout the city, often in hard-hit areas at low elevations, which are also often the most blighted. Evacuteer doesn’t need to own land, but it does need access to it. By mapping Evacuteer’s and other organizations’ interests, the designers identified where those interests and vacant land overlapped.

The schemes outlined in the three proposals, including Team PaD’s recommendation that the city’s vacant land be viewed as part of the region’s ecological and economic networks, are noteworthy in that they largely work in tandem. “They could nest into each other, and be implemented almost simultaneously,” Whitesides says.

The proposal situated the neighborhood within a regional network of state parks and wildlife refuges. PaD

Which, in a way, is what happened. In late 2015, the Future Ground jury, which included the landscape architect Elizabeth Mossop, ASLA, the urban planner Maurice Cox, ASLA, and the architect David Waggoner, as well as local and national experts, determined that “there was not one clear winning project that could be fully implemented as is,” Van Alen’s executive director, David van der Leer, says. Rather, each “brought something new to the local and national conversation on reusing vacant land.” Van Alen chose a handful of the competition’s big ideas and published an illustrated report that condensed months of research into six aphoristic lessons, including “Let the Public Get Creative” and “Create New Visions for Low Density.”

Even so, David Lessinger, who at the time was the director of planning and strategy at NORA, says the recommendations that emerged from Future Ground had an immediate and direct effect on how the city thought about vacant land. NORA established a new Regional Committee on Resilience at the Regional Planning Commission and is in the midst of developing a Strategic Acquisition Program, “which will support the acquisition of targeted lots in order to assemble larger sites,” Lessinger says. The agency has also played a key role in the vision for the Gentilly Resilience District, a $141 million infrastructure project informed by 2013’s Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan that will use blue-green corridors and other green infrastructure approaches to flood mitigation to revitalize one of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.

For the NO/LEX team, the competition even spawned a copycat project close to home. Cheramie, a winner of the 2016 Rome Prize in landscape architecture, and her team from Ohio State are working to set up a land exchange similar to the one proposed for New Orleans in the Rust Belt town of Lima, Ohio, which has its own abundance of vacant land.

But participants were understandably unhappy with the jury’s decision. For most team members, it was the last straw in what already had been a frustrating and opaque process. The original RFQ—really an RFP since teams were required to submit proposals, not just qualifications—stated that “Travel costs are included in the overall competition budget, and will not come from the teams’ $15,000 stipend.” Later, participants were told that the travel budget per team was $5,000. In part owing to Van Alen’s encouragement that teams be multidisciplinary and geographically diverse, Stoss had a team of nine. With four trips to New Orleans, $5,000 didn’t go far.

Dart, a principal at New Orleans-based DARCH, says Van Alen also dragged its feet on solidifying the language in the teams’ agreements. That was “the first hint that all was not well in Mudville,” he says. “We still haven’t signed our agreement because it’s somewhere still in flux.”

NORA ultimately decided not to implement any of the teams’ designs. “It was clear that they weren’t going to necessarily pick one winner,” Lynch, of Mass Economics, says. “But it was also clear that they were going to implement something from one or more teams.”

The RFQ stated: “As part of its commitment to this competition, in the third and final Implementation Phase, NORA will implement an initial phase of some of the proposed designs on NORA-owned vacant lots.” That the competition ended with a “glib and cursory” illustrated report, to use Dart’s words, felt to participants like a bait and switch.

The news came via several “very awkward” conference calls (again, Dart), during which Van Alen and NORA explained that any future projects would have to be let out for public bid due to changes to their rules for procurement.

This “rang profoundly hollow,” says Dart, who suspects that it was not a matter of changing requirements but rather a lack of oversight. “If no one bothered to check, then both NORA and Van Alen have a lot of egg on their face.”

Like the others, Cheramie takes little issue with Van Alen not selecting a winner. “But there were offices devoted to this, Stoss being one of them, on the good faith that this was going to lead to—we were told very explicitly there would be three contracts handed out for implementation. I have my job at the university, but there were people working full-time for no billable hours on this, as it turned out. And I think they had a responsibility to come through on that. Because the stipend didn’t cover anything.”

Van der Leer offers little by way of explanation, writing in an e-mail that NORA’s “process had changed” and that implementation ultimately rests on the shoulders of Van Alen’s government partners. NORA declined to comment on the reason for the change.

Ultimately, Future Ground may have been too ambitious. It’s possible that Van Alen overextended itself. “Van Alen has taken on a lot of these big-scale competitions in recent years, and it does seem like the competition is out of scale with their infrastructure,” Cheramie says. “We had one of the smaller teams, and we had four people flying in once a month from all over the country. These are significant asks for professionals. And it takes a lot of coordination to manage that.”

Is the design competition dead? Not by a long shot. But the rules are changing. “Frustrations with the limitations of the old black-box style of competition…have led to what sometimes seems like the opposite extreme: lengthy, process-heavy, multistage formats featuring extensive public involvement,” Elizabeth Padjen wrote in this magazine last year (see “Competitions: What’s the Real Prize?” LAM, July 2015). She easily could have been describing Future Ground, which in Whitesides’s opinion is Exhibit A in this “new wave of competitions that probably shouldn’t be called competitions because they’re not set up that way.”

Vacant Land by Elevation

No organization is more aware of this evolution than Van Alen, which has organized 10 competitions just in the past two years. Last year, it partnered with Architectural Record to publish a survey titled “Design Competitions: Fair or Unfair?” and later hosted a two-day symposium on the topic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As a follow-up to that event, Jerome Chou, who recently left Van Alen but continues to consult for the organization, organized a panel session at ABX Boston devoted to the topic of equity in design competitions. Chou asked Whitesides to be on the panel. She says he encouraged her to be honest. “He recognized that a number of people weren’t particularly happy with the process and the way things had gone,” she says.

But it put Whitesides in an uncomfortable position. She didn’t want to openly criticize Van Alen because in many ways the organization functions as a client. Chou was also a friend. When asked whether or not she thought the panel was a sincere effort to answer questions about the treatment and compensation of designers, there is a long pause. “Yeah, I do,” she says finally. But the organization’s choice of venue also struck her as dubious. “I wouldn’t think a public panel is the place to really plumb the depths of this question.”

In the results of its survey, Van Alen noted: “Designers enter competitions to learn, build portfolios, experiment, push themselves, get seen, have fun, not just to win. So let’s make competitions that aren’t winner-take-all, but offer opportunities for anyone who enters.” Future Ground makes clear that the shift from a winner-take-all paradigm will be accompanied by growing pains, which seem to stem from an absence of spoils, or even clarity about what “winning” means.

Despite their frustrations, most participants agree that Future Ground offered an unparalleled opportunity to explore new ideas and modes of thinking, as well as a chance to work with professionals not typically part of a project team. “It’s hard to convince a client that they need an economist and an attorney and an urban designer and an architect and someone who does public activation,” Whitesides says. Getting to work with people who think about problems differently than they do informs the rest of Stoss’s work, she says, “so there’s great value for us in that.”

There’s value in fun, too, and Lynch says she “had a blast.” But that doesn’t change the fact that as a long-term model for competitions, Lynch believes Future Ground isn’t viable. “If you really told people, we’re going to run the competition, and at the end we’re going to call you all winners, and we aren’t implementing any of it, no one would have applied for this.”

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the environment. He lives in Honolulu.

BY ZACH MORTICE

The Living Filtration System. Illustration by Living Filtration System.

