Ken Smith, ASLA, a premier landscape architect, discusses his recent, award-winning work on the Orange County Great Park and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) roof garden in New York City. Smith also discusses the value of green infrastructure, the crucial role of inter-disciplinary design teams in making green infrastructure projects work, and the future of sustainable design.
On the massive, 1,300-acre Orange Country Great Park, Smith says it was easier for him to work on such a large scale, but project management has proved challenging. “I think it’s kind of easier to come up with the concepts and the design for something that big. But the principle challenge is actually keeping the project on track and figuring out how you start to deal with the political and financial issues in terms of orchestrating the construction and implementation. There are things that I would have liked to have seen much earlier in the implementation, things that are not possible because of regulatory issues. Figuring out how you actually orchestrate the park and get it implemented has turned out to be the biggest challenge.”
The Great Park will also include a reconstructed habitat park, which will provide an “ecological backbone” for the broader park. Smith is working with an ecologist on “reconstructing nature” in this area, and learned that invasives are a huge issue in habitation restoration. “Revegetation strategies are really developed by the ecologist, Steven Handel. He’s developed a series of interesting techniques that range from seeding acorns to planting small saplings. From what I’ve learned from him, weed control and weed abatement are actually the big issues in terms of native habitat restoration. The invasives can be a big problem. How you prepare the soil and control the invasives through the process are probably the biggest challenges.”
At a very different scale in an urban setting, the MoMA roof garden provides visual stimulation for office workers looking down on the Yoshio Taniguchi-redesigned MoMA building. Smith was inspired by camouflage (and studied its history for the project), as well as Japanese gardens. “From Japanese gardens, I think it’s really not so much the classic rock garden as the gardens like the Golden Temple. That garden has these little islands with little pine trees that are kind of bonsai-ed. The trees on the island are smaller than in nature. They’re in this lake and the lake is not very big. But when you view those islands and those somewhat miniaturized trees against the real landscape behind, it makes the whole composition of the garden seem bigger because you’re reading as full size and they’re not. There’s a kind of scale distortion I find to be really interesting. The little rocks and little shrubs at MoMA are really playing that kind of game of scale distortion more so than the kind of superficial rocks and gravel kind of a stereotypical Japanese garden.”
Inspired by the materials used by artist Brian Tolle, Smith investigated the use of styrofoam for the MoMA roof garden. Using innovative material manufacturing techniques, Smith also cut down the cost of roof materials. “I was working with an artist, Brian Tolle. Brian had been doing these interesting sculptures. He did this one called the Witch Catcher, which was this kind of twisted fireplace thing in City Hall Park in New York City, which I thought was fabulous. And I was asking him about it. And he said, “Well, it’s not brick at all. It’s made out of Styrofoam.” He, in fact, makes most of his stuff out of Styrofoam and it’s milled in factories based on a computer model. And then it’s treated with this kind of polycoat and painted. I also learned that this is the same process used in historic preservation, a lot of building preservation. The material used to replace the cornices for historic buildings or other kind of architectural detail is actually made out of this milled foam. It occurred to me that the milled foam would be a way that I could get the control I wanted on those shapes. It was lightweight. It was contemporary. It was a lot cheaper. So, that’s how that material shift happened.”
The concept of green infrastructure is going mainstream. More and more policymakers understand the need for infrastructure to serve multiple purposes at once. To ensure infrastructure is sustainably designed, Smith thinks design teams must be interdisciplinary. “I think the policymakers are probably onboard. I mean my urban clients are all for these things. They may not know exactly how to do it. If the problem in the past was having a single profession make a single-purpose infrastructure, then I think the solution in the future is really a multidisciplinary team of people who bring multiple interests and multiple functions to that infrastructure. I think we’re starting to see that more and more — it’s engineers, architects, landscape architects, and ecologists working together on a piece of infrastructure. That’s how you bring the green to the infrastructure and sort of incorporate it into the infrastructure.”
Lastly, when asked what form sustainable design will take in the future and whether biomimetic buildings will take off, Smith responded: “I think they already are. They may not be as sophisticated now as it will be. But all of design is really biomimicry, right? I mean a shoe or a glove is biomimicry. Clothing is biomimicry in terms of moving and breathing. I think we’ll soon get to a much more sophisticated understanding of the biological function of structures and how they operate. Computer modeling allows us to do things that are way more sophisticated than before, and can give us metrics on how something performs efficiently and effectively.”
Image credit: MoMA Roof Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. Ken Smith Landscape Architecture
