The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. Atlanta, Georgia. Andropogon / Willett Photography
How can architects, developers, and planners better partner with landscape architects to achieve shared goals on greenhouse gas emission reductions and carbon drawdown? How can residential, commercial, and public landscapes be designed to advance long-term climate resilience?
To answer these questions, ASLA has organized a dynamic session — Improve Your Carbon Drawdown: Leverage Landscape Architecture Strategies to Increase Sequestration and Resilience — at the upcoming 2023 Greenbuild Conference in Washington, D.C. The live session will be on September 29 at 8.30 AM EST.
The session features landscape architecture climate leaders:
Moderator: Katie Riddle, ASLA, Director of Professional Practice at ASLA
Landscape architects who led the creation of the ASLA Climate Action Plan and its implementation through the ASLA Climate Action Committee will outline how landscape architecture strategies, including nature-based solutions, provide significant carbon benefits and a range of economic, equity, biodiversity, public health co-benefits. They will explain the latest landscape architecture approaches that can be used to conceptualize, plan, and design projects, including Sasaki’s updated Carbon Conscience tool.
“We can only achieve carbon drawdown through the creation of diverse living systems. To protect, sustain, and regenerate complex ecological networks in harsh environments, we need to use an integrative design process. This is crucial to ensure that every design decision — regardless of which discipline made the decision — supports that goal,” Almiñana said.
“When we integrate landscape into whole-project life cycle assessments, we can take advantage of potential carbon sinks in the landscape through ecosystem preservation and restoration. We can also realize the often overlooked externalities of site infrastructure and hardscape spaces. Partnering with landscape architects early in the process can inform teams how to best leverage sites, mitigate the potential impacts of site design, and achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals,” Hardy said.
Ellinikon Metropolitan Park, Athens, Greece / Sasaki
Danielle Pieranunzi, SITES Director at GBCI, will explain how certifications and guidelines, such as the SITES v2 Rating System — specifically the Pilot Credit 3: Assess and Improve Carbon Performance — and other open-source tools can lower the carbon footprint of projects.
SITES-Certified Project. ASLA 2012 Professional General Design Honor Award. Orange Mall Green Infrastructure. Tempe, Arizona. COLWELL SHELOR LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE / Marion Brenner
“The carbon footprint of the built environment is often understood in terms of construction, building energy use, and transportation. However, landscapes and outdoor spaces have the unique capacity to sequester carbon to help mitigate climate change. It is essential to include those with expertise in ecology and landscape architecture early — prior to design and throughout the development process — in order to achieve shared goals on greenhouse gas emission reductions and carbon drawdown. Using SITES and LEED certification ensures that such goals can be prioritized and not value engineered out,” Pieranunzi said.
Our community — the architecture, engineering, and construction industry — must transform standard practice by taking responsibility for the climate impacts of our projects — from the regional, city, to neighborhood and site scales.
The climate emergency requires both organizational and individual action to reduce emissions in all planning and design stages and prioritizing nature-based solutions in a meaningful way.
This free discussion on September 21 at 2 PM EST features Wendy Andringa, ASLA, Founder and Principal, Assemblage Landscape Architecture; Joshua Cerra, ASLA, Department Chair, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Taewook Cha, ASLA, Founder and Principal, Supermass Studio. Adrian Smith, FASLA, Team Leader, Staten Island Capital Projects, NYC Parks, is moderating the discussion.
The Hudson River is connected to the ocean. Over the coming decades, river water levels are projected to substantially increase because of sea level rise. Many Hudson River communities face growing flood and inundation risks due to sea level rise and other climate impacts.
Like many small cities, Kingston and Hudson in the Hudson River Valley of New York have limited budgets and resources to address these challenges. But they are seeking to adapt to a rising river through smart waterfront planning and resilient infrastructure.
Through a community-driven approach, landscape architects at Supermass Studio and Assemblage Landscape Architecture designed nature-based climate-adaptive solutions to river rise.
Communities were aided by earlier work with the Climate-Adaptive Design Studio, a unique partnership with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
The program links Cornell University landscape architecture students with at-risk communities to envision more resilient waterfront communities. These communities in turn became eligible partners for DEC grants to work with landscape architects at Supermass Studio and Assemblage and develop real-life adaptation projects in their cities.
Climate-Adaptive Design Studio, Ossining, NY / Zikun Zhang, Cornell MLA’22
Supermass Studio partnered with the City of Kingston to develop a climate adaptive framework plan for Kingston Point beach and wetlands. The plan will mitigate the threat of sea level rise and provide accessible recreational lands while protecting valuable natural resources.
Intertidal wetland at reinforced Kingston Point Beach / Supermass Studio
With the City of Hudson, Assemblage adapted an existing waterfront park to flooding and sea level rise. At the same time, they enhanced ecological habitat and recreational amenities that support the city’s waterfront vitality.
This approach demonstrates the benefits of academic-public and public-private relationships in designing urban climate adaptation strategies with multiple benefits.
ASLA 2023 Professional General Design Honor Award. The Meadow at the Old Chicago Post Office, Chicago, IL. Hoerr Schaudt / Dave Burk
Thirty-four Professional Award winners represent the highest level of achievement in the landscape architecture profession
By Lisa Hardaway
ASLA announced its 2023 Professional Awards. Thirty-four Professional Award winners showcase innovation and represent the highest level of achievement in the landscape architecture profession. All winners and their locations are listed below.
Jury panels representing a broad cross-section of the profession, from the public and private sectors, and academia, select winners each year and are listed below. The 34 winners were chosen out of 435 entries.
New this year, the ASLA / International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) Global Impact Award is presented to a project in the Analysis and Planning category. The award is given to a work of landscape architecture that demonstrates excellence in addressing climate impacts through transformative action and scalable solutions, and adherence to ASLA’s and IFLA’s climate action commitments. The inaugural award goes to the Caño Martín Peña Comprehensive Infrastructure Master Plan by OLIN for Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE del Caño Martín Peña. Led by a coalition of residents in the Caño Martín Peña District, the plan will increase access to safe drinking water, flood protection, economic opportunities, and safe housing and open space.
