April | 2012 | Landscape Architecture Magazine

Archive for April, 2012

THE GSA MESS

Posted in LAND MATTERS on April 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Yesterday, in light of the scandal unfolding at the General Services Administration, a reader wrote:

Bradford,

I wonder if you’re going to do an update to this month’s LAND MATTERS. Your buddy Robert Peck got canned for misusing tax dollars. No wonder so many architects are flocking to the GSA. It seems the agency thinks it’s Google or Apple and can spend like drunken sailors while those of us in the private sector have seen layoffs and severe cutbacks in benefits.

Great timing on your column.

As for an update, I initially said no to this reader. But I really should provide one, which would be that the positive views expressed toward GSA in my April column are basically unchanged, including my view of Robert Peck, the head of the Public Buildings Service and one of two top executives fired by the administrator, Martha Johnson, before she resigned earlier this month. Peck is not my buddy, by the way, but is someone whose excellent work in the public sector I have admired. If you read the pertinent testimony and exhibits carefully, you may conclude, as I have so far, that Peck’s main bad luck was that of a political appointee in charge of a part of a federal agency that had a regional (career) manager with sociopathic spending habits.

Speaking as a taxpayer, though, I still have no doubts about the enormous value GSA has brought to the country with better architecture, landscape architecture, and design over the past 20 years. This scandal seems to have first been uncovered, as you might hope it would be, by an alert GSA accounting employee. Apart from it, though, if I were looking for really serious federal government waste and abuse of tax money, that is, with a few more zeros behind it, GSA would hardly be the first place I’d go looking.

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UPDATE: PEAVEY PUSHBACK

Posted in ART, CITIES, ECONOMICS on April 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation

Surprise! The same day my editorial on the fate of Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis came out, the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission voted 8 to 1 against issuing a demolition permit. I had been expecting the permit to be issued, given the air of defeat hanging over the pro-Peavey phalanx. But the commission asked the city’s planning director to study the plaza, designed by M. Paul Friedberg in the 1970s, and determine whether it should be designated as historic; that process could take up to six months. The city’s director of the renovation project, Beth Grosen, told a local paper, City Pages, that Peavey is a “beloved space” and that her department looks forward “to having it be even more vital and sustainable in the future.”

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PRESERVATION, PLUS AND MINUS

Posted in ART, CITIES, ECONOMICS, HISTORY, LAND MATTERS on April 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Land Matters, from the May 2012 issue of LAM

When you work in the public realm, you’ve got to have a thick hide. If you don’t, the public will give you one.

M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, and Tom Oslund, FASLA, have each run into this reality over the past year and a half. The two were teammates in 2010, until they weren’t, for a competition project to renovate Peavey Plaza next to Orchestra Hall, the home of the Minnesota Orchestra, in downtown Minneapolis. Friedberg designed the plaza in the early 1970s. You see his signature written in concrete all over its long amphitheater stair seats, floating terraces, groves of shade, plus, when the plumbing worked, in the cubic fountain that shed solid sheets of water and the big pool that stared up from the center of it all.

The pictures of the plaza are gorgeous. The plumbing hasn’t worked for some time. A couple of pumps that supply the 120,000 gallons of water it needs are on the fritz and can’t be fixed. The plaza is crumbling in places. It suffers from a chronic lack of love, not least from the city, which wants to replace it.

Replacement is not what Friedberg and his biggest advocate, Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, the founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, had in mind when they both joined Oslund’s design team, one of four that competed for the project. Things soured between Friedberg and Oslund after Oslund won the competition and Friedberg realized a new design would not keep his old one intact.

Otherwise this is pretty much a standard preservation dispute, (more…)

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TREE VALUE

Posted in RESEARCH on April 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

If I look to my right as I sit at my desk, I can see a midsized tree across the street. For the past 12 years, I’ve seen that tree turn gold in the fall, shed its leaves for the winter, then spring back with bright green buds in March that unfold, fill out, and deepen in color right about this time every year. So how much is that tree’s display worth? That tree, and other trees I can see if I look in another direction, increase my productivity as an employee to the tune of $3,000 a year, or so says a study cited in an article on GreenSource.

What seems difficult to quantify is nonetheless being tackled by scientists, who conclude that access to nature and views of nature not only make more productive employees, they shorten hospital stays, increase retail sales and home property values, and make people healthier.

