landscape architecture

As professional practice becomes more collaborative, so must approaches to practice and academia. Meaningful mentorship can establish a sense of culture, encourage explorations in design, and facilitate rapid growth for employees at all levels. SWA Laguna Beach has committed to creating successful public/private partnerships in order to leverage mentorship through outreach, education, and giving back… Read more »

For the fifth consecutive year, the Laguna Beach office and the department of landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona are collaborating to expand the design curriculum and deliver an intensely focused and tailored experience that closes the real-world gap for students. The SWA Studio is centered on large-scale urban design projects. The partnership grounds a studio agenda in professional culture and expertise while helping students to develop their creative process, technical discourse and applied thinking. By linking the professional and academic worlds through design exploration, the partnership also creates the perfect academic laboratory to test urban design ideas of significant commercial, cultural, and environmental impact.

For SWA, this process is an ideal way to reinvigorate practice and strengthen the connection to design-based academic research while supporting the growth of our culture and staff. For the students, this collaboration is an invaluable educational and professional development experience. The exposure and relationships they gain by interacting with SWA principals and associates is very unique in the academic environment, and provides professional resources, networks, and experience for an unparalleled level of mentorship and commitment.

The 2018 professional-academic collaboration, Beyond the Edge: Water + Urbanism in Wuhan, is officially underway. Along with Cal Poly Pomona, this partnership has expanded to include Huazhong University of Science and Technology’s department of landscape architecture in Wuhan, China. The studio collects 20 students from CPP and 20 students from HUST who are divided into six teams made up equally from each university. The teams are assigned one of two project sites to research and design: the Yangtze River Waterfront and the Huxi River, at HUST’s Campus. Both projects are focused around issues of water and urbanism.

In order to make a studio collaboration in China possible, SWA was required to provide funding for a field trip to visit the project areas and cultural sites, as well as facilitate a workshop with HUST students and faculty. SWA reached out to various industry partners to solicit donations on behalf of the students and successfully raised funds from a generous group of vendors, contractors, and designers. Their support allowed for a 10-day excursion to China to visit Wuhan and Shanghai, resulting in a successful, sponsored studio experience that won’t be forgotten.

CHECK OUT OUR VIDEO JOURNEY in 90 seconds, or follow us on Instagram @swa_laguna or by using the hashtag #swa2018wuhan for more insights into the studio and China travel experience.

Pavel Petrov is a designer in our Laguna Beach studio.

A special thanks to our donors who made this memorable experience a reality:

PLATINUM DONOR

GOLD DONORS

SILVER DONORS

Bison Innovative Products

D.L. CUNNINGHAM

BRONZE DONORS

David Silverman & Associates

Tri-C Natural Soilutions

Tnemec

Netafim USA

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Posted by Pavel Petrov
in Education
on 6 March, 2018

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After several years of extreme drought, last winter’s heavy rains quickly replenished many reservoirs and aquifers throughout the state. This wet season ended with months of record-high temperatures that dried out a surplus of vegetative fuel, and was followed by strong winds along the steep, hilly topography of many California suburbs. The result was one… Read more »

California has had a long history of wildfires, often caused by recurrent climatic symptoms: long, intense periods of dry, then wet, then dry weather that has now been exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Couple that with an aggressive development history in highly fire-prone areas, the frequency of fires has more than quadrupled in the past three decades. In 2017 alone, California suffered a total of 8,442 fires that burned over one million acres of land, destroyed at least 9,000 structures and cost more than $3.3 billion in damage. Now compare these figures to the 1999 fire season, where about 6,000 wildfires consumed 273,000 acres of land, destroyed over 300 structures, and cost around $500 million worth of damage. The results are daunting.

Just as low-lying coastal communities have become increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise, flooding and hurricane events, communities in close proximity to or surrounded by wildlands (within the wildland-urban interface) are also becoming increasingly prone to uncontrollable urban fires. And while land planning and management strategies such as prescribed burning and remote sensing have been implemented to preemptively reduce these risks, what more can be done specifically in the context of urban environments? What roles can landscape architects, planners and urban designers play in creating more fire-resilient communities?

