LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS MAR2024/VOL114 NO3 US $16 CAN $22 MAIN COURSE Lessons from the lake at Utah’s biggest development OPEN PLANNER The changing culture of project management WOODS GO URBAN Elizabeth K. Meyer on what we can learn from landscape labs ROBERTSON PLAZA HKLA cracks a puzzle in Los Angeles
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4 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 GABE SACHTER-SMITH, TOP; EVAN MATHER, FASLA, BOTTOM LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS MARCH 2024 8 INSIDE 10 LAND MATTERS 120 ADVERTISER INDEX 121 ADVERTISERS BY PRODUCT CATEGORY FOREGROUND 16 NOW Timothy A. Schuler, Editor Slowing down floodwaters to protect Virginia shorelines; new tools for calculating carbon; an Indigenous soapstone quarry will become an educational park; and enlisting bananas to help fight fires. 36 OFFICE Who Needs to Know? by Bradford McKee For the latest generation of design professionals, knowledge is key to inclusion. Four landscape architects discuss how transparency around project budgets and contracts leads to better retention. 50 GOODS Kristen Mastroianni, Editor Go with the Flow New designs for capturing and moving water. 16 36
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 / 5 JAMES GESSEL, TOP; MARTIN SLIVKA, LONDON, CENTER; © BLAUWDRUK PUBLISHERS, BOTTOM FEATURES 60 Just Add Water by Brian Fryer Years after development, Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah, was still missing a vital piece: a community connector. Designed by LOCI, the Watercourse, a new aquatic network, delivers on recreational needs as well as stormwater infrastructure and habitat. THE BACK 82 Lasting Impressions by Jennifer Reut An artful compendium chronicles 150 years of nature printing through rare and captivating specimens. 96 BOOKS Mimi Zeiger, Editor Experiments in Slow Design by Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA A review of Woods Go Urban: Landscape Laboratories in Scandinavia, edited by Anders Busse Nielsen, Lisa Diedrich, and Catherine Szanto. 132 BACKSTORY HKLA’s oversized planters fit a tricky bill. 82 96 60
6 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 ON THE COVER The Watercourse at Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah, by LOCI, page 60. JAMES GESSEL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS EDITOR Jennifer Reut / [email protected] ART DIRECTOR Christopher McGee / [email protected] SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER Kristen Mastroianni / [email protected] COPY CHIEF Lisa Schultz / [email protected] PRODUCTION EDITOR Leah Ghazarian / [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Brian Barth; Jared Brey; Jessica Bridger; Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA; Lydia Lee; Jonathan Lerner; Jane Margolies; Zach Mortice; Maci Nelson, Associate ASLA; Timothy A. Schuler; James R. Urban, FASLA; Lisa Owens Viani; Mimi Zeiger EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE Dennis R. Nola, FASLA / Chair Monique Bassey, ASLA / Vice President, Communications Diana Boric, Associate ASLA Nathaniel Byro, ASLA Sara Hadavi, ASLA Jiali Liu, Associate ASLA Graciela Martin, Associate ASLA Daniel McElmurray, ASLA Andrew Sargeant, ASLA Matthew Sickle, ASLA David Toda, ASLA Bo Zhang, ASLA EDITORIAL 202-898-2444 PUBLISHER Michael O’Brien, Honorary ASLA / [email protected] DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT AND STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS Daniel Martin, Honorary ASLA / [email protected] ADVERTISING SALES 202-216-2363 SALES MANAGER Monica Barkley / [email protected] SALES MANAGER Kathleen Thomas / [email protected] PRODUCTION SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER Laura Iverson / [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS REPRESENTATIVE [email protected] BACK ISSUES 888-999-ASLA (2752) LandscapeArchitectureMagazine(ISSN0023-8031)is publishedmonthlyby theAmericanSocietyofLandscape Architects, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001- 3736. Periodical postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Landscape Architecture Magazine, 636 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-3736. Publications Mail Agreement No. 41024518. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 503 RPO, West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Copyright 2024 ASLA. Subscriptions: $79/year; international: $119/ year; digital: $68/year; single copies: $10. Landscape Architecture Magazine seeks to support a healthy planet through environmentally conscious production and distribution ofthemagazine.Thismagazine is printed on certified paper using vegetable inks. You can read more about the sustainability efforts of our publishing partners at bit.ly/lam-sustainability. The magazine is also available in digital format through bit.ly/lam-zinio or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA. ASLA BOARD OF TRUSTEES PRESIDENT SuLin Kotowicz, FASLA PRESIDENT-ELECT Kona Gray, FASLA IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Emily O’Mahoney, FASLA VICE PRESIDENTS Monique Bassey, ASLA Chris Della Vedova, ASLA Joy Kuebler, FASLA Ebru Ozer, FASLA Jean Senechal Biggs, ASLA April Westcott, FASLA CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Torey Carter-Conneen SECRETARY Curtis Millay, ASLA TREASURER Michael O’Brien, Honorary ASLA TRUSTEES Benjamin Baker, ASLA Chad Bostick, ASLA Elizabeth Boults, ASLA Jonathan Bronk, ASLA Kenneth Brooks, FASLA Katie Clark, FASLA Matthew Copp, ASLA Jitka Dekojova, ASLA Geoff Evans, ASLA Alexander Fenech, ASLA Jay Gibbons, ASLA Lara Guldenpfennig, ASLA William Hall, ASLA Jonathan Hayes, ASLA James Hencke, ASLA Gail Henderson-King, ASLA Todd Hill, ASLA Allen Jones, ASLA Carl Kelemen, FASLA Omprakash Khurjekar, ASLA Randy Knowles, ASLA Chad Kucker, ASLA Chris Laster, ASLA Justin Lemoine, ASLA Evan Mather, FASLA Christopher Moon, ASLA Elizabeth Moskalenko, ASLA Amin Omidy, ASLA Holley Bloss Owings, ASLA Michele Palmer, ASLA Vaughn Eric Perez, ASLA Zachary Pierce, ASLA Matthew Rentsch, ASLA Brian Roth, ASLA Thomas Ryan, FASLA Jan Saltiel-Rafel, ASLA Barbara Santner, ASLA Todd Schoolcraft, ASLA Tim Slazinik, ASLA Dustin Smith, ASLA Nathan Socha, ASLA Robert Tilson, FASLA Patricia Trauth, ASLA William Bryce Ward, ASLA Alan Watkins, ASLA Andrew Wickham, ASLA Gretchen Wilson, ASLA Barbara Yaeger, ASLA Dana Anne Yee, FASLA LAF REPRESENTATIVES Barbara Deutsch, FASLA Roberto Rovira, ASLA NATIONAL ASSOCIATE REPRESENTATIVE Nicole Beard, Associate ASLA NATIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE Lexi Banks, Student ASLA PARLIAMENTARIAN Susan Jacobson, FASLA
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8 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 LAM / INSIDE BRIAN FRYER (“Just Add Water,” page 60) is a native Utahn and freelance journalist who has specialized in coverage of the architecture, engineering, and construction industries for the past 15 years. You can follow him on Instagram @brifryguy4444. “From developing the orientation of neighborhoods down to colors and features for different homes, I was deeply impressed with the level of design detail that went into creating the Watercourse and the second phase of Daybreak.” ELIZABETH K. MEYER, FASLA, (“Experiments in Slow Design,” page 96) is the Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture and the inaugural faculty director of the University of Virginia’s Morven Sustainability Lab. You can follow her on Instagram @elizabethkmeyer. “I visited the Alnarp land lab, and the montage-like transitions between the varied woodland rooms are moments of sheer pleasure and wonder.” CONTRIBUTORS BRIAN FRYER, TOP; TOM DALY FOR THE UVA SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BOTTOM At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an area of interest you’d like to see covered, tell us! Send it to [email protected]. For more information, visit LAM online at landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/ contribute-to-lam. Follow us on X and Instagram @landarchmag and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ landscapearchitecturemagazine. LAM is available in digital format through landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/ subscribe or by calling 1-888-999-ASLA. GOT A STORY? CORRECTION In “An Elegy in Granite” in the January issue of LAM, Monument Lab was incorrectly identified as being a partner of the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, which was led by a partnership between the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Trust for the National Mall, and the National Park Service. In addition, the park service was inadvertently omitted as one of the partners of the Beyond Granite pilot exhibition, which took place in 2023, not 2022. We regret the errors.