It’s the habitat that most determines the health of any ecosystem, but it’s largely invisible to the naked eye. The soil under your feet, if it’s healthy, is filled with all manner of micro-organisms, bacteria, and fungi that break down organic matter into fresh dirt loaded with nutrients, and nourish the plants growing there. Soil is the building block for all healthy biomes, and a critical concern for all landscape architects. It’s also a finite resource that’s been continually degraded and polluted. But recent Biomimicry Institute design competitions are pitching two products that rehabilitate soil as the best way to strengthen the food cycle. Last month, team BioNurse, representing the Ceres Regional Center for Fruit and Vegetable Innovation in Chile, won the first-ever $100,000 Ray C. Anderson “Ray of Hope Prize” for BioPatch, a disk and dome made of organic material (like corn husks) that provides shelter for seedlings, eventually rehabilitating soil as it decomposes. In September, a team of landscape architecture students and recent grads from the University of Oregon won the $10,000 Living Product Prize for a Living Filtration System, which filters and retains fertilizer nutrients in agricultural fields, preventing them from polluting waterways.

The BioNurse team’s BioPatch mimics the domed geometry of the hardy yareta, common to the Andes. The team engineered a biodegradable, sheltered terrarium with a base and conical cap that protects seedlings from wind and UV radiation, regulates temperature and humidity, and provides nutrients. “The cushion shape permits other plants [to] grow inside the yareta,” says team member Camila Hernandez. “This plant grows slowly so you can find, at the same time, different conditions of life inside. Some parts will start decomposing and others growing, creating the perfect biological situation for other plants that need different conditions.” BioPatch will be ready for commercial sale by 2018, Hernandez says.

A yareta plant and a BioPatch disk. Photo by BioNurse.

Megan Schuknecht, the Biomimicry Institute’s Director of Design Challenges, says their proposal earned top honors because of its flexibility and wide applicability. “Their initial market is looking at Chilean fruit orchards, but the team and the judges also think there’s strong potential for them to enter other markets,” she says, such as viticulture or forest restoration.

The Living Filtration System aims to reduce eutrophication of waterways from fertilizer pollution by preventing runoff upstream in agricultural fields—“a way to cut the problem off at the source before it becomes a big issue,” says team member Wade Hanson, Student ASLA. Meant to replace standard tube drainage systems, the team’s tube filter uses a series of layers to trap and retain fertilizer nutrients. It is loosely based on the geometry of an earthworm’s digestive system. First, a recycled plastic pipe is perforated to increase its surface area, like tiny intestinal villi, to slow the movement of water through it. Layers of filtering fabric then wrap around the inside and outside of a layer of biochar—wood or field waste that’s been burned at a high temperature, like charcoal. This char layer is seeded with a menagerie of microbial life that can help rehabilitate soil degraded by the seasonal onslaught of herbicide- and pesticide-intensive farming: fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, huddled together in a “tiny hotel for microorganisms,” says team member Casey Howard, Student ASLA.

“That layer is the starting point, and they radiate out from there,” says team member Matt Jorgensen, Student ASLA.

The char layer works like a charcoal filter, capturing and sequestering fertilizer nutrients so microorganisms can return them to the plant roots, allowing plants more time to absorb them, instead of washing through and polluting downstream ecosystems. The project was developed in accordance with the Living Product Challenge, the standard for sustainable product development that looks to biomimicry to create products that leave no impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and resources.

From left to right: John Lanier, executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, Megan Schuknecht, Director of Design Challenges at the Biomimicry Institute, Camila Hernandez and Camila Gratacos of Team BioNurse, and Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute. Photo by Hardy Wilson/Bioneers.

Open to students and professionals alike, the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge seeks to raise awareness about the sustainable possibilities of biomimetic design, and to also create a path for more biomimicry products to make their way into market. Each project was chosen after a yearlong accelerator process during which finalists worked to refine the technical details of their plans and learned how to make sure their project could thrive in the marketplace once mass produced. That training taught them “how to set up a business, how to identify their customers, [and] how to identify their market size,” Schuknecht says.

The Living Filtration System team is several years away from a mass-produced prototype. Their next steps will require threading the Living Filtration System through large farm plots. But Hanson says their accelerator training has prepared them well. He learned “how many different hats you have to wear, and how crazy it is being an entrepreneur when you’re trying to push forward and develop your technology, while at the same time getting a crash-course MBA without getting the actual degree. I would have never expected it going in, but I’m more grateful than anything to have gained that experience and have that knowledge.”

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. Listen to his Chicago architecture and design podcast A Lot You Got to Holler, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

Landscape architects are visualizing the future of renewable energy.

FROM THE MARCH 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

I first began to see the signs outside Sioux City, Iowa, along Interstate 29. They were white with big black letters: “Have Pride in Our Community.” The words were arranged around a central graphic of a wind turbine circumscribed by a red circle, a diagonal line through the middle. Just beyond the signs, and the farmhouses whose owners had put them up, were the real thing. Dozens of them. Giant, spinning turbines as far as the eye could see. Their presence gave the homes a sense of existing in occupied territory.

Wind turbines—and opposition to them—are an increasingly common reality, not just in Iowa but throughout the United States. According to Department of Energy statistics, wind energy generation quadrupled from 2001 to 2006 and did so again by 2011. By 2015, the United States was producing 190 million megawatt hours of energy by harnessing the wind, compared to just 5.5 million megawatt hours in 2000. Most of this capacity has been constructed in the heart of the country, where wind is plentiful. Iowa, with an installed capacity of 6,917 megawatts, is the national leader when it comes to in-state wind energy generation. Wind accounts for 36 percent of the state’s energy needs.

Assuming that the United States continues to devote land and other resources to large-scale wind and solar power (and experts believe it will, despite the election of Donald Trump, owing to market pressures), its infrastructure will become all the more visible, even ubiquitous, in certain regions. This has serious implications for the landscape, says Dean Apostol, a senior landscape architect and restoration ecologist at MIG, a planning and design consultancy. “If [wind energy] gets developed to the level that we’re anticipating, you will drive from Maine to Oregon 20, 30 years from now, and you will not be out of sight of a wind turbine for that entire drive,” he says. “What we’re talking about is reshaping the rural landscape, including the nearshore environment, of the entire continent.”

Apostol is the coauthor—with James Palmer, FASLA; Martin Pasqualetti; Richard Smardon; and Robert Sullivan—of a new book titled The Renewable Energy Landscape: Preserving Scenic Values in our Sustainable Future, a dense, research-based attempt to reckon with that very future. Commercial wind farms can occupy as many as 50,000 acres and are visible from well beyond their property line. This new energy infrastructure can be plopped onto the landscape, erected with little thought to its visual impact, Apostol says, or it can be skillfully integrated with the surrounding topography and arranged in eye-pleasing patterns, the turbines synchronized in balletic precision. He and his coauthors have created a guide to achieving the latter for both wind and solar facilities, outlining principles for producing comprehensive visual impact assessments and realistic renderings.

A U.S. wind power map shows energy generation potential at a height of 150 feet. Blue areas are considered “superb.” Image courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Compared to more traditional projects—a corporate campus or a public park—renewable energy facilities are a relatively new typology for landscape architects, rife with unique challenges. “It’s not like anything else we’ve encountered,” Apostol says. “A single wind turbine is a 50-story building with a spinning blade the size of a Boeing 747.” Turbines vary in size but generally have gotten taller over time, reaching heights in excess of 500 feet, measured to the tip of the blade. Trying to accurately represent the impact of such an object—not to mention 80 square miles of them—is tricky. How do you visually communicate the sensation of a turbine’s blinking lights or the continuous rotation of its blades? How do you simulate the temporal aspects of driving amid fields of these objects for half an hour or more? Videos, animations, and other sorts of simulations can be effective but are expensive, Apostol says. And yet, given that aesthetics are at the center of much of the opposition to renewable energy development, visualizations can play a key role in a project’s fate.