One such role may involve defensible space design at the neighborhood scale, where every home is designed with fire-resistant building materials, plant species and fire breaks to provide containment. Another may involve performative husbandry at the city scale, where goats are adaptively managed to graze on excess vegetation and reduce fuel loads (with the added side benefit of more goat cheese). Perhaps even new technologies such as weather modifiers, emergency reservoirs, and automated environmental monitoring systems can be integrated at the regional scale to gradually encourage landscape adaptations over time.

None of these scenarios alone can address all the complexities associated with urban fire risk but a redundant toolkit of strategies that is spatially and temporally distributed across our urban environments may significantly decentralize and shift the scale of our vulnerabilities. As planning and design professionals with the power to affect change, I believe it is our responsibility to provide new paradigms for mitigating urban fire risk – no matter how large or small. The American Society of Landscape Architects recently announced the launch of the Blue Ribbon Panel, which will advocate for climate change policy and resilient design. The Managing Principal of our Los Angeles studio, Ying-yu Hung, is a member of this significant panel. But this message is for all the rest of us: There is no better time than now to mobilize our profession in the exploration and implementation of alternative methods to adaptively design and plan for safer, fire-resistant communities in the future.

Elvis Wong is a designer in the Laguna Beach studio. Image of Santa Rosa, California, courtesy of the California National Guard.

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Posted by Elvis Wong
in Ecology, Landscape Urbanism, News, Restoration
on 20 November, 2017

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I made my first digital drawing in Microsoft Paint on my dad’s computer when I was in primary school. It was so exciting then to be able to draw without a pencil, and paint with shades unconstrained by my color sets. Although the drawing tools were very primitive, I was enthusiastic about creating simple images on a monitor. Since university, where… Read more »

Computer-produced images have become the accepted standard in the landscape architecture profession. Perhaps the convenience for quick production and ability to edit quickly were the primary attractions in the first place; being able to demonstrate design ideas in seemingly photorealistic images is certainly one of the key motivations for digital graphics. However, I sometimes wonder, whether the advancement of digital graphic tools makes us overemphasize the picturesque quality of a built environment, rather that the fundamentals of public space, such as people, function and management.

I resumed my passion for drawing during a trip to Istanbul in 2009, when my camera broke. Hesitating to buy a new camera, I began sketching interesting scenes (the Hagia Sophia) in a notebook. Although they were as simple as black- and-white cartoons, the details related to their production are still vividly alive in my mind: buildings, streets, shop windows, the brightness of the sky, the temperature of the wind, the people coming around to chat, and so on. Since then, I have not traveled without my sketchbook, and I remain captivated by what drawing has brought to my life.

Drawing is like a lens that magnifies the details of everyday objects at different scales. Our fast-paced lives mean that we typically see things at one scale, while drawing offers me a chance to slow down and devote time to the things often unnoticed: the shades and textures on the two sides of a single leaf, the woven patterns on a couch cover, the glints on a glass bottle, reflections in a coffee mug, the variety of stones embedded in a concrete path, the composition of displaced chairs in a park, the social interactions between pigeons and sparrows near a little bin…Drawing these things feels like capturing glimpses of a hidden world, which offers abondant inspiration for design.

Early this year, I worked with three colleagues on ideas for a 30-km-long waterfront design competition in Guicheng, 30 minutes drive from Guangzhou, China. Surrounded by rivers and teeming with canals, the city is traditionally famous for small- scale manufacturing. During recent decades, the local economy has become more diverse, many factories were upgraded, and more emphasis has been given to the quality of civic life.

We proposed a destination park at an old port site for shipping containers, at the confluence of two main rivers. We believe that the landscape should somehow evoke the memory of the city’s shipping industry, which enables a thriving chain of manufacturing-related businesses.