The Professional Awards jury also selects a Landmark Award each year; this year’s Landmark Award celebrates Vista Hermosa Natural Park by Studio-MLA. Previously an oil field located in an urban area without much green space, the park provides residents of a dense, primarily working-class Latine neighborhood with “a window to the Mountains,” opportunities for recreation, access to nature, and quiet reprieve.
“The ASLA Professional Awards are the highest achievement in our profession,” said ASLA President Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA. “This year’s winners are preeminent leaders and have set a high bar for standards of excellence. We congratulate the winners and their clients and thank them for their contributions to the health and well-being of their communities.”
“These award-winning projects showcase how landscape architecture transforms the daily experiences of local communities,” said ASLA CEO Torey Carter-Conneen. “Cutting-edge design solutions help address increasing climate impacts, capture more carbon, and contribute to the health and well-being of neighborhoods. Congratulations to the winners—thank you for your leadership.”
Award recipients and their clients will be honored in person at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA 2023 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Minneapolis, Minn., October 27-30.
Award Categories
General Design
Honor Award
Qianhai’s Guiwan Park
New York, New York
Field Operations
Honor Award
Grand Junction Park and Plaza
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
David Rubin Land Collective
Honor Award
Hood Bike Park: Pollution Purging Plants
Charleston, Massachusetts
Offshoots, Inc.
Honor Award
Remaking a 1970’s Downtown Park into a New Public Realm
Houston, Texas
OJB Landscape Architecture
Honor Award
The Meadow at the Old Chicago Post Office
Chicago, Illinois
Hoerr Schaudt
Honor Award
University of Arizona Environment + Natural Resource II
Phoenix, Arizona
Coldwell Shelor Landscape Architecture
Honor Award
Cloud Song: SCC Business School + Indigenous Cultural Center
Phoenix, Arizona
Colwell Shelor Landscape Architecture
Honor Award
The University of Texas at El Paso Transformation
Austin, Texas
Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, Inc.
Urban Design
ASLA 2023 Professional Urban Design Award of Excellence. Heart of the City: Art and Equity in Process and Place, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Coen+Partners / Sahar Coston-Hardy
Award of Excellence
Heart of the City: Art and Equity in Process and Place
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Coen+Partners
Honor Award
St Pete Pier, Revitalization of Waterfront and Historic Pier Site
New York, New York
Ken Smith Workshop
Honor Award
Town Branch Commons: An Urban Transformation in Lexington, Kentucky
New York, New York
SCAPE and Gresham Smith
Honor Award
PopCourts! – A Small Plaza That Turned into a Movement
Chicago, Illinois
The Lamar Johnson Collaborative
Residential Design
ASLA 2023 Residential Design Award of Excellence. The Rain Gardens at 900 Block, Lexington, KY. Gresham Smith
Award of Excellence
The Rain Gardens at 900 Block
Nashville, Tennessee
Gresham Smith
Honor Award
Andesite Ridge
Aspen, Colorado
Design Workshop, Inc.
Honor Award
Dry Garden Poetry
San Francisco, California
Arterra Landscape Architects
Honor Award
Black Fox Ranch: Extending the Legacy of the West to a New Generation
Aspen, Colorado
Design Workshop, Inc.
Honor Award
Sister Lillian Murphy Community
San Francisco, California
GLS Landscape | Architecture
Analysis & Planning
ASLA 2023 Professional Analysis and Planning Award of Excellence. Re-investing in a Legacy Landscape: The Franklin Park Action Plan, Boston, MA. Reed Hilderbrand LLC Landscape Architecture / Reed Hilderbrand with Agency Landscape and Planning and MASS Design
Award of Excellence
Re-investing in a Legacy Landscape: The Franklin Park Action Plan
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Reed Hilderbrand with Agency Landscape and Planning and MASS Design
Honor Award
The New Orleans Reforestation Plan: Equity in the Urban Forest
New Orleans, Louisiana
Spackman Mossop Michaels
Honor Award
Reimagine Middle Branch Plan
New York, New York
Field Operations
Honor Award
Iona Beach / xwəyeyət Regional Park and WWTP
Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
space2place design inc.
Honor Award
Joe Louis Greenway Framework Plan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
SmithGroup
Honor Award
The Chattahoochee RiverLands
Metro Atlanta Region, Georgia
SCAPE
Honor Award
Nature, Culture + Justice: The Greenwood Park Master Plan
Watertown, Massachusetts
SASAKI
Honor Award
Nicks Creek Longleaf Reserve Conservation & Management Plan
Raleigh, North Carolina
North Carolina State University Coastal Dynamics Design Lab
Communications
Honor Award
Sakura Orihon
Newport, Rhode Island
Ron Henderson / LIRIO Landscape Architecture
Honor Award
The Historic Bruce Street School: A Community-Centered Design Approach
Atlanta, Georgia
Martin Rickles Studio
Honor Award
Landslide: Race and Space
Washington, D.C.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Honor Award
Los Angeles River Master Plan Update
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
OLIN
Research
Honor Award
The Cobble Bell: Research through Geology-Inspired Coastal Management
Charlottesville, Virgina
Proof Projects, LLC
The 2023 Professional Awards Jury includes:
Jury 1 – General Design, Residential Design, & Urban Design
Chair: Kimberly Garza, ASLA, ATLAS Lab Inc.
Michel Borg, AIA, Page Think
Shuyi Chang, ASLA, SWA
Chingwen Cheng, PhD, ASLA, Arizona State University
Claude Cormier, FASLA, Claude Cormier & Associates
Jamie Maslyn Larson, FASLA, Tohono Chul
Garry Meus, National Capital Commission
Jennifer Nitzky, FASLA, Studio HIP
Jury 2 – Analysis & Planning ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award, Research & Communications
Chair: Maura Rockcastle, ASLA, Ten x Ten
Camille Applewhite, ASLA, Site Design Group
Stephanie Grigsby, ASLA, Design Workshop, Inc
Mitchell Silver, Hon. ASLA, McAdams
Michael Stanley, FASLA, Dream Design International, Inc.
