Photo by Jane Hutton

By Jane Hutton

“This John Chipman bench was planted 500 years before Columbus sailed for America,” reads a Landscape Forms ad from a 1973 issue of this magazine. The familiar slatted bench is shown towering over a forest canopy. Its base is anchored to a colossal redwood stump. “When you have a site furnishing job to do, think about Chipman in 1,000-year-old redwood,” the ad says. “Even if your benches only have to last another 100 years.”

Old-growth redwoods yield beautiful, warm-toned lumber with a straight grain. The wood is low in resins and rich in polyphenols, which makes it both fire resistant and impenetrable to fungi and insects. Because of these desirable traits and the wood’s wide availability in the midcentury, modernist landscape architects in California used it extensively. Thomas Church even acted as a spokesman for the California Redwood Association in a 1956 ad, calling redwood one of his “most versatile materials.”

By the 1980s, landscape architects’ enthusiasm for old-growth redwood had waned. Harvest rates plummeted because of the near decimation of populations, and many of the remaining stands were incorporated into parks and preserves. As the use of old-growth redwood declined, other materials appeared on the market: second-growth redwood, chemically treated softwoods, and tropical hardwoods. When the redwood decking of Church’s Fay Garden in San Francisco was restored in 2006, it was replaced with a tropical hardwood called ipe (see “Degrees of Preservation,” LAM, January 2009).

Most ipe (pronounced ee-pay) comes from rain forests in Brazil and Peru. Like redwood, ipe lumber resists decay and is dimensionally stable; unlike redwood, it is extremely hard and dense—nearly five times as heavy as old-growth redwood. Freedonia Group, a company that provides information for businesses, estimates the U.S. decking market will grow to $5.7 billion by 2016 and “among wood types, tropical hardwoods will see the fastest growth.” Ipe has become the wood of choice for many public landscape architecture projects. It can be found in the renovated Coney Island and Atlantic City boardwalks as well as in the first phase of New York City’s High Line.

As with old-growth redwood, ipe’s use is controversial. Four months after the High Line’s opening in 2009, people involved with the Rainforests of New York campaign hung a banner at the park’s West 17th Street amphitheater, which is made with ipe certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). “High Crime on the High Line: FSC Lies, Amazon Wood Is Not Sustainable,” it read. The campaign, initiated by members of Rainforest Relief and the New York Climate Action Group, criticizes the use of tropical hardwoods such as ipe in public landscapes. New York City is the largest consumer of tropical hardwood in North America, it says.

When Rainforest Relief began speaking out about this issue, it promoted the use of FSC-certified tropical lumber, explains Tim Keating, the group’s executive director. But since then, it has become skeptical that certification is a reliable indicator of sustainable production, citing the FSC’s willingness to certify old-growth forests in the Amazon.

The issues surrounding ipe are typical of a new set of material challenges that landscape architects face today. We are increasingly interested in where materials come from and what their production entails from an ecological and social perspective. But it is often hard to find good information on this subject. I’ve specified ipe myself, and in an effort to understand more about this popular wood, I followed some back to its Brazilian habitat.

Belém, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Pará, is strategically located where the Rio Pará—the southern arm of the Amazon River—pours into the Atlantic Ocean. The city has been the port of trade for goods harvested in the Amazon basin for several centuries. Established as a Portuguese colony in 1616, the city saw economic booms from cacao in the 17th century and rubber at the end of the 19th century. Today, it is home to a plethora of major environmental protection and research organizations such as the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment and the Amazon Environmental Research Institute as well as lumber exporters, including Timber Holdings USA—the lumber supplier for the High Line.

The Instituto Floresta Tropical (IFT), which is also in Belém, straddles these domains of environmental protection and forest extraction. The group conducts independent research and provides training and certification in sustainable forestry for logging companies, government agencies, and community landholders. I asked Marco Lentini, the technical manager of IFT, to show me some ipe growing in its natural habitat. Lentini invited me to the Roberto Bauch Forest Management Center, an eight-hour drive to the southeast of Belém. But he warned that we might not see many live trees: “Looking for ipe is like following a trail of stumps.”

Marlei Nogueira, who leads courses in sustainable forestry practices, drove us to the research center, where we began our search. He cleared a path through the vines and the dense undergrowth toward a single mature purple ipe. At a meter and a half in diameter and 40 meters high, the tree dwarfs those around it. The species, Tabebuia impetiginosa, is locally known as ipe roxo for the flush of purple flowers that appear after the dry season—a trait that makes it a popular urban street tree.

T. impetiginosa and T. serratifolia (known as yellow ipe) are two of the most exploited in the group of about 20 species collectively marketed as “ipe.” These two species range from the Brazilian Amazon to Mexico, yet they appear at low densities; a mature tree is found once every three to 10 hectares, according to the ecologist Mark Schulze and his colleagues. Their slight, winged seeds get caught in foliage as they fall from the canopy and are quickly consumed by tapir and deer on the forest floor. The seedlings, once established, require specific lighting conditions controlled by the size of forest gaps. Lentini explained that these traits, along with characteristic slow growth (less than 0.5 to 0.7 cm growth in diameter at breast height [DBH] per year), produce a population structure that comprises mainly old, large adults with few juveniles.