The authors make little secret of their support for renewable energy development, but they also take a realistic, perhaps even pessimistic, view of current technologies. They are focusing on how to mitigate the inevitable harm these mechanical intrusions cause to the landscape. If this camp represents the pragmatic end of the spectrum—a realist’s guide to siting renewable energy—at the other end are those landscape architects who take issue with the notion that our infrastructure must be visually unappealing. Anne Godfrey, a senior instructor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, says landscape architects should “question the basis of some of those [assumptions] and say, ‘Hey, we want this to be different. We don’t want wind turbines covering the United States. What do we do about it?’”

For the past six years, Godfrey has had her students participate in the biennial competition held by the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). This year, two of her graduate landscape architecture students, Keegan Oneal, Student Affiliate ASLA, and Colin Poranski, took second place. LAGI was founded by Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian in 2008 to inspire new forms for alternative energy generation. Competition sites have included Copenhagen, Denmark; New York City; and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This year, the competition site was 2,000 feet off the shore of Santa Monica, California. It was the first time LAGI had selected an offshore site, and it raised the bar for aesthetic considerations considerably. Despite the absence of any literal backyards, there is little more fraught territory than nearshore environments, especially in affluent areas like Santa Monica. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have long served as unique magnets for contemplation and artistic interpretation within American culture, and coastal areas are, statistically speaking, scarce: While the United States has 3.8 million square miles of land, it has just 95,471 miles of shoreline.

The rib-like structures generate wind, wave, and solar energy, while also providing marine habitat. Image courtesy of Keegan Oneal, Sean Link, Caitlin Vanhauer, and Colin Poranski (University of Oregon).

Oneal’s and Poranski’s proposal, Cetacea (created with architecture undergrads Sean Link and Caitlin Vanhauer), demonstrates the possibilities of site-specific renewable energy infrastructure. Inspired by the blue whale, a series of humped, rib-like arches protrude from the water in distinct groupings, like a pod of whales swimming along the shore. Their forms are open, diaphanous. “We wanted there always to be an idea of the presence of the horizon line, a sense of being on the water,” Oneal says. Almost 100 feet in height at their tallest, the arch structures use wave energy converters, integrated photovoltaic panels, and Windbelts—which convert the motion of aeroelastic flutter into electricity—to annually generate 4,300 megawatt hours of clean power. That power, the students decided, would go to the Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility (SMURRF), which treats 500,000 gallons of stormwater a day, creating a highly visible connection between water and energy.

The students also designed rubble-like concrete footings that would provide habitat for sea creatures, including predators of the purple urchin, which is decimating the area’s kelp forests. “If an installation is going to have a large foundation, that foundation had better be playing a role in the ecology of the site that it’s being imposed on,” Oneal says.

Cetacea’s emphasis on ecology and ethnography—the material palette draws on the local sailing culture—was a big part of why the jury liked it, Godfrey says. “Their entry showed that they really understood what was happening on the ground in Santa Monica, and the legacy of the planning that had already occurred around water,” she says.

In Glasgow, a winning proposal for a utility-scale renewable energy facility is being prototyped this year. It uses turbine technology developed by the Spanish company Vortex Bladeless. Image courtesy of Dalziel + Scullion, Qmulus Ltd., Yeadon Space Agency, and ZM Architecture.

It’s unlikely that Cetacea will ever be built. But site-specific energy infrastructure may not be too far in the future. In 2015, Ferry and Monoian were hired by the city of Glasgow, Scotland, to host an invited design competition on a brownfield site north of the city center. They tapped past LAGI winners to work with local firms to design a utility-scale energy facility that would double as public art. Wind Forest, the winning proposal by Dalziel + Scullion, Qmulus Ltd., Yeadon Space Agency, and ZM Architecture, uses bladeless wind turbines to create a series of inhabitable groves, turning the hillside into something between a public park and a power plant. The project is being prototyped on site next year.

As countries set ever more aggressive renewable energy targets, there may be limitations to how creative designers can get. Larger, more efficient facilities will be desired. For Apostol, that’s the issue. “An individual wind turbine is a beautiful thing,” he says. “I’m not sure you can improve on it, aesthetically.” The problem is scale. “I could design something that’s really beautiful, and if I put one of them in a public park or a plaza, people go, ‘Oh, that’s really gorgeous.’ Now, let’s put a thousand of them there. People would say, ‘Wait a minute.’”

Ferry admits that not every wind farm will be a work of art. But “in certain conditions,” he says, “it’s an opportunity to allow for the more accelerated adoption of these technologies because people will find them sexy; they’ll want them. And they [will] become landmarks, monuments to this important time in human history.”

There is also the chance that opposition to wind farms based on aesthetic grounds will eventually fade away. In her forthcoming book, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making, Yuriko Saito, a professor of philosophy at Rhode Island School of Design, explores the opposition to wind farms from an aesthetic perspective. She presents the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge as examples of beloved landmarks that were once reviled. “Nobody would say these are eyesores today,” she says. Similarly, the writer Eula Biss has chronicled the backlash against telephone poles—more akin to wind turbines, perhaps—when they were first erected in the late 1800s. Now, they are a part of the landscape.

Saito’s explorations are based on a conclusion also reached by Apostol and his coauthors: that aesthetics play an enormous role in influencing our decisions about things like renewable energy. “Aesthetics can be a great ally for creating a better world,” she says, “but it can also be a powerful enemy. If aesthetics is part of the problem, perhaps we can redirect aesthetics so that it can be part of the solution.”

What is undeniable is that energy infrastructure is becoming more diffuse, making its way into towns and neighborhoods. Godfrey sees opportunities for landscape architects to lead the way in designing what that will look like. It doesn’t have to be a monument, she says. It can be as simple as using off-the-shelf technologies in unorthodox ways, or working with manufacturers to develop new but marketable products. “Landscape architecture should act like any other field that does a high level of innovation,” she says. “We should be the ones inventing.” And to really invent something new, designers should be thinking not about tomorrow but about 25 or 50 years from now, she says. “If we target for those time scales, we can be way more innovative.”

But tomorrow is important too, especially for communities in places like Iowa that have borne the aesthetic brunt of America’s transition to renewable energy. Those white signs outside Sioux City encouraged residents to have pride in their community by fighting the wind farms. Oneal is hopeful that the sort of thinking that produced Cetacea and the other LAGI entries can encourage more sensitive solutions. “Renewable energy infrastructure can do more than produce power,” he says. “It can become part of the story of a place and be something that communities can be proud of.”

Timothy A. Schuler writes about landscape architecture, ecology, and urban design. He lives in Honolulu.

The battle to document and save old trees that may have once marked Native American trails.

Congratulations to Timothy A. Schuler, editor of LAM’s NOW section and a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is the 2017 recipient of the Forest History Society’s John M. Collier Award for Forest History Journalism, which recognizes excellence in reporting on forest or conservation history. Tim’s winning article, “Searching for a Sign”—about the strangely bent trees once used as trail markers by Native Americans—originally appeared in the November 2016 issue of LAM.

BY RACHEL DOVEY

The team led by SCAPE proposes breaching levees to allow trapped sediment out, creating a stronger network of marshes and mudflats that can cushion developed areas. Image courtesy SCAPE/Public Sediment team.