Michael Todoran, The Landscape Architecture Podcast
Yujia Wang, ASLA, University of Nebraska
Joining the professional awards jury for the selection of the Analysis & Planning – ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award category will be a representative on behalf of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).
Monica Pallares, IFLA Americas
Also, joining the professional jury for the selection of the Research Category will be representatives on behalf of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA).
Jenn Engelke, ASLA, University of Washington, LAF Representative
Sohyun Park, ASLA, University of Connecticut, CELA Representative
The Landmark Award is bestowed upon a distinguished landscape architecture project completed between 15 and 50 years ago that retains its original design integrity and contributes many benefits to the surrounding community.
Completed in 2008, Vista Hermosa was the first public park built in downtown Los Angeles in over 100 years. Previously an oil field located in an urban area without much green space, the park provides residents of a dense, primarily working-class Latine neighborhood with “a window to the Mountains,” opportunities for recreation, access to nature, and quiet reprieve. The project was a partnership between Studio-MLA and their clients Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA have always been on the leading edge of landscape architecture,” said ASLA President Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA. “Fifteen years ago, Vista Hermosa Natural Park was ahead of its time in both community social benefits and environmental benefits. Those contributions continue today.”
“Vista Hermosa Natural Park is a perfect example of the impact landscape architects can have for a community—transforming a toxic brownfield to a beautiful community asset.” said ASLA CEO Torey Carter-Conneen. “This park is indeed a landmark of significance.”
“From an environmental perspective, the park is far ahead of its time and full of firsts for Los Angeles. We have a water collection system under the meadow, a cistern beneath a permeable pavement parking lot, green roofs on the restrooms and offices, a synthetic turf soccer field, and drought-tolerant native species throughout the site, organized into three specific habitat areas,” said Mia Lehrer, FASLA, founder of Studio-MLA. “There is a sense of place here, ‘a window to the mountains’ for community and families, quinceañeras, yoga classes, weddings, and a vista of downtown that’s really beloved and featured in films and photos. It was a forgotten oil field in a park-deficient neighborhood, and it has been reimagined into a thriving 10-acre wonderland. In every way, Vista Hermosa is a landmark that has changed the city and the experiences of people who live here.”
The Landmark Award was announced as part of the ASLA 2023 Professional Awards. Thirty-four winners in multiple categories showcase innovation and represent the highest level of achievement in the landscape architecture profession.
Award recipients and their clients will be honored in person at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA 2023 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Minneapolis, MN., October 27-30.
The 2023 Professional Awards Jury includes:
Jury 1- General Design, Residential Design, & Urban Design
Chair: Kimberly Garza, ASLA, ATLAS Lab Inc.
Michel Borg, AIA, Page Think
Shuyi Chang, ASLA, SWA
Chingwen Cheng, PhD, ASLA, Arizona State University
Jamie Maslyn Larson, FASLA, Tohono Chul
Garry Meus, National Capital Commission
Jennifer Nitzky, FASLA, Studio HIP
Jury 2 – Analysis & Planning ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award, Research & Communications
Chair: Maura Rockcastle, ASLA, Ten x Ten
Camille Applewhite, ASLA, Site Design Group
Stephanie Grigsby, ASLA, Design Workshop, Inc
Mitchell Silver, Hon. ASLA, McAdams
Michael Stanley, FASLA, Dream Design International, Inc.
Michael Todoran, The Landscape Architecture Podcast
Yujia Wang, ASLA, University of Nebraska
Joining the professional awards jury for the selection of the Analysis & Planning – ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award category will be a representative on behalf of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).
Monica Pallares, IFLA Americas
Also, joining the professional jury for the selection of the Research Category will be representatives on behalf of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA).
Sohyun Park, ASLA, University of Connecticut, CELA Representative
Jenn Engelke, ASLA, University of Washington, LAF Representative
Led by a coalition of residents in the Caño Martín Peña District, the plan will increase access to safe drinking water, flood protection, economic opportunities, and safe housing and open space
The ASLA/IFLA Global Impact Award is presented to a project in the Analysis and Planning category of the annual ASLA Awards. The award is given to a work of landscape architecture that demonstrates excellence in addressing climate impacts through transformative action, scalable solutions, and adherence to ASLA’s and IFLA’s climate action commitments.
“This project is so deserving of the inaugural ASLA/IFLA Global Impact Award because it showcases the full range of expertise in landscape architecture,” said ASLA President Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA. “Community engagement and data-driven decision-making inform a design that will address chronic flooding in a way that creates healthy green spaces, improving both mental and physical wellbeing of the neighborhood.”
“As the impacts of climate change increase, so does the importance of the work of landscape architects,” said Torey Carter-Conneen, CEO of ASLA. “The residents of Caño Martín Peña have a long history of taking action to address needs in their community. For this plan, they knew they needed a visionary problem-solving partner and they found that in OLIN.”
“This project stands as an inspiring statement to the pivotal role of landscape architecture as the profession of the 21st century – a profession adeptly poised to navigate the challenges that will define new ways of living and designing for future generations,” said Dr. Bruno Marques, President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects.
“Anchored in a profound comprehension of the natural environment, the built environment, and the interface between them, this project not only protects the only tropical estuary in the United States but also provides a comprehensive infrastructure master plan that caters for the community’s health and wellbeing. Within this myriad of complexities, design solutions that address climate resilience, biodiversity, flooding, housing and nature-based solutions are meticulously explored. Projects like this one call upon landscape architects to raise their voices and share their insights so we keep raising the profile of the profession.”