Nogueira made a small incision behind the tree’s bark and removed a slice of the sapwood for us to inspect. At his prompting, we tried to rip the shiny, yellow tissue with our fingers and found that it is impossible. Ipe species have thick-walled fiber cells that produce extremely dense and strong wood. The Janka hardness test, the industry standard for measuring the hardness of wood, determines the pressure required to embed a small steel ball into the surface of a wood board. At 3,680 pounds of pressure, ipe’s Janka score is three and a half times greater than teak, and nearly nine times that of second-growth redwood, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ipe wood is so hard that the U.S. Navy considered it for producing ball bearings during World War II; it is so heavy that it sinks in water. Furthermore, as the tree grows and sapwood is converted to heartwood, biochemicals known as extractives are deposited into heartwood cells and make the wood highly resistant to decay. These qualities make ipe a valuable commodity. According to Brian Lotz of Timber Holdings USA, a cubic meter of ipe lumber products is worth some $3,000. At that price, a single mature tree could be worth nearly $9,000.

We spotted a seedling at the base of the large tree. Nogueira picked off one of its five-leaflet leaves and showed us how it matches the logo on his IFT uniform—a stylized ipe leaf. He explained that ipe was chosen as the institute’s emblem because it represents a great conundrum for the region. The desire for highly valuable, yet sparsely distributed trees like ipe has exacerbated the processes that drive deforestation in the Amazon. The typical sequence of uncontrolled deforestation involves the cutting of valuable species, the clearing of remaining biomass for charcoal production, and finally the planting of crops for cattle grazing. As desired species are eradicated, the logging frontier and associated road construction advance further into unlogged interior forests.

The harvest of big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla)—also prized as a decking material in the United States—is a textbook example of these dynamics. In 2003, big-leaf mahogany faced commercial extinction owing to illegal logging and a rampant export market—60 percent of it bound for the United States—and so it was listed in Appendix II of the UN-chartered Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This regulation still allows the wood to be traded but limits the quantity and sizes of trees that can be harvested. It has alleviated some of the pressure on mahogany populations, but similar exploitation patterns are being repeated with other species like ipe, whose export market increased by 500 percent between 1998 and 2004. Schulze and his colleagues assert, “Tabebuia appears as vulnerable to uncontrolled logging as mahogany.” Ipe, they conclude, is “the new mahogany.”

Back in Belém, the forest engineer Eduardo Eguchi explained how the Brazilian government regulates logging. Companies must produce a “sustainable forestry management plan” that includes an inventory of all commercial trees with a DBH larger than 40 centimeters and a description of species to be harvested. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) is responsible for reviewing management plans, granting licenses, and conducting inspections. Within a licensed site, logging companies that use heavy machinery are limited to taking 30 cubic meters of lumber per hectare for each 35-year cutting cycle. Along with the protection of any endangered species, 10 percent of any species in a lot must be retained as a seed source, no species with fewer than three individuals per 100 hectares may be harvested, and, unless otherwise legislated, no trees smaller than 50 centimeters DBH may be cut.

Since 1969 it has been illegal to export whole logs from Brazil. The sawmills of the Icoraci District, to the north of Belém, process logs that arrive by river and road from various regions of the Amazon. Marcia Teixeira of Timber Holdings USA took me to one of the mills that her company purchases from. On the day of our visit, the mill was cutting ipe almost exclusively. Mounds of behemoth logs, some one meter in diameter, surrounded the roofed, open-sided structure. Inside the mill building, activity circled around the main saw: A colossal hook anchored to the trusses was lowered to catch the edge of a three-quarter-meter-square section log. The cumbersome hook flipped the log so that it was properly aligned as three men slowly guided it toward the blade.

At the front of the building are floor-to-ceiling stacks of smooth, warm-hued ipe two-by-fours drying. Teixeira works with the mill’s grader to check quality and to verify the moisture levels of the lumber. Boards are air- or kiln-dried before shipping to ensure lighter and therefore cheaper freight. The ipe that Timber Holdings USA buys comes primarily from the states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Logs are typically transported from interior forests to rivers by truck, and then by barge to port cities like Belém. Timber Holdings USA purchases sawed wood and ships it directly from Brazilian mills to New York City’s port. And from there it is distributed to warehouses in New Jersey, Texas, California, and New Hampshire.

In a hotel lobby in Belém, Teixeira walked me through the string of documents required to secure a legal shipment of lumber from Brazil to the United States. Each shipment of sawed lumber is associated with a unique number and set of documents that describe its cadera de custodia or chain of custody. In 2006, IBAMA instituted the Document of Forest Origin system, whereby all forest products are tracked digitally in real time. According to the Brazilian government, this system, along with new surveillance methods, has significantly increased its ability to control illegal logging and stem deforestation rates. Teixeira’s job involves the meticulous administration of Timber Holdings USA’s lumber on its way out of Belém, maintaining records of the locations, handlers, and licenses associated with each link of the chain, from forest to importation. Tightened regulations, along with amendments to the U.S. Lacey Act, which prohibits the trade of any illegally harvested plants or animals, have required companies to be even more diligent. Timber Holdings USA has developed a continuing education course to help clients navigate the controls and develop specification language, Brian Lotz told me. The paperwork is so arduous, Teixeira said, that “illegal companies can’t survive.”