They’re no stranger to wildfires and drought, but the cities around the San Francisco Bay haven’t been hit with a climate change-fueled disaster on par with Hurricanes Sandy or Harvey—yet. Still, sea-level rise won’t spare the metros. Even if they escape the drowning predicted by certain apocalyptic maps, Bay Area residents rely on freeways and rail lines built on soft, low-lying bay fill—areas particularly vulnerable to flooding and erosion. And the region’s tidal marshes and mudflats, which should act as natural barriers, are slowly losing sediment owing to poorly engineered dams.

“Unlike New York City, the Bay Area has all these slower and more invisible problems related to climate change,” says Gena Wirth, ASLA, the design principal at SCAPE Landscape Architecture.

The Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge is bringing some of those unseen issues to light. Last year, judges selected 10 winning teams (SCAPE is the leader of one) made up of ecologists, designers, and landscape architects to imagine infrastructure that works with the region’s shifting landscape rather than against it. The challenge, which is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, is modeled on New York’s post-Sandy Rebuild by Design contest, with one key difference: This one is proactive, not reactive. Instead of waiting for federal funds to come in after a disaster, Bay Area leaders want to chart a more sustainable course now. The teams led by landscape architects take a particularly whole-systems approach, peering beneath the streets and beyond the shorelines to brainstorm innovative solutions to those slower-moving but no less pressing problems.

The Public Sediment team, led by SCAPE, wants to start with tidal buffer zones.

“Sediment is really the building block of resilience in the bay,” Wirth says.

Using Alameda Creek, south of Oakland on the bay’s east side near Union City, as a pilot, the team proposes strategically breaching certain levees to let trapped sediment out, ultimately creating a stronger network of marshes and mudflats that will cushion the cities from strong waves and drastic tides.

Image courtesy SCAPE/Public Sediment team.

Another unseen problem: overdevelopment on the cities’ low-lying bay fill, which is vulnerable to seismic activity as well as sea-level rise. When the Big One hits (as it inevitably will), heavily trafficked thruways like Highway 37 could very well crumble into the marshes that surround them. Common Ground, a team led by TLS Landscape Architecture, suggests planning and funding transportation infrastructure on the region’s more stable high ground going forward, and taking greater advantage of water-based transportation routes linked by ferries.

The BionicTeam, led by Bionic, looks at the fact that many of those waterside lowlands also house the region’s lowest-income residents. The team overlaid a number of existing data sets to create a scale for policy makers, showing each area’s “composite vulnerability” and identifying spots where the response to sea-level rise should be fast-tracked.

BIG + ONE + Sherwood’s plan. Image courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group, One Architecture + Urbanism, and Sherwood Design Engineers.

And the Field Operations Team, led by James Corner Field Operations, takes an all-of-the-above approach to a whole host of interrelated problems—housing costs, transportation, shrinking wetlands—with a design scheme that emphasizes elements such as “edges” (i.e., better-designed waterfronts) and intertidal “sponges” for stormwater absorption.

Ultimately, the proposals reiterate one consistent message: The water that gives the Bay Area its name needs to be front and center in planning decisions going forward.

“Native American peoples knew how to live flexibly within the shore as a zone,” the Common Ground research report states. “[W]e will similarly need to alter our lives and create adaptations to become more comfortable with the dynamic bay.”

The All Bay Collective’s plan. Image courtesy the All Bay Collective.

BY ZACH MORTICE

The Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates plan uses a series of intensely programmed pavilions at the park’s urban edge. Image courtesy Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

At 22 acres on a prime Detroit River site southwest of downtown, the future West Riverfront Park could become the city’s new civic front yard.

A design competition hosted by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy has collected a short list of plans to fill this need, with work by GGN, James Corner Field Operations, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), and Hood Studio making the cut. The winner will be determined by jury later this month. Several of these plans deal with the site’s relative surrounding vacancy and lack of connection to active, urban uses by building up dense layers of programming, but differ on whether the park is to be a regional centerpiece or one notable amenity along the Detroit RiverWalk’s miles-long string of them.

West Riverfront Park is part of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s larger plan to rejuvenate 5.5 miles of the Detroit Riverfront. East of downtown Detroit, 3.5 miles of the RiverWalk is already complete, featuring entertainment and event spaces, sculpture gardens, cultural venues, parks, and hotels. At the confluence of downtown, Corktown, and Mexicantown, the West Riverfront Park sits near some of the city’s most dramatically resurgent (and stable) neighborhoods. But the park site has been largely barren for decades. Previously, a hulking warehouse for the Detroit Free Press dominated the site. It was privately owned and closed off to the public for about 100 years until the conservancy purchased it and installed a temporary park in 2014.

The conservancy’s president and CEO, Mark Wallace, says he wanted to activate the site as soon as possible, even though the design competition would eventually install a new scheme, because “we wanted to beta-test different uses.” So the conservancy, which has raised more than $163 million for riverfront public spaces, launched a series of programming initiatives to help gather ideas for what might work best in the park’s ultimate configuration. These included music festivals, movie nights, yoga, and bicycle gatherings. “It taught us about what the site wants to be, and it’s taught a lot of our future visitors where the site is and how to access it,” Wallace says. They learned that families in Detroit are especially hungry for high-quality public space, and that “this space can be a regional draw,” he says.

Community advisers at Gantry Plaza State Park in New York City. Photo by Stephen McGee.

Throughout this process, 21 “community advisers,” selected for their deep personal and professional networks, played a critical role. The conservancy used their expertise as Detroit neighbors to advise design teams on the types of spaces and programming they want the park to contain, and the conservancy bolstered their expertise by sending them to other cities to tour cutting-edge waterfront and park spaces. In New York, they visited Governors Island; in Chicago, the 606; and in Philadelphia, Spruce Street Harbor Park, among other sites in each city. Afterward, recent grads from the Detroit Public Schools had a chance to chat about what they learned with landscape architects such as Kathryn Gustafson, FASLA.

“When we started putting together a riverfront park, I realized how hard it was to dream without having seen what’s possible,” says Wallace. He says the community advisers are a way to ensure that Detroit residents drive the process and maintain a sense of ownership.

The James Corner Field Operations submission is composed of a series of spherical hills. Image courtesy James Corner Field Operations.

One community adviser, Khalil Ligon, is a native Detroiter who works as an urban planner with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. She traveled to Philadelphia, and was attracted to Bartram’s Garden, particularly  its sense of pastoral remove on the banks of the Schuylkill River. She says she wonders how patches of Detroit’s sparse and frayed urban fabric might be recast in a similar manner with a new park. Ligon would like West Riverfront Park to be “an educational opportunity [that] starts to pique curiosity of young people around science and nature, and give them an opportunity to have that feeling I got when I went to Bartram’s Garden.”

The most consistent advice the community advisers gave designers was that the new park should provide a wide range of programming and activities. Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, took those suggestions to heart. Meeting with the community advisers, he says, “was the beginning of my eventual falling in love with Detroit.” They have “a sense of confidence about their aspirations—for what they want the park to be.”

MVVA’s plan places a series of oblong pavilions that host lively, active programs along the edge of the park. “We wanted to have a very active urban edge on the city side,” says Van Valkenburgh. Building out the urban edge is a way to address the nearby vacant parcels by creating a range of attractions beyond simple green space, planning for a “park in a city that isn’t there yet,” he says.

These pavilions (designed by the architect David Adjaye) offer activities for kids through adolescents, and into adulthood. At the Pool House, Van Valkenburgh envisions swimming lessons for small children run in conjunction with local schools. “In doing that, you’re building the beginning of a generational bond to the park,” he says.