“OLIN is delighted to see the Caño Martín Peña Comprehensive Infrastructure Master Plan recognized! If we are to respond to climate change justly, it has to be led by the voice of the community,” said Richard Roark, ASLA, Partner at OLIN. “The plan reimagines traditional infrastructure systems as a force for rebuilding social capital and environmental equity. Everything we planned for comes from understanding a community’s relationship to their neighbors, to the estuary they live beside and the shared resources between them.”
Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE del Caño Martín Peña’s reaction to the award news:
“This award is a recognition of the ongoing participatory planning process that for many years has been led and implemented by the G-8 Inc. in collaboration with the Proyecto ENLACE Corporation and the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust as a social and environmental justice project, addressing the community’s needs and aspirations as well as climate change challenges in a sustainable, inclusive and innovative manner,” said Mario Núñez Mercado, Executive Director of ENLACE.
Grupo de las Ocho Comunidades Aledañas al Caño Martín Peña or G-8 Inc.’s reaction to the award news:
“The creation and implementation of the plan culminates the hard work of a team who fought to transform this great community for current and future residents. Showing the country that when there’s passion, anything is possible. This award shows us we have done things right and we hope to be a beacon for other communities in pursuit of accomplishing their goals,” said Lucy Cruz Rivera, President of G-8 Inc.
The Global Impact Award was announced as part of the ASLA 2023 Professional Awards. This year, thirty-four winners in multiple categories showcase innovation and represent the highest level of achievement in the landscape architecture profession.
Award recipients and their clients will be honored in person at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA 2023 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Minneapolis, MN., October 27-30.
The 2023 Professional Awards Jury includes:
Jury 1- General Design, Residential Design, & Urban Design
Chair: Kimberly Garza, ASLA, ATLAS Lab Inc.
Michel Borg, AIA, Page Think
Shuyi Chang, ASLA, SWA
Chingwen Cheng, PhD, ASLA, Arizona State University
Jamie Maslyn Larson, FASLA, Tohono Chul
Garry Meus, National Capital Commission
Jennifer Nitzky, FASLA, Studio HIP
Jury 2 – Analysis & Planning ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award, Research & Communications
Chair: Maura Rockcastle, ASLA, Ten x Ten
Camille Applewhite, ASLA, Site Design Group
Stephanie Grigsby, ASLA, Design Workshop, Inc
Mitchell Silver, Hon. ASLA, McAdams
Michael Stanley, FASLA, Dream Design International, Inc.
Michael Todoran, The Landscape Architecture Podcast
Yujia Wang, ASLA, University of Nebraska
Joining the professional awards jury for the selection of the Analysis & Planning – ASLA / IFLA Global Impact Award category will be a representative on behalf of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).
Monica Pallares, IFLA Americas
Also, joining the professional jury for the selection of the Research Category will be representatives on behalf of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA).
Jenn Engelke, ASLA, University of Washington, LAF Representative
Sohyun Park, ASLA, University of Connecticut, CELA Representative
Yu is founder of the Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and founder and principal designer of Turenscape. His firm, which has a staff of more than 400, plans and designs landscapes that “combat flooding while repairing ecological damage.”
“The award means that no matter our differences among peoples and nations, there is one common ground we have to hold together: taking care of planet Earth. We have to get together to heal this ill planet,” Yu said.
He also sees the award as a win for developing countries like China. “It is a huge encouragement for those who are working hard to establish themselves from the grassroots; for those who made their career in underdeveloped regions, in the most difficult parts of the world.”
In an interview, Yu offered his thoughts on future opportunities and challenges for landscape architects. He outlined his design philosophy and how it can serve as a roadmap for leadership on nature-based solutions and climate and biodiversity action.
Yu foresees an explosion in demand for landscape architects in China and other developing countries. “I am expecting revolutionary development of the profession of landscape architecture in the developing world where landscape architects are badly needed.”
ASLA 2014 Professional General Design Honor Award. Slow Down: Liupanshui Minghu Wetland Park. Liupanshui, Guizhou Province, China. TURENSCAPE
“I believe landscape architects are coming into a golden era. We are positioning ourselves at the forefront in the battle for climate adaptation and planetary healing, particularly in China, India, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa, where climate change is mingled with issues of urbanization, industrialization, and food security.”
“But there are also many obstacles that landscape architects need to overcome,” he added.
“The top obstacle is our lack of capacity. We need to breakthrough the boundaries of professional and disciplinary stratification. This will involve restructuring institutions, changing school programs, and redefining landscape architecture at a much larger scope, toward the art of survival.”
Yu founded his China-based firm Turenscape in 1998 with an ambitious goal — “nature, man, and spirits as one.”
“Tu-Ren is two characters in Chinese. Tu means dirt, earth, or the land, while Ren means people, man, or human being. Once these two characters come together, Tu-ren, it means ‘Earth Man,’ a relationship between land and people. The firm’s philosophy is to recreate the harmony between land and people and create sustainable environments for the future. We act in the name of the Heaven (Nature) and as messengers of the spirits of our native forebears,” he explained.
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Shanghai Houtan Park: Landscape as a Living System. Shanghai, China. TURENSCAPE
Yu brings that philosophy to his work planning and designing nature-based solutions that integrate wetlands, mangroves, and forests.
“Any sustainable landscape is nature-based. Landscape is a synonym for nature when one discusses landscape architecture in the context of its sister professions such as architecture and urban planning. Landscape architecture is about using knowledge and skills related to adaptation, transformation, and the management of nature to harness ecosystem services — such as provision, regulation, life support, beauty, and spiritual benefit — for humanity’s long-term and short-term needs. This is the essential core of nature-based solutions.”
ASLA 2020 Professional General Design Honor Award. Deep Form of Designed Nature: Sanya Mangrove Park. Sanya City, Hainan Province, China. TURENSCAPE
And he also shared some news about how his combined practice and academic work are advancing these goals. “The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Peking University to establish a joint research program at our campus focusing on nature-based solution best practices. This is largely the landscape planning, design, and management work of Turenscape.”
