This fall, LAM will be highlighting professional and student winners from the 2020 ASLA Awards by asking designers to dive deep into one image from their winning project.
The Landscape of an Agreement: The Role of Regional and Geopolitical Landscape, Agriculture, and Religion in a Future Peace Agreement Between Palestine and Israel, by shelter_expanse, Professional Analysis and Planning Honor Award.
Image courtesy shelter_expanse.
“In our work we mostly try to investigate the relationships between people based on the land. We hope this image, in the form [of an] aerial panorama (like those of Heinrich Berann), succeeds in showing this by detailing two entangled populations making clear actions over the land, thus shaping their life and future. It is the landscape that delineates the ground for actions, the Judaean Desert at the foreground, and the Jerusalem Mountains at the back.”
“We always believe landscape can and must take a larger responsibility in society, toward greater equality and justice, with communal and spiritual aspects. But we were still surprised to find to what extent this is possible if one addresses the critical issues and sites with the right tools. In a region cultivated for thousands of years, landscape plays an enormous geopolitical role: People pray, live, and die for it. In a world torn by health and environmental crises, economic and political inequalities, we must come out into the land; leave behind the boutique work for a while. It should be based on a clear and universal set of principles.”
—Matanya Sack, International ASLA, and Uri Reicher of shelter_expanse
The Palestinian–Israeli conflict in the West Bank is one of the world’s thorniest territorial disputes. The firm shelter_expanse, commissioned by Peace Now to look at the situation through the lens of landscape architecture, shows how considerations of topology, land use, and future development can inform negotiations by policy makers and analysts. The design team created a potential solution to the complex patchwork of overlapping claims based on its analysis of the region’s developed territories, agricultural lands, nature reserves, and heritage sites. Providing useful new data in the course of its research, the team created detailed maps of developed areas, turning up new communities not previously recorded. The resulting proposal is based on a vision for long-term stability and growth of a separate Palestinian nation and makes recommendations for specific land swaps between Israel and Palestine. The jury took note of the sensitive approach to the region, where “fights over ownership often neglect realities of the land itself,” and “the ability to de-settle land will hold lessons for flood-prone cities that face the prospect of retreat.”
This fall, LAM will be highlighting winning projects from the 2020 ASLA Awards by asking designers to dive deep into one image from their winning project.
Effecting Change to Avoid Disaster: Communicating Effective Wildfire Planning Strategies, by Design Workshop, Professional Communications Honor Award.
Prepared by Design Workshop, Inc., for CPAW.
“We were in need of a suite of graphics to effectively communicate to decision makers how the choices they make can help their communities mitigate the risks of wildfire. We wanted our audience to learn about different mitigation techniques to reduce wildfire risk to the structure and surrounding landscape.”
“The graphic showing the overlapping home ignition zones further makes the point that mitigation takes a collective response—particularly in areas of more dense development. Research shows that while a holistic, comprehensive approach is important for other aspects of wildfire safety, such as evacuations and response, the home ignition zone is a critical component for reducing structure losses and other property damage. These two scales of mitigation are not at odds; rather [they] work together when coordinated.”
Since 1970, wildfires have increased 400 percent in the United States, especially across the western states. At the same time, about 60 percent of new residential development is built along what is known as the wildland urban interface—a region particularly susceptible to highly damaging wildfires. Landscape architects increasingly need communication tools to help clients, public officials, and communities understand different wildfire mitigation strategies and include them in the planning and design process. In response to this need, Design Workshop created a series of graphics that underscore the importance of collective land use and wildfire mitigation decisions at the community scale, as well as the house, city, and regional scales. For example, a graphic on home ignition zones illustrates decisions that can be made in concentric circles moving from the house out to the surrounding area, including eliminating combustible material near the house, creating “fuel breaks” such as driveways and walkways, and maintaining a mix of appropriately spaced and pruned trees in the outermost zone around the home. “Armed with this visual toolbox of strategic risk-reduction methods,” the jurors concluded, “landscape architects are empowered to initiate conversations that would trade vulnerability for resilience.”
“It’s so incredibly simple, you almost wouldn’t recognize it as landscape architecture,” Tanya Olson, ASLA, a cofounder of Tallgrass Landscape Architecture, says of her firm’s latest project, the Custer Beacon. “And that’s why it’s kind of interesting, because we were involved for years before it got built.”
The Beacon, as it’s known, is a concert hall and “canteen” in Custer, South Dakota, a town of approximately 1,900 people situated in the far west part of the state in the scenic Black Hills. Opened in 2019, the venue occupies a pair of converted metal warehouses located a block off Custer’s main street, Mt. Rushmore Road. Custer is also Tallgrass’s home base, which gives the firm a unique understanding of the culture and rhythms of a small town that is dependent on summer tourism. Continue Reading »
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s plan for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden. Image courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
At the Hirshhorn, a preservation row tests the bounds of unity between building and landscape.
The Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden is a cloistered 1.5-acre art landscape just across Jefferson Drive SW from the museum. Stepped into the earth and filled with modern sculpture arranged in intimate outdoor rooms, it’s a definitive change of pace from the broad civic expanse of the National Mall, though no less significant as it’s the only Smithsonian entity with “Sculpture Garden” in its official name, per the law that established the institution.
The sculpture garden was originally designed by the Hirshhorn Museum’s architect, Gordon Bunshaft. His initial sculpture garden was a harsh, wide expanse of hardscape and gravel when it opened in 1974, centered on a 60-foot-wide rectangular reflecting pool. In 1977 the Smithsonian enlisted Lester Collins to soften the landscape and make it more hospitable, especially during Washington, D.C.’s sweltering summers. When the new landscape opened in 1981, it was with additional lawn and shade cover recessed into the ground—a more layered experience of concrete walls that cordoned off and defined outdoor rooms for the quiet contemplation of sculpture. Collins selected trees with an intense sculptural presence (weeping willows, weeping beeches, ginkgoes, dawn redwoods) and was lauded for his progressively accessible design, nearly a decade before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
But the museum’s new plan for a revised landscape by the artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto is drawing the attention of landscape advocates who charge that the changes proposed will alter the relationship between the landscape and Bunshaft’s monumental ring of aggregate concrete, two elements of the museum campus that were conceived as one. With the new landscape, the Hirshhorn (the staff is quick to point out that only 15 percent of museum visitors make a visit to the sculpture garden) hopes to offer art lovers more programmatic flexibility in the garden and the chance to host larger, more performance-driven events. Continue Reading »
As part of its climate change and urban flood mitigation strategy, Copenhagen aims to build 300 stormwater management projects over the next 20 to 30 years. Among the projects are a series of detention roads, entire streets redesigned to convey and detain rainwater locally to relieve the existing storm sewer system. It’s an ambitious target that reflects the city’s understanding that investment in these projects is a way of managing greater long-term risk to city infrastructure while providing citizens with multifunctional spaces in the short term.
The Sankt Kjelds Square and Bryggervangen by SLA is a pilot of the detention road concept. Completed in 2019, it comprises the entirety of the 2,300-foot-long Bryggervangen road and Sankt Kjelds Square, the roundabout in the middle. “It’s quite a simple project,” says Bjørn Ginman, a project director at SLA, who says that the fundamental concept is about seeing water move through the site. Rain gardens lining the pedestrian rights-of-way receive rainwater from sidewalks and the roofs of adjacent residential buildings, while road runoff is directed into larger infiltration ponds at the roundabout and at intersections, though not before an in-ground diverter (one of the municipality’s first applications in a public road context) deals with the most polluted first flush. Continue Reading »
Economic and environmental policies have a direct impact on the formation and maintenance of landscapes, but it can often take years for those impacts to be felt, or for a particular policy’s spatial consequences to be revealed. A recent student design research project attempts to make those implications more clearly and immediately visible.
The project On Riven Land by then-University of Toronto MLA candidate Aaron Hernandez, the winner of this year’s CELA Student Award for Creative Scholarship, analyzed land use within and adjacent to Ontario’s Rouge National Urban Park, a five-year-old park on the outskirts of Toronto. The project visualized the conflicts embedded in some of the park’s stated policy aims, namely the “maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity” as outlined in the Rouge National Urban Park Act. Continue Reading »
STUDENT COMMUNICATIONS: 652 to You: An Approach for a Collective Voice
In the September issue of LAM, the 2020 Awards lineup unfurls.
At the end of March, just a few weeks into the nationwide shutdown orders, both the coronavirus and the now-ubiquitous Zoom meeting were novel. But the jury for the 2020 ASLA Professional Awards, made up of landscape architects across various levels of practice, accepted, if not embraced, a new means for judging these 38 winning projects. Under these conditions, the jury assessed the merits of shared space from a fresh perspective. Projects that facilitated equal access to the outdoors, enhanced how people naturally behave in those spaces, and established meaningful connections with one another—and with the land—assumed a different weight in these times.
The ASLA Student Awards jury met this year under a different moon, several months later. The pandemic had blown up the spring semester, fracturing student focus and cutting short many research projects. Yet despite these disruptions, the jury found its center quickly. Clarity and community were the twin threads that entwined the comments over several days. As one juror remarked, “We should be leaning in” on anything that engages community. Continue Reading »