On the road to and from the IFT field station, we regularly saw officials from IBAMA and SEMA (Pará’s Environmental Secretariat) stopping trucks loaded with logs to check their documents. But this legal paperwork can provide an administrative mechanism for concealing illegal wood, Nogueira said.

In 2012, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that some logging operations had bribed or bullied landowners to produce legal forest management plans, which were then used to cover illegal lumber from a different forest. The scam is known as “heating” the wood, and the vast terrain and complex network of actors related to logging in the Amazon make it challenging to control. Illegal logging in the Brazilian Amazon fell by 50 to 75 percent in the past decade, according to a 2010 report by Chatham House, a policy institute in London. But estimates by the group suggest that 35 to 72 percent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is still illegal. Chatham House came up with these figures by contrasting the amount of legal wood produced with the total amount of wood consumed domestically or exported.

Even if all illegal logging could be stopped, that might not stabilize ipe populations. To actually produce a sustained yield of a given species, the cutting intervals and quantities must be calibrated to match regeneration rates. The Tropical Forest Foundation, an international not-for-profit, asserts that conventional, legal logging in Brazil is “detrimental to the forests’ future.” The foundation and others promote “reduced-impact logging,” which involves longer cutting cycles, harvesting methods that protect neighboring trees and reduce soil erosion, and improved working conditions. These methods have been adopted by various certification programs that are trying to reduce the impacts of conventional forestry.

The FSC, established in 1993, has created the most recognizable third-party certification system for sourcing wood in the United States. It is the authority on certified wood for the Sustainable Sites Initiative, a landscape certification developed by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the U.S. Botanic Garden, and ASLA, this magazine’s publisher. The FSC oversees third-party certifiers who administer two forms of certification: forest management and chain of custody. Companies, in return, may gain access to higher-price markets for certified products. Ian Hanna, director of business development for the FSC in the United States, estimates that approximately 5 percent of the forest product market in the United States (this includes everything from cardboard packaging to timber) is FSC certified. This is comparable to the current consumption of certified organic food.

Some seven million hectares of Brazilian forest have been certified by the FSC. Around 59 percent of that land is plantations. The remaining land is “natural.” This includes a spectrum of forest types from relatively old-growth forest to re-naturalized former pasture. The FSC doesn’t explicitly ban the harvest of old-growth forests, Hanna told me, except where they are exceedingly rare. The FSC maintains that the careful management of all types of forests is the best way to protect them. Unmanaged forests receive no protection, Hanna said.

The FSC’s forest management certification is based on 10 principles that address environmental impacts, the rights of indigenous peoples and workers, and maintenance of high conservation value forests, among others. Principle Five requires that harvesting occur at a level that can be sustained permanently. Hanna said at the level of the forest, the sustained yield of wood is strictly met, but he acknowledged that at the level of the species there is “slightly more slack.”

A 2008 study by Schulze, James Grogan, and Edson Vidal in Oryx challenged the assumption that FSC certification guarantees sustained yields. They studied all FSC certificates issued in the Amazon from 1993 to 2005 and found that although the standards are comprehensive, they are administered subjectively. This leads to inconsistencies in the ways standards of harvest operations, forest management, and monitoring are met, they said. If companies in the Amazon were strictly held to all standards required for certification, the researchers concluded that “no companies would currently qualify.” At the time of the study, FSC indicators required that cutting rotations, extractable volumes, and the percentage of seed trees retained must be based on individual species’ biology, but the authors found no evidence of species-level management plans at that time.

In another paper published the same year, in Biological Conservation, the same authors, along with Lentini and Chris Uhl, analyzed the population dynamics of T. impetiginosa and T. serratifolia, on sites harvested under conventional and reduced-impact logging regimes, and projected the impacts of future harvests. Their analysis found that even with reduced logging intensity, it is not possible to sustain production of ipe lumber under current “sustainable” harvest levels. The numbers of trees will continue to decline. The authors recommended further protection of T. impetiginosa and T. serratifolia similar to that which was eventually granted to mahogany. This would involve applying stricter regulations about how much of the species could be harvested from the forest and incorporating silvicultural techniques that could improve chances of seedling survival.

In the experimental plots surrounding the IFT’s Forest Management Center, these silvicultural techniques are being tested. The IFT establishes plantations in forest gaps from seedlings collected from mature trees. Paricá (Schizolobium amazonicum), mahogany, and ipe are planted together to take advantage of their distinct cutting cycles; paricá will be harvested every 30 years, mahogany every 60 years, and ipe every 90 years. We visited two plantations, one planted the year before and one planted 10 years earlier. The young plantation looks like a small garden of neat rows of seedlings. The 10-year-old plantation is barely discernible from the forest around it. Lentini told us that plantation timber, which grows faster than its forest-grown counterparts, tends to be inferior in quality. However, it is these techniques that might one day make the commercial harvest of slow-growing trees, like Tabebuia spp., a more tenable proposition.