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10 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 I n our region, spring marks not just the passing of time but the border crossing of sensory experience, from cold to warm and dark to light. We expect that spring will follow winter—we depend on it socially, economically, creatively—and for landscape architects, it ushers in a busy and rewarding time. New projects move forward while older ones mature and show their promise, and students graduate and join the profession. When we send this issue out into the world from inside the dark and disbelieving months of winter, we have to trust spring will come—that March will come—and the natural world will begin to live and thrive, as it always has done. While we lean toward spring in LAM, toward the lengthening light and the return of plants and birdsong, we also dread it; we dread the stories we’ll report on wildfire, dread the flooding rains and the parching heat. These are now signs of spring as surely as a robin or a flower crown. One of the quintessential symbols of spring, the myth of Persephone offers promise in a time of great sorrow and anguish. In it, Demeter’s beloved child Persephone is abducted and brought to the underworld by Hades to be his unwilling bride. Demeter, the grief-stricken goddess of the harvest, throws the world into winter. Nothing grows, everything dies. Pressured by the gods, Hades agrees to let Persephone return to the world for half the year, and so the spring and summer seasons go. Like most myths, it’s not a redemptive or heroic story. Persephone isn’t saved, Hades isn’t punished, and everyone just gets on with their business underthese new limits. Demeterremains in grief for those months, while Persephone makes the best of her time as the queen of the dead. It’s not hopeful or just, but it’s a way to make sense of the discordances in a season of humanitarian and climate crises. Inthis issue,there are seemingly unresolvable contradictions embedded in nearly every story. To me, these stories illustrate the way landscape architects are able to thread their way through modern life, to embrace the contradictions and make something completely new. THE AGE OF PERSEPHONE LAND MATTERS LAM / JENNIFER REUT EDITOR
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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 / 15 AGENCY LANDSCAPE + PLANNING CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS Agency Landscape + Planning is in on the trend of sharing knowledge to retain good employees, in OFFICE, page 36. FOREGROUND
16 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 CITY OF NORFOLK, TOP LEFT; STROMBERG/GARRIGAN & ASSOCIATES, INSET Before it became a tagline for a certain coterie of urban designers, “living with water” was an everyday reality for residents of Tidewater Gardens. Constructed in the 1950s, the Norfolk, Virginia, public housing complex was built on land created from the filling in of Newton’sCreek. By the 2000s, rising sea levels and more severe storms made flooding in the area a regular occurrence. Residents waded through floodwaters to reach their doors; one resident told reporters she would park as close to her apartment as possible and climb into her car from the passenger side to avoid getting wet. Flooding isn’t a problem for Tidewater Gardens anymore because Tidewater Gardens no longer exists. All 618 public housing units have been demolished. In their place, the city is building a new, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood called Kindred. In addition to 714 housing units, the former housing bloc will include 26 acres of RETREAT AND RETURN TOP LEFT All 618 units of public housing in Norfolk's flood-prone Tidewater Gardens were demolished in 2022. INSET Twenty-six acres of the former housing tract are being transformed into a blue/greenway that will absorb stormwater and protect future housing. NOW public open space, designed as a superabsorbent sponge to mitigate future floods. Known as St. Paul’s Blue/Greenway and expected to begin construction this fall, the park space is being designed by Moffatt & Nichol, Waggonner & Ball, and Norfolk-based Stromberg/Garrigan & Associates (SGA).It will feature a freshwater simulacrum of Newton’s Creek, which, according to the designers, will help slow, store, and treat10.6 million cubic feet of stormwater, preventing the kind of flooding earlier public housing residents endured. It’s a tangible example of a planning approach that landscape architects and others have been preaching for years: Move vulnerable populations out of harm’s way, and return portions of the floodplain to a more natural state using landscape-based strategies to ameliorate the risk of flooding and other climate threats. It is also something of a trial run. Huge swaths of Norfolk FOREGROUND / EDITED BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER ON THE FORMER SITE OF FLOOD-SOAKED PUBLIC HOUSING IN NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, A BLUE/GREENWAY MAY PROVIDE A DRIER FUTURE. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
