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Kongjian Yu: China’s Olmsted

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management, Wildlife on 01/29/2013 | 2 Comments »

Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, a new book on the ideas and work of Kongjian Yu, FASLA, put together by former Harvard Design Magazine editor William Saunders really enriches our understanding of a landscape architect many consider to be China’s Frederick Law Olmsted. Unlike some other design monographs, there’s a lot to read and understand here because Yu’s life has been so rich and his journey so interesting. Nestled among 21 case studies of projects by Yu and his firm Turenscape across China and the U.S. are a set of essays by leading Western landscape architecture practitioners and thinkers like Peter Walker, FASLA; Professor Frederick Steiner, FASLA, at University of Texas, Austin; Professor Kristina Hill, Affiliate ASLA, PhD, at the University of Berkeley; Harvard University landscape architecture department chair Charles Waldheim, Affiliate ASLA; and Dumbarton Oaks’ John Beardsley, who each examine an aspect of this world-changing designer and place Yu’s work and ideas in global contexts.

The most personal (and perhaps finest) article in the book is by Saunders himself. He interviews Yu, tracking his path from life in a small village to university in China to Harvard Graduate School of Design (where he did his PhD) to teaching and starting his own firm, which now has more than 600 employees. It’s an amazing story that Saunders relays beautifully. Yu was born in 1963, “growing up communally raising crops and livestock.” As a boy, Saunders writes, Yu saw his parents stripped of their dignity and possessions during the Great Cultural Revolution, which Mao Ze Dong unleashed on China in an effort to upend the traditional patterns in Chinese society and instill collectivism. Yu parents had been a “well-off, land-owning” family — exactly the kind of family Mao targeted. Saunders says seeing his family undone gave Yu a powerful ambition.

Coupled with this ambition was a deep love of nature. Within the poverty of rural China, there was also natural splendor. Yu grew up in a kind of Arcadia, with a “an enchanting forest and a fish-filled creek.” He spent his time away from his farming duties exploring nature. Over the years, he saw the forest cut down and the river totally polluted. “This explains the depth of his commitment to recreating and protecting natural abundance.” In fact, Yu is now one of the most potent advocates for the environment in China. Like Olmsted, he’s also a prolific writer, creating books aimed at convincing both policymakers and the public about the dangers of environmental degradation.

Yu beat incredible odds just to make it to high school. He had to overcome the political stigma associated with his family. Riding a water buffalo, tending his duties in the fields, Yu studied hard and passed the national entrance exam to get into high school. Then, he had to walk 6 miles to get to his high school and then back, each week. Yu moved from the bottom of the class to the top, eventually beating out 600 of his class mates to become the only one in his district to get into university. In comparison, getting into Harvard years later must have been a walk in the park.

At university in Beijing, Yu was a “country bumpkin,” but he quickly got over the shock and buckled down, learning how to speak and draw for the design courses he wanted to take. He ended up studying forestry and then completing a master’s degree in landscape architecture. With great English language skills, which opened many doors for him, he became a translator for a series of speeches by Carl Steinitz at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). In 1992, he began the PhD program there. He once again felt like a bumpkin, having never interacted with computers. He became a GIS master. Upon graduation, he worked at SWA Group for two years in California before returning to China in 1997, where “his confidence and sense of personal mission emerged full blown.” Seeing how China was destroying its environment with its rapid urbanization, Yu started a firm and won his first design competition in 1999. More than ten years later, he has an amazing body of work, winning ASLA professional design awards year after year. He is now among the top tier of landscape architects in the world.

Yu’s work is based in a deep-rooted philosophy about nature and society. His essay, “The Big Foot Revolution,” explains how ornamental gardens are about as useful as binding a woman’s feet. These ornamental approaches were created by an urban elite that saw sophistication in a lack of functionality, in rebelling against nature’s “inherent goals of health, survival, and productivity.” Yu instead offers a new landscape aesthetic based in incorporating the rural, the messy, the functional landscape into the urban realm. Yu says he’s not opposed to beautiful art that doesn’t really have a productive function — like art, dance, or music — but “that in our resource-depleted and ecologically damaged and threatened era, the built environment must and will adapt a new aesthetic grounded in the appreciation of the beauty of productive, ecologically-supporting, survival-enhancing things.” This is revolutionary landscape architecture, rooted in part in Communist ideas about elevating practicality and productivity for the common good, even though, in practice, the Communists themselves were the ones who have wrecked havoc on nature (see the current state of nature in China, Russia, the former Soviet Union states, and North Korea).

The rural, peasant aesthetic is now center stage. “We need a new aesthetics of big feet — beautiful big feet.” Productive rural landscapes (like those productive big feet) are what’s needed to fight today’s problems. There are ecological reasons for doing this, too. Those old-school rural landscapes, while productive, are highly in tune with nature and reflect a farmer’s sense of balance with the environment.

Yu sees the extent of China’s massive urbanization as a form of excess, with all those big gaudy new buildings in Beijing as “meaninglessly wild forms with exotic grandeur.” China and the rest of the planet can’t afford things like these while “anthropogenic climate change” brings “additional floods, storms, droughts, and diseases, along with the extinction of many plant and animal species and other threats to survival.” Yu then translates this ethos into an ambitious, ecologically-minded program for remaking the whole of China, and guiding cities still in the wilds of explosive and often destructive development. This is because “the Chinese urban landscape must not repeat the mistakes of past European and American methods of city beautification.” Beautification for beautification’s sake alone is a crime in today’s world, with all our problems.