The Friends of the High Line opted to complete the project’s second phase with oil-treated teak instead of ipe; the teak was salvaged from industrial and agricultural structures being demolished in Indonesia. The decision followed a 2008 pledge by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Honorary ASLA, to the United Nations General Assembly that he would reduce New York’s tropical hardwood use by 20 percent. Since then, NYC Parks & Recreation has stopped using tropical wood in park benches. San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Baltimore ban the use of tropical hardwoods completely for municipal projects.

Some problems surround New York’s agenda to reduce its reliance on tropical woods and to source more responsibly harvested wood. When repairing existing structures, replacing unusually strong materials like ipe with alternative materials that have different properties may not work. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade’s decking of tropical greenheart (Chlorocardium rodiei) can span the structure’s joists, yet replacement with a weaker wood would require an overhaul of the structure, according to New York’s Tropical Hardwood Reduction Plan.

Rot-resistant wood alternatives are hitting the market, including new products like heat-treated and silica-treated lumber. The NYC Tropical Hardwood Reduction Plan suggests using recycled plastic lumber, concrete and clay pavers, or domestic wood products. Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) appears to be particularly promising. It is a species native to the United States, it is harder than teak and white oak, yet it is fast growing. Due to its vigorous growth, it has been actively removed in certain contexts and the market for its timber is still nascent. The species was the focus of a 2011 ASLA presentation by the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, and Don Lavender of Landscape Forms, which recently introduced black locust to its palette for site furnishings.

Where FSC-certified ipe might be allowable, it can be difficult to find. At the time of my visit to Belém, two of Timber Holdings USA’s lumber suppliers had access to FSC lumber, but neither had any certified ipe. Teixeira predicted that there would possibly be a small amount of FSC-certified ipe available a few months later, but it seemed like an exception in an otherwise vast market. FSC’s Hanna sees this limited supply of FSC-certified ipe as an indication of the careful management of an uncommon species. He believes that ipe is overused because it is specified by convention, not function. The specification of less common species, Amy Smith of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says, has the potential to shift value to the ecosystem rather than the single species and encourage the long-term management of the standing forest. She cites Angelim vermelho (Dinizia excelsa) and curupay (Anadenanthera colubrina) as two tropical hardwood alternatives to ipe. Later this year, the WWF, a longtime partner with the FSC, will be launching a set of tools for designers to find lesser-known timber species and navigate the dense literature on wood selection.

Ipe earned its place in the landscape because it can withstand decades of tough weather, but last fall, Superstorm Sandy revealed the wood is no match for a 13-foot storm surge. At press time, Keating and Rainforest Relief are battling with Avon, New Jersey, and its decision to rebuild its tropical hardwood boardwalk, ravaged by the storm, with ipe. A striking photograph in the New York Times showed the remains of the famous Rockaway Boardwalks—“a hardwood hodgepodge of Angelique, teak, pine, ipe, Cumaru, and greenheart,” as the paper wrote. The crumpled boardwalks triggered debates about whether wood replacements will be able to withstand the more frequent storms that some people expect to result from climate change. Keating sees the devastation of Sandy as an important alarm and sees a direct connection between the destroyed boardwalks and the status of the forests that their wood comes from. “Sandy wiped out boardwalks from Maryland to New York,” he says. “The fact that towns are willing to go back to tropical hardwood is incredible. Materials are not a free ride—they are taken from somewhere, and we forget that at our own peril.”

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Fragments of this paper were developed from “Reciprocal Landscapes: Material Portraits in New York City and Elsewhere,” which was published in JoLA, Issue 15, Spring 2013.

Margie Ruddick is the recipient of the 2013 National Design Award in landscape architecture given by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Ruddick, whose namesake firm is based in Philadelphia, has become known for big urban and ecological projects such as Queens Plaza in New York (with WRT), the Shillim Institute and Retreat in Maharashtra, India, and the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China. The installation of Ruddick’s Urban Garden Room in the Bank of America building in Manhattan can be seen in the time-lapse video below. The project was a collaboration with her mother, Dorothy Ruddick, who died in 2010. (A gallery of Ruddick’s projects can be found here.)

Closer to home, a couple of years ago, Ruddick’s neighbors in Philadelphia thought she was a farmer of noxious weeds. As a hilarious story by Anne Raver reports, Ruddick received a summons from the city and went to court to tell a judge that she knew exactly what she was doing. The judge tossed the summons.

For lifetime achievement, the Cooper-Hewitt is honoring the great James Wines. Wines founded his multidisciplinary studio, SITE, in New York in 1970, and was far ahead of most architects and designers in pushing the importance of the environment and the landscape. Some of you may remember Wines’s apocalyptic designs for the Best retail chain. If you’ve ever been to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in New York, that’s his design, too. But there is much, much more.

James Wines

A BEST retail store by SITE.

The architect and critic Michael Sorkin is receiving a National Design Award for “Design Mind,” which few followers of his agitations over the years will question. Studio Gang Architects in Chicago wins the award for architecture; Aidlin Darling Design is the winner for interior design; and Paula Scher, of Pentagram, wins for communication design. The full list of winners can be found here.

The Florida Capitol Complex. Photo courtesy urbantallahassee via Wikimedia Commons

In the past few years, Florida has become a bit of a minefield for design professionals. Landscape architects, architects, engineers, and others have been exposed to an unusual level of potential personal liability, compared to colleagues in most other states, if the firms they work for are sued. But a new law, signed by the governor, Rick Scott, in late April, will bring Florida in line with the majority and give individual designers a greater degree of protection from litigation.