Yu believes landscape architects’ ability to bring together multiple disciplines and leverage science and engineering will help solve the climate crisis.
“Landscape architects play a key role in addressing climate change, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation, particularly the latter. Landscape architecture is the cornerstone of the intellectual mansion of arts, sciences, and engineering that jointly stand together to address climate change. That is why I am so glad to see landscape architecture recently listed as a STEM discipline in the U.S.”
He envisions landscape architects leading the way, pulling together a range of professions to form enduring solutions.
“Ian McHarg defined a landscape architect as a conductor, who orchestrates disciplines and professionals and integrates all abiotic and biotic processes into a harmoniously performing ecosystem through the skill of designing in the physical medium of landscape.”
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Honor Award. The Red Ribbon – Tanghe River Park, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, China. TURENSCAPE and Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture
ASLA 2022 Professional General Design Honor Award. Riverfront Spokane. Spokane, Washington. Berger Partnership / Miles Bergsma
Each year, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) issues its ParkScore, which ranks the park systems of the 100 most populous cities in the U.S. This year, the organization also explored the positive health outcomes of top-scoring cities, looking at more than 800 innovative programs and practices that integrate park and healthcare systems.
Their findings are collected in a new report, The Power of Parks to Promote Health, which offers smart strategies for making parks a more formal part of community health programs. Their inclusive, equitable approaches can help ensure more communities experience the physical and mental health benefits of public green spaces.
TPL finds that in the 25 cities with the top ParkScore rankings, “people are on average 9 percent less likely to suffer from poor mental health, and 21 percent less likely to be physically inactive than those in lower- ranked cities. These patterns hold even after controlling for race/ethnicity, income, age, and population density.”
And in 26 cities, efforts are underway to deepen connections between parks and healthcare systems. In these cities, “a healthcare institution is funding, staffing, or referring patients to health programs in parks as part of efforts to improve patient and community health.”
TPL wants to see even more cities make these connections. “Park administrators and health professionals should think of parks as part of a holistic public health strategy,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, senior vice president at Trust for Public Land (TPL), co-editor of Making Healthy Places, and one of the co-authors of the report.
Free bike rides in the park. ASLA 2022 Professional Urban Design Honor Award. Shirley Chisholm State Park. Brooklyn, New York. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates / Etienne Frossard
Numerous studies by landscape architecture researchers and other scientists have demonstrated the health benefits of spending time in green spaces, even if it’s just 20 minutes. Dr. MaryCarol Hunter, ASLA, and William Sullivan, ASLA, and others have done much to quantify those benefits.
Studies have found that exposure to nature in cities can improve “hormone levels, heart rate, mood, the ability to concentrate, and other physiological and psychological measures,” TPL writes.
Specific benefits include: “lower blood pressure, improved birth outcomes, reduced cardiovascular risk, less anxiety and depression, better mental concentration, healthier child development, enhanced sleep quality, and more.”
Other research has demonstrated the long-term benefits of spending time in nature on “body weight, cardiovascular disease risk, and life expectancy.”
ASLA 2022 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Palm Springs Downtown Park. Palm Springs, California. RIOS / Millicent Harvey
“If we had a medicine that delivered as many benefits as parks, we would all be taking it,” Frumkin said. “And they do those things without adverse side effects and at minimal cost.”
But park inequities, and therefore health inequities, are also real. TPL states that “neighborhoods where most residents identified as Black, Hispanic and Latinx, American Indian/Alaska Native, or Asian American and Pacific Islander had access to an average of 43 percent less park acreage than predominantly white neighborhoods. Similar park-space inequities existed in low-income neighborhoods across cities.”
“Over 100 million people across the country, including 28 million kids, don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of their home. In California, 42 percent of low-income parents report that their children have never participated in outdoor activities.”
The report brings together a range of scientific findings that clearly show why all communities need nearby access to high-quality parks. With inclusive parks spread more equitably throughout cities, health programs can better reach historically underserved communities.
These findings can help landscape architects, planners, policymakers, developers, and community advocates make the case for more parks and the new public health programs that can amplify their benefits:
“Close-to-home parks are associated with lower obesity rates and improved health in both young people and adults.”
“Staffed programming, such as fitness classes, dramatically increased physical activity. Each additional supervised activity increased park use by 48 percent and moderate to vigorous physical activity time by 37 percent.”
A 2014 study in the journal Preventive Medicine, which relied on five years of data on individuals’ body mass index (BMI) and characteristics of nearby parks in New York City, found that “greater neighborhood park access and greater park cleanliness were associated with lower BMI among adults.”
A study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which examined children ages 6 to 12 in Valencia, Spain, found that “park and playground access was ‘significantly associated’ with increased physical activity, especially on weekdays, and contributed to lower BMIs overall.”
A 2022 study in the journal Health & Place explored the rates of depression and anxiety among older people during the pandemic. “It found that those with access to neighborhood parks were much less likely to report symptoms of depression or to screen positive for anxiety than those without.”
“A 2023 study conducted in Philadelphia and published in the journal PLOS ONE found that those who lived closest to green space reported better physical health and less stress than those who lived farther. Actually visiting green spaces during the pandemic was linked to better mental and physical health and less loneliness.”
In their report, TPL also outlined the climate benefits of parks and how they can reduce the dangerous health impacts of extreme heat. Assembling the “highest-resolution heat data” available in the U.S., they found a “stark difference in temperature between neighborhoods that have parks nearby and those that do not.”
Analyzing “thermal satellite imagery for 14,000 cities and towns,” TPL researchers found that areas within a “10-minute walk of a park can be as much as 6 degrees cooler than neighborhoods outside that range.”
The report offers examples from leading park and health coalitions in cities, outlining how public agencies, non-profit community organizations, and healthcare providers came together to leverage public park space to improve health outcomes.