My sketchbook lent me the inspiration. Once I was sketching a boat moored in a lake in China, whenever I was trying to draw the outlines, the breeze on the lake nudged the boat, moving it from side to side. Although I was frustrated about not being able to pin down the frame, it was mesmerizing to watch the gentle and rhythmic motions of the boat. In the end, rather than creating a single frame, I made the drawing as a sequence of snapshots.

This is where the design concept of the headland park came from, a series of overlapping snapshots of a moving ship. The key landscape elements, including display gardens, lookouts over the river, seating terraces, and gathering spaces, were tied into a series of frameworks generated by the motion snapshots. Apparently the client likes the concept as much as we do!

I think drawing is very much alive in design because it is a process of conscious observation that involves capturing transient feelings, making connections between different things, and distilling ideas down to the essentials—a process from which many design ideas arise. From the moment light reaches the retina to the completion of a drawing, there is a whole sequence of analyses of what we see and choices to be made concerning compositions, shapes, colors and textures. This makes drawing a highly personalized tool for individual expression. A good speaker needs to find his or her own voice—not just the vocal sound, but the ability to speak through one’s innate thought process; similarly, drawing can operate as a “voice” for designers.

Lei Zhang is a designer in the Houston studio.

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Posted by Lei Zhang
in Arts and Culture, Education
on 18 July, 2017

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Addressing natural disasters from a landscape architecture perspective requires a balanced approach. This statement focused my master’s project at West Virginia University. I chose the dam crisis issue as my topic when I learned that the risk of dam failure has been rapidly increasing due to the aging of dams and the high intensity of… Read more »

Addressing natural disasters from a landscape architecture perspective requires a balanced approach.

This statement focused my master’s project at West Virginia University. I chose the dam crisis issue as my topic when I learned that the risk of dam failure has been rapidly increasing due to the aging of dams and the high intensity of rainfall from climate change. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has reported that approximately 27,000 dams in the United States are classified as potential hazard dams, which is equal to 32% of all dams in the United States. Dam failure could cause massive floods and catastrophic damage to the downstream communities.

The conventional methods for combating these issues have been addressed by politics and engineering in the United States, and the main ideology lies not in terms of coexistence with the river dynamics but in the control of it. The federal flood control program has resulted in building over 8,500 miles of levees and dikes, developing about 90 major shoreline protection projects along 240 miles of the nation’s 2,700 miles of shoreline. In spite of this effort, however, an evaluation of this program after 20 years of experience concluded that flood damages continued to increase.

There are two possible reasons for this increase. One is that river control systems have also brought intensive development along the riverfront and in floodplain areas. This has increased the risk of damage from flooding, because rare catastrophes like 100-year-flood events would destroy structures and cause more catastrophic damage. Another reason is that the river dynamics lost their resiliency and flexibility against natural disturbances and could not mitigate the impact and damage from, for instance, flooding to the shoreline. In addition, the conventional methods for flood management have resulted in not only causing more flood damage, but have also created a disconnect between people and rivers while increasing taxes to keep updating flood control facilities.

So, what alternatives can landscape architects propose to address this issue? The fundamental principle of landscape architecture is to create balance—balance between the needs of people and the needs of the environment, between the manmade and the natural, between development and conservation. From this perspective, landscape architecture methods could provide different and alternative choices for flood management while bringing more benefits to our society and the natural world. Introducing green infrastructure techniques in upstream communities, for example, could reduce the risk of dam failure; building park systems along rivers will reduce the risk of damages from flooding. These balanced methods for flood management could also improve people’s quality of life, enhance natural habitats, and provide cultural and economic benefits.

Please check out the online booklet if you are interested in seeing more proposals.

Project Summary:
The goal was to propose landscape planning and designs for flood management using a design simulation of the Bluestone Dam failure. The project is composed of two parts, one located in a community upstream from the Bluestone Dam, and the other in a community downstream. The objective of the first profile was to mitigate the risk of a Bluestone dam failure by storm water management. The objective of the downstream project was to propose planning and design to manage flooding associated with a potential Bluestone Dam failure.

