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4 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JAN 2014

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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN

SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

LAM

8 LAND MATTERS

10 LETTERS

FOREGROUND

14 NOW

Prefab housing for animals; the defined benefits of wildlife crossings; a new city plan for Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, with input from dog sledders; a scale to weigh the environmental impacts of specialty crops, and more.EDITED BY ADAM REGN ARVIDSON, FASLA

32 SPECIES

Where indigo grew, the color of money was blue; plus, the naked mole rat, notable for several reasons, including its social network.BY CONSTANCE CASEY

38 WATER

The InltratorMami Hara, ASLA, is second in command at the Philadelphia Water Department, and shes winning converts to the citys green infrastructure plan and to landscape architecture.BY LINDA McINTYRE

48 SOILS

The Measure of MoistureA proper soil specification factors in how well soil holds or drains water. Landscape architects should know these quick field tests to help predict a soils performance. BY JAMES R. URBAN, FASLA

54 PARKS

Watching Us Watching ThemAt the Philadelphia Zoo, animals have a new circuit of paths to roam around.BY JONATHAN LERNER

58 PALETTE

The Greater MidwestIn Chicago, Douglas Hoerr, FASLA, plants for the bleakest times of year, which makes the richest times pretty stunning, too.BY BILL MARKEN, HONORARY ASLA

72 GOODS

Mais, Oui!Highlights from the fall Maison&Objet show in Paris.BY LISA SPECKHARDT

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JAN 2014 / 5

WE DONT HAVE

A STYLE.DAVID HOLLENBERG, UNIVERSITY ARCHITECT, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, P. 126

THE BACK

142 VERSAILLESS VERY OWN

The Andr Le Ntre quadricentennial.BY THASA WAY, ASLA

148 BOOKS

The RecongurationA review of Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates, by Karen MCloskey, ASLA.REVIEWED BY JANE AMIDON, ASLA

166 DISPLAY AD INDEX

167 BUYERS GUIDE INDEX

176 BACKSTORY

Farms on TopThe good, the bad, and the edible of rooftop ag.BY JENNIFER REUT

FEATURES

78 OLIN LIVES HERE

The firm has a string of new cultural projects in its hometown of Philadelphia. But its partners want more than high design.

84 Along the Benjamin Franklin ParkwayThe making of a fine-arts axis.

86 NEW SITE, SAME DREAMWhat the Barnes Foundation brought downtown.

96 THROUGH THE GATEThe Rodin Museum remembers what it forgot.

102 THREE WISHESThe Philadelphia Museum of Art got new parking, a sculpture garden, and a Sol LeWitt all at once.

108 FOLLOW THE LINES The fix is nigh for Dilworth Plaza.

BY FRANK EDGERTON MARTIN

114 SPECIAL INTERESTS

A few new parks follow the clout in Center City, Philadelphia.BY INGA SAFFRON

126 RUNNING IN PLACE

At the heart of the University of Pennsylvania, the new Shoemaker Green, designed by Andropogon, makes way for students, sports, and stormwater.BY JENNIFER REUT


ON THE COVER

The Anne dHarnoncourt Sculpture Garden at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, designed by OLIN, page 102.

OLIN/S

AHAR COSTON-H

ARDY

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINETHE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

EDITOR

Bradford McKee / [email protected]

MANAGING EDITOR

Lisa Speckhardt / [email protected]

ART DIRECTOR

Christopher McGee / [email protected]

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Lisa Chambers / [email protected]

WRITER/EDITOR

Jennifer Reut / [email protected]

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Adam Regn Arvidson, FASLA; Jane Roy

Brown; Constance Casey; Daniel Jost, ASLA;

Bill Marken, Honorary ASLA; Frank Edgerton

Martin; Linda McIntyre; Anne Raver;

William S. Saunders, Affiliate ASLA;

James L. Sipes, ASLA; Kim Sorvig;

Alex Ulam; James R. Urban, FASLA;

Lisa Owens Viani; Marjorie Weber

PLEASE E-MAIL COMMENTS TO THE APPROPRIATE

STAFF MEMBER OR SEND VIA U.S. MAIL TO 636 EYE

STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 200013736.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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Communications

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Radhika C. Mohan, ASLA

Elizabeth Mossop, ASLA

Stephen P. Plunkard, FASLA

Stephanie A. Rolley, FASLA

Thomas R. Ryan, FASLA

Steven Spears, ASLA

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ASLA BOARD OF TRUSTEES

PRESIDENT

Mark A. Focht, FASLA

PRESIDENT-ELECT

K. Richard Zweifel, FASLA

IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT

Thomas R. Tavella, FASLA

VICE PRESIDENTS

Thomas R. Doolittle, ASLA

Shawn T. Kelly, FASLA

Pamela J. Linn, ASLA

David L. Lycke, FASLA

Annette P. Wilkus, ASLA

Kay Williams, FASLA

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Nancy C. Somerville, Honorary ASLA

SECRETARY

Curtis A. Millay, ASLA

TREASURER

Michael D. OBrien

TRUSTEES

Thomas J. Alves, ASLA

Brian E. Bainnson, ASLA

Karen Beck, FASLA

Andrew C. N. Bowden, ASLA

Travis G. Brooks, ASLA

Gary A. Brown, FASLA

Matthew O. Carlile, ASLA

James D. Coffman, ASLA

Ann C. Cruess, ASLA

David Cutter, ASLA

Christopher A. Dacus, ASLA

Tamas Deak, ASLA

Sharon Deep-Nelson, ASLA

William T. Eubanks III, FASLA

Steven A. Fritts, ASLA

Eric D. Gilbey, ASLA

J. Kelly Gillman, ASLA

Robert J. Golde, ASLA

David Gorden, ASLA

Keven L. Graham, ASLA

Christopher Green, ASLA

Scott L. Howard, ASLA

Gregg W. Hudspeth, ASLA

Stephen Ibendahl, ASLA

Roger J. Kennedy, ASLA

Daniel J. Kovach, ASLA

Lisa A. Kunst Vavro, ASLA

Matthew D. Langston, ASLA

Lucille C. Lanier, FASLA

Curtis LaPierre, ASLA

Jade Liska, ASLA

Jeanne M. Lukenda, ASLA

Jeannie M. Martin, ASLA

Mark J. Mastalerz, ASLA

Robert P. Mercier, ASLA

Ann Milovsoroff, FASLA

Emily M. OMahoney, ASLA

April Philips, FASLA

Jolene Rieck, ASLA

Stephen A. Shurtz, ASLA

Adrian L. Smith, ASLA

Michael S. Stanley, ASLA

Ellen C. Stewart, ASLA

Mark A. Steyaert Jr., ASLA

John A. Swintosky, ASLA

Mark Tabor, ASLA

Nicholas Tufaro, ASLA

Vanessa Warren, ASLA

Keith P. Wilson, ASLA

LAF REPRESENTATIVES

Barbara L. Deutsch, FASLA

Bill Main, Honorary ASLA

NATIONAL STUDENT

REPRESENTATIVE

Andrew Bernard, Student ASLA

PARLIAMENTARIAN

Donald W. Leslie, FASLA

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I wouldnt call 2013 the Year of the Bike in the United States, but only because I hope that 2014 will be an even better one. It was a pretty great year, though. Two of the biggest American cities added bicycle sharing programs. New York City opened its Citi Bikes system in May with 330 stations; by years end, nearly 100,000 people had bought a years subscription to the system, and by October, the system had recorded 42,000 trips a day. Not bad! Chicago started its Divvy bike system in June with 3,000 bikes at 300 stations between Cicero Avenue and Lake Michigan, and is planning on 4,000 bikes by this spring. The new Bay Area Bike Share started in late August in San Francisco. It was considered a slow start by some mea-sures, but then many people in the city are already married to their own bicycles. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in December that the Municipal Transportation Agency, which has counted cyclists around town since 2006, found that by 2013, cycling had risen by 96 percent. One September evening during rush hour, more than 1,200 people were counted on bikes at the corner of Fifth and Market Streets.