In other places, Yu remakes what is past its prime, degraded into new landscapes. This may involve remaking degraded environments into new ecologically-sound ones, but also making them publicly accessible so that people benefit, too. Yu was also one of the first in China to see the beauty in modern Chinese ruins — remaking a shipyard park built by the Communists into a park, creating an urban haven out of the revolution’s past.

His other projects certainly weave in aspects of Chinese culture, creating contemporary works that also feel classic, timeless.

The fine contributions by the Western practitioners and thinkers add another interesting layer to the book. Most zoom in on a few projects; others offer multifaceted critiques of Yu’s ideas and work. They all show how Yu was also inspired by ideas he found in the West, and how his work can be appreciated in a global context. Peter Walker writes that Yu “frequently integrates sculptural references in ways reminiscent of Andre Le Notre’s huge Baroque seventeenth century gardens, which were also based in agricultural images.” John Beardsley notes that “Yu’s approach might be challenging in any context. But in the West, there is a precedent for his messy aesthetics in the tradition of the wild garden, which date back to at least William Robinson. Moreover, there are contemporary designers with whom he shares some notions of nurtured wildness.” Frederick Steiner explains Yu’s equally important role as an educator in China, how his research to “identify nationwide ecological patterns with GIS technology” is rooted in work by Ian McHarg and other Americans in the 1990s to create a “prototype database for a US national ecological inventory,” which was based on an earlier effort by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) in the 1970s. Kristina Hill, a fellow PhD student with Yu at Harvard GSD, delves into how landscape planner Carl Steinitz’s approach to spatial analysis also influenced Yu. “In Yu’s plans for metropolitan Beijing’s ecological infrastructure, several patterns emerge directly from Yu’s exposure to the ideas of Steinitz and [landscape ecologist Richard] Forman.” Other essays by Kelly Shannon, Peter Rowe, and Antje Stokman also examine his approaches to urban ecological design.

It’s Hill in the end who also writes that “Yu’s practice model and ideas have a historical analog in the exemplary writings and practices of Frederick Law Olmsted.” And as Charles Waldheim writes in the afterword, Yu takes on the mantle of publicly promoting a sophisticated approach to landscape planning at not a moment too soon: “The first generation of Chinese professionals trained in landscape ecology and planning in the United States now embody the greatest hope for the renewed relevance of of a tradition of planning that has all but been eclipsed in the United States.”

Read the book.

Image credits: Birkhauser Press

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Rural Communities Need Design Help, Too

Posted in Opportunities, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Smart Growth on 01/16/2013 | 1 Comment »

The new Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Project for Public Spaces, and other organizations, is looking for proposals from rural communities who need design help. According to the group, successful applications will receive a $7,000 grant and technical assistance valued at $35,000.

CIRD, which used to be called “Your Town,” helps rural communities with fewer than 50,000 people. Through facilitated design workshops, CIRD aims to “enhance the quality of life and economic vitality” of these places. The intensive two-day workshops bring together “local leaders, non-profits, and community organizations with a team of specialists in design, planning, and creative placemaking to address challenges like strengthening economies, enhancing rural character, leveraging cultural assets, and designing efficient housing and transportation systems.”

Since the program began in 1991, more than 60 workshops have been held across the U.S., resulting in a range of new projects like new public art and business improvement districts, new waterfront parks, and complete streets.

Communities will need to find $7,000 in matching funds to participate (cash or in-kind).

Submit a proposal by March 5.

Also, the American Architectural Foundation’s innovative Sustainable Cities Design Academy (SCDA) program is asking teams that represent public-private partnerships to apply to attend design workshops in D.C. The program connects “project teams and multi-disciplinary sustainable design experts” in workshops that “help project teams advance their green infrastructure and community development goals.” See the kinds of communities SCDA has helped in the past few years.

Image credit: ASLA 2011 Residential Honor Award. A Farm at Little Compton. Michael Vergason Landscape Architects / Michael Thomas

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Detroit Is Not a Ruin

Posted in Agriculture, Education, Environment, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 01/09/2013 | 1 Comment »

At the National Building Museum, a controversial set of two new photography exhibits asks us to consider whether a city can die, whether districts of ruined, abandoned buildings reverting back to nature can define a city that still has a population of 700,000 people. The answer is no: Detroit is still alive, but perhaps shamed by its decline. At a presentation by two photographers — Camilo Jose Vergara and Andrew Moore — Detroit was viewed as a warning of things to come, a modern-day Necropolis or city of the dead, but fortunately this storyline doesn’t tell the whole tale about that city.

Vergara, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, sociologist by training, and also an evocative photographer, covers the process of decay in many cities in the U.S. Each year, he travels to cities like Camden, Chicago, and Detroit, to document how “time, elements, scavengers, and people” do “whatever they do to fine buildings.” In Detroit, he has taken series of photographs showing the decay of the same few buildings over time. Year and year, Vergara comes back because he’s fascinated by “what is going to happen” to these buildings. “Some are engulfed in vegetation or become ruins.”

The Chilean photographer has spent a lot of time at the old Ford Packard Plant, which once churned out the cars and trucks that populated Detroit’s streets and all of America’s arteries. Once the factory closed, the mile-long building became home to over 200 businesses, beginning in the early 90s. However, those businesses seemed more focused on disassembling or scavenging. “This was now the place you took your car to be taken apart and turned into scraps.” Other businesses collected old shoes or cardboard boxes to be reused or recycled.

In a view of the old plant Vergara returns to year after year, he documents a time when there were “wild parties” organized within the walls, organized via pagers, to a period of partial demolition, to nature eventually taking over again.