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Posted by Ayaka Matthews
in Community, Ecology, Landscape Infrastructure, Landscape Urbanism, Restoration, Urban Ecologies, Urbanism & Planning
on 30 May, 2014

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The methods used to illustrate our ideas about landscape consist of marks and data that create a network of information that informs us and others about designed works. These methods are premised on a system that displays a final product, one that is polished but also stagnant and unable to be compromised. By contrast, much of the development processes of an actual landscape (i.e., growth, seasonality, singularity, and decay) are not at all prevalent in the visual language that represents the field of landscape architecture.

The introduction of new methods of constructing drawings digitally as well as digitizing analog documents is an exploration that much of the field of landscape architecture is not utilizing let alone exploiting. Landscape documentation has not been fully explored and the complexity that a site already contains or may contain in the future is left unconsidered, without a thought or debate. Layers of time, amorphousness, and potential are each exploratory paths that cannot be documented through built form, but are important aspects of a project that need to be developed and represented.

A representative drawing, one that depicts a single idea, is the predominant form of our visual communication. The integration of a designer’s process and individuality (personal signature) is a missing component that could add fascinating information and personalization into constructed illustrations. The documentation of such processes allows for a project to record ideas that are becoming instead of being, ones that could reveal many facets of an intricate idea. The absence of process in our drawing methods not only dismisses that opportunity but creates a distance between designers and people external to the discipline and further separates the potential for collaboration to strengthen built forms and systems. A construct drawing, on the other hand, one that is built from many forms of media, contains pieces that allow viewers to glimpse the people who built them. The result is much more interesting work that could explain the considerations informing the placement of objects within a landscape system and what influences other forms of design have upon the creation of a space.

These forms of drawing are by no means new and have been practiced for decades using found images, different tools for making marks, and media surfaces. A shift in personal values that places emphasis on the creation and documentation of individual process is what’s required now for the prevalence and use of such drawings. As technologies and various forms of media multiply, the limitations of traditional drawing methods will become obsolete, as will the inability to convey the necessary complexity of landscape systems and the processes used to complete a design. It’s time to start exploring methods used to create and convey ideas that will not presuppose an exclusive relationship between our documented work and our thought processes.

This drawing by Perry Kulper, an architect and associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, was created in response to the Central California History Museum competition. Kulper’s new book, Pamphlet Architecture 34: Fathoming the Unfathomable, with Nat Chard, is available through Princeton Architectural Press.

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One Response to “An Evolving Construct: Toward Representative Drawing Methods”

nunger8

I don’t agree, read http://www.thehousethatlarsbuilt.com/2014/04/lessons-learned-your-first-idea-is-not.html
– Nereida
May 6th, 2014 Reply

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Posted by Evan Lee
in Arts and Culture, Landscape Urbanism, Urban Ecologies
on 25 April, 2014

1 comment

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Just fifty miles northwest of the SWA Dallas office, jolts in the earth can be felt that are believed to be a result of fracking. Claims like these are a popular subject in this region where I have lived my entire life. I first became aware of the practice of fracking and its effects in 2008. Many family members and friends in Northwest Louisiana were approached by gas company land men for the leasing of their property’s mineral rights. This generated much buzz about what positives and negatives were to come from the new exploration, but the issues were generally clouded over by the sharp influx of royalties. It wasn’t until I was browsing Google Earth a few years later that I became aware of the negative impact of fracking on our landscapes. I noticed strange, visible patterns of cleared land scattered over vast areas, as shown in the images above. That was when I realized that fracking sites were invading our rural and suburban landscapes with the proliferation of noxious weeds, and with far more dire consequences. They are alien, unsightly, over-scaled, invasive, and plentiful. These images display how swift the process can be over a relatively short period of time and how our landscapes are left in the end.

This explanation of the fracking process and its history ran in “Welcome to Frackville,” by New Mexico landscape architect Kim Sorvig, from the June 2013 issue of Landscape Architecture.