What could be the downside to all of this? I honestly dont know, but for some people, there seems to be oneusually grounded in irrationality. A perfectly benign technology that runs on calories, presents almost no harm to anyone, that is cheap and environmentally sound, fast, convenient, and, not least, very enjoyable will inevitably make people uptight for their own reasons. Dorothy Rabinowitz, of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, fnds Citi Bikes depressing to no end because she thinks its socialist and ugly. You could grant her those points and she still sees no benefts. Rob Fords bike ha-tred helped him become the mayor of Toronto. Adrian Fentys bike love helped unseat him in Washington, D.C. Many people in cities greet bikes as you might an invasive species.

There are attitudes, and then there are economics. Lately Ive been following a push in St. Louis County in Missouri, where I am from, to create a Complete Streets program. The bill before the council is a landscape architects dream. It would fat-out require bike lanes, better transit stops, and nicer

streetscapes for all new street and road projects. It throws in everythingeverythingexcept any cost consideration. A group called Trailnet is lobbying for the bill, and it was moving quickly toward passage this fall until ofcials with the countys transportation department, who apparently had not been consulted closely, showed up to say, where is all this money coming from? Their concerns about the costs are not out of line. The bill was tabled for the time being. Meanwhile, next door in the city of St. Louis, a Complete Streets bill in place since 2010 requires the city to study the costs and benefts of multimodal improvements on new street projects and to strive to incorporate them. So their hearts are in the right place, and well see if their design and resolve are, too.

Up front, St. Louiss approach is more persuasive to a money-weary audience than the countys. The fnances are the FAQs of Complete Streets. The benefts can be shown to validate the costs. But people want to know in plain fgures what the costs are based on experience. Costs vary. The better question is one of how costs have leveraged into benefts, and what the multiplier efect of Complete Streets spending is in terms of the economics, environment, safety, and health of a place. Seattle redesigned one street, Stone Way North, to accommo-date cyclists and pedestrians; bike trafc rose by one-third and collisions involving pedestrians fell by 80 percent. Lancaster, California, redesigned several blocks of a central streetscape for $10 million and saw $125 million in investment move in around it; sales tax revenue rose 26 percent. There are plenty of examples, especially as these programs proliferate and suc-ceed. (The National Complete Streets Coalition can furnish many others.) People have unreasonable reasons for oppos-ing things like bicycles and transit, but they also often have reasonable ones until you show them otherwise.

BIKES AND

MORE BIKES

BRADFORD MCKEE

EDITOR

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As a daughter of a farmer family and a landscape architect practic-ing in rural America, I feel compelled to respond to Brad McKees editorial following the Associated Presss ar-ticle regarding corn, ethanol, conser-vation, and climate change. Farming is a business. Land is a farmers asset, necessary to keep the business vi-able. The farmer owns or leases the land; it is not in the public domain. Farming is global. Grain prices are often infuenced by demand from Asia, production in South America, and local conditions. Conservation programs are dictated by the federal government. The farm bill has placed

caps on how much land can be placed in conservation. As of this writing, farmers cannot enroll new acreage in conservation programs, due to the lack of a farm bill. If you ask most farmers, they would be happy to convert their lands back to prairies. However, since land is an asset used in a business, someone must pay a farmer market price not to farm his land. Some call that farmer welfare.

Keep in mind that prices are set by market supply and demand. The year 2012 was an extreme drought year, and the corn supply was down; 2013 was a good supply year, and

IN DEFENSE OF FAMILY FARMS

LETTERS

SUBMIT

Please e-mail comments to LAMletters @asla.org or send via U.S. mail to:

AMERICAN SOCIETY

OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

636 EYE STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC 200013736

prices are half of what they were in 2012. Is ethanol playing a role? Yes. Did you also know that corn is a grass? It is in the Poaceae family. Corn sequesters carbon from the air and soil. Many farmers have imple-mented no-till farming practices. I know very few farmers who actually even own a plow, much less use it. Fertilizer is placed next to the seed during plantingin the ground! My parents were visiting an urban park and were disgusted to fnd fertilizer pellets all over the sidewalks and streets. My mother exclaimed, And people think farmers are polluting their waters!

Before you judge farmers and their business practices, you must actu-ally visit with a 21st-century family farmer. Asking farmers to not farm their land to singularly reduce the impacts of climate change is like asking LAM not to sell advertise-ments because they are printed on paper, which is harvested from trees that take in carbon. When it comes to ethanol for fuel, Id rather pay an American farmer than that other country overseas.

JOLENE RIECK, ASLA

BILLINGS, MONTANA

THE WRITER IS A MEMBER OF THE ASLA

BOARD OF TRUSTEES.

I was pleased and gratifed to fnd in the December issue the excel-lent review by Alex Krieger of Fran-cis Kowskys new book, The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Bufalo Park System. Krieger does a fne job of describing the books merits and situating it in the broader context of the history of the evolution of American cities and park systems. My only regret is that the Library of American Landscape History (LALH) is not listed as co-publisher of the volume.

LALH is an Amherst, Massachusetts- based nonproft whose mission is to foster understanding of the fne art of landscape architecture and ap-preciation of North Americas richly varied landscape heritage through books, exhibitions, and online re-sources. Under the leadership of

Robin Karson, Afliate ASLA, the organization has sponsored and produced many well-researched, beautiful volumes that have helped to establish and defne the feld of North American landscape his-tory. The University of Massachu-setts Press has had the privilege of publishing 23 titles in association with LALH since 1999, including the 10-volume ASLA centennial reprint series. The Best Planned City in the World represents the latest such collaboration and is also the inaugural volume of a new se-ries titled Designing the American Park under the editorship of Ethan Carr, FASLA.

BRUCE WILCOX

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

PRESS

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FOREGROUND

SOILS

Loam soil at wilt point,

page 48.

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CONCRETE MASONRY UNITS

BECOME HABITAT.

BY KEVAN WILLIAMS

A California-based team of landscape architecture students is reenvisioning the ubiquitous cinder block as a new home for unnoticed urban creatures. The undergraduates from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, produced the project as part of a studio exploring how to better connect ecological and man-made systems. This was really about opening up a new can of worms, a new notion of what wilderness is, says team member Natasha Harkison, Student ASLA. The project earned the team a 2013 ASLA Student Honor Award in the General Design category. If we actually value [urban wilderness], we have to be prepared for what its going to look like, says Kenny Sperling, Associate ASLA, another student who participated in the project. There are going to be bugs and fies and things were not used to dealing with on a daily basis.

As students began investigating the behaviors and nesting requirements of Southern Californias nonhuman inhabitants, the concrete masonry unit (or CMU) jumped out as a compelling can-didate for urban habitat. CMUs are everywhere, really, but a lot of people dont think about them, Harkison says, pointing to retaining walls, high-way sound barriers, and conventional commercial construction as examples of modular masonry in the landscape. Each block contains a pair of voids waiting to be flled by something other than rebar and mortar. The team found a few existing projects that modifed a CMU-type block to do something simplistic, like catch water or create a pattern on a wall, but none that looked at the habitat potential of this ready-made nook or cranny.

ANIMAL HOUSES

FAR LEFT AND BELOW

Students manipulated

the form of standard

concrete masonry units to

produce articial habitats

for a variety of Southern

California fauna.