The law (Section 558.0035, Florida Statutes) was a response to court decisions that expanded clients’ ability to sue design professionals for economic damages. Until it takes effect on July 1, only firms–not individual professionals–can protect themselves with limitation of liability provisions (sometimes called “LOL clauses”) in contracts.

In Moransais v. Heathman, in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court allowed a homebuyer to sue the engineers who allegedly failed to identify defects in the building, even though the engineers were not personally named in the contract between the buyer and the firm they worked for. And in Witt v. La Gorce Country Club, in 2010, a state appellate court said that a limitation of liability clause in a contract between the country club and a geology firm hired to design and build a reverse osmosis water treatment system didn’t limit damages for the firm’s owner himself in a negligence lawsuit.

The new Florida law extends limitation of liability provisions to individuals if those provisions are written in the specific way it prescribes (it even requires that part of the provision be in all capital letters and an extra-large font size). It will not apply retroactively, so contracts negotiated before July 1 could still cause liability problems for professionals.

An analysis on the website of law firm of Smith, Currie, and Hancock predicts that the new law will mostly affect owners and contractors who lose money in situations such as construction delays caused by a design professional’s negligence. It doesn’t affect lawsuits for personal injury or property damage.

The extent to which design professionals and firms can limit their liability through contracts varies from state to state. Most states allow some enforcement of limitation of liability provisions, and recent litigation has tended to favor enforcement. But in other states, laws or policies designed to prohibit the transfer of risk and liability make it hard or impossible to enforce them in court.

Even in states where the provisions are enforceable, their effectiveness depends on exactly what the state law requires and exactly what the contract says.

“What Florida teaches us is that every design professional should take a close look at the situation with his or her state law, see what protection is available, and make sure contracts include any ‘magic words’ the law or regulation requires,” Stuart Kaplow, a real estate and construction attorney, told me.

And because state laws can change fast, it’s smart for chapters of professional groups to keep a close eye on the issue. In this case, Jonathan Haigh, ASLA, the Florida Chapter ASLA’s government affairs chair, told me that the chapter worked to make sure that landscape architects were treated with parity and that there were no attempts to exclude landscape architects or otherwise restrict the scope of practice for the profession.

This column appears in the May 2013 issue of LAM.

In the interest of public health, this issue should probably carry an antihistamine with it. Our feature stories this month all involve residential landscape architecture projects, wonderful projects, each quite different and with its peculiar challenges and virtues. But the thought of designing gardens around the places people actually live, categorically, seems to cause itching, swelling, and citations of Thorstein Veblen among some landscape architects. I have witnessed this reaction more times than I can recall, though in each case, I am glad to report, the victim has fairly quickly resumed his or her normal activities.

There is a charming fiction in the design world that private work, especially residential work, and especially residential work for anyone living at or above 200 percent of the poverty line, is decadent and unworthy of professional regard. The parallel belief is that all public work is good and righteous for designers to do, and about that there is little doubt, though the case is oversimplified. Ask anyone who’s done public work.

Private work and public work are like fresh pasta and dried pasta, as Gillian Riley has it in the Oxford Companion to Italian Food. One is not better than the other. They are different. Because private clients are often rich, they tend to be open to new ideas, artistic, ecological, or otherwise (they can also drive you crazy). Surely most of us are with Daniel Libeskind in his recent pronouncement that you should not build gleaming streets for despots. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is perfectly okay to do design work for someone who on their own has made something happen without harm to anyone and has made money as a result. There is a no-fly zone over much of Wall Street, direct mail entrepreneurs, and a certain evil Australian media magnate, but a designer has to use the sixth sense to figure out just who the client is.

Nearly 80 percent of private firms run by ASLA members offer residential design services. This work makes up more than one-third of private sector billable hours. It is far and away the largest market subsector. The domestic front, particularly designing for what you might call the permanently rich, brought a lot of firms through the recession. Many of the landscape architects who do both private and public work will tell you that in their offices the private work pays for the public work. The public work, high-minded as it is, often pays low margins and it increases the number of clients from a couple to a couple of hundred or more. Residential projects are where a lot of designers try the novel things that, if they work, make their public projects better. Still, some designers recoil at the thought of something they consider too close to housework. There’s a T-shirt for sale online by the Landscape Architects Network that says, “I’m a landscape architect and I won’t design your garden.” Good for a laugh, I guess, but not great for business. You may have heard the sentiment elsewhere and noted the need for heroics it carries—besides, who does not love gardens?—and the obliviousness to how the economics of this profession play out in reality.

All images courtesy STOSS landscape urbanism

A playful proposal by STOSS landscape urbanism with Höweler + Yoon Architecture, Nitsch Engineering, and Angie Cradock ScD, MPE has won the Movement on Main competition to reimagine Wyoming Street in Syracuse, New York. The competition, funded by the Educational Foundation of America, challenged participants to reimagine the five-block-long street in a way that will promote human and environmental health and spark new development within the neighborhood, while being sensitive to residents and businesses already there. STOSS’s scheme was chosen by a group that included people in the community, architecture faculty from Syracuse University, public health experts, and Richard Weller, the new chair of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. I caught up with Chris Reed, the founding principal of STOSS, this morning to find out more about the competition and his firm’s winning scheme. The interview has been condensed and edited.