“A couple of million oil and gas wells have been drilled in the United States since the 1950s; there are about 825,000 of them currently producing, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But conventional reservoirs are becoming rarer, pumped out, capped, or abandoned. Conventional production has peaked, and demand keeps rising. To survive, the petroleum industry is betting heavily on “unconventional” reservoirs, shales and sands from which oil or gas can’t just be pumped. Imagine sponges soaked in petroleum, then hardened. Tar sands are boiled to release crude oil. Shales must be “fracked” (hydraulically fractured) by pumping huge volumes of water and chemicals under extreme pressure to crack bedrock so its riches flow. There was even one attempt to nuke petroleum loose, with radioactive results. Unconventional reserves, many believe, will dwarf conventional ones. The International Energy Agency predicted in 2009 that U.S. shale gas may be triple the nation’s conventional total. In some played-out conventional fields, fracking old wells may release half again their former production. Fracking is profitable, enough to perpetuate our fossil-fuel addiction, enough to deny fracking’s documented risks.”

Fracking sites are all about function. There is definitely no formal consideration, and not much regard for anything else. They tend to be large, cleared portions of land roughly two acres in size, simple in form and mostly consisting of a giant gravel yard with a few storage tanks and other machinery. Hosting hundreds and even thousands of trucks for supply, the layout is based on the necessity for these vehicles to deliver water and drilling equipment. The sites are typically configured in a dense, grid-like pattern and there may easily be hundreds within a few square miles of a producing area.

While it’s obvious that this practice is cosmetically problematic, the environmental and ecological issues that accompany any destruction of native landscapes also leap to mind. I don’t believe these “fracked” landscapes have to be the way they are. As landscape architects who regularly discern genuine values in land and water, and who deal with aesthetics, the environment, and other sciences on a daily basis, this reality presents an opportunity for us to contribute potential solutions and to be heard as professionals.

What kind of ideas can we generate to make these fracking sites less of an impact on our landscapes? Can we work with engineers to improve the functionality of them through planning and design while preserving the necessary function and flexibility? Can we work with them to provide solutions for reducing the overall site footprint? Can we create a best practice strategy to mitigate the damages from the process (perhaps beginning with a simple tree-centered plan to make up for a portion of the lost trees on an older fracked site)? Is it possible to hide these sites? Or, are there landscape restoration plans that we can develop? We could even take it as far as meeting with and encouraging energy companies to engage in more considered strategies.

I believe that we can offer strong ideas for protecting, improving, and restoring these abused landscapes and I hope to do so with further research and creative design solutions. I invite others to join this discussion now.

Check out Sorvig’s entire article about his personal experience with fracking here: http://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2013/06/27/welcome-to-frackville/

Those unfamiliar with the Houston office’s innovative Keystone proposal can find it in the most recent IDEAS journal: http://www.swagroup.com/ideas/swa-ideas-journal

Images are courtesy of Jonathan Tauzin (top), the U.S. Geological Survey (left, middle), and USDA Farm Service Agency (right).

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3 Responses to “Fracking: Can Landscape Architects Be Part of the Solution?”

Susan Dalton Ginter

This is sure a hot topic here in Santa Barbara, California. Many people are out there with petitions to stop this process of fracking, or to at least put it on the ballot for citizens to vote on. Thanks for writing your article about it from the perspective of a landscape architect. Well done Hank!
April 29th, 2014 Reply
Pam Dalton

Hank: This is a key issue that needs to be addressed. You have stated the issue extremely well and outlined the specific concerns in a clear concise way. Kudos for inviting more conversation from others. I’m reassured that someone with your mind is addressing this issue. Keep at it! Pam
April 24th, 2014 Reply
Jeremy

Nice post, Henry. The aerial images are very telling. I think the biggest challenge to working with oil and gas company engineers to address the issue will be convincing them that there actually is an issue in the first place. Their strategy always seems to be deny, deny, deny any problems. Also, what level of repair or restoration is required by the permits these companies get to build drill sites? Are they already required to return the sites to a pre-drilling state? Is it going to turn out like the debate happening now in the Gulf, with drilling companies being sued for never filling the thousands of miles of canals they dredged? Will it be too late?
April 23rd, 2014 Reply