MVVA’s plan includes a fishing pier and beach. Image courtesy MVVA.

In addition to a three-acre playground, the park would also include a beach inlet, fronted by a long fishing pier that faces away from the beach. Topographically, Van Valkenburgh described the park as a series of low “dunelike” hills, except for a performance lawn that drops down by 15 feet and terminates at a floating stage.

Seedling Park is organized by a series of cursive paths, dotted with Jens Jensen-style council rings. Image courtesy Hood Studio.

Hood Studio’s plan also uses intensive programming along the park’s edge to help deal with the adjacent city’s scarcity. Dubbing his plan “Seedling Park,” Walter Hood, ASLA, Hood Studio’s creative director, has designed a horticultural center with three parts: the Seedling Tower, where high green walls will propagate plants; the Urban Lab, where the public will be invited to learn about and participate in this process; and a café.

Seedling Park’s café, adorned with green walls. Image courtesy Hood Studio.

The park and its horticultural center have an “emergent sort of feeling,” he says. “As the park manifests itself, the Urban Lab, and particularly the Seedling Tower, becomes a metaphorical expression of this larger horticultural process that takes place.”

James Corner Field Operations’s plan (developed with nArchitects and the Detroit Collaborative Design Center) offers a series of circular hills. These bring visitors to river overlooks and a long, axial pergola that runs along the park’s city side. Working with Arup and Guy Nordenson and Associates, GGN’s park contains a terraced earthen amphitheater bowl and a runway-like pedestrian path that cuts diagonally across the site, offering expansive views of the river.

GGN’s park contains a wide pedestrian path that cuts diagonally across the site. Image courtesy GGN.

So far, Ligon, the community adviser, has been pleased with what’s been on offer. She says seeing the teams’ designs made it “very obvious to me that they listened. Which is really atypical. People typically come into Detroit with their own ideas of what it should be. Everything I heard, I saw some reflection of in their plans.”

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

BY ZACH MORTICE

The Upstate Archipelago proposal. Image courtesy Cornell Design, H+N+S, and SOAR (Strengthening Our Area Residents) of the Cornell University Cooperative Extension.

New York’s Erie Canal once projected a young nation’s power and commercial ambitions across half a continent. Connecting New York City and the Hudson River north of Albany all the way to the Great Lakes, at 363 miles long, it was the second largest canal in the world when it opened in 1825, and one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of America’s early history. It reduced bulk commodity costs by 90 percent, according to some estimates, and it’s been immortalized in stories and songs ever since.

But in the 201 years since it began construction, the canal has been leapfrogged by nearly every manner of freight and commodity transit: rail, road, pipelines, and even the now-navigable St. Lawrence River. Vessel traffic on the canal peaked in the early 1950s, and recreational boating peaked in 1989.

To reverse this slide, the New York State Canal Corporation is hosting the Reimagine the Canals Competition to re-envision how this feat of 19th-century land engineering can be better integrated into the 21st century.

While the population of upstate New York has sagged in recent decades, recreational uses along the river (if not on it) have gone up. The competition seeks to expand this sort of access. Despite their diminished industrial significance, the canals are still a rich artery of settlement. Many of the communities along the canals (more than 200 in all) sprung up because of it, and 80 percent of the upstate New York population lives within 25 miles of them. A revived canal system would complement plans for the 400-mile Empire State Trail, which runs concurrently with several canals.

The goals of the competition are to develop tourist destinations and recreational assets, to encourage sustainable economic development, to respect the historic value of the canals, and to enhance the long-term financial stability of the canal system. Ideally, these plans would allow the canals to pay for their own maintenance and upkeep.

The canal corporation (under the aegis of the New York Power Authority, which has three hydropower plants on the Erie Canal) released a short list of seven plans last month, selected by a jury that included Mia Lehrer, FASLA, of Studio-MLA. Public input and the jury will choose two or more finalists in the fall, and each will get $250,000 to $1.5 million to be spent on planning or partial implementation. Beyond the Erie Canal, the competition is also considering the state’s three other major canals: the Champlain Canal that connects the Hudson to Lake Champlain on the Vermont border, the Cayuga-Seneca Canal that connects to New York’s Finger Lakes, and the Oswego Canal that joins the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario—524 miles in all.

These short-listed plans are divided into traditional design prescriptions and more ephemeral programming initiatives, and Steven Gosset, the media relations manager for the New York Power Authority, says these two tracks could be installed together to have a “complementary effect.”

The Canal Winterlocks project. Image courtesy CLUAA, John Ronan Architects, and Urban Engineers.

The most landscape-centric plans of the bunch include a proposal called Canal Winterlocks, by Chicago-based Clare Lyster Urbanism and Architecture and John Ronan Architects, with Urban Engineers of Philadelphia. They see the canals as wintertime playgrounds for ice skating, cross country skiing, and more. In her plan, Lyster, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says the canals already offer a multitude of activities in warmer months. “We thought that this would address a hole in the program calendar,” she says.

The Upstate Archipelago plan by the Cornell landscape architecture professors Jamie Vanucchi and Maria Goula, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and the Netherlands-based landscape architecture firm H+N+S softens the canal’s edges with vegetation. It would add lush wetlands for outdoor recreation: canoeing, hiking, and bike trails. There’s no specific site for this plan either, and Frank Talsma, a project leader at H+N+S, describes it as a “toolbox” approach to be applied at a handful of potential pilot sites.

There was no aquatic ecology here 250 years ago; a new wetland would be as engineered as the canal itself.  “It’s an artificial system, so there’s no use in looking backward and trying to restore anything,” Talsma says. “It’s about [enlarging] the water system so there’s more capacity in it to hold the water.” Beyond offering an attractive recreational environment, such a plan would offer more biofiltration and stormwater capacity than the current hardscape. Though removing the hardscape entirely wouldn’t be good for the ecosystem, either. “If you remove the borders, there might be a risk that you could lose the water and drain the canal,” he says.

The wetlands might just be an additive layer that could still allow for new formal possibilities. Because it’s an artificial construction, Talsma says, he believes his team can take more geometric liberties with the shapes of the canal. These wetlands could re-create the meander of nature, install ornate curlicues, or, he says, embrace the sharp lines and self-consciously human-made angles of a rectilinear “water machine.”

 Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

An American garden at the Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire garden festival is a landscape of endless possibility.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

When Phoebe Lickwar, ASLA,  and Matt Donham arrived in a small town in central France this past March, everyone knew who they were. The designers, principals at FORGE Landscape Architecture and RAFT Landscape Architecture, respectively, were one of some 24 teams (and the only Americans) competing in this year’s Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival. And as they walked around, Donham remembers, “every person was like, ‘Ohhhh, the Americans with the 400 trees.’ Even the guy who took our tickets in the chateau was like, ‘Oh, you’re the ones with the 400 trees.’”

The festival’s theme was “Garden of Thoughts,” and Lickwar’s and Donham’s concept, Dans les Bois or Into the Woods, was based loosely on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which presents a labyrinthine garden as a metaphor for time, choice, and infinite possibilities. Their plan called for two intersecting systems of walkways: the first, a circuitous and ultimately circular series of gravel paths, the second, a skewed grid of wooden gangways, each as narrow as a gymnast’s balance beam. Both would be obscured by a dense screen of vegetation, created by more than 400 trees.

Young whips were planted close together to create an instantaneous woodland experience. Image courtesy Eric Sander.

“We wanted to create this experience that we were reading within the story, of not moving on a straight path, making choices along the way,” Lickwar says.

“You can’t ever know where you are completely,” Donham adds.