What is Wyoming Street like now?

It’s a fairly simple street. It’s on the edge of a residential community that’s adjacent to downtown and yet completely disconnected from downtown. Syracuse in general is a city that has lost population over the last few decades. Wyoming Street is the seam between a number of residential areas which now include some community centers and services and a number of former industrial sites. The East side of the street is a bit more spotty in terms of constant tenants. There’s a new television center and literacy center. There’s an old warehouse building full of artists but there is also a lot of empty buildings as well.

Wyoming Street is not really your typical troubled “main street,” right?

No, what they wanted to do is to convert this street into the community’s main street but think about it in a different way. They really thought of it as a new kind of main street—not a main street with lots of shops and cute lampposts but a main street that really became the social and activity center for that community, the Near West Side.

The “movement” piece is all about public health and how can you, through the design of a civic space, get people out and moving and socializing and improving physical health, environmental health, and civic life.

Tell me about STOSS’s winning vision for the street.

Our launching point was this broader idea of what is public health. Surely the physical part is important, but the social part is also important. Particularly with elders, where social interaction for them is as important as physical movement to produce a healthy life—healthy body, healthy mind. Beyond that, improving the health of the environment—stormwater is cleansed through the project. And all of this contributes collectively to the health of a community.

The project itself is really focused around a number of physical interventions—mounds—arranged along the street and on adjacent properties. The mounds are designed to encourage running jumping, moving, that sort of thing. They’re designed to create social rooms along the street for playing, for small-scale events, for impromptu sort of performances, for gathering. In the bigger sites, these mounds become quite large and allow for larger scale gathering around basketball courts and, in the winter, can be used for sledding and snowman contests. And all this is done with a series of rubber surfaces that allow people to jump and play and hop. The mounds slope up from the street to create a series of reflective surfaces along the street and [the ground] slopes down to collect stormwater to clean it.

The lighting agenda is really important to extend the life of the street. Here we worked very closely with Höweler + Yoon Architecture on embedding into the street a set of reflective surfaces that are designed to be illuminated by passing cars. There are also a series of motion activated lights that track pedestrian movements along the street. As you’re running along the street, a series of embedded lights will be illuminated as you go along. The whole idea is to really animate the street with light, with motion, with activity and really do it in a way that encourages people to play. Hence the name of the project, “Light-Play!”

The competition brief required you to work with a limited budget of $250,000 per block. How did you respond to this challenge?

The overall budget was actually $3.5 million That was changed at some point during the proceedings. We figured out that if you spread that project over the entire site, you ended up with $12 per square foot, which doesn’t buy you a lot. So, we focused the work on the west side of the street adjacent to the residential areas and some of the community spaces, as well as two of the larger lots. By cutting down the square footage, we were able to quadruple the budget to $48 per square foot which then allowed us to do something with some real impact.

Will there still be cars on the street or will it be taken over by people?

There will continue to be cars in the street. It can be shut down for community festivals. Part of the strategy includes a number of safety devices. There are two chicanes along the way that cause cars to slow down. With the reflective surfaces, pedestrians will be more aware of the cars as they are moving. Likewise, with motion activated lights, activated by pedestrians, motorists become more aware of pedestrians along the street so the whole lighting strategy embeds a safety component to it as well.

The chicanes, are those sort of sharp zags in the road?

Yeah. That’s a fairly standard way to slow traffic. The things we are doing are fairly normal things—the chicane in the street, the reflectors embedded in crosswalks, even the materials we’re using like the surfacing from playgrounds. They’ve all been proven and tested. We’re just using them in different ways.

To see more images of STOSS’s design and the other finalists proposals, check out to the competition’s website.

The offending superstop. Courtesy Arlington County Department of Environmental Services.

You hear a lot of talk about making suburbs into something more like cities, and if reporting like that of the Washington Post last week is any guide, it’s going to be a tricky sell to turn the talk into reality. On March 24, the Post published a story about what it calls a “$1 million bus stop” in Arlington, Virginia. It didn’t cost $1 million, technically, and it isn’t just a bus stop. The Post showed signs of having known as much, but went ahead and made a new transit project sound like a boondoggle anyway and stoked enough outrage to have a major county transit improvement project put on hold.

The stop is what Arlington transportation planners are calling a “superstop.” It is a prototype, the first of two dozen stops meant to handle both bus and, eventually, streetcar traffic down Columbia Pike, a four-lane commercial strip that runs three-and-a-half miles through the county from its outer suburbs to the edge of the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, buses unload at a very busy subway stop that takes people into Washington, D.C. Once the streetcar line is built as planned, the combined transit line is expected to carry about 30,000 passengers on a typical weekday.

The hard costs to build the stop were $574,000. There were other costs, too, about $433,000, as Dennis Leach, Arlington’s transportation director, told me. Those other costs involved design (by HOK), planning, reviews, fees, and so forth. There were also problems of construction delays, about 14 months beyond the four months originally scheduled. Arlington contracted the construction of three superstops to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or Metro, which wound up for its own reasons scaling down its construction operations. (Metro can barely keep a single subway station fully functional these days.) “This project really became an orphan” at Metro, so Arlington County ended that relationship with just the one superstop.