FOREGROUND /

CMU TRANSFORMATION

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Each student in the studio selected a plant or animal species native to the Pomona area and began modifying the form of a standard 8-by-8-by-16-inch block to accommodate the particular requirements of each creature. To satisfy these animals needsopenings, shelter, or perchesstudents transformed the fat, regular surface of the block into rippling, organic, but still stackable forms. Theyre called Concrete Habitat Units, or CHUs. Although the requirements for some species, like the clif swallow, were fairly straight-forward, resulting in essentially a birdhouse ren-dered in concrete, others, like the social brown bat or the large great horned owl, called for in-vestigating how blocks might be joined together to create larger spaces.

After their initial species research, the students created actual blocks. They employed plaster, 3-D print-ers, and concrete to test their con-cepts. We spent a good two weeks modeling these and thinking about whether they really would work, Harkison says. Turning the

concept into a real product would require a great deal more testing, not

just for the blocks compressive strength, but for its success at attracting targeted species. There wasnt a guarantee that a bat or an owl was going to come into it; it could be that a rat or a lizard would come in, team member Joshua Leyva, Student ASLA, says.

Our cities are already host to a hidden cadre of opportunistic species, some native and some imported, which provide all sorts of ecosystem services, from mosquito-gobbling bats and rat-hunting snakes to soil-aerating ants and voles. The CHU wouldnt necessarily introduce new animals to new areas. Rather, it could provide an opportunity to manage the urban ecosystem by prioritizing certain species over others on a much larger scale. In theory, CHUs would be cheap and easily replicable, while also being quite a bit more beautiful than the average hand-built backyard birdhouse.

TOP

The Concrete Habitat

Units were modeled using

plaster and concrete.

CENTER

The uniform dimension

of the CHU allows for

networks of blocks that

create complex habitats.

BOTTOM

The blocks could enliven

urban structures like

parking decks and

warehouses.

FOREGROUND / NOW



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FOREGROUND / NOW

But do these crossings actually work? Rob Ament, the road ecology program manager, cites a typical 90 percent re-duction in wildlifemotorist collisions wherever wildlife crossings are installed. But besides accident tracking, researchers have relied mostly on their hunches and on

camera monitoring to learn exactly how and which species these structures served.

Until now. A team from WTI working over the past three summers in Canadas Banf National Park collected more than 10,000 strands of bear hair near wildlife crossings of the Trans-Canada Highway, which slices through the park. They placed barbed wire at strategic locations and visited these snares periodically to collect the hair. This study is allowing researchers to look at large-scale migration patterns within habitat splintered by highways and then partially re- stitched by crossings.

The fndings show that all major species use cross-ings in numbers comparable to their respective populations within the park. Lab analysis of the bear hair strands allowed researchers to plumb deeply into the lives and habits of these animals. With DNA analysis of the hair we could identify individual bearsblack bears and grizzliesand know by gender and species which animals

OVER

UNDER

A RECENT STUDY SHOWS

WILDLIFE CROSSINGS

ACTUALLY WORK.

BY MARGARET

SHAKESPEARE

A dozen years ago the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University launched a road ecology research program on the intersection of highways and wildlife. The impe-tus was the rising number of wildlifevehicle collisions, as well as the recognition that road construction was likely cutting of animals natural migration routes, limiting their access to forage areas, and constricting their gene pools. A visible though sporadically used method of reducing roadkill and keep-ing natural areas connected has been construction of road crossingsoverpasses and underpassesdedicated to wildlife use.

U.S. 93 IN MONTANA

U.S. 93 IN MONTANA


COURTESY CSKT, MDT, AND W

TI-MSU

FOREGROUND / NOW

preferred traveling over the highway to going under it, Ament says. It turns out that grizzlies preferred the wide-open overpasses, while black bears primarily used the underpasses. Roughly equal numbers of males and females for both spe-cies used the crossings. We can also fnally start to answer some gene-fow questions, Ament says. We didnt see much bottleneck. These bears do mix it up with one another, crossing back and forth to do so. Its not just a few brave bears tripping the video camera over and over againthe whole population is using the crossings.

The exposed Banf passages, which have been a model for projects in Montana and elsewhere, are essentially a vegetated forest, contiguous with the natural landscape. Ament says that if a crossing is too narrow or confned, prey animals wont use it. But open and natural crossings are more expensive. We [need to fnd] simple ways to in-corporate wetlands, streams, and other crossings for various species, Ament says. In other words, a miniature mimic of the natural setting, enough for the short haul.

This thinking was the basis for the winning de-sign in the 2011 International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition, by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) and HNTB. That competition was run by an organization called Animal Road Crossing, which was founded by one of WTIs researchers, Anthony Clevenger. MVVAs design for I-70 in Colorado (theres no construction timeline yet) includes varying bands of vegetation and clearings to provide choices for the variety of small and large mammals.

But regardless of how crossings are built, the WTI has found, empirically, that they do workand not just for a few select species or individuals, but for the entire animal population. Ament notes that as highway construction grows globally, countries such as China and Mongolia are looking to WTI for direction. The more wildlife crossings that are part of transportation [planning], he says, the better for biodiversity.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Animal commuters include

grizzly bears, mule deer,

white-tailed deer, river

otters, coyotes, mountain

lions, and moose.

This dwarf form of the popular Limelight hydrangea has all the charm of the original

plant, but in a smaller package. Cold hardy and adaptable, Little Lime hydrangeas soft

green owers appear each summer and transform to rich burgundy pink in fall.

At just three to ve feet tall and wide, it ts beautifully into any landscape.

Little Lime Hydrangea paniculata

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Yellowknife is a strange city. Its downtown is wedged onto rocky bits of land between the Great Slave Lake (the deepest lake in North Amer-ica) and numerous smaller lakes. It stretches into Yellowknife Bay on a fnger of rockhomes and docks huddling against what looks like a stegosauruss backbone. The city is the capital of Canadas Northwest Territories (which in 1999 lost three-ffths of its land area to the creation of Nunavut, Canadas newest territory) and gets nearly 20 hours of sun per day in summer (and just fve in winter). The people there are a fas-cinating lot, too: foat-home residents, ice road truckers, diamond mine workers, and a Den First Nations community. Yellowknife in many ways stretches the bounds of planning.

When we arrived, says Donna Hinde, a land-scape architect and partner at the Planning Part-nership, based in Toronto, we realized there were quite a number of interesting communities.

BRINGING ICE ROADS, FLOATPLANES,

AND NATIVE COMMUNITIES TOGETHER

IN YELLOWKNIFE.

BY ADAM REGN ARVIDSON, FASLA, EDITOR OF NOW

Contact [email protected] or @AdamRegn on Twitter

UNEXPECTED

PLANS

FOREGROUND / NOW

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Hindes frm was hired in 2010 to prepare a new harbor plan. Despite being in the center of a massive gran-ite landmass, Yellowknife is a water city. Boating is huge. Floatplanes con-nect the city to even more remote communities throughout the terri-tory. In winter, massive trucks drive on the frozen lake, heading north to the diamond mines, while kite skiers ply Yellowknife Bay.

The water itself (coupled with a bit of the frontier spirit of lawless-ness) was one point of contention in the planning process. Floating houses moored just ofshore had a long history in the community but were essentially unregulated. On-land owners felt the floaters had an unfair advantage. Informal settlements, like the Woodyard right on the harbors edge, were, again, part of the culture, but many people thought they werent paying their way. The government dock had be-come choked with individuals boats and small business miscellanyeven though it was technically public land. We had to fgure out how to evolve this into something that met planning regulations, Hinde says, but still had the spirit of the infor-mal settlement.

Hinde and her staf typically went to Yellowknife for a week at a time (its a couple of long, expensive fights up there). They initially followed a somewhat conventional process: meetings with the public and of-cials and a lot of inventory work (tak-ing advantage of the long days). But

they also met with the Den elders group and were invited to a drum dance as a means of sharing the project with that native community.