“In New York City, for example, a program called Shape Up NYC offers free classes in everything from yoga to Zumba to Pilates in easy-to-access locations: libraries, public-housing complexes, recreation centers, and, of course, parks. In Columbus, Ohio, doctors at a local hospital prescribe 11-week fitness programs, provided for free by the city’s parks department, to patients struggling with obesity and high blood pressure,” TPL writes.
A set of 14 recommendations then outline how park and healthcare systems can better integrate. Many of their recommendations can inform the planning and design work of landscape architects.
One recommendation worth highlighting — “ensure that everybody lives within a 10-minute walk (about a half mile) of a park.” TPL states that proximity is important but so are “quality, activation, and safety.” And “creative place-making initiatives that incorporate local character through cultural elements, such as public art and bilingual signage,” are also key.
ASLA 2022 Professional Urban Design Honor Award. Midtown Park. Houston, Texas. Design Workshop, Inc. “Wild Wonderland” mosaic by Dixie Friend Gay / Brandon Huttenlocher – Design Workshop, Inc.
More recommendations:
“Prioritize park investment in historically underserved communities
Develop transit connections and guided tours, like youth programs
Bring parks to the people through pop-ups and mobile offerings
Offer all-ability or ‘try before you buy’ fitness and wellness programs [in parks] explicitly designed for beginners.
Encourage park visitors to try something new with low-commitment offerings such as drop-in sports (e.g., adult recess) or free or low-cost gear rentals.
Make it easy for community groups to use parks and recreation facilities as their primary gathering venues.
Refer, prescribe, or host patients with health programming in parks and recreation facilities.
Sponsor the costs of wellness programs, sports leagues, and other health classes as part of any free fitness membership benefit.
Invest in capital improvements in parks as community health investments.
Work with parks and recreation agencies to map and identify park deficits as part of Community Health Needs Assessments.
Continue to partner with parks and recreation agencies to reach key patient populations with health services and education.
Partner with parks and recreation agencies to evaluate the impact of park initiatives on key patient and community health outcomes.”
Chris Hardy, ASLA, is senior associate at Sasaki and founder of Carbon Conscience. He is Co-chair of the ASLA Climate Action Committee Subcommittee on Carbon Drawdown and Biodiversity. He was a 2022-2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation Innovation and Leadership Fellow.
The purpose of Carbon Conscience is to make it easier to have an intuitive understanding of the climate impacts of design proposals. It’s designed for early-phase design work. It’s for landscape architects, architects, urban planners, and urban designers. It’s even for community advocates who may want to get a better grasp of the carbon potential of what’s being proposed.
For example, if there’s a multi-housing family development with multiple buildings and landscape, the designer of the project could sketch out architecture and landscape land uses and get a high-level understanding of the carbon impacts of building that project, focusing on the embodied carbon in construction.
Embodied carbon is what it takes to build the project; the carbon emitted to produce, ship to site, and install the construction materials. There’s also a way to tally biogenic stored carbon, which is the carbon locked up in things like wood materials, or sequestered carbon, which is the carbon drawn down out of the atmosphere by planting and restored ecosystems. We accounted for the probable carbon sequestered by living systems over a period of 60 years, to correlate with the typical lifecycle study period for buildings.
What we realized using Pathfinder, Tally, and other tools is you usually need detailed quantities of materials in a project before you can get a meaningful estimate of the global warming impacts of a given project. The problem with that is the biggest potential for change is in the earlier design phases, when maybe you’re fundamentally challenging or deciding what the framework of a project is.
What are some of the new features of Carbon Conscience v2 you’re excited about?
In version 2, we created an entirely new landscape baseline materials database. There are now over 140 different landscape materials with carbon factors that include mean values as well as low and high standard deviation. Carbon factors are how much carbon it takes to make a given material. For example, a carbon factor for concrete would be so many kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of concrete. With version 2, we have a much more accurate and defensible tool.
We were also able to get user feedback from the version 1 beta testers. We realized we had two types of users. We have what I like to call the noodlers, who wanted to sketch something simple, test it, and see how things work. The second group were the deep dive users who wanted to gamify the tool. They wanted to use the tool more actively — to test, iterate, and get more sophisticated material options.
In Version 2, we’ve made things a lot easier for the noodlers. We’ve reconstructed the user experience to be more intuitive. We’re going to post new user tutorials. And we also made it more open to planners who might not be in technical drawing tools on a day-to-day basis. For the deep dive folks, we provided the ability to use a lot more materials and land use options, and the ability to edit assumptions for those land uses.
Carbon Conscience is a scale bigger than individual sites that might be put in the Pathfinder. And it’s a phase or two earlier.
In Pathfinder, you need to know how many square meters or square yards of different paving, furnishings, etc, and numbers of trees. You may not know that at a planning phase. You can use Carbon Conscience even before there’s a defined project to bid on, when you have a rough idea of what the project is or could be, and you want to evaluate options. Carbon Conscience is for planning and concept design phases only.
Once you go beyond those phases, it would be best, as a workflow, for landscape architects to transfer their project into Pathfinder. We’re working with Pamela to connect our APIs, so projects can graduate from Carbon Conscience into Pathfinder. And Pathfinder is going to refer to our dataset as they move forward with their updated version this coming year. We’re very closely linked with Pathfinder and collaborating with the Climate Positive Design team.
Carbon Conscience also has an architectural dataset sourced from the Carbon Leadership Forum. It’s at a whole building lifecycle analysis approach, averaged out by floor-level of resolution. And we’re going to be moving forward with collaborating with the Epic tool by EHDD in Version 3, which will be coming this fall.
You’ve used the Carbon Conscience platform to make smart planning and design decisions for the 600-acre Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens, Greece, which will transform an abandoned airport into what will be the largest coastal park in Europe. You have stated the top three carbon reduction strategies of the project were: 1) swapping out imported soils for amended soils; 2) reducing the need for new concrete by using other materials; 3) reusing concrete found on site. How did you use the platform to figure this out?