Much of the $433,000 can be filed under research and development costs, one-time charges to create the first superstops that will spread over the creation of the other 23 stops. “Our intent was to do one [stop], evaluate it, and then go forward with modifications,” Leach said.

Ah, but the Post reported that “[t]he county has budgeted $20.8 million for the remaining 23 stops, or about $904,000 for each one.” With this burning fact, the Post’s reporter headed out to the superstop in question and baited commuters who were waiting for buses to offer their thoughts about all this million-dollar business.

One commuter said: “From a citizen, from a voter, whoever put that budget through needs to get their butt canned. It’s an outrage.” Another asked: “Is this made of gold?”

Well, no. It’s made of stainless steel, glass, and concrete. It has real-time electronic displays to let commuters know when the next bus will arrive. Each stop will also involve a lot of work to relocate utilities underground, to make streetscape improvements, and install new street lighting. The costs may surprise commuters. They obviously surprise the Post. But they don’t surprise people who have designed transit systems in other cities.

“The cost breakdown [in the Post] is suspiciously missing a lot of detail,” said Brian McCarter, FASLA, a landscape architect at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF) in Portland, which led the recent redesign of the Portland Mall, a late-1970s transit corridor that now serves 57 blocks (see it in the April issue of LAM, which is free over there on the right rail). “There is some amount of infrastructure that goes into the ground at the platform to be ‘rail-ready’ in the future. It involves high-voltage electrical, communications, and safety equipment. The article doesn’t even acknowledge this,” he said. A typical light-rail platform the length of two rail cars can cost $1 million to $1.5 million, he said, “depending on the size of the shelter canopies and other amenities.”

Rendering of Columbia Pike with planned streetcar. Courtesy Arlington County Department of Environmental Services.

There are complaints about the Arlington shelter as well. Its open form, basically a canopy, doesn’t seem to keep people dry or out of the wind. An Arlington County board member, Libby Garvey (D), told the Post she is irked that “if it’s pouring rain, I’m going to get wet, and if it’s cold, the wind is going to be blowing on me.”

Well, there’s a reason for that, Leach said. “The big issue is the community wanted a very open, airy design, and wanted it to be very transparent.”

But there is more. Jason Hellendrung, ASLA, a landscape architect and principal at Sasaki Associates, in Watertown, Massachusetts, has designed public transit fixtures and shared his views on the shelter issue in particular. Architects and designers don’t always anticipate all of a shelter’s functional needs, but “there are also a lot of technical complications to address,” Hellendrung says. For safety, most transit shelters are rather open so that people don’t become “trapped, mugged, or raped” in them. A shelter has to have clear visibility inside and out. “There are setbacks and height clearances that don’t allow full coverage for the shelter onto the vehicle,” Hellendrung says. “Also, there are considerations for view angles from security cameras that limit vertical obstructions.”

Ron Stewart, an architect and colleague of McCarter’s at ZGF, added: “It is not possible to design windscreens that protect during all seasons and from all wind directions. Waiting times at frequently used stops are short, so exposure time is minimized while not creating a security issue.”

So be sure to dress for the weather and bring an umbrella on those rainy days.

A couple of other points: Municipal planners don’t have much money for maintenance, so taxpayers, voters, whoever, ought to be glad whenever they use high-grade materials in building infrastructure; the good stuff costs less in the long run. And finally, Arlington County is known the world over for its clever mass-transit planning and for having placed a lot of new development around transit since the 1980s. The money the county spends today to improve transit and take cars off the roads is going to pay itself off and then some. Developers are already swarming around Columbia Pike with new six- to eight-story commercial and residential buildings where there has for decades been one long, thin retail strip.

“The higher investment in the transit infrastructure is absolutely justified by the increased property values, tax base, higher ridership, less vehicle miles traveled, environmental benefits, and increased social capital of good, planned communities,” McCarter said. “An article like this one completely ignores what the bigger effort is about and focuses on the shocking headline.” That $1 million bus stop: a line the Post works almost to the last sentence, even though it might even know better, or should, given how much coverage the paper devotes to the region’s incessant gridlock and its crumbling highways.

AUSTIN, TEXAS—

The speech was a winding road system with many cul-de-sacs, loosely related observations that cannot be done justice in this format. Its main intent seemed to be challenging landscape architects to think about where they get their conceptions of landscape beauty, and where clients get theirs.

Stilgoe asserted that many people get their ideas about landscape beauty from advertisements. More specifically, he thinks many women get their ideas from the ads in fashion magazines, and so he has become an avid reader of these magazines himself. He challenged the audience to look at the landscapes that fashion models appear in, and showed slide after slide of unsmiling models positioned in similar landscapes of concrete and stone. “The very straightforward formula for producing the background image is very, very creepy,” Stilgoe said. “Notice how often the model is in a derelict environment.” The model is the beautiful thing. Nothing is allowed to outshine her or her dress.

He wondered why we seem to put historicized scenes on our Christmas cards and how our movies, our children’s books, and our camera lenses are affecting the way we see landscape.