And then, Hinde says, we completely changed our approach halfway through. They just werent getting enough people at meetingscertainly not enough to represent the diverse interests of the community. So, with local community help, Hinde organized 11 focus groups of around 10 people each. These represented particular inter-ests including dog sledding, sailing, commercial barging, and local businesses. A draft plan went up for public comment in 2012, and the fnal plan was adopted later that year. It won an Honor Award from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects in 2013.

The plan calls for some big changes, most sig-nifcant, of course, in the harbor area. It outlines two nonmotorized ice parks, suggests unfettered public access to an island just ofshore (as well as the recommendation to use the historic Den name for it), and designs a whole system of dif-ferent types of trails around and on the lake. It envisions a public lakefront boardwalk around the perimeter of the Old Town peninsula. It would decommission a deep draft boat launch in Old Town, better defne foatplane routes, and corral existing foat homes into discrete areas, instead of letting them speckle the bay randomly.

Yellowknifes unusual landscape, diversity of peo-ple and uses, and extreme diference between summer and winter combined into a planning project like none that Hinde had ever seen be-fore. It wasnt always smooth sailing, but the community embraced the plan in the end. That is partly attributable to Hindes willingness to adapt the process on the fy. I think you have to be prepared to put things on hold for a minute, she says, rethink, and then go back. The entire plan is available online at www.yellowknife.ca.

FOREGROUND / NOW

ABOVE

The plan dealt with ad hoc

private uses on public land.

BELOW

The Planning Partnership

wanted to preserve

Yellowknifes quirky,

on-the-water way of life.

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When SWA Group was hired to beautify fve miles of the I-75/I-85 corridor in the heart of Atlan-ta, the company did what successful landscape architects tend to do. First the team went beyond beautifcation and started talking about stormwa-ter and climate change. Then they did some calculations to show how much carbon the freeway could of-set with new plantings or how much of its own stormwater the road could treat. Thats where all the green talk came to a screeching halt. To ofset the connectors carbon, more than 13.6 million trees would need to be planted (that would cover an area 1.6 times the land area of Atlanta). And naturally managing the freeways 1.9 billion gallons of stormwater would be a nearly impossible task.

It wasnt even worth discussing, once you put the metrics on it, says Kinder Baumgardner, ASLA, the SWA landscape architect who led the project. All that stuf that we are programmed as landscape architects to think aboutwe were now free to think about something else. What

they thought about was art. Not the etched concrete animals and bridge edge patterning you normally see on freeways. Baumgardners team imag-ined a whole museum: the Museum of Freeway Art (MoFA).

In essence, the entire corridor would be curated, with a clear interpretive program ranging from the Middle Ages to impressionism to abstract expressionism to performance art. And these artistic periods and schools would be arranged according to their connection to nature: prehistoric art and earthworks at the northern and southern ends, Dada right in the cen-ter of the urban jungle. How can we layer traditional museum infra-structure on top of this freeway, asks Ian Cion, an Atlanta artist and arts

consultant who worked with SWA on the project, which won a 2013 ASLA Professional Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category, and map it like a great museum? We wanted an art-historical approach.

The problem with that idea is that motorists at 70 miles per hour are unlikely to actually see, for instance, an Henri Rousseau painting hanging in one of the six identifed MoFA site types (trench wall, bridge face, bridge arc, feld, deck, or interstitial space). So MoFA has to become a museum that communicates art the-ory without actually hanging original art (imagine an douard Vuillard painting after a couple years of free-way fumes). The SWA teams idea is to create, essentially, mash-ups of historical artists with contemporary ones. So the vibrantly colored Rous-seau jungle scenes get reinterpreted

by Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist known for large-scale sculptures of animals in midleap. SWAs MoFA re-port envisions (and draws) a theoreti-cal interstitial space (a greensward between the road and the city) popu-lated with the lushness and sculpted fauna reminiscent of both artists. Or a bridge arc with elements of Andy Goldsworthys land art and native etchings from Horseshoe Canyon, Arizona. Or a trench wall mural by neorealist Kehinde Wiley and the Brazilian grafti duo Os Gemeos.

SWAs Natalia Beard, Afliate ASLA, did much of the mash-up artwork. The Photoshop is the easiest part, she says. The process was about sketching and researching and argu-ing about [the combinations]about getting to the quality and general direction without designing the art object itself. Were not those

THE MUSEUM OF FREEWAY ART ENVISIONS

THE INTERSTATE AS A GALLERY.

FOREGROUND / NOW

LEFT AND ABOVE

SWA Group rethought

a freeway as an art

museum, envisioning

permanent commissioned

artwork throughout the

corridor.


A NEW PROGRAM SETS AN ENVIRONMENTAL BASELINE FOR SPECIALTY CROPS.

Big retailers like Wal-Mart havefor the most partgotten the message that people are in-terested in environmental issues, even if they may not be ready to pay a premium for USDA organic produce. Big growers associations, too, recognize that people are more and more concerned about things such as nutrient runof, synthetic fertiliz-ers, and energy use. But plenty of farmers dont actually even know what outputs they are generat-ing. A new program, the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (SISC), hopes to fll that void.

Specialty crops include all fruits, nuts, and vegeta-bles meant for human consumption. From broc-coli to almonds to wine grapes to winter squash, specialty crops cover about 9.5 million acres (about 1 percent of the total agricultural land in the United States), according to the most recent USDA census of agriculture, taken in 2007. The goal of SISC is to create a suite of outcomes-based metrics, says Alison Edwards, SISCs project program director, who herself farmed vegetables for seven years. Were not saying You need to farm this way. Rather, SISC hopes to give farmers tools to bench-mark and communicate their environmental per-formance. The metrics take the form of complex spreadsheets, downloadable for free from the SISC website, into which a farmer enters the source data. Once a farmer completes the sheet, way over on the right-hand side are a few fnal numbers that can be compared to previous years or, perhaps, to other farmers.

Edwards says the metrics can be used however a grower, wholesaler, or retailer wants to use them. Lets say a lettuce farmer, Jones, might want to reduce nitrogen runof. With SISC Jones can

get a single important number each year to help measure progress. Jones can change practices in the feld and see how that afects the number. Retail buyer Smith might want to put the least energy-consumptive tomatoes available on the shelf. Smith can ask tomato suppliers to follow and provide SISC metrics. That would incentivize tomato farmers to improve their performance.

SISC began in 2008 and got money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through 2013, when its major participants took over the fund-ing role. The consensus-based process brings together representatives of the entire food chain to ensure that the metrics work for everyone. The main Coordinating Council is made up of an unlikely alliance of growers (such as the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Association and the National Potato Council), buyers (including Del Monte and Wal-Mart), and environmental and public interest groups (such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nature Conservancy). Thats where SISCs legitimacy comes from: It has a balance, says Edwards. The people in the organization have a lot of trust in each other.

Five measures are currently available: applied water (irrigation), energy use, nitrogen use, phos-phorous use, and soil organic matter. Three morebiodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and wasteare in various stages of development. The main focus of SISC right now is to make sure the existing metrics get incorporated into the practices of the members of the Coordinat-ing Council, so they can lead by example. Try out the metrics or just keep up-to-date at www.stewardshipindex.org.

EAT YOUR GREENER GREENS

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artists. Baumgardner likens the process to hip-hop, which is big in Atlanta. Youre channeling these artists a bit, he says. Theres a lot of sampling that gets folded into something new. Some young person has maybe never heard the original piece. But, the theory goes, they still learn the basic elements of diferent art movements.

At this point, no artists have been commissioned, and Baumgardner stressed that the MoFA concept is meant to set a tone and some gen-eral parameters only. If MoFA gets funded, it will hire a curator, just like the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and any other arts institution. That person will commission artworks and pro-mote the museum, in collaboration, of course, with the Georgia Depart-ment of Transportation. By setting up as a real museum, MoFA could acquire a permanent collection as well as host temporary exhibitions. The re-sult would feel like some combination of sculpture garden and traditional museum, with most patrons moving through at freeway speed.