When we started the Ellinikon, we had a high-level master plan for the park and public space authored by Foster Partners and their team. In the beginning of our engagement, we were asked to create a concept plan. We started by mapping out the Foster plan in Carbon Conscience, using that as a benchmark. We quickly realized that it was going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for us to be climate neutral before our restored ecosystems would hit their carbon carrying capacity.
I wanted to define that term, because I think it’s something that we all need to be aware of as landscape architects. The carbon carrying capacity for an ecosystem is how much carbon an ecosystem can reasonably store and sequester by the time it hits maturity. In most ecosystems, as they age and become fully mature, they store less and less carbon. They become relatively static carbon stores. But that’s not true of all ecosystems. Wetlands are different, and I can talk about that for a whole hour. But for Ellinikon, this was critical, as Mediterranean ecosystems generally store and sequester much less carbon than temperate or tropical humid forests.
What we realized in our early sketches of Ellinikon is that we needed to change business as usual. We started looking at different strategies in Carbon Conscience, which gave us a way to include the client in the discussion. We even had the client come into the tool themselves, so they could play with the assumptions and start tweaking them with us in workshops. They became personally invested in the development of the project carbon goals, and that gave our team the social capital to challenge business as usual assumptions in site design as we moved forward into technical documentation phases.
As we used the tool, we decided to hugely reduce the amount of paving and increase the area dedicated to restoration style planting, as opposed to gardenesque planting or lawns. Now in the final design, the only lawns in the project have to work for a living. They’re for active uses, sports events. Ornamental horticulture is almost entirely defined by aromatic gardens that are passively maintained in that climate. And about 70 percent of the site is now restoration-style ecology.
We also used it to challenge our material assumptions. If we were swapping out our concrete hardscapes for resin-bonded aggregate hardscape or a salvaged concrete hardscape, that gave us huge savings.
In the design guidelines released with Carbon Conscience, you outlined seven principles designers can follow to reduce the climate impacts of their projects. One is to prioritize reuse. How can landscape architects reuse materials they find on existing sites they may be redesigning? And what do you think is needed to make reuse more cost effective at smaller scales?
Cost efficiency is totally dependent on the quality and scale of the material. In some cases, it can be a lot cheaper if you’re just resurfacing asphalt pavement and not resetting it. If you’re just re-setting existing cobbles in a particular streetscape, that’s extremely cost effective. It gets trickier when you’re doing substantial amounts of work to the material itself. For example, if you want salvaged concrete — let’s say crushed salvaged concrete for riprap in a very small site — that might not be cost feasible.
If you have a site an acre or more, specialized equipment like concrete crushers can be viable. But in the United States, we’re already diverting over 50 percent of our construction waste to some kind of salvaged facility, and that includes lot of concrete work. There’s already some efficiency where you can salvage aggregates coming from demolition debris in most major metropolitan areas.
A big part of reuse is also thinking about the end-of-life of our designs and materials. It’s a lot easier to crush, salvage, and reuse, or up-cycle or down-cycle concrete if it doesn’t have steel reinforcing in it. Without steel reinforcement, you can start cutting it like stone. If we think about our concrete pavement profiles, maybe we make them a little thicker to avoid having steel in them, so that in the next generation of that concrete pavement, it’ll be a lot easier to salvage it for reuse.
In the guidelines you also call for using natural and locally-sourced materials wherever possible. What are the climate benefits of these approaches? And are there projects that have done this that inspire you?
When we can avoid emissions associated with the making of the material itself — like the emissions that go into making clinker for cement, smelting for metals, or complex hydro-chemical processes to make plastics — that dramatically reduces the carbon factors of the material itself.
When we specify natural materials, the material is there; it just needs to be cut, shaped, and moved. And those emissions can be a lot less. I’m talking about things like stone, aggregate, wood, bamboo, and rammed earth, which are naturally occurring and just need be manipulated to become construction products.
When we talk about locally-sourced materials, we’re avoiding the transportation carbon cost that regional or more distant materials can have. Unfortunately, in the United States almost all of our transportation for construction materials is generally truck, which can have the highest carbon factor of almost any typical transportation options. Local sourcing becomes a huge factor for landscapes in particular, because most of our materials are massive and come at a high carbon transportation cost.
Right now, I’m focused on our Ellinikon project in Greece where we are trying to locally source most of the materials on site. We have the benefit of having stone quarries less than 20 miles from the site. And we have the benefit of mining material on the site. There’s a wonderful opportunity when you think about sourcing local stone in particular, because usually you’re tapping into a vernacular, a material tradition. There are regional craftsmanship traditions people take pride in.
You also emphasize the value of nature-based solutions and promoting ecological preservation and restoration. How do healthy ecosystems and nature-based solutions create positive climate outcomes? Do biodiverse, ecologically-rich landscapes store more carbon?
Only in living systems do we have economically viable ways to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Geoengineering solutions are speculative businesses. Trees and plants are very efficient at what they do. And it’s very hard for technology to replicate those processes in an economically viable way.
One of the great benefits of nature-based solutions is the co-benefits. Rain gardens not only contribute to stormwater management but reduce the fundamental need for grey infrastructure. They’re replacing the concrete pipes and catch basins. And in the right context, they’re a high-carbon sequestrating landscape. And when you start layering in biodiversity benefits, it becomes an even richer proposal.
Biodiversity is more of a correlation with carbon sequestration than a causation. For example, a Spartina salt marsh is not the most biodiverse planting design but it is super carbon sequestering. However, when you compare two different landscapes, the more structurally complex an ecosystem is — the more trophic levels, the more physical levels of living organisms, such an overstory, an understory, and rich mycorrhizal horizon in the soils — the more carbon it is going to store. And it will usually be more biodiverse than a structurally simplistic ecosystem. What we want is structural diversity and complexity; we want resilient, complex, adapted ecosystems.