Stilgoe has built his career on such questions and observations. “J. B. Jackson told me to get in a car and go look,” Stilgoe recalled. “Don’t ever ask for a grant, because how are you going to ask for money if you don’t know what you’re going to look at?”

He has observed a nation of passive consumers, more concerned about their own bodies than the content of their character or the flowers around them. “We became a people who stopped dancing and started to watch others dance,” Stilgoe said.

He said foreign students often ask him to explain Americans’ fascination with vampires. “How do you explain that to someone from another country?” he wondered.

And he said youthful explorations, particularly by girls, are being discouraged. Stilgoe argued children have become “the organized prisoners of adults.” Once, it was assumed that a child had the capacity to build things like rowboats and there are many books that showed them how with detailed plans. Today, boys are playing video games—though he seemed to find this less troubling than the little girls who dressed up as Disney princesses all the time. (He was generally a bit harder on women, which turned off some of the women in the audience.)

Why is that happening within our culture? To learn more about the subject, Stilgoe recommended Rudolf Flesh’s The Art of Clear Thinking. There are very few courses on advertising taught at any level of the education system, he observed.

Stilgoe offered a number of book recommendations, including Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It offers “something we’re beginning to forget in this country about the simplicity, about the beauty of nature,” he said.

As he closed his talk, he offered one final recommendation: Harmony by Prince Charles, though he wasn’t recommending the message, per se. Very powerful people, Stilgoe said, known to landscape architects as their clients, are getting their ideas about landscape from this book.

“Say Manure!” -Rich Haag.
(Photo by Daniel Jost)

AUSTIN, TEXAS—The Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture conference began on Wednesday with a rousing and hilarious rant by Richard Haag, the 89-year-old landscape architect from Seattle best known for his design of Gas Works Park and his early advocacy for edible plants. The speech veered in numerous directions. At one point Haag polled the audience to see what topics they wanted him to focus on, and, to his surprise, they chose trees. Some of the most memorable lines and moments:

“I have known for 50 years that landscape architecture is the fine art of visual swindles.” [Arguing that no rendering can truly capture the landscape in all its complexity.]

“Landscape architecture is the only profession that embraces nature as a lover. Biophilic, we were biophilic before they started combining words like that.”

On the landscape architecture profession: “Right now we’re on the top. We have what I call the power of procreation. But it can be threatened by other technologies moving in, and we damn well better take control of it.”

“Every idea you have, give it away, because you get a better one in return.”

On death: “The university’s going to get me…. There ain’t going to be no funeral. There ain’t going to be no obituary.”

On Antarctica: “The most overrated landscape in the world.” [It has no trees.]

Given a choice of about six subjects, the audience chose to hear Haag talk about trees, which Haag had called “a weak spot in our profession.”

“Here’s a problem: Trees do not have legal standing. I predict trees will soon have legal standing. I mean, wetlands do. Endangered species do.”

“I probably owe my life to a tree. Black walnut.”  Whenever he had problems—teenage problems, God problems—he’d go up into that tree’s swaying branches.

“Every city should have a tree czar…or a tree czarina…. That person’s obligation is the welfare of the trees.”

In response to a LAM article that ran last June, “The Trouble with Brick,” on Boston’s efforts to move away from brick sidewalks, Haag argued for developing “wheelchairs with suspension systems.”

Haag said he once asssigned a problem to architecture students to design a tree. “The joke was on them…. That was one way to bring those boys down to earth.”

On an article he published in LAM many years ago, laying out his idea for more productive landscapes that produce food. “I wanted to call it nutrimental horticulture, but LAM thought that was too out there so they called it edible landscapes.”

His preferred way of ending conversations with native plant nazis: “You’re not going to grow many native vegetables or fruit trees.”

On arborists and why they aren’t always the best advocates for trees: They’re “usually more interested in pruning.”

He put in a kind word for phytopathologists, though: “These guys can take the pulse of trees.” But unfortunately there are few of them out in the field, he says.

On his general dislike of answering questions from a podium: “This is not good. We should be sitting in a circle. I should be sitting on a log.”

“Can design be taught? I think it can be professed. I doubt if it can be taught.”

“The term plant materials should be banished from our vocabulary. Plants are not materials. They are living organisms.”

Responding to someone’s concern that plants are not being taught in some landscape architecture programs anymore: “That’s a shame. This really does worry me. The plants are one of the things that separate us.”

“Trees and lawn are antagonistic. They work on different regimes.”

Asked what technologies we ignore at our peril, Haag said: “G–I–S! It’s a tool, but here’s the problem with these tools. The wrong people get ahold of them. The capitalists. The corporations.” He told the audience about a man who was working on a railroad in China without field surveys, hydrologists, or cultural anthropologists, only GIS. That is “dangerous as hell,” Haag said.

He described his idea for “Bio-Olmsteding” with an effort to measure how someone could survive on the bounty of five acres of land.

One thing Haag forgot to explain during his lecture was the title of his talk, “The Sooner the Better.” Later in the evening, he shared the story. A woman who attended one of his talks said to him, “Mr. Richy, you have strange ideas. Are you writing?” He replied that he was. “Oh, when will you publish it?” the woman asked. “I said, ‘Oh, posthumously,’” Haag says, ”and she said, ‘Wonderful! The sooner the better!’”