Now, it’s a dangerous place filled with scavengers and homeless people. “Fires have further weakened the structures.” But a theme both Moore and Vergara returned to again is that this place and others in Detroit are also sites of creative rebirth. Within all the decay, it has become a “museum of graffiti,” where any graffiti artist of note wants to have a piece.

For Moore, a leading contemporary large-format photographer, the process of documenting Detroit’s glorious ruins are like “mental blueprinting.” His father is an architect and he grew up with the idea that “you can tell a story through a space.” He says that “buildings are an incorruptible witness of history.” Buildings inflect history; buildings can’t lie, whereas the faces of people can tell lots of different stories.

Like Vergara, Moore takes photographs of cities undergoing change, even if that change is destructive. His work has spanned New York City’s Time Square and Fulton Fish Market areas over the years. In early 2008, he began to really take photos of Detroit and was at once “amazed by the quality of the architecture.” He sees the ruins as particularly “emotionally charged” because that city’s fall is so recent.

In the Ford company’s Dry dock building, where Henry Ford first worked as an apprentice, “one guy is now living there, with a wind screen up to block the cold air.” (The historic building is now slated for condos).

A grand old theater that opened in 1928 with an appearance by Gloria Swanson is now “damaged by water, neglect.” The muted palette of the buildings create a sense of “loneliness, desolation, and abandonment.”

Both Vergara and Moore also see a “surreal” quality of the city. A theater with an amazingly beautiful ceiling was turned into a parking lot, because it was more cost-effective than tearing it down. Nature is also seen as playing a key role in creating the surreal effect. “Wherever there is a void, nature returns in full force.” For example, what Moore thinks is Henry Ford’s old corner office is now covered in moss. An old post office building’s roof has caved in. The space was once a depot for storing old books. Those books have decomposed and turned into mulch and now provide a foundation for birch trees that grow out of the hole in the roof.

Within this landscape, Moore said, there’s also good and bad. “There are black hats and white hats. The black hats are interested in destruction, blowing things up. The white hats looking at documenting, taking photos.”

Both photographers, who almost seem to view buildings as living things – with their own cycle of life and death, said the ruins are “always changing over time. Ruins aren’t static.” Vergara, though, also thinks that the ruins are indicative of what “we’ve done to the earth. The ruins are the future. I’ve internalized what I’ve seen. It has energized my life, but it isn’t positive. The experience of these desolate places has marked me.”

And while both do include photos of living people (occasionally), both said people in these places are few and far between. In their tours, there just weren’t people walking around. And perhaps because of this, both feel a greater responsibility towards the buildings — and to document the buildings, instead of the people who created them and let them decay. Vergara said: “I feel a responsibility to all those buildings. I have to know what’s going to happen to them.” By shining a “strong light on their ruin, we can bring attention to what’s happening here. That’s positive.”

For Carolyn Mitchell, a Detroit native and now Washington, D.C. resident who attended the lecture and was interviewed after, the photographers “only showed the death, but not the life of the city.” The exhibits were “misleading.” She said some great buildings were always well-maintained and others have been newly restored. “We have some of the greatest Art Deco buildings in the U.S.” Still, the exhibits brought back “memories of how the city once was.”

Many neighborhoods are still maintained like those in any other city and are real, thriving places. In neighborhoods like Woodbridge and Corktown, “homes have porch swings. There are lots of community gardens. Neighbors know each other.” This narrative isn’t really out there. The story of nature taking over, both positively in the form of urban farming and new forests, and, negatively, in the form of decay, may not be accurate. As Mitchell argued, “nature has always been in the city.”

In their presentations, Moore and Vergara admitted that they have received criticism from the local community, and there’s no way the exhibits will ever be shown there. As the moderator John Beardsley, head of the landscape studies program at Dumbarton Oaks and a professor at Harvard University, said, “well, these photos don’t paint the best portrait of the city.”

Mitchell also thinks that the photographers failed to place the ruins in a historical context. She said the exhibits could have been more powerful had they shown “the before and after, what the city once looked like, how fabulous it once all was.”

In the end, the photographs then don’t answer the real question: What happened? Why did Detroit fail while other large cities like Chicago and Los Angeles renewed themselves? Mitchell, who used to work for the Detroit city government, said it was a real “lack of vision, leadership” at the top. A series of corrupt mayors and their cronies stymied positive change and drove out business owners. City services declined with mismanagement and a falling tax base. And while there are a number of non-profits coming in to create bottom-up, community-led visions, “these can’t really replace the lack of vision from the mayor.” Detroit sounds like any other big city — with its mistakes, but not dead yet.

Learn more about the two exhibits and see a book of Moore’s work on Detroit.

Image credits: (1-3) Copyright Camilo Jose Vergara, (4-7) Copyright Andrew Stone, (8) Copyright Camilo Jose Vergara

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A Vision for a Greener Chinatown

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 12/11/2012 | 2 Comments »

To kick-off ASLA’s year of public service early, ASLA President Tom Tavella, FASLA, Fuss & O’neill, led a process of re-envisioning the many blocks around ASLA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown as a green, livable neighborhood. Using a framework established by D.C.’s government organizations — including the planning office and departments of environment and transportation, along with non-profits like the Downtown Business Improvement District and Anacostia Watershed Society — Tavella and his team of designers created a vision for an inter-connected series of green “complete streets,” with new, safer bicycle lanes and a pedestrian-friendly “festival street,” while also creating a central hub for all the new street-level sustainability education programs right in front of ASLA’s door (and below its green roof) right on Eye Street.