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18 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 STROMBERG/GARRIGAN & ASSOCIATES FOREGROUND /NOW ABOVE A daylit area of once-buried Newton's Creek will help manage stormwater. The wetland areas will be protected by an edge detail that prevents lawnmowers from entering the ecologically sensitive zone. are susceptible to flooding. “Norfolk is second only to New Orleans in terms of low-lying land,” says Susan Perry, the director of Norfolk’s Department of Housing and Community Development. The St. Paul’s area, a formerly redlined region that includes Tidewater Gardens, has the highest concentration of public housing of any part of the city, with approximately 1,700 units—roughly half of Norfolk’s public housing—over 200 acres, all of which faces significant flood risk. Timothy Stromberg, ASLA, a principal at SGA, says the city’s long-term vision is to eventually extend the Blue/Greenway further upstream, protecting an even larger swath of the city. The effort to transform St. Paul’s dates back to the early 2000s and has been informed by a number of planning studies, including an EPA-funded plan led by SGA that in 2020 won a Virginia ASLA Honor Award. It still hasn’t been smooth sailing. The new mixed-use development will include just 260 “replacement” units for former residents of Tidewater Gardens, which means not everyone will have the opportunity to return. A lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of residents in 2020 resulted in 50 additional units reserved for former residents. Ensuring that those who can and do return to their former neighborhood feel a sense of continuity and belonging has been a key challenge for designers. In addition to a public art program partially directed by former residents, the design will retain elements of the existing landscape, including 88 mature trees, mostly willow oaks. “One thing in this neighborhood that you don’t see in a lot of constrained neighborhoods is they really have large canopy trees, and they valued them,” Stromberg says. As waterlevels continue to rise—and in Norfolk they’re rising at a faster rate than just about anywhere else in the country—the threat to low-income residents will necessitate additionalrelocations and flood-mitigation measures like the Blue/Greenway. Stromberg says, “We have to be thinking about, as the land is sinking and the wateris rising, are we fighting a battle that we’re never going to win?” WATER MANAGEMENT EXISTING CONDITIONS N
20 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 FAST TRACKED TO MEET THE AMBITIOUS CLIMATE TARGETS AHEAD, DESIGNERS, DEVELOPERS, AND CONSTRUCTION FIRMS NEED COMMON STANDARDS. AND SOON. BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER SASAKI FOREGROUND /NOW LEFT Developed by Sasaki, Carbon Conscience is a tool that helps landscape architects calculate embodied carbon. An effort to standardize emissions reporting is now underway. As municipal governments, developers, universities, and corporations begin to collect emissions data, either voluntarily or to comply with localregulations, experts say that the building sector will need better standards forreporting embodied carbon data. “We need to be aligned at the highest levels of guidance and leadership, or else it’s going to lose its impact,” says Pamela Conrad, ASLA, the founder ofClimate Positive Design and the creative force behind Pathfinder, a free carbon calculator designed for landscape architects (see “The Plus Side,” LAM, October 2020). Currently, design professionals who have climate commitments lack a standardized way to report embodied carbon emissions, which prevents owners from being able to quickly and easily get a full picture of a project’s carbon footprint. “There’s different tools, and they all report data a little bit differently,” says Kate Simonen, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington and the founding director of the Carbon Leadership Forum.Reportingmethodologies can vary based on the unit of measurement, estimated project life span, or how a project’s area is defined. “For example, a landscape project could talk about the carbon footprint of the concrete used per cubic yard. They could talk about the total carbon footprint of the concrete used. Or they could talk about the average carbon footprint per yard of landscape covered,” Simonen says. The Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) Projectis an industry effortto standardize embodiedcarbonreporting across carbon calculators, rating systems, and other platforms. The group, which is led by theCarbon Leadership Forum, Architecture 2030, Building Transparency, the U.S. Green Building
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22 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 CLIMATE POSITIVE DESIGN FOREGROUND /NOW ABOVE Climate Positive Design, whose Pathfinder platform is another emissions calculator, is among the ECHO Project's participants. Council, and the International Living Future Institute, is developing a framework for embodied carbon reporting that can be used by all the members of a projectteamand will include agreed-upon definitions, units of measurement, and more. Simonen says the industry representation within the group is unique. Among the participants are advocacy organizations, such as Climate Positive Design, as well as national professional associations, including theAmericanSociety of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects, and the