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THE “BIGGEST SMALL CREEK TRANSFORMATION”

Posted in CITIES, RIVER RESTORATION, WATER on April 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Courtesy Waller Creek Conservancy

In Austin, Texas, today, four teams made the final shortlist for the Waller Creek Competition, a bakeoff to find the best way to restore 1.5 miles of Waller Creek through downtown Austin. The competition, sponsored by the public-private Waller Creek Conservancy and led by Donald Stastny, covers 28 acres around the creek, or, the conservancy says, 11 percent of downtown. Thirty-one teams entered the first stage of the competition; that list was cut to nine teams earlier this year. The four finalists are: CMG and Public Architecture; Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates with Thomas Phifer & Partners; Turenscape and Lake | Flato Architects; and Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, and Rogers Marvel Architects. An announcement of a winning team is expected October 16.

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D.C. TO WELCOME SKYSCRAPERS?

Posted in ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, IDEAS, PLANNING, REGULATIONS on April 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

For more than 100 years, the federal government has restricted building heights in Washington, D.C. But those limits may soon be relaxed, according to the Washington Post. A number of leaders from both sides of the aisle, including Mayor Vincent Gray, Congressman Darrell Issa, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, are discussing changes to how building heights are regulated.

There seems to be a common interest in preserving views toward major monuments, and height limits downtown would probably only increase a little, the leaders say. But Issa tells the Post he’s interested in exploring taller buildings in areas outside the historic core—such as Southeast D.C.

The Post talked to people on both sides of the debate but didn’t really get into the issues surrounding height restrictions that I find most intriguing: (more…)

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WINTER IN RETREAT

Posted in CLIMATE, PLANTS, PRACTICE on April 12, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

From the April 2012 issue of LAM:

USDA

By Daniel Jost, ASLA

Winter never took hold in Washington, D.C., this year. So it was with our spring jackets that we greeted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s first new Plant Hardiness Zone Map in 22 years on January 25. Here and there, you could see daffodils already in bloom.

The scene couldn’t have been more appropriate. According to the new map, large parts of the United States—including some neighborhoods in the nation’s capital—are now a half zone warmer than they used to be.

The hardiness zones help determine which plants will survive the winter in a given area of the United States. The map approximates the average minimum temperature as it divides the country into 10 degree Fahrenheit zones, which are further divided into 5 degree Fahrenheit half zones—marked by a number and the letter a or b. The National Mall, once located in USDA Zone 7a, is now in the warmer Zone 7b. Atlanta, Dallas, and Tampa, Florida, have all moved into warmer zones as well.

(more…)

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PLAY IT SAFE

Posted in ACCESSIBILITY, ADA, PLAYGROUNDS on April 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Worried about how the new ADA regulations will affect projects you’re working on? An article in LAM’s May issue breaks out 10 changes that you’ll want to know about. In the meantime, the International Play Equipment Manufacturers Association has come up with a checklist that specifically looks at what’s required in terms of accessibility for playgrounds.

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REPARATIONS BECOME A PARK

Posted in PARKS on April 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

From the April 2012 issue of LAM:

The Arup designed cable-stayed pedestrian bridge has become an iconic image for the park. Photo by Craig Kuhner.

By Jennifer Zell, ASLA

On the southern edge of the city of Wilmington, California, just before the Port of Los Angeles begins, lies the newly constructed Wilmington Waterfront Park. It will be remembered for some time, maybe this lifetime, maybe longer, as a place of contention. The park, which spans almost 30 acres, with the Port of Los Angeles on one long side and the stacks of the petroleum industry on the other, stands as a reminder of the tension between people and industry, and the unlikely but somewhat qualified triumph of the people.

Wilmington is a tough town, known for its hardscrabble longshoremen and for having been a convenient dumping ground for industrial waste. Tougher still is Ken Melendez, who has been a leading advocate for the new park. Melendez, who is 58, is a tall, swarthy man of French Canadian and Hispanic lineage who has the mouth of a sailor and the devotion of a nun. To hear him describe the pleasure he gets from watching his grandkids play at the park, it’s hard to imagine the years he spent hectoring and name calling city and port officials for their obliviousness to the residents of Wilmington.

(more…)

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