Most kinds of forest have a carbon carrying capacity, but many wetlands and some prairie do not. Wetlands offer a linear rather than sigmoidal sequestration of carbon. Over the long-term, wetlands can be incredibly high performance from a carbon perspective. Maybe the solution isn’t always planting trees to offset a project. Maybe it is protecting or investing in the restoration of a wetland or a prairie.
Sanders highlighted the results of a five-year assessment of the LAF fellowship program and its efforts to grow the next generation of diverse landscape architecture leaders. The assessment shows that past fellows are shaping the future of the built environment in key public, non-profit, and private sector roles.
And she introduced the latest class of six fellows, who focused on climate, equity, technology, and storytelling:
Chris Hardy, ASLA, senior associate at Sasaki, used his fellowship to significantly advance the Carbon Conscience tool he has been developing over the past few years. The web-based tool is meant to help landscape architects, planners, urban designers, and architects make better land-use decisions in early design phases when the opportunity to reduce climate impacts is greatest.
Carbon Conscience is also designed to work in tandem with the Pathfinder tool, created by LAF Fellow Pamela Conrad, ASLA, as part of Climate Positive Design. Once the parameters of a site have been established, Pathfinder enables landscape architects to improve their designs and materials choices to reach a climate positive state faster.
Hardy examined more than 300 studies to develop robust evidence to support a fully revamped version of Carbon Conscience, which will launch in July 2023. He found that “landscape architecture projects can be just as carbon intensive as architecture projects per square foot.” He wondered whether the only climate responsible approach is to stop building new projects altogether. “Are new projects worth the climate cost?”
After months of research, he believes decarbonizing landscape architecture projects will be “very hard,” but not impossible. He called for a shift away from the carbon-intensive designs of the past. To reduce emissions, landscape architects need to take a “less is more” approach; use local and natural materials; and increase space in their projects for ecological restoration, which can boost carbon sequestration. He cited Sasaki’s 600-acre mega-project in Athens Greece — the Ellinikon Metropolitan Park — as a model for how to apply Carbon Conscience, make smart design decisions, and significantly improve carbon performance upfront. “There are exciting design opportunities — this is not just carbon accounting.”
Ellinikon Metropolitan Park / SasakiEllinikon Metropolitan Park / Sasaki
Landscape architect Erin Kelly, ASLA, based in Detroit, Michigan, sees enormous potential in using vacant land in cities for carbon sequestration. Her goal is to connect vacant lands with the growing global offset marketplace, which offered 155 million offsets in 2022 that earned $543 million. And she sees opportunities for landscape architects to work with carbon developers to improve offset projects.
Carbon offsets are purchased by organizations to reduce their climate impacts. One offset credit equals one ton of greenhouse gas emissions. Offsets are verified by third-party verification companies and then listed on carbon registries. Like other projects, there are carbon developers, who purchase or lease land to grow trees or protect natural carbon sinks, like wetlands. Projects are monitored, usually over a 25 to 100 year period. But there is no one price for an offset, and “the quality varies,” Kelly said.
There is a need for new approaches to offsets that generates more direct income for communities and incentivizes landscape health by factoring in biodiversity. Sequestering carbon in cities like Detroit provides an opportunity for urban communities to benefit, but to date urban offset programs like City Forest Credits have been limited and need to be scaled up.
The vision / Erin Kelly, ASLA
She estimates that 31 million people in the U.S. now live in vacant land communities. Using machine learning and satellites, Kelly is developing a national atlas of vacant land ripe for redevelopment as offsets by city governments, community groups, and companies. “Landscape architects haven’t been involved in setting up these offerings,” but can tell “compelling stories” and influence how they are developed. Locally-managed, small-scale offsets can provide greater financial benefits and community health and environmental co-benefits.
Local connections to offsets / Erin Kelly, ASLANational offsets that enhance biodiversity / Erin Kelly, ASLA
Robert Levinthal, a PhD student at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), is focused on Mega-Eco Projects, or very large-scale nature-based solutions. Hundreds of these projects, like the Great Green Wall in Sub-Saharan Africa, are in development at different scales around the world. They are meant to combat desertification, protect biodiversity and connect habitat, and preserve and restore watersheds. They may be in urban or rural areas.
Mega-Eco Projects / Robert Levinthal and Richard Weller
Unfortunately, few landscape architects are involved in these projects. For Levinthal, this means the project leaders are “missing critical insights,” as landscape architects can help ensure these massive projects balance the needs of humans and non-human species. Landscape architects can plan and design the connections between large-scale natural systems and communities.
In Senegal, Levinthal explored the implications of the Great Green Wall himself. Initially proposed in the 1950s, the plan envisions a 50-kilometer-wide belt of trees from the east to west coasts in Sub-Saharan Africa as an anti-desertification measure that will prevent the Sahara Desert from further expanding south. The African Union, which supports the initiative, has scaled down the effort but it still remains ambitious — with the goal of restoring 100 million hectares of land and storing 250 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But Levinthal noted that out of $14 billion spent on the Great Green Wall to date, just $20 million has reached Senegal. And desertification is happening outside the Great Green Wall area.
Mega-Eco Projects / Robert Levinthal
Levinthal sees the need to better connect green belt planning with community master planning and eco-tourism development. Senegal, like other Sub-Saharan African countries, is “sadly missing landscape architects and urban designers” who can weave parks, community spaces, recreational areas, and transportation systems into ecological restoration efforts.
The need for regional planning around the Great Green Wall in Senegal / Robert Levinthal
And pastoralists remain deeply underserved. He called for a renewed focus on regional and land-use planning among landscape architects and deeper partnerships with indigenous peoples. To learn more, look out for an upcoming symposium at UPenn, October 13-14, 2023.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
“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.”
“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.”
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
“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.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
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.”
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
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.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
“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.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin AtkinsonLaguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
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.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin AtkinsonLaguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
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.
Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Beach, California. Terremoto / Caitlin Atkinson
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.
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.”