“Or what the consequences are going to be,” Lickwar says.

“You make all these choices with partial information, which is kind of the experience of life,” Donham says.

And yet it was the number of trees that flabbergasted the festival’s organizers, especially given the garden’s size: a mere 1,750 square feet. Some tried to persuade the team to use fewer and larger trees. “But the entire idea hinged upon creating this density of plant material to create the effect of moving through a labyrinth,” Lickwar says.

More important than how many were the types of trees selected. Lickwar and Donham specified whips, specifically young specimens of cultivars such as hybrid poplar (Populus trichocarpa x P. deltoides), which are bred to grow quickly for uses such as biofuel. Their use was a reference to the passage of time. “The idea of trees that are kind of superpowered and [growing] faster than a person would think, there’s a shift in perspective that might come through that,” Donham says.

The team, which also included Hannah Moll, Associate ASLA; Andersen Woof; Daphne Edwards; Jenny Sasson, ASLA; Charles Myers; and Raafi Rivero, had five days to construct the garden (a timeline imposed by the team’s budget). Despite unforeseen challenges—a week of rain soaked the wooden beams, which then took days to properly char—the garden, which will be on view through November 4, 2018, was completed on time. It went on to receive the festival’s Prize for Creation, one of four awards given out.

For Lickwar, the experience aligns with her continued exploration of ecology, productivity, and culture. For Donham, it’s a reminder that minimalism can be whimsical. “This garden conforms to my notion of minimalism in all ways except it’s super fun, too. It’s not dead.”

Image courtesy Forge/Raft.

But the most memorable day for both designers remains the day the 400 trees arrived. Because they hadn’t been able to tag them, and also because of the fuss that was made early on, they were nervous the whips would be too bare, too spindly to create the desired effect. “We were kind of on pins and needles,” Lickwar says. When they arrived, however, the trees were “better than we had anticipated,” she says. “They were taller, they were more well-branched. The willows had these burgundy trunks, the sycamore maples were green. They were perfect.” More important, the team’s enthusiasm had caught on. “Everyone was so excited,” Lickwar says. “All the people working at the domaine came out to help.”

Timothy A. Schuler, editor of Now, can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com and on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Thrainn Hauksson.

From “A Greater Crater” in the November 2018 issue by Bradford McKee, about Landslag’s Saxhóll Crater Stair in Iceland (winner of the 2018 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize), which provides access to a jaw-dropping volcano vista while still protecting a delicate alpine ecosystem.

“Crater climb.”

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A lei by PBR HAWAII references the island’s dark colonial past. Courtesy PBR HAWAII.

As the receptionist for the Honolulu office of Belt Collins, Dawn Higa is not typically involved in design discussions. Her tasks, while vital to the day-to-day operations of the global design firm, tend toward the administrative: answering phones, directing calls, taking messages. It’s a job Higa’s held since 1987, when as a single mother she was placed at the company, which today has offices in multiple countries, including China, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, by a temp agency. “I don’t think I even knew what an engineer did for the first year,” Higa says.

But once every two years, Higa becomes an integral part of the team competing in Honolulu’s biennial RE-LEI competition, in which individuals and teams craft traditional Hawaiian lei—a garland typically made out of flowers, ferns, leaves, or nuts—out of 100 percent postconsumer waste. Registration for this year’s competition, which is open to anyone, not just those living in Hawaii, closes Saturday, March 23, 2019. The cost is $75 for individuals and $250 for teams, with discounted rates for students. RE-LEI was first organized by a group of landscape architects and planners in 2015; its proceeds support landscape architecture education and the recently created MLA program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM).

RE-LEI’s aim is to educate the public about environmental issues and how landscape architecture can help solve them while also celebrating a unique aspect of Hawaii’s material culture. Long a part of Native Hawaiian culture, lei remain a part of daily life in Hawaii, given out on birthdays and graduations and worn in hula performances. Rather than May Day, since 1928 on May 1 Hawaii has celebrated Lei Day, a celebration of Hawaiian song and dance and lei making. Most often, lei are a symbol of hospitality and friendship, though they can also hold much deeper significance for those versed in traditional Hawaiian practices.

A lei made from bits of a T-shirt. Courtesy Mayumi Dao/Thai & Lu.

The idea to make lei out of discarded materials emerged from conversations between Brad Tanimura, ASLA, a landscape architect at Belt Collins, and Dawn Easterday, ASLA, then with Belt Collins and now the principal of Easterday Design. They knew that the student chapter of the American Institute of Architects at UHM held an annual sandcastle competition to raise money for chapter activities. Tanimura and Easterday thought a similar event could benefit the nascent landscape architecture program.

The rules of RE-LEI are simple: All materials must be postconsumer waste, with the exception of string or wire and paints and dyes used to alter the discarded material. There are no restrictions on the type of lei an individual can submit—some lei are worn around the neck, others on the head or around the wrists or ankles—but preference is given to entries that can be worn.

Beach plastic, recycled into a lei. Courtesy Jonathan Stanich, Student ASLA/Thai & Lu.

Entries are submitted in one of seven material categories (for example, “plastics” or “electronic or composite”) and are then evaluated by a jury of design and conservation professionals on the basis of artistry, innovation, execution, fulfillment of the theme, and creative reuse of materials. Prizes are given out in each category, and winning lei are displayed at the Honolulu Museum of Art the last weekend in April and at Honolulu Hale (city hall) for the city’s Lei Day celebration. Prizes are generally donated by local businesses so that the majority of the competition’s entrance fees can be put toward RE-LEI’s mission of landscape architecture education.

RE-LEI is perhaps most notable for the way it draws attention to both indigenous practices and the pernicious problem of waste. For Easterday, the value of the competition lies in its ability to shift a person’s perspective, to illuminate the hidden value of what they thought was rubbish, or to at least make visible just how much rubbish they produce. “I was always taught, from way back in school, that we are stewards of the land,” she says. “And that’s always been part of landscape architecture for me.”

This lei is made from packaging plastic. Courtesy Ashley Kawabara/Thai & Lu.

For some, the competition is an opportunity not only to challenge themselves as designers, but also to educate the public about Hawaii’s complex history. The 2017 winner in the paper/plastic category, for instance, was a combination of maile and crown flower lei all made out of recycled Hawaiian language newsprint. It was created by PBR HAWAII, a Honolulu-based planning and landscape architecture firm, in honor of the centennial of the death of Queen Liliuokalani, who during the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in the late 19th century had news smuggled into her chambers via flower bouquets wrapped in newsprint. To make the crown flower lei, the team cut, folded, and colored the newsprint to resemble Calotropis gigantea blossoms—the queen’s favorite flower.

Grace Zheng, ASLA, a landscape architect with PBR HAWAII, says her team’s entry was “a celebration and an appreciation” of Queen Liliuokalani, while also “recognizing what had happened to her, and in a symbolic way, calling attention to that, choosing not to glaze over Hawaii’s history.” Zheng adds that the concept came from the firm’s administrative department: It was Paula Okamoto, an administrative assistant who is part Native Hawaiian, who suggested that the team use Queen Liliuokalani as their inspiration. “Our admins are very involved in this because it allows them to be creative beyond their administrative work,” Zheng says. “So it’s a way to bond with our administrative staff as well.”

Tire rubber, recycled into a decorative lei. Courtesy Thai & Lu.

In past years, entries have come from outside the islands, and Easterday stresses that participants don’t need to be trained in traditional lei making to enter. A YouTube video or two can be a good start. But even those who don’t enter can participate in the competition. For the week of April 22–28, the public is encouraged to vote for a People’s Choice award via Instagram (@relei808) as a part of Earth Day celebrations and Landscape Architecture Month. May the best lei win.