American Society of Civil Engineers. “I don’t know of any other place where you’ve got this diversity of building sector actors coming together with an aim of helping to align and move forward,” she says. The ECHO Project held its inaugural meeting in Seattle inMarch 2023.In September, it announced it had completed a draft framework, which is currently being circulated among participating organizations for review. Simonen says a public version ofthe framework is expected to be released sometime in 2024. A soon-to-be-released standard for embodied carbon reporting for mechanical systems—developed by the American Society of Heating,Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers and the International Code Council—is also calling for a global standardized approach to emissions reporting. “What is really exciting is that this is a venue to share with the participants of ECHO the details of these emerging standards, and then be able to develop responses to those standards that are informed,” Simonen says. Christopher Ng-Hardy, ASLA—a senior associate at Sasaki who developed Carbon Conscience, a design analysis application for carbon—says he hopes the industrywide alignment of embodied carbon reporting will further advance carbon accounting in design software. “I would love to see Land F/X have a way to export embodied carbon schedules, like you can export yourreference note schedules.I would love to seeRevittools for landscape that have this kind of data,” Ng-Hardy says. “Hopefully, one of the things we get out of formalizing these reporting standards is more innovation.”
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Four thousand years ago, if you were working with a stone mallet, it would be steady but relatively quick work to carve a soapstone boulder into a medium-sized bowl. With stone chipping off with every strike, you could start the project in the morning, work into the afternoon, and be boiling water in the bowl by nightfall. Soapstone was ideal that way—easy enough to carve but dense enough to hold heat. In late 2023, Montgomery Parks, a department oftheMaryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, acquired a longtime equestrian facility tucked into the watershed of the Patuxent River, a major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. According to county park staff, archaeologists had long known that the site was the location of a soapstone quarry used by Indigenous people between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago. The department has now begun a planning process to turn the 33-acre property into a park that will interpret this history. Also known as steatite, soapstone is a metamorphic rock that is solid but relatively soft, making it a popular material for carving into cooking vessels, tools, pipes, and other objects. The Ednor Soapstone Quarry, as the park site is known, is one of 11 such quarries that have been identified in DIG DEEP A SOAPSTONE QUARRY WITH INDIGENOUS ROOTS IS SET TO BECOME AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK. BY KIM O’CONNELL COURTESY MONTGOMERY PARKS N TOP RIGHT The park's conceptual plan includes places for demonstration, reflection, and reforestation. INSET Examples of previously excavated soapstone. Montgomery Parks says future archaeological excavations are likely. FOREGROUND /NOW 26 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024
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COURTESY MONTGOMERY PARKS FOREGROUND /NOW RIGHT The former equestrian center will retain significant open space for scientific research and visitor programming. Montgomery County, but all the others have been destroyed by development or are otherwise inaccessible. The former equestrian center, by contrast, remains mostly open space, aside from a horse barn and associated buildings that will eventually be removed. “The landscape itself was pretty intact outside of the buildings,” says Cassandra Michaud, a culturalresources stewardship supervisor with Montgomery Parks. “It really lent itself to preservation, with interpretive value and archaeological value.” The conceptual plan includes areas for reconstructions of Indigenous dwellings and demonstrations, an interpretive center and trails, space for K–12 school groups, and parking. A significant portionofthe propertywill be devoted to reforestation.Next steps include community engagement and a formal design process, Michaud says.Itis importantto county officials that Indigenous groups be involved in the park’s development. “We’ve reached out to the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs,” Michaud says. “We’d like to set up an advisory committee fortheproperty thatwould represent these groups.” Although future archaeological excavations are likely, Michaud says that the site is valuable to research even without digging. The quarry is thought to have drawn people from significant distances, she says. “Each of these quarries has a chemical marker, and you can perform chemical analysis from this site and source where a stone artifact is coming from,” she says. “So you can rebuild those trade networks and understand how they came about.” Landscape architect SheilaBoudreau, the principal of SpruceLab, an Indigenous- and woman-owned practice based in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta, has