Sarah Lewis, an urban planner at Fuss & O’Neill, put the project in its broader context, asking, “what should the neighborhood look like?” Big picture changes to the neighborhood, which is rich with history, will necessarily change the “urban fabric,” but by integrating green, complete streets with true green infrastructure systems, the fabric can only be improved.

In a city “active in urban planning,” the designers sought to leverage all the existing programs and new ones coming next year as well. The city’s complete street and green infrastructure guidelines, which are in place, will soon mix with more stringent stormwater policies that impose higher fees on private property owners that create runoff. All of these local requirements shaped their concepts.

To green this neighborhood, any plan has to start with the streets — all of them. For Chris Ferrero, who runs urban planning and landscape architecture at Fuss & O’Neill, the beginning of a new green neighborhood mean tackling all the alleyways running off Eye Street that contribute to stormwater runoff. Just as Chicago has done with its innovative green alleys program, the neighborhood could put in permeable pavements along with underground cisterns in key areas that would enable cars to still have access but water to be absorbed into the ground.

Along Eye Street, the intersections at 9th, 8th, and 7th streets could become green, permeable ones. What is now a source of huge amounts of runoff in the center of the streets could become a central place for absorbing rainwater into the underlying soils. Additional layers of stone or sand underground could also help boost absorption rates.

Crisscrossing an east-west system of green streets along Eye street would be a new north-south green “festival street” running down 8th street, transforming an underused, garage-heavy street into an active, pedestrian-friendly zone (see image above). Designed to be like a Dutch woonerf or pedestrian mall, this “B or C street,” which means it doesn’t get that much car traffic, could be designed so pedestrians could move more freely between the National Portrait Gallery and the commercial complex at K street.

Throughout this new green boulevard, which could be a pedestrian “arboretum,” different materials would be used to designate different realms — those for people or for cars. There would be no curbs, creating a flat plane for pedestrians. For 8th and other streets, redesigning the street so it can evolve may be the way to go. Kent Schwendy, senior vice president at Fuss & O’Neill, said many engineers want to simply lock streets into one use, but he argued that “streets change and their uses evolve. We have to let that change happen.”

Where 8th street meets Eye, new open grates would feature prominently so that “people could actually see that water moves through this area, even when it doesn’t rain. This will help educate people about stormwater,” said Tavella. But the street-level stormwater management systems proposed for Eye Street wouldn’t be “lipstick on a pig,” said Ferrero. They could instead represent an “integrated series of events, a system.” Some six additional feet would be added onto the sidewalks, giving 2-3 feet for “green gutters along the curbs” and another 2-3 feet for a step area to get to bridges that would take people across the new gutters. Intermixed among the new green gutters would be rain gardens, which all inter-connect with the existing tree pits and proposed permeable pavement systems.

On 9th street, creating a new “two-way cycle track,” a dual-direction bicycle lane, actually creates an opportunity to create yet more green infrastructure. The bicycle lanes would be protected by a 4-foot “physical separation filled with plants, not just paint and bollards,” said Tavella. That physical separator would not only protect bicyclists from car traffic but also help create a sense of place and add greenery. The street may certainly need it: Wade Walker, Jr, head of transportation planning at Fuss & O’Neill, said the bicyclists he saw on that street were “up on the sidewalks, showing that they didn’t feel safe.”

Lastly, right in front of ASLA, there could be a new parklet, taking up two parking spaces, which would be designed to give people a place to sit and view the green roof education video and read signs about the new green features of the neighborhood. Throughout the district, “signage would show what a green street is about, what porous pavements do,” said Tavella.

According to Nancy Somerville, Hon. ASLA, Executive Vice President and CEO, ASLA, the next steps will include pitching Fuss & O’Neill’s concepts to stakeholders in the neighborhood, starting the fundraising process, and further refining the plans to meet the approval and specifications of the many D.C. government departments involved. Hiring landscape architects to turn the concepts into real designs also sounds like a next step, given the positive early feedback from the D.C. planning office.

At the end of the intensive, two-day design charrette, Chris Shaheen, who manages the public space programs with the D.C. planning office, said, “We’ve tested many of these ideas here and there, but this brings it all together. This is what the city wants to do.” The city knows, just like ASLA does, that really ambitious proposals like this are needed if the city will reach its goals of making 1.5 million square feet of public right of way permeable by 2016.

Image credits: Fuss & O’Neill

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Atlantic City Gets “Artlantic”

Posted in Land Art, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Revitalization on 12/11/2012 | 1 Comment »

In Atlantic City, a set of five outdoor public art installations, curated by the non-profit arts group Fung Collaboratives, were created within a landscape designed by Balmori Associates and Cairone & Kaupp. The first piece, the $3 million Artlantic: wonder, had its preview just a few days after Hurricane Sandy wrecked havoc in New Jersey. In this case, not even the second most destructive storm in U.S. history could stop this art from happening.

Fung Collective says that “these new creative spaces will function as public meeting places, fostering social interaction and reinvigorating the community culturally and socially.” Also, the non-profit organization writes that a new Artlantic piece will be created every year up until 2016, at a total cost of $13 million. Every year, the team will “provide a unique theme reflective of Atlantic City’s environment, architecture, and history, and will invite the participating artists and designers to develop projects specific to each site.” The Atlantic City Alliance (ACA), a marketing agency, and Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) has put up the money to create the art installations in an effort to support the local community and boost Atlantic City’s already considerable tourist numbers. Interestingly, the sites are just on temporary loan from private owners.