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the natural environment. He lives in Honolulu.

BY JONATHAN LERNER

Solitary moments with nature as a response to urban loneliness.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

As one might expect, the winners of Bubble Design Competitions’ Eliminate Loneliness challenge mostly offered ways to bring people together. Second prize went to a concept for umbrellas that hook together. A high-angle view shows a cluster of about 20; under this bumpy canopy only people’s bodies are visible, not their heads, but perhaps murmured conversations are starting (or even flirtations). The third prize winner proposed a building game. Giant shapes of recycled plastic would be piled in public places for passersby to assemble into structures, necessarily interacting as they do. (“What happens later inside made objects is up to the people,” its designers note, possibly winking.)

First prize went somewhere else altogether. The brainchild of Gandong Cai, Associate ASLA, and Mingjie Cai, Student ASLA, landscape designers at Sasaki and Stimson respectively, it imagines “spiritual infrastructure” for crowded central Tokyo. It’s not about togetherness, and it won’t get anybody a date. Recognizing the distinction between being lonely and being alone, it suggests repurposing marginal spaces where individuals can go, solo, and be touched by nature. They’re called “urban tree holes.” One would place a seat in an empty storefront’s window so that someone could sit and “start a silent conversation” with an adjacent street tree. The accompanying two ideas use the label “urban tree hole” metaphorically. One would line the gangway between skyscrapers with tilted mirrors reflecting the sky. Another, below grade, would collect runoff into a contemplative water feature.

Where loneliness in the crowd is pervasive, the designers propose “spiritual infrastructure for the city.” Image courtesy Gandong Cai, Associate ASLA, and Mingjie Cai, Student ASLA.

It is possible that the designers’ penchant for solitude in response to loneliness is a culturally determined sensibility. In East Asia, “We are shy,” says Gandong Cai. Life in cities such as Tokyo is intense, he says, and people have plenty of collective experience. “You want to do something that nobody will know.” Perhaps for people of any origin, as an antidote to loneliness and a strategy for depathologizing it, privacy may be as effective as company. “If we feel lonely, do we really want to talk to somebody? I think that’s kind of stressful. People might think you’re not doing well,” he says. “I don’t want to be a problem; I just want to be with myself for a few minutes. That’s why we tried to shift the idea from helping people to get together to helping people enjoy themselves without feeling guilty.”

Jonathan Lerner writes often on design and environmental issues.

BY JARED BREY

As the pandemic slows projects, Philadelphia has a chance to rethink a difficult public space.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Most of Philadelphia was still asleep when city workers pulled the nine-foot-high statue of Frank Rizzo off the concrete steps of the Municipal Services Building across from City Hall, loaded it into a truck, and carted it off to an undisclosed storage locker. It was early June, and by then, the Rizzo statue, which depicted in monumental proportions the racist former mayor and bully cop, had been a target of protesters for years. They had tugged on it with ropes and chains, tried to set it on fire, yarn-bombed it with a pink bikini, and covered it in a white Ku Klux Klan hood. In late May it became a focal point of protests again. Long lines of police began standing guard in front of the statue daily. Officially, they were guarding the Municipal Services Building, but as the police presence grew, it began to seem like they were there to protect the statue or the very legacy of Rizzo himself.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney had previously said the statue would be removed as part of an eventual redesign of Thomas Paine Plaza, the elevated public podium that surrounds the Municipal Services Building. But in a statement that day, explaining the sudden overnight removal of the statue, he acknowledged that tying its removal to the long-term plans for a plaza makeover, rather than the immediate and repeated demands of protesters, was “a mistake.”

“The statue is a deplorable monument to racism, bigotry, and police brutality for members of the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and many others,” Kenney said.

Still, for days after the statue was removed, police officers and military service members remained stationed at Paine Plaza as if they were occupying a hill, looking down on the surrounding sidewalks from the high corners of its concrete walls. Pennsylvania National Guardsmen holding rifles and dressed in fatigues blocked access from the street. “Why are the cops being paid to watch this?” someone wrote in chalk on the west wall. Long after the military left town and the police force on site dwindled—up until the time this story went to print—loose security fencing remained around the entire perimeter of the plaza, vaguely suggesting that passersby shouldn’t enter the space, even as city workers and skateboarders nonchalantly passed through the gaps in the fencing. With the provocation of the Rizzo statue gone, Thomas Paine Plaza was exposed: an overbuilt space with no apparent purpose, overpoliced for no discernible reason. What was it supposed to be?

The plaza forms the podium of the Municipal Services Building and hosts public art such as Jacques Lipchitz’s Government of the People, installed in 1976. Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

The plaza is one of three prominent public spaces surrounding City Hall in the heart of Philadelphia, just across the street from Dilworth Park to the south and LOVE Park to the west. All three spaces were designed by the Philadelphia architect Vincent Kling and built during an era of overheated civic ambition, starting with Paine Plaza and the Municipal Services Building in 1962 and ending with Dilworth Park (originally Dilworth Plaza) in 1972, the same year that Rizzo took office. For good or ill, the adjacent plazas, each occupying a city block or more, helped to establish a built identity for midcentury Philadelphia. But as the 1960s ended and Philadelphia began rapidly shedding population, its ambitions changed, too. Over time, the triangle of plazas—nearly all hardscape, devoid of greenery, full of weird grade changes and obstructed sight lines—began to feel like the vestige of an era of erroneous ideas.

When Philadelphia’s population began ever so meagerly to rebound around 2006, its leaders started to look again at its central plazas as an opportunity to redefine the type of city it was meant to be. The makeover of Dilworth Park was a signature gesture, opening up a formerly sunken plaza into “a more usable, sustainable, and equitable public space,” in the words of the 2020 ASLA Awards Jury. (The project won the Award of Excellence in Urban Design.) A similarly reimagined LOVE Park, designed by Hargreaves Jones, opened in 2018 to high praise from officials—“a masterpiece that embodies the Philly spirit,” Mayor Kenney said at the time—but harsher-than-usual critiques from the public.

OLIN reimagined Paine Plaza, one of three civic squares surrounding City Hall. Image courtesy OLIN.

Paine Plaza was supposed to be next. The city issued a request for qualifications in 2018, followed by a request for proposals to a short list of applicants early the following year, including Andropogon Associates, James Corner Field Operations, DAVID RUBIN Land Collective, Mikyoung Kim Design, OLIN, and Sasaki. (“They interviewed everybody. It was like Grand Central Station,” says Lucinda Sanders, FASLA, the CEO and a partner at OLIN, which is based in Philadelphia.) The initial timeline had work scheduled to begin as early as January 2020, but progress stalled after a mandatory meeting for applicants in the spring of 2019. Over the summer a city spokesperson told me that, because of pandemic-related budget cuts, “funding for design for Paine Plaza will not be available this year, and no designer is being selected at present.” So now, the center of Philadelphia appears to be suspended between two half-formed visions, like slides jammed in a projector.

An early proposal by OLIN sought to soften the hard edges of the square and reconnect it to the street. Image courtesy OLIN.

Paine Plaza is built on top of occupied office space in the Municipal Services Building, where Philadelphians occasionally go to get city-issued licenses and permits and pay utility bills. Portions of its 88,000 square feet lie underneath the building’s overhang, and one sunken section is dedicated to the Hub of Hope, where people experiencing homelessness can find showers and laundry facilities and access supportive-housing services. It’s home to several iconic pieces of public art—a bronze pile of gnarled human bodies called Government of the People, installed in 1976, and Your Move, a series of oversized board game pieces including chess, Parcheesi, and Sorry! added to the plaza in 1996. From the street, the whole thing is nearly impossible to see, surrounded by a granite wall that’s six feet high at its shortest point and an imposing 16 feet at its highest, towering over the sidewalks in the northwest corner.