And this big idea came from SWAs being unable to justify much envi-ronmental beneft, which allowed the frm to turn its sights on (or back to) beauty. I feel like landscape archi-tecture has gotten a little technical, says Baumgardner. Were beautiful engineers. What we learned on this project is that we need to look under the rug of the metrics and see if what we plan to do is really going to work. And if not, plan something complete-ly diferentlike a museum.


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Phil Salesses thinks you can train a computer to have an opinion on urban design. Hes a digital media designer at Frog Design in Shanghai who, while doing a masters at MITs Media Lab, cracked the door on doing just that. He says computers are pre-dicting preferences right now. Ama-zon uses sheer numbers of buyers to suggest products specifcally for you (Customers who bought this item also bought). Pandora takes apart songs you say you like and seeks out other songs with similar attributes. In both cases, computers are being trained to like things on your behalf.

But a city? There has to be a way to design cities with data, Salesses says. But how do we pull out the attributes of a city? Theyre huge and diverse. So he and his collaborators, Katja Schechtner and Csar Hidalgo, who recently authored a paper for PLOS ONE, decided to keep things rela-tively simple. They grabbed hundreds of Google Street View images of New York and Boston, arranged them in pairs, and asked people pretty basic questions, like Which looks safer? and Which looks more boring? Its not a far cry from the visual prefer-ence surveys planners and designers have used for years in public meet-ings. Except that the whole thing is online, which allows for a scale of re-sponse approaching statistical viabil-ity. In 2011, the MIT team partnered with the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, to push the idea out to the masses. They got about one million votes from several hundred thousand people.

That volume allowed the team to do two things. Because all the images are geotagged, the MIT team was able to map New York, Boston, Vi-enna, Salzburg, and Linz according to actual public perceptions of safety, vibrancy, and uniqueness. And they got data that empirically backs up many of the expert opinions usu-ally batted about in urban design circles. Yes, streets without trash are preferrednot just by a small set of people who are likely to go to public meetings, but by hundreds of thou-sands of people across the world. Up until now, urban design has been expert based, Salesses says. Gener-ally people would accept that because a lot of this was common sense. The tool we built can actually test that.

The project is still alive online, and its pretty addicting. Pick your ques-tion, click a photo, which may now be from any of about 60 cities from around the world, and youll get an-other photo set, all the while you are contributing to the mass of data. Graphs on the website show, in real

time, how diferent cities are trend-ing in diferent categories. Its a mas-sive global visual preference survey.

But Salesses is actually more inter-ested in the next step, which brings us back to Pandora. Right now, set-ting up all the images is done manu-ally and therefore takes a lot of labor, and the data is only as good as how many people actually vote on a par-ticular city. But based on the ever-growing data set, Salesses believes that algorithms can be developed that could peer into a photo and compare its attributes to the attributes that real people tended to like or dislike. A computer, for instance, could be trained to see trash on the street and rate such an image lower. The logi-cal end point is this: Someone could download all the Google Street View images of a city, run them through the algorithm, and automatically gen-erate a map of peoples perceptions of safety, uniqueness, or livelinesswithout any actual people voting. For now, though, you can still vote at pulse.media.mit.edu.

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE

FOREGROUND / NOW

THE VISUAL PREFERENCE SURVEY GOES DIGITAL.

ABOVE

An online survey is

collecting peoples

impressions of

geotagged images

of actual places.

BELOW

The data is used to

graph perceived safety,

uniqueness, and other

factors of cities and

neighborhoods.

Scatter plot showing the Q-scores obtained for each image, city, and question. Top and bottom whiskers represent one standard deviation.


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A young colonial

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this modest-looking

pea relative.

Its scientifc nameIndigoferagives a hint of the plants special value. But its medium-green compound leaves, unremarkable roots, and inconspicuous fowers dont give a clue that Indigofera is the source of the worlds richest blue dye. Adolf von Baeyer won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in part for his development of synthetic indigo, which now puts the blue in blue jeans, but until then the plant product was coveted. Strips of indigo-dyed cloth were currency in African trade networks as early as the 15th cen-tury, and the dye, dried into small blue chunks, was for a while the British East India Companys most valuable export.

A member of the Fabaceae family and thus a cousin to peas, beans, mimosa, kudzu, and oth-ers, Indigofera looks like crown vetch that has pufed itself up to four feet tall and four feet wide. Like cotton and sugar, indigo is a signifcant example of the infuence of a plant on human

culture. Once someone fgured out how to extract the magical ingredient in the leaves and rulers decided they and their soldiers looked impres-sive in a strong blue, European trade with Asia and Africa expanded. Two species of indigo, one Asian, Indigofera oxycarpa, and one native, Indi-gofera sufruticosa, turned out to grow well in the American South. (The crop also fourished in the Caribbean and tropical parts of South America. The Venezuelan estates of Simn Bolvar pro-duced indigo along with cofee. South Americas Liberator was a landed aristocrat with a lot to lose.) For a few decades in the mid-1700s, the indigo crop created a class of planters in lowland South Carolina who were the wealthiest people in North America.

The indigo boom in the colonies was ignited by the sudden expansion of Englands textile indus-try but in a surprising turn was developed by the teenaged daughter of a British ofcer. Colonel

NOTES FROM THE WORLD OF LIVING THINGSBY CONSTANCE CASEY

FOREGROUND / SPECIES

BLUE

CURRENCY

T 1 3 0 1 A 5 0 0 0

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George Lucas sent his daughter Eliza to an Eng-lish boarding school, a highly unusual decision in the case of a daughter. There she learned to play the harpsichord and speak French, but, most signifcant, her favorite subject was botany.

When promoted and posted to a governorship in the British West Indies in 1739, Colonel Lucas left 17-year-old Eliza in charge of his three South Carolina plantations. The price of rice, grown on the wetter parts of the Lucas land, had dropped. Looking for an alternative to rescue the property, Eliza asked her father to send her seeds of gin-ger, cotton, alfalfa, and indigo. The indigo grew best and could do well on higher, sandier areas, making it a good complement to rice.

As she selected the best plants to repro-duce and her indigo fourished, she glad-ly gave seed away to her neighbors, one of whom, Charles Pinckney, she married. To jump to the end of the boom, the American Revolu-tion shut down the English mar-ket for South Carolina indigo; in fact, British soldiers burned the Pinck-ney plantations. Eliza was a patriot. Her eldest son fought in the Continental Army and was a delegate to the Constitutional Conven-tion, where he was not surprisingly an opponent of the abolition of slaverythe South Carolina planters wealth in the indigo boom decades be-fore the revolution depended on slave labor. At Elizas funeral in 1793 one of her pallbearers was a fellow farmer, President George Washington.

Indigo, unlike cotton and sugar, is relatively easy to harvest, but extracting the blue dye is laborious and unpleasant. Slaves in 18th-century lowland South Carolina died by the thousands of diseases such as yellow fever. Slave deaths far exceeded births, but

high profts allowed the planters to quickly replace the dead with new arrivals from West Africa.

Eliza at frst hired a white overseer to supervise processing the indigo, but he turned out to be uncooperative. She turned to a free man born in Africa, an indigo maker her father hired from the French West Indies.

There are three stepsfermentation, oxidation, and extractionand for the frst two the timing is tricky. The frst, steeping indigo leaves in a vat of water for 18 to 24 hours, creates a putrid smell

that repels domestic animals, attracts fies, and lingers for months. In a second

vat slaves beat the liquid with paddles for several hours

to introduce oxygen into the mix and acti-vate the crucial ingre-dient, indican. When the water turned blue, lime, ash, or urine was added to the mix. Blue

sediment formed, and the resulting indigo mud is

scooped up and hung in linen bags to drain for two days, then

removed, pressed into molds, and cut into small squares for shipment.

