“We try to be light on the land. We try to do minimal engineering, with minimal impact. We try to design less. This is part of the decarbonization process. This is part of climate action for the profession of landscape architecture,” explained Jenny Jones, ASLA, with landscape architecture firm Terremoto.
In Laguna Beach, Califonia, Terremoto designed a low-carbon, low-impact, no-waste 4-acre public landscape for the Laguna Canyon Foundation, an organization dedicated to “preserving, protecting, enhancing, and promoting the 22,000-acre South Coast Wilderness.”
“A mantra of our office is the inverse of Daniel Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans’ quote. Our rebuttal is ‘Make no big plans’, said David Godshall, ASLA, a leader of the firm.
“Our office increasingly believes that the best future landscapes and gardens need to be of a replicable small scale, as materially closed-loop as possible, avoid bureaucratic red tape, and be of, by, and for the communities and creatures they serve.”
The Laguna Canyon landscape was a “hurt site,” Jones said. Once an illegal dump, rain helped pull waste down the hillside. But that changed when the Foundation leased the public land and began a multi-year process of clean-up and ecological restoration.
The machines used in the clean-up effort left three terraces, which Terremoto decided not to change. “The site had been through a lot of trauma, so we decided to take a quiet, loving approach,” Jones said. To manage stormwater, Terremoto worked with the terraces and also designed a network of bioswales lined with local stones, which Jones called “softer and amorphous.”
“Our approach to grading and drainage was really to minimize grading altogether and simply bolster existing natural drainage patterns. This meant less machinery and carbon, and required we work with the land and the existing conditions rather than impose a new, bold thing,” Godshall said.
California’s record rainfall caused by a series of atmospheric rivers also meant the firm needed to return later to modify the design of some swales. Jones sees this as a plus.
She said Terremoto’s goal is to take an iterative approach, based in continuous stewardship, rather than go in with a “build it and never return” mindset that results in the “hard engineering found in many Californian coastal projects.”
Jones wanted to give the site room to adapt and evolve. For her, that demonstrates true climate responsibility. “We need to continue to participate with the site. It’s not finished. This is what stewardship is about.”
Climate considerations, along with a limited budget, led the firm to source many materials locally and use what was available. Local materials means lower embodied carbon, as there are less greenhouse gas emissions released from transporting materials.
Timber logs have become benches. They were produced by Angel City Lumber, a company based in Los Angeles that reuses city trees felled by drought, disease, or age.
“So many trees in Los Angeles are coming down but they can be salvaged and repurposed instead of sent to the landfill,” Jones said. Due to smart material choices, the carbon sequestered in the trees has been saved. And reusing the trees eliminated the climate impacts of sourcing new materials.
The project includes both stone found on the site and stone brought in from another project, where too much was ordered by mistake. “Laguna Canyon is about no waste; we found a way to use it.” But the stone trucked in was still local, originally sourced from a quarry in Santa Paula, 100 miles away. Gravel and rip rap also traveled a similar distance to the project site.
Above the terraces, the form of four simple wood structures was guided by both function and beauty. The Foundation restoration team had been operating out of a trailer but needed new structures to support trail and field work. The wood structures serve as a place to store “cacti pups” — cuttings from grown cacti that will take root elsewhere — and native plant seedlings.
New landscape plantings near the structures were designed to blend with the existing native landscape but also modified in places to accommodate the needs of the fire department. “Fire fighters don’t love native plants because they have evolved with fire so they are combustible. This is a contradiction.”
Wood steps and trails then take visitors down to a hollow where the Foundation had cleared an area taken over by invasive ice plants. Once the invasives were removed, “we wanted to put something back. To us, it felt like a destination,” Jones said.
Now, the space, ringed with the reclaimed timber logs, features a wood circle made from FSC-certified Western red cedar wood, “most likely from the Pacific Northwest or Canada,” Godshall said.
Here, one of the limitations of the wood market for landscape architects became apparent. “Using local wood is often counterintuitively more expensive, as the producers of local woods are generally small businesses with greater overhead than, say, a giant lumber mill in Canada that can operate with a problematic brute efficiency.”
The space is used for gatherings among the Foundation staff and the public. And the nearby K-8 school brings students here for outdoor classes.
“Given the present environmental situation, our office believes that we should be championing the beauty of modesty in gardens, modesty in material choices, but also in the scale of a project,” Godshall said.
The firm’s philosophy is in part inspired by landscape architect Julie Bargmann, the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize winner, who has called for designing with modesty.
For Jones, modesty means landscape architects need to design within their means. “We need to treat the Earth like a body. You don’t redesign a body to take care of it. Look at projects with a stewardship lens, rather than a ‘capital D’ design lens.”