According to Fung, Artlantic: wonder is located in two separate sites, one is seven acres and the other 8,500 square-feet. The New York Times writes that just a few months ago the seven-acre site was a barren gravel-filled void. Now, it provides a base for works by conceptual artists Illya and Emilia Kabakov, Kiki Smith, and Robert Barry. There are two open spaces “framed by one 14-foot-high and one 11-foot-high earth sculptures shaped like an infinity and covered in indigenous grasses and wildflowers.”

The earth sculptures created by Balmori Associates and Cairone & Kaupp “evoke the roller coasters, past and present, on the Steel Pier, an historic Atlantic City amusement pier.” The New York Times says that the newly-constructed forms only survived the onslaught of Sandy because they include about “22,000 sod staples, inserted just a day before the storm struck.”

The installation by Russian artist Kabakov is a “playful pirate ship that rises from the ground evoking the sunken pirate ships that line the ocean floor off New Jersey’s coast.”

Opposite the pirate ship is a garden by Smith, which is made up of “brilliant red foliage —plants with red flowers, red berries, or red leaves—that is intended to change with the seasons.” The garden will feature a sculpture by Smith called “Her,” which has a “woman tenderly embracing a doe.”

Within the earth sculpture, Robert Barry offers brightly colored, illuminated text pieces. These “will become alive at night, engaging in an informal dialogue with the city lights and the bold signage that adorns the Boardwalk.”

The second smaller site will eventually be home to Étude Atlantis by John Roloff, set within “minimalistic landscaping comprised of Japanese Black Pines” designed by Cairone & Kaupp. The concept here is to “find Atlantis” and “connect Atlantic City with the opposite side of the world—the sea floor off the southwestern coast of Australia.” Fung writes: “Bold linear stripes converge into a spiral pattern, leading the visitor to the center of the space where an embedded cistern of lights simulating an image of trickling water that appears to be alive and weeping, suggesting a pathway into the Indian Ocean.” The stage-like setting will be used as a backdrop for performances and other public events.

Elizabeth Cartmell, president of the Atlantic City Alliance, told The New York Times: “One of the glaring gaps here is really the arts and culture scene. One of the other gaps is the lack of economic development in some of these empty, huge, blighted lots.” Art, then can serve, as a “leading-edge perception driver” and perhaps help change create new opportunities for this part of town and the city as a whole.

Fung thinks that art sends out a “positive message,” particularly in the very tough times after the storm and could even help heal the city. He’s made a point of involving year-round residents in actually constructing the works. Local painting, plumbing, and carpeting unions have donated time to build the works, while local performers will be asked to stage new theatrical and other live performances. Fung said, post-storm: “One of the most heartening things is all the e-mails I have been getting from locals asking, ‘How is the art project?’ ”

See more images from The New York Times.

Image credits: (1) Rendering / Balmori Associates, (2) Artlantic: wonder / Peter Tobia, (3) Artlantic: wonder / Layman Lee (4) Artlantic: wonder / Layman Lee

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Create a New Vision for Toronto’s Green Line

Posted in Opportunities, Public Spaces, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 12/10/2012 | 1 Comment »

The many organizers of the new Green Line international design competition seek visionary proposals from landscape architects, architects, designers, planners, artists that will revamp the public green space and bicycle and pedestrian access of Toronto’s 3-mile-long transmission line corridor (a.k.a. hydro corridor). The goal is to “imagine the electricity infrastructure as a Green Line — a pedestrian and cycling link across the middle of the city and a public space and recreational amenity to the many neighborhoods across Toronto that it links.” Design teams will look at both the overall vision of the park and identify opportunities for reusing an underpass. The organizers are looking for pragmatic proposals that address safety concerns while also providing new public space concepts and sustainable transportation solutions.

The Green Line passes through a number of neighborhoods in midtown Toronto, from Davenport Village to the Annex. “The Green Line is already well used by local residents. It has splash pads, sports fields, allotment gardens, parking lots and children’s playgrounds, but the spaces are mostly in poor condition and the corridor does not currently provide a continuous physical connection due to grade changes and fencing.”

The vision part of the competition will ask designers to create a “comprehensive” approach that will also tie into Toronto’s cycling network. “The Green Line should be considered as both a series of community spaces and a physical and psychological link across the city.” Green public spaces will need to be designed so they can be used 24/7, 365. Designs will need to be able to be implemented in phases.

For the underpass portion of the ideas competition, designers should provide a detailed approach to “improve pedestrian, cyclist and car-users’ safety and mobility, and make an improved physical, visual and/or psychological connection for the Green Line.” The goal is to create a model that can be used for the eight other underpasses along the line.

This ideas competition also has some unique constraints, which could prove to be an interesting mental challenge for designers. Given the primary purpose of the corridor is to transmit electricity, there are some stringent guidelines for how the public can interact with this infrastructure. There are also some major safety issues: Electro-magnetic fields come off the equipment. The International Agency for Research on Cancer says these fields are a possible carcinogen so “taking practical low or no-cost actions to reduce exposures to young children is prudent.” Toronto now has a policy of “prudent avoidance” and calls for taking steps to keep young children away from the infrastructure. However, the city also recognizes “that recreational, trail and park uses of hydro corridors have health benefits for children and adults who use them which outweigh any potential risk from EMF exposure.”

The competition organizers intend to show the community the best designs. The organizers say that the ideas “will not be built, but are meant to get the communities who live, study and work near the site to start thinking about its future.”

The jury will award $6,000 CDN in cash prizes to the winners. The bulk of the prize money ($4,500) goes to the vision component of the competition, while the underpass portion of the competition will give out $1,500 CDN in prizes. Winners will also have their work published in a Canadian magazine, Spacing, and will be featured in an exhibition.