Its hard to know who frst discovered and perfected the multistep process of turning

green leaf into highly valuable blue product. But we have a clue, something that can still be seen. The city of Kano in northern Nigeria was the southernmost point of the famous Saharan caravan trade routes in the 15th century. The citys most important industry was indigo dyeing. The industry has survived. Indigo is worked and cloth is dyed in centuries-old ways by the Hausa people there.

Perhaps because of the difculty of production, perhaps because of changes in the world market, little indigo was grown in the American South after 1800.


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For a few decades

exported indigo

created a colonial elite.


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The little creature is unattractivea pale pink cylinder with buck-teeth, about the size of a mouseand lacks the attributes that human beings fnd appealing in their fellow mammals: soft fur, big liquid eyes, and cute foppy ears. Instead, the na-ked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) has wrinkled bare skin, tiny nearly blind eyes, and no visible ears. Even a man who dearly loves the animals, David Kessler, a biologist for small mammals at the Smithsonians Na-tional Zoo, calls his charges saber-toothed sausages.

But he and others who study them are stunned by some of these ro-dents characteristics. Most notable, of all the 5,500 or so species of mammals in the world, the naked mole rat is one of only two known to live like the social insects, with one queen, a few breeding males, and a host of soldiers and workers. (The other eusocial mammal species is the nicely furred Damaraland mole rat.) These rodents organize them-selves like bees, ants, or termites.

NAKED

GLAMOUR

ABOVE

They look like miniature

walruses; people in

their native East Africa

call them sand puppies.

For rodents, they live a long, long time. A mouse lives three or four years; a naked mole rat can live more than 30 years. And its a high-quality long life, if you measure quality of life in health, not learning and adventure. The naked mole rat is the only mam-mal known to exhibit the quality of negligible senescence. As is true for certain turtles, tortoises, lobsters, and fsh, the naked mole rats organs do not age. They may die of infection, ac-cident, or predation (though at six feet underground they have few preda-tors), but there are no naked mole rats sufering from failing kidneys or dementia, and the wrinkles they have were there at birth.

Not only do they possess negligible senescence, but naked mole rats also apparently do not get cancer. This has not surprisingly created a stir among cancer researchers. A recent paper speculates that their loose skin may hold the answer to the animals resistance to cancer tumors. When Kessler picks up a naked mole rat by its back, the little animals skin stretches up over its head. The sci-entifc paper argues that the magic ingredient may be a system that controls a substance called hyaluro-nan, found in connective tissue and involved in the progression of some tumors. The naked mole rats evolved to have skin that doesnt tear when stretched as they squeeze through tunnels; one theory is that their cells do not tend to group in clusters.

Not everyone would consider their lives, though cancer and aging free, enjoyable. Naked mole rats spend night and day (with naps) excavating tunneling to find tubers, widely spaced under the dry African grass-lands. Their two opposing pairs of giant incisors do all the digging work; unlike other moles, their front feet are quite delicate. The 300 or so male and female workers and soldiers share equally in the colonys task, but the queen does not dig. Her life isnt easy, though, with four litters a year of up to 20 pups each. She isnt chosen, the way a queen bee is, but bullies her way to the top. How are the lucky few breeding males selected? You have to ask the queen, Kessler says.

Naked mole rats are not complete-ly hairless. They have some barely visible short hairs, plus whiskers at their tail ends as well as around their mouths. They need sensors at both ends because they can go backward as fast as they go forward. Theres some-thing mesmerizing about watching the little animals zipping backward and forward and over and under one another in their clear plastic tunnels. Kessler swears that after fve minutes of watching the naked mole rats, even the people who said yuck at frst will admit, They are kind of cute.

CONSTANCE CASEY, A FORMER NEW YORK CITY

PARKS DEPARTMENT GARDENER, WRITES ON

NATURAL HISTORY FOR BLOOMBERG NEWS

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In September 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave fnal approval to one of the countrys most innovative and am-bitious green infrastructure programs when it signed a consent order for Philadelphias Green City, Clean Waters (GCCW) plan. The plan spans 25 years (see Green City, Gray City, LAM, Sep-tember 2011) and is the citys road map to meet the requirements of the federal Clean Water Act. The plan, as much as any plan previously ap-proved by the federal government, relies on green and porous spaces to manage stormwater runof and storm and sanitary sewer overfows. Its not surprising that a plan based, in large part, on landscape architecture has landscape designers helping to make it happen. Whats unusual is that some of the landscape designers are working in-side the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD).

Landscape designers work in a variety of capaci-ties at the department. Some are doing design work, mostly on stormwater management, that would be considered routine if it werent being done directly by a water utility. And one, Mami Hara, ASLA, the deputy water commissioner, is the PWDs second-highest-ranking employee, co-ordinating policy and strategy for Commissioner Howard Neukrug and serving as his chief of staf.

Before joining the PWD in the fall of 2011, Hara worked for years in a more traditional landscape architecture and planning practice at Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), the big multidisciplinary firm with headquarters in Philadelphia. She became a principal at the frm and led its work on waterfronts and watersheds. Hara was also active in local design, academic, and nonproft

ABOVE

Mami Hara, ASLA, leads a team that includes Rachel Ahern (center) and Lindsay Reul, ASLA, (right) at the Philadelphia Water Department.

THE INFILTRATOR

MAMI HARA, ASLA, IS TRYING TO TRANSFORM PHILADELPHIAS WATER SYSTEM.BY LINDA McINTYRE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADLEY MAULE

FOREGROUND / WATER

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circles, teaching courses at Penn and Temple and serving as a cochair of Philadelphias Community Design Collaborative, a group that provides pro bono services and volunteer opportunities (a position she still holds). But as Neukrug, with whom she had worked as a consultant on several projects, rose through the ranks at the water department (he was named commissioner in January 2011), he encouraged her to join him in the public sector.

Not all established landscape designers would see working at a water utility as a great or logical career move, but Hara was intrigued. She had settled on a career in landscape architecture at the unusually early age of 13, and she enjoyed her design and planning work. But though she had been deeply involved in large-scale projects, including the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative in Washington, D.C., and a vision plan for the Delaware River waterfront in Philadelphia, Hara thought she could do even more with her experi-ence beyond her design and consulting roles. I really wanted to understand how to implement the ideas I was working with, she says. When

youre working on plans, youre giv-ing your absolute best advice. Here, decisions are getting made, and things start moving right away.

Her job at the department was a new one, created by Neukrug, whos widely considered to be an innovator in municipal water policy. He set the stage for Green City, Clean Waters by establishing the PWDs Ofce of Watersheds in 1999, merging the previously separate departments for combined sewer overfows, storm-water management, and drinking water source protection.

Like most people who run water utilities, Neu-krug is an engineer. But just as he was willing to encourage collaboration and unsegregate de-partmental functions to take a watershed-based approach to managing water, its clear that he has gone out of his way to learn from other profes-sionals, including landscape architects.

There arent a lot of direct role models for the PWDs landscape designers. Hara says shes not aware of other water departments that have landscape designers on staf, although she notes that Lois Eberhart, who is trained in landscape architecture, manages Minneapoliss stormwater program within the citys Department of Public Works. Neukrug isnt aware of any either; nor is Nathan Gardner-Andrews, the National Associa-tion of Clean Water Agencies general counsel.

But Gardner-Andrews says that could change. I think it is a potential growth area, he says. To fgure out how to integrate green infrastructure into the fabric of a community, utility manag-ers will have to reach outside their traditional community.