Over the years, celebrations and demonstrations have made use of all three plazas in various ways. An Occupy Philadelphia encampment took over Dilworth Plaza for several weeks in the fall of 2011, only to be evicted by the city when the redesign was scheduled to begin. The private management of the space since then by the Center City District, a business improvement district, has been a perennial controversy. When the Center City District announced last year that it was opening a Starbucks on the south side of the plaza, it struck many people as a conspicuous symbol of the park’s creeping privatization. Protesters set the Starbucks on fire late in the spring as protests against the killing of George Floyd filled Center City, notably leaving a small café on the other side of the plaza and a local coffee shop across the street undamaged. LOVE Park serves as a regular meeting place for demonstrations and marches, too.

An as-built sketch by Mikyoung Kim Design shows the Frank Rizzo statue in place. Image courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design.

Officials have been wanting to make improvements to Paine Plaza for years—a 2013 planning document for Center City notes that the site “does not function as a desirable public destination”—even as they acknowledge that it should be a place that welcomes protests and demonstrations. In the RFP issued last year, the city said that the redesign “should provide unique opportunities for civic engagement and understand the need for public demonstrations and events,” while strengthening Paine Plaza’s relationship to LOVE Park, Dilworth Park, public transit, and the street. In another document responding to applicants’ questions, the city noted that the plaza is “a location for politically charged assembly.” City representatives declined to elaborate on a new vision for the space, saying that it was meant to be developed through a community engagement process after a designer was selected.

“[Paine Plaza] had a blankness to it—it’s really like a platform,” says Bryan Chou, ASLA, an associate principal at Mikyoung Kim Design, who attended the meeting about the redesign last year. “It was never developed as a place for tourists or for ingrained programming, so it really was for the people of Philadelphia.”

The firm’s proposal envisioned pedestrian connections and plantings. Image courtesy Mikyoung Kim Design.

Now, with destructive budget cuts on the horizon, the city is finding the limits of its ability to use public space redesigns as a way of projecting a fresh image. And it’s pursuing shorter-term interventions. In August, the mayor stood in front of a row of news cameras, a few paces behind the space where the Rizzo statue used to be, to dedicate a new mural placed across the entrance of the Municipal Services Building.

“This place, this spot, has been a really difficult place for a long time,” Kenney said. “And the remnants of what was here [are] gone, and the remnants of what is being born [are] right behind me.”

The work, called Crown, is a reworking of Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, and it features photographs of protesters from Black Lives Matter demonstrations arrayed in a crown shape behind the seal of the city. The artist is Russell Craig, a former inmate at Graterford Prison, who started working with Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program while he was incarcerated. At the dedication, Craig said that a series of portraits he had worked on for a previous installment at the same space had included brick walls as backdrops, in a reference to Rizzo’s brutality as police chief and a famous photograph of a group of Philadelphia Black Panthers stripped naked and handcuffed against a brick wall that ran in the local news in 1970.

Craig later told me that his early ideas for the new piece were more politically explicit, depicting cops in riot gear poised over top of prostrate protesters. At the request of the Mural Arts program, he says, he reluctantly toned it down. But he was still happy to see Rizzo removed and Crown installed, even if he won’t put too much faith in progress until “they take down Mount Rushmore.”

“That’s a space for the people,” Craig said of Paine Plaza. “[Rizzo] is for one type of people that want to oppress others. So it was overdue—long overdue. It was a small step, but it was a good step. So we’ll celebrate the little win.”

Demonstrators have periodically occupied Paine Plaza, as seen here in 2017, and the city maintains that the square is “a location for politically charged assembly.” Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

Jared Brey is a freelance reporter in Philadelphia.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

In Colorado, outdoor dining concepts are grounded in pragmatism—and the latest public health research.

FROM THE FEBRUARY 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Cities around the country have held design competitions over the past several months, inviting ideas from designers and planners for how to “winterize” outdoor dining. Many of the resulting concepts, however, have been criticized for being impractical or too expensive, partially because of the vacuum created by the typical competition process, in which design teams receive a brief and proceed with limited feedback.

A program run by the state of Colorado in partnership with the Colorado Restaurant Association and the Colorado Restaurant Foundation offers an alternative model. Launched in October, the program has two components. The first is a $1.8 million pot made up of public and private funds that is available to locally owned restaurants (corporate-owned chains are not eligible). The second is a series of design concepts developed for specific spatial conditions, such as sidewalks, parking stalls, closed streets, and rooftops. Where the Colorado initiative diverges from a design competition is in its collaborative and interdisciplinary nature. Each concept was developed during a one-day charrette by a team of landscape architects, architects, and engineers, as well as public health experts, restaurateurs, general contractors, product suppliers, and government officials, all of whom were grouped and assigned one of nine pre-identified conditions by the event organizers.

Teams were tasked with providing warmth and comfort without creating enclosures. Image courtesy Colorado Restaurant Association.

“They did a really good job of making sure that each team had a diverse transect of professionals,” says Kimberly Case, ASLA, a landscape designer at Design Workshop, whose “PARK[AS]” concept involves a modular system of ventilated, hip-roofed pods built out of structural insulated panels.

Tom Klein, ASLA, another landscape designer at Design Workshop who worked on the PARK[AS] concept, says the daylong event differed from other outdoor dining charrettes.

Rooftop C-shaped pods are heated by radiant heating pads and are designed to shed snow and provide ventilation. Image courtesy Colorado Restaurant Association.

Klein joined Design Workshop in August 2020, relocating to Denver from New York City. In New York, Klein had participated in three different charrettes, including one in Washington Heights that was led by the local business improvement district. The absence of city officials meant that the team had to “make a lot of speculative decisions,” Klein says, “and I think that impacted the ability of it to be rapidly deployable. This process was much more holistic in that, in real time, you could get feedback from folks who are in decision-making roles in their municipalities.”

“The District” is a streetscape dining plan that places tented dining pavilions made of wood and polycarbonate sheets along a pedestrian-scaled block. Image courtesy Colorado Restaurant Association.

That feedback led to a variety of less-conventional strategies, including a recommendation by the team focused on rooftop dining to sell branded blankets, sweaters, and beanies to generate additional revenue. Megan Jones Shiotani, ASLA, an associate at Wenk Associates and a member of the rooftop team, says that in addition to the team’s C-shaped pods, which would shed snow while still providing ventilation, they also developed a list of basic strategies for restaurant owners—blocking the wind, for instance, or using materials like wood instead of metal. “It’s much less sexy than architectural igloos, but realistically I think it was a little bit more attainable,” she says.

Providing amenities for outdoor winter recreation is something that many cities were considering prior to the pandemic, and as with the rise of remote work, the pandemic could accelerate the trend. As early as September, faced with the onset of fall and winter amid rising case counts, American media seized on the Norwegian concept of friluftsliv, which roughly translated means “open-air living” and refers to an all-seasons approach to the outdoors. It’s a shift Jones Shiotani says designers can help encourage. “There’s more that we can do in public spaces to celebrate the winter experience,” she says, “especially in cities.”

Designed for Colorado’s ski resorts, the PARK[AS] concept prioritizes ventilation thanks to feedback from public health officials. Image courtesy Colorado Restaurant Association.