Submit proposals before February 4, 2013. Registration is free, but registrants must be members of the Toronto Society of Architects. Students can join for $25 CDN. Full membership is $50 CDN.

Image credit: Green Line ideas competition

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Smarter Growth Is Happening Everywhere

Posted in Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Smart Growth, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 12/06/2012 | Leave a Comment »

At a presentation in the ornate wood-paneled offices of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA announced this year’s winners of their annual smart growth awards. The winners all “break old habits and development patterns and give Americans more healthy choices,” said associate administrator Michael Goo. Jackson herself applauded the winners, who all demonstrated that “great ideas are easy, but it takes work to make a great idea actually happen.” She added that each winning team was a true collaboration between multiple non-profit, private, and government partners, who worked together “to creatively overcome challenges.”

This year’s winners were selected from nearly 50 projects from 25 states:

BLVD Transformation Project, Lancaster, California
Overall Excellence – Winner
Lancaster’s ”dilapidated downtown corridor” had been in “decline for more than 20 years and desperately needed an update.” Sketchy strip malls lined a 4-lane highway so all people wanted to do “was to drive through really fast.” Some first steps included removing 2 lanes, adding in traffic calming measures, new sidewalks and bikelanes, along with creating an innovative central ”Ramblas” promenade space filled with trees. The promenade space can actually transform into parking lots when needed, too. Outoor pianos, scattered around the town, are labeled with signs called “Random Acts of Music.” People stop and play them. Farmer’s Markets help bring in crowds. Small businesses have clearly seen the opportunities: more than 45 new businesses have taken root along the new streetscape, leading to $130 million in new private sector investment, boosting revenues downtown by almost 96 percent, generating $300 million in new economic output, and creating nearly 2,000 new jobs. On top of that, bird noises piped in downtown are said to be responsible for a huge decline in the crime rates. (See an interactive Web site for the new streetscape).

Mariposa District, Denver, Colorado
Equitable Development – Winner
Denver’s historic and ethnically diverse La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood was transformed from an “economically challenged area into a vibrant, transit-accessible, district.” The city housing authority worked with Mithun architects on a new master plan that ”preserved affordable housing while adding energy-efficient middle-income and market-rate homes.” A series of design charrettes and personalized outreach to community members who couldn’t make the planning meetings meant a new community where sustainability is actually affordable. Representatives from the housing authority noted that the nearby light rail station keep transportation costs for residents in check. A complex green infrastructure and urban gardening plan was also put in place.

Northwest Gardens, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Equitable Development – Honorable Mention
The first LEED-Neighborhood Development (ND) project in Florida provides LEED gold homes affordably along with access to fresh local produce and green jobs training. One official said “crime is now down, happiness is up, and the vegetables are great.”

The Cooperative Building, Brattleboro, Vermont
Main Street or Corridor Revitalization – Winner
The EPA writes: “The Brattleboro Food Co-op, the town’s only downtown food store, made a commitment to remain at its downtown location by constructing an innovative, four-story green building on Main Street with a grocery store, commercial space, offices, and affordable apartments. The Main Street location provides healthy food, new jobs, and housing within walkable distances of downtown businesses and public transit.” The $14 million project, said the coop owner, “is about the health and well-being of downtown. This reflects Vermont values.” The new home for the coop has also helped them boost revenue from $500,000 a year to more than $20 million.

Larkin District, Buffalo, New York
Main Street or Corridor Revitalization – Honorable Mention
The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning worked with community organizations and a local developer to totally transform an “old, abandoned industrial district.” The new master plan for an urban village “now features new office space, restaurants, apartments, parks, and plazas.” Already, some 2-3,000 people come in each Wednesday for band night and drinks. The whole project was done with private money.

Destination Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Virginia
Programs and Policies – Winner
Amazingly, in just one year, the historic city of Portsmouth, site of the oldest naval base in the U.S., completely revamped all their codes to enable denser smart growth within the city center. The project basically “rezoned the entire city in order to connect growth back to the downtown core.” The goal was to “attract people to targeted areas through mixed-use developments,” new, wider sidewalks and bikelanes. The EPA writes: “Destination Portsmouth prepared a package of new plans, zoning ordinances, and other development policies in collaboration with community stakeholders.”

Bay Area Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing Fund, San Francisco, California
Programs and Policies – Honorable Mention
The Bay Area Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing Fund created a new $50 million rotating loan fund to assist developers in building affordable homes near public transportation.

Check out the winners from last year and 2010, too.

Image credits: Theavtimes.com

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This Public Art Can Revolutionize Urban Planning

Posted in Land Art, Public Spaces, Urban Revitalization on 11/15/2012 | 1 Comment »

Candy Chang, a daring young urban planner, artist, and graphic designer, said “small interventions” in the public realm can lead to bigger, smarter ones, at the 2012 Greenbuild conference in San Francisco. Increasingly well-known for her informational public art projects around the U.S., Chang walked the crowd through her latest works, which aim to improve community self-organization and empowerment, and create a feeling of a shared experience in neighborhoods that are “giant hotels of passing neighbors,” urban places with little civic realm. Chang’s work may also provide the model for 21st century community visioning; her amazing web sites may offer a new way forward for gauging demand for planning initiatives.

While many designers aim to “transform cities through art and design,” Chang, a TED Fellow, may actually be doing it. Chang said her role model was gardener / architect Joseph Paxton, who was the first person in England to grow giant lily pads, the biggest flowering plants in the world. Amazed by the support structures — the veins — of the lily pad leaves, Paxton would actually put his young daughter on top of them to test how much weight they could hold. “He then somehow borrowed 5 or 6 other people’s kids and also put them on the pads,” discovering that these highly flexible structures can hold incredible amounts of weight. His discovery then pushed him into making experimental greenhouse structures, which translated into the famous Crystal Palace in the London Expo of 1851. For his discovery of the inherent powers of ribbing structures, he won a knighthood.