FOREGROUND / WATER

LEFT

Commissioner Howard Neukrug (in front of the bookcase) and Mami Hara lead a meeting at the PWD.

HERE,DECISIONSAREGETTINGMADE,ANDTHINGSSTARTMOVINGRIGHTAWAY.

MAMI HARA, ASLA


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Both the West Philadelphia Landscape Project by Anne Whiston Spirn, FASLA, and the Penn-sylvania Horticultural Societys Philadelphia Green program, which focus on planting and maintaining vacant sites in the city, made strong impressions on Neukrugs thinking, as did the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certifcation process. We take that concept, of getting the parties together before you design the building, to heart here, he says. Bringing in people from other disciplines, getting so many points of view, thats really exciting to me.

Philadelphias green infrastructure plan is, of course, a big part of the departments challenge. Although the consent order was the last step in the years-long process of getting the federal gov-ernments permission to use the plan to help con-trol combined sewer overfows and meet Clean Water Act standards, there are still fve-year fed-eral milestones to be met to make sure the city stays on track. Now that the Pennsylvania EPA and the PWD have signed the consent order, the

approach is a done deal on paper, but the PWD has to make sure it works in practice.

A lot of the groundwork for the plans implemen-tation was laid as the city negotiated with the state and the EPA, including watershed analysis, pilot programs, and the cultivation of relationships with federal and state regulators. Along the way, much of the skepticism about the performance of green infrastructure that has hobbled implemen-tation in other cities has worn of.

In some other places, such as Washington, D.C., even environmental groups have seemed leery of green infrastructures ability to deliver water quality results for polluted rivers and streams, resulting in legal entanglements and delays.

Hara says that in Philadelphia, environmental groups have pretty much come around. It prob-ably helped that Philadelphias agreements with the state and the EPA were hashed out in a setting that was, by comparison, not litigious.

FOREGROUND / WATER

ABOVE AND RIGHT

Swapping asphalt for rain

gardens, as the PWD did

at the George W. Nebinger

School in the Bella Vista

neighborhood, is part of

the GCCW plan and will

increase water inltration

on the site.

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Others within the city government have come around, too. Any skepticism that once might have existed inside the engineer-intensive water depart-ment has dissipated. Nearly everyone respects the need to comply with the standards set out in the consent order, and in any case, Hara says, there are now plenty of staf who are complete converts to the green approach.

Haras portfolio extends beyond the landscape. Shes managing an organization of about 2,000 people, with a budget of almost a billion dollars per year. Budgeting and fnance take up a lot of her time. This year, shes been focused on a strategic plan with an eye to planning and build-ing green infrastructure at various scales. Shes also been building the departments team and bolstering minority participation in contracts. As always, there are reporting requirements, alterna-tive energy and recycling projects for the depart-ments treatment facilities, and brainstorming new incentives. And, of course, the department has to make sure the pipes are working and city residents have clean drinking water.

Her portfolio also reaches beyond the water depart-ment. She works with other city agencies, commu-nity members, and residents. The PWD is engaged in partnerships with all kinds of groups, from bike organizations to business improvement districts to public health advocates. Joint projects with outside groups such as rain gardens, design charrettes and competitions, and park revitalizations are part of the GCCW implementation plan and have helped raise public awareness and acceptance.

These outreach activities bear some resemblance to the work Hara did with WRT, but the perspec-tive is a little bit diferent. My work as a consul-tant often entailed facilitating understanding and agreementbetween many stakeholders, she told me. Thats still the goal. Theresponsibility to get the most value for our ratepayers investmentsand the ways we defne what that meansdoes infuence my interactions with stakeholders now.

Hara is a bit removed from the design process these days. I am very rarely involved in specifc site designs, but I work with others to design and

refine large-scale programs, she says. Other landscape designers at the departments watersheds ofce are more directly engaged.

Rachel Ahern is one of them. Ahern, a designer/project manager for green stormwater infrastructure, looks for opportunities for stormwater proj-ects. She helps develop standard de-tails and specifcations for projects and reviews construction, monitor-ing, and maintenance plans with other ofces within the department. Ahern and her colleagues also work with other city departments and part-ners such as schools and commu-nity groups on design concepts. The GCCWs latest project, the George W. Nebinger School, is an example of the kind of ambitious partnerships the PWD is undertaking. The project features a recently completed rain garden and outdoor classroom that will incorporate green stormwater initiatives in the curriculum.

FOREGROUND / WATER

BELOW

PWD volunteers

helped plant the

new rain garden at

the Nebinger School.


Working for a utility involves a few extra challeng-es in the design process. The green infrastructure program works to maximize the social, economic, and environmental benefts of each project. The sites they work on can be small and constrained. Each green infrastructure project is a retroft squeezed into an existing building or parcel that otherwise isnt part of a bigger redesign.

There arent a lot of resources available for main-tenance, so designers also help fnd people in the community to adopt and care for projects after theyre installed. One project was a series of rain gardens in a parking lot on Eadom Street in north-east Philadelphia. The neighboring NorthEast Treatment Centers has a horticultural therapy program, and the members stepped in to adopt the gardens and help care for the plants. The PWD now sponsors a grant program to formalize and encourage these kinds of adoptions.

Money is a long-term issue as well. Although the water department is funded by ratepayers, and therefore doesnt compete with other agencies for limited city funds, it operates under a tight budget. The citys rates are considered low by na-tional standards, but a recent efort to raise them was ultimately scaled back, from a rise of 28.5

percent over four years to one of 17.5 percent over three years. A November 2012 ballot measure to take some of the power for setting rates out of the department won easy approval.

Afordability is also a key component of the citys agreement with the EPA. One goal of GCCW is to demonstrate the cost-efectiveness of green infrastructure as well as its functionality. Were being creative about simplifying our projects to do the best job at minimal cost, Ahern says.

And as in any big organization, there are bu-reaucracy and politics. Part of Aherns job is strategizing with colleagues to identify policy hurdles and issues that need to be coordinated with other agencies, as well as how to set mile-stones to meet the ambitious goals of the green infrastructure plan.

A former staf member in the Ofce of Water-sheds, George Schroeder, said he hadnt realized just how wide-ranging the details of the green infrastructure plan were. One minute youre looking at whether you can get water of the street and into a rain garden, and the next youre trying to fgure out how to get enough greened acres to meet the goals, he says. But the program is progressing: Hundreds of acres of public and private land have been, or are on the verge of being, greened. Hara fnds the work exciting, too. She calls her work at the Philadelphia Water Department the most intellectually challenging and interesting job you can imagine.

LINDA McINTYRE IS A FORMER STAFF WRITER AND A FREQUENT

CONTRIBUTOR TO LAM.

FOREGROUND / WATER

ONE CHALLENGE IS

FUNDING. ANOTHER

IS FINDING ENOUGH

LAND TO MEET THE

DEPARTMENTS

GREEN GOALS.

LEFT

Rupal Patel prepares

root balls and Charles

Pildis III plants trees at

the Nebinger School.

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Most projects dont have a soil scientist as a consultant, which leaves landscape archi-tects to make important feld decisions during construction. We need to specify soil moisture as part of the process of installing and compacting soils, and managing soil moisture is a critical part of plant establishment afterward. Working with wet soils can damage the performance of those soils, and allowing root balls to dry out can create tree stress problems that may impact tree growth far beyond the guarantee period.

Soil, grading, and planting specifcations often require that soils not be delivered, worked, or graded when wet, muddy, or dry. Some specif-cations include references to soil moisture, us-ing terms such as optimum soil moisture, feld capacity, wilt point, or saturated. What do these terms mean? And how can landscape architects in the feld, with no time to send samples to a lab, determine how moist the soil is?

Landscape architects need to understand soil moisture terms so they can make their specifca-tions accurate and defensible.