Chang said Paxton’s sense of curiosity, his love of learning, helped him break down barriers. Disciplines, as we have defined them today, didn’t seem to matter. In the same vein, Chang is also trying to break down barriers between design professions, studying architecture, graphic design, and urban planning to create a new hybrid approach to solve the complex problems facing communities.

For her, many local urban communities lack information about how their own communities are run and decisions are made, so, in turn, their communities often don’t reflect their needs and desires. Chang believes that “local communication tools are an infrastructure system” as important as water, energy, or transportation. Communications infrastructure is about providing access to information and building platforms for sharing information that everyone can use. With these tools, “more residents can self-organize, and more communities can have places that reflect their values.”

Studying at Columbia University and later working as a graphic designer at The New York Times, Chang was stunned by the colorful, informal nature of the public realm in New York City. Lamp posts are bulletin boards. Fliers – for lost dogs, band performances, job opportunities – are informal information sharing systems, which she studied for her thesis project. Chang was also interested in how these physical manifestations of informal information sharing work together with online forums. She made the point that “it’s hard to reach an entire neighborhood online” so you do need some sort of physical connection.

One of Chang’s first projects was “Post-It Notes for Neighbors,” which enabled residents to detail the amount they spend for their apartments in neighborhoods throughout New York City. Another early project for GOOD magazine created a cut-out “Can I Borrow?” tag to hang on neighbor’s doors, which enables neighbors to communicate with each other without bothering each other at inconvenient times. In New Orleans, where she lives, she covered vacant storefronts in rows of vinyl ”I Wish This Was” stickers and markers, which enable residents to outline their dreams for the space. Systematically documenting these wishful notes, she finds what’s actually in demand in neighborhoods, from fresh produce and farmers’s markets, to restaurants and liquor stores. She’s now been playing with the “I Wish This Was” concept, using a wide range of media, including digital billboards in a central plaza in Minneapolis.

A more ambitious web-based project financed by Tulane University and the Rockefeller Foundation called Neighborland.com enables residents to “self-organize around shared ideas.” Users can add their own ideas for the neighborhood or simply select “Me, too,” building steam for initiatives. She said apps like these are critical because too often in public planning meetings, a “few voices drown out everyone else” or the same 10 people show up. In New Orleans, Neighborland initiatives have led to spontaneous night markets in vacant lots and other bottom-up happenings.

A wonderful project in Fairbanks, Alaska, helped the community reimagine the future for its tallest building, which has also been abandoned for the past 10 years. The Polaris building got a new sign, ”Looking for Love Again, which is a beacon of love” on a derelict space. Residents were invited to use chalk to write in their memories of the place and their hopes. She said the project shows how “meaningful cities are in our lives, and the value of introspection in public places.”

Her most famous project maybe the walls asking residents to say what they want to do ”Before I Die.” In New Orleans, the first wall received hundreds of responses in just a day. Now there are 50 walls around the country. “Before I Die” was inspired by the death of one of Chang’s loved ones. The death set her on a journey to think about the nature of death and enabled her to “not caught get up with the little things in life.” “Thinking about death clarifies life.” The walls, she said, now reflect “the hopes and dreams of communities.”

Another new project in Las Vegas plays with that city’s tagline, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Her “Confessions,” inspired by Catholic confessionals and Japanese Shinto prayer markers, which are usually hung in trees, asks residents and visitors to make their private secrets public. She said this project helps build a “safe place in the community,” yet is still a mix of “catharsis and voyeurism.”

Returning to Paxton, Chang said there’s great value in “serendipidity,” and following small ideas so they become huge, world-changing ones. With wisdom beyond her years, she said: “the world becomes far more rewarding when you look beyond what you are searching for.”

Image credit: ASLA 2012 Residential Design Honor Award. Urban Spring, San Francisco. Bionic / Bionic.

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Landscape Architecture vs. Consumerism

Posted in Agriculture, Land Art, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Residential Design on 11/12/2012 | 2 Comments »

The design professions are at a crossroads, struggling to reconcile design’s role as an engine for consumer-driven economic growth with its role in imagining and implementing sustainable lifestyles and businesses. There’s a “meaning” gap between designers’ potential for social good and the ruthless commercialism and consumerism that serves as the context for the professions.

In my new book, Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: How design activism confront growth, I explore this gap and present examples of how designers are confronting key problems of consumerism. Here I look at a few examples from landscape architecture.

Consumerism acts as an engine for economic growth. This engine shapes design as market values increasingly outweigh civic or environmental values. One example is private suburban communities. Peter Cannavò reports that the growing trend for making new suburbs private—privatization is a requirement in a number of cities—means that more and more whole neighborhoods are managed as property rather than as communities or civic places. This type of management usually limits the variety of structures and allowable types of landscapes, often aiming for an outdated suburban ideal of big houses, big cars, and resourced-intensive landscapes, all of which drive increased consumption.

New suburbs are privatized, becoming consumption-driven commodities rather than communities. Photo Patrick Huber.

Consumerism also shapes landscape design when market actors control the location of public places. Emily Talen describes how cities such as Phoenix and Chicago implement new parks and other public spaces not according to where they are needed, but rather, according to where developers have paid impact fees. In the case of Phoenix this means that parks are planned for low-density, peripheral locations rather than strategic locations that might synergistically enrich the public landscape. This is similar to other “privately owned public spaces.” Whoever has money to pay impact fees determines location, whether or not the location adds wider value. The locations and contexts then dictate the benefit that any landscape design can bring to the urban fabric as a whole.