There are a number of ways to measure soil mois-ture, and there are diferent systems to express the results. The diferences are important and can be confusing. When most people think of how much moisture is in soil, they usually think of it as a percentage. Soil with 5 percent moisture may be dry and 25 percent may be wet. But there are

FOREGROUND / SOILS

CRITICAL SOIL MOISTURE TERMS

Macropores: Large spaces

between soil particles or spaces

within the soil structure that

are large enough to allow

water to move under the

inuence of gravity.

Micropores: Small spaces

around and between soil

particles that hold the water

by surface tension and capillary

action against the force of

gravity.

Gravity water: Water in

macropores that moves relatively

rapidly downward or sideways

under the inuence of gravity.

Capillary water: Water in

micropore space that moves

very slowly up, down, or

sideways under the inuence

of capillary forces.

Soil texture: The percent of

sand, silt, and clay in the soil.

Soil structure: Soil particles

stuck together by organic glues,

roots, and clay to form larger

structures in the soil, called

soil peds. Soil structure is the

primary building block in the

creation of macropores.

THE MEASURE

OF MOISTURE

WHEN SPECIFYING A SOIL, YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW IT HOLDS WATER.BY JAMES R. URBAN, FASLA

TOP

Loam soil

at wilt point.

CENTER

Loam soil at

eld capacity.

BOTTOM

Saturated

loam soil.


VOLUMETRIC SOIL MOISTURE BY SOIL TYPE

SOIL TYPE PERMANENT WILT POINT FIELD CAPACITY

Sand, loamy sand, sandy loam 58% 1218%

Loam, sandy clay, sandy clay loam 1425% 2736%

Clay loam, silt loam 1122% 3136%

Silty clay, silty clay loam 2227% 3841%

Source: Soil Water Characteristic Estimates by Texture and Organic Matter for Hydrologic Solutions,

by K. E. Saxton and W. J. Rawls, Soil Science Society of America Journal, vol. 70, SeptemberOctober 2006.

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two ways to express percent mois-ture: Volumetric moisture is where the total volume of the soil, includ-ing the pore space, is 100 percent, and the total volume of the water is a percentage of the total volume.

Gravimetric moisture is where the total mass of the soil, including the water, is 100 percent, and the mass of the water within the soil is calculated as the percent moisture. Because soil weighs more than water, the percent water in a gravimetric calculation will be smaller than the same sample cal-culated volumetrically. The gravimet-ric method is often used by scientists in research reports.

Soil moisture can also be expressed as soil water potential, which mea-sures the energy that it takes to move

water from one place to another. Scientists like to use water potential to discuss water as it takes into con-sideration many factors in a single metric, and the result for similar water states in diferent soil types is the same value.

But the vast majority of the tools and methods available to measure gravi-metric moisture or soil water potential are too cumbersome, time consum-ing, or expensive to have a feld ap-plication for landscape architects dur-ing a site inspection. The measuring tools easily available to a contractor or a landscape architect are those that measure volumetric moisture.

Soil moisture meters that measure volumetric soil moisture as a func-tion of electric conductivity in the

soil are relatively cheap and easy to use. Although these tools are not sufciently accurate for scientifc purposes, they are very good for establishing relative soil moisture levels. A good moisture meter that gives reasonably reliable data will cost about $250 or more. These meters will typically read around 50 percent when the soil is totally saturated. Moisture meters that are far cheaper, $15 to $100, are avail-able, but these give much more ap-proximate readings.

I use two meters. The Digital Soil Moisture Meter DSMM500 by Gen-eral Tools & Instruments ($250) is a reasonably precise volumetric soil moisture instrument. The biggest drawback to this meter is the short, eight-inch-long probe that makes it difcult to look at water deeper in the soil. Often a perched water table or other drainage problem may be deeper than the surface layer. To look at water deeper in the soil pro-fle, I use the Lincoln Soil Moisture Meter by LIC ($105). LICs meter is an industry standard for an inexpen-sive meter and can be purchased with a 36-inch-long probe that al-lows deeper measurements. It has a relative scale of 0 to 10 (dry to wet) but does have a calibration screw on the back of the meter. I simply

FOREGROUND / SOILS

ABOVE

The Digital Soil Moisture

Meter DSMM500 has an

8-inch probe and the Lincoln

Soil Moisture Meter has a

24-inch probe.

BELOW

These volumetric readings

are approximate starting

points to interpret meter

readings. All soil types are

USDA soil nomenclature, and

the soil is assumed to have

2.5 percent organic matter

with density and structure

suitable for root growth.


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insert the General meter and the LIC meter into the soil to the same depth and calibrate the LIC to read the same as the General. I also use a soil auger to look at relative soil moisture to any depth the auger can reach using the method noted below for observing soil moisture by appearance. The two systems, meters and appearance, work well together in the feld.

Soil texture, soil structure, percentage of organic matter, and compaction all play a role in the percentages of volumetric soil moisture measured at permanent wilt point and feld ca-pacity, the two critical benchmarks to fnding the limits of plant-available water. Adding compost to soil will increase the available water about 10 percent above the values in the table as dry weight soil organic matter rises up to 7.5 percent. Soil mixes of sand, soil, and compost are closest to sandy loam or loamy sand, but often soil organic matter will be higher than 2.5 percent in the fnal mix owing to the large amount of compost.

Optimum soil moisture levels for compaction must be determined from a proctor curve prepared by an engineering soils laboratory, but they are normally between 10 per-cent and 18 percent, or slightly above the wilt point of the soil.

Because of the wide range of factors that afect volumetric soil moisture, the percentages in the table are only a guide. In the feld, using visual and physical indicators may help in refning the discussion if a soil is too wet or too dry.

Landscape architects can develop the skill to check soil moisture just by feeling and observing its appearance. As the soil approaches wilt point, it becomes lighter in color. If youre un-sure what the color should be when there is adequate moisture, add water to a small sample and compare it to the actual soil color. Dry soil will tend to become dusty when crushed. Soil clumps with higher percentages of clay and silt will become harder to crush when dry, whereas clumps of soil with high percentages of coarse sand, particularly most sand-based soil mixes, will fall apart more easily.

As soil approaches field capacity, it will become much more plastic and moldable and will leave a slight muddy impression on your hand when its squeezed. Above feld ca-pacity, the soil will start to look shiny, with free water coating the soil, and your hand will become muddy. As the soil nears total saturation, sam-ples will become fuid.

Using correct terminology and citing referenced volumetric soil moisture levels are important parts of the spec-ifcation process. Checking soil mois-ture and moisture within the soil of tree root balls during construction, planting, and maintenance should be a regular part of the construction observation process. Landscape ar-chitects need to have the equipment and skills to do thisthey shouldnt have to rely on laboratory analysis.

JAMES R. URBAN, FASLA, IS A LANDSCAPE AR-

CHITECT WHO SPECIALIZES IN URBAN TREES

AND SOILS AND A CONSULTANT TO OTHER

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS.

FOREGROUND / SOILS

MOISTURE TERMS FROM DRY TO WET

Wet, dry, muddy: All undened

slang terms.

Oven dry: The point where

there is no moisture in the soil,

generally only used in laboratory

test discussions and rarely found

in eld soil conditions.

Permanent wilt point: A level

of soil moisture that is so low

the plant will not recover unless

water is added. It varies with

plant type and soil type.

Wilt point: Considered slang by

soil scientists, this is ofen used

to describe the point where a

plant begins to wilt.

Optimum soil moisture:

When used in geotechnical

specications, this is the level

of moisture where the greatest

degree of compaction can be

achieved in a proctor test.

This testcomparesactual

orspeciedcompaction as a

percentage of the maximum

compaction that can be obtained

within the proctor testprotocol.

In agricultural soil discussi

lam-2014-01.pdf

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