How Landscape Architecture is Reshaping Consumption

Despite these problems we’re also seeing cases where landscape design is shaping, or reshaping, consumerism. Here we look at the examples of sharing, appropriation and interactivity. The discussion above suggests that the location of landscape amenities can limit the way they enrich the public realm. Although we think of a landscape as stationary, recent examples of mobile urban farms and floating parks begin to question what it means to share a landscape. Two examples are the Neptune Foundation’s floating swimming pool, essentially a floating park, and “The Farm Proper,” a mobile urban farm.

Set & Drift developed this experimental, mobile urban farm using abandoned shopping carts, among other things.

Landscape architects are also looking at ways to appropriate and reassign existing landscapes that are underperforming socially, often because spaces are shaped by market efficiencies, to the exclusion of social or environmental values. In these cases designers highlight and uncover added value in tactical ways. An example is the Park(ing) Day project by ReBar, where money in the meter converts on-street parking spaces into temporary pocket parks.

Western countries are driven increasingly by “positional” consumption—for status rather than to meet basic needs. But research indicates that providing a better quality commons, including public space, could offer new means for gaining social distinction and weaken the link between status and private consumption. To this end, designers are enriching public spaces in new ways.

Play encouraged by flexible, fiber-optic “stalks” that emit sound and light as people passed near them in “White Noise, White Light” by J. Meejin Yoon. Courtesy of Howler + Yoon Architects.

Examples are experiments in interactive landscapes such as Enteractive (by Electroland Studio) and White Noise White Light. In both cases public spaces were “wired” to react to public and social activity. This interaction introduced play, but also temporarily personalized the place without privatizing it. Interesting developments occur as these interactive components are deployed in urban greenscapes as well as hardscapes.

This guest post by author Ann Thorpe is part of a virtual book tour for the book, Architecture & Design versus Consumerism (Earthscan/Routledge 2012). Thorpe currently serves as strategist with a Seattle-based startup, a social enterprise called Luum. She is also author of The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability.

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Warren Byrd, Jr: “I Don’t Do Drugs. I Do Design Competitions.”

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Opportunities, Public Spaces on 10/31/2012 | 1 Comment »

Design competitions are a big component to the profession of landscape architecture. Many firms, whether in an effort to maintain their high-profile statuses or to propel their smaller firms into the big leagues, will enter these competitions. At the ASLA 2012 Annual Meeting, Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, University of Virginia; Donald Stastny, FAIA, STASTNY: architect llc; and Warren Byrd, Jr., FASLA, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects sat down to discuss the current state of design competitions and their place in the discipline of landscape architecture. The focus was primarily on the competition as a means of design exploration, a strategic tool for remaking urban landscapes, and an opportunity for positioning landscape architects as multidisciplinary team leaders.

Meyer, who has recently been appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts by President Obama, was the first presenter on the subject of design competitions. She has extensive experience as a competition juror on the national level, including the recent Trust for the National Mall’s design competition in D.C. Meyer does not see competitions as a platform solely to honor winners, but also as a driver of new ideas that advance the state of the design professions and multidisciplinary discourse. In reference to Rem Koolhaus’ submission for the Parc de la Villette design competition in 1982 (see image above), she said “some of the most important entries did not win. OMA was not selected because the jury was afraid of it.”

Meyer also spoke of TerraGRAM’s submission to the High Line Ideas Competition in 2003. Although TerraGRAM’s team (lead by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and D.I.R.T. Studio) did not win the job, their ideas lived through the project. “TerraGRAM’s submission is the driver of the third phase of the High Line,” alluding to the proposal to retain the opportunistic planting palette planned for the final phase of the park. “A competition is a snapshot of generational concerns.” In this case, restoration is the driver, and the competition entries are indicative of that concern.

Stastny is as intimately familiar with architectural competitions as anyone. As a practicing architect, urban designer, and process facilitator for over forty years, he’s recognized as one of the preeminent design competition advisors and managers in North America. He understands the design competition process and what constitutes a successful submission. Stastny believes that successful submissions are those that are multi-disciplinary in nature, and his competitions reflect that. He has most recently worked with The Waller Creek Competition, an international competition to redesign a 1.5 mile stretch of Waller Creek in downtown Austin, Texas. An amazing set of final proposals have been created.

Byrd also has extensive experience in the realm of architectural competitions. Byrd is interested in how competitions position urban landscapes as central to the remaking of cities. An innovative program, Greening America’s Capitals, a project of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which is made up of the E.PA., the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), aims to use design teams to help state capitals develop green building and green infrastructure strategies. Byrd is currently working on projects in both Little Rock, Arkansas, and Hartford, Connecticut.

Byrd and his firm spend ample time on competitions as he believes that they are a good way to keep his company current. Byrd’s firm won a prominent competition in Pennsylvania, the Flight 93 National Memorial, a competition that Stastny directed. In the end, Byrd is hungry and sees the competition as a way to keep his skills sharp and his firm in production. His belief is evident in his conclusion: “I don’t do drugs. I do competitions!”

This guest post is by Tyler Silvestro, a master’s degree candidate at the City College of New York (CUNY), and writer for The Architect’s Newspaper.

Image credits: (1) OMA Proposal for Parc de Vilette / Georgia Tech, (2) TerraGRAM High Line proposal / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, D.I.R.T. Studio, Beyer Blinder Belle, (3) Waller Creek / Waller Creek Design Competition.

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