spoken about the work of decolonizing landscape architecture. At the Ednor site, she says, designers have an important opportunity to stretch theirtemporal understanding of landscape and invite Indigenous voices to be heard. “Landscape designs for public realm and natural heritage areas are critical opportunities to open up the design process, to invite the First Peoples of those lands to tell us how they want to tell their story, but also what values should guide these designs,” she says. “As landscape architects, we are trained to think in terms of hundreds of years. For Indigenous peoples, whose ancestors have lived on their traditional territories for over 12,000 years, this is merely a blink of an eye.” 28 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024
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A BUFFER BUFFET COMPUTER MODELING PUTS A NEW SPECIES ON THE MENU OF EDIBLE FIRE BREAKS. BY MADELINE BODIN GABE SACHTER-SMITH Ateam of scientists says it has found a plant that could help protect communities against wildfire while providing income and filling bellies at the same time: the banana. A new study, recently published in the science journal PNAS Nexus, used complex computer modeling to show thatin SouthernCalifornia,raising bananas in fields at least 2,000 feet wide could both slow fire within the wildland–urban interface (WUI) and potentially be profitable. It’s a finding that could be applied to otherU.S. locations, including Hawaiʻi, where wildfires largely destroyed the town of Lahaina last year. A computer simulation showed that a banana buffer ofthat sizewouldhave slowed California’s 2017 Tubbs Fire by more than fivehours,long enoughforfirefighters to intervene. “It turns out that this plant you would think is a specialist can do more things than we thought,” says one of the researchers, Michael Kantar, an associate professor in the tropical plant and soil sciences department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Ma¯noa. Not only do banana plants retain a lot of moisture (even their dead leaves are moistrelative to other plants), making the plant an effective BELOW Banana plants, seen here at the Counter Culture Organic Farm on Oahu, Hawai'i, could be an effective buffer for wildfire. FOREGROUND /NOW 30 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024
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fire break, but a banana buffer with an average yield could produce fruit sale profits of $56,000 per hectare (or $22,663 per acre), according to the study. “It’s fun when science provides new answers,” Kantar says. The banana is not the first food crop suggested as a potential fire break. Vineyards have acted as unplanned fire breaks during certain California fires, such as 2017’s Atlas Fire. Avocado fields have filled thatrole in other fires. Succulents such as agave and cacti are popular choices as edible fire buffers because of their low water use. Kantar says the researchers also tested figs, carob, perennial peanut, and sweet potatoes as potential fire buffer plants but were able to proceed farthest and fastest with research into bananas. Edible fire breaks have other benefits, too. Fire maintenance is expensive, and cropland such as a banana field could potentially pay its own way. “We can’t afford land that only fills one need,” says Jonah Susskind, a California-based senior research associate with SWA’s XL Lab. “Fire breaks that are not just open space but provide food and income are an important part of the land-use mix.” Douglas Kent, the author of the book Firescaping: Protecting Your Home with a Fire-Resistant Landscape who teaches land management courses at three California universities, says that maintenance plays an important role in whether a plant or landscaped area will withstand fire. Communities may be more willing to alter croplands through pruning, thinning, or prescribed fire than they may be to manage wildlands or parklands, he says. Similarly, Susskind says that there is a “glaring knowledge gap” about reducing fire risks at the community level compared to techniques known forhouseholds or overlarge landscapes, anobservationthatinformedSWA’s 2023publicationPlaybook forthePyrocene:Design Strategiesfor Fire-ProneCommunities. Susskind says he appreciates that Kantar and his coauthors chose that spatial frame. While Kantar’s study focuses on fire-prone Southern California as the potential beneficiary of banana fire buffers, in the paper, the researchers point out that the benefits of growing bananas are not limited to the country’s warmest zones, especially as climate change expands the ranges of various banana species. “We need to think about where plants might grow in the future,” Susskind says. One practical challenge to implementation could be a lack of infrastructure for banana cultivation in the United States, which grows a fraction of the world’s bananas, mostly in Hawaiʻi and Florida. But Kantar says the team’s primary aim was to find new ways to think about land use at a time when owners want to get more out of their landscapes. What they didn’t know, he says, is that the answer would be bananas. “FIRE BREAKS THAT ARE NOT JUST OPEN SPACE BUT PROVIDE FOOD AND INCOME ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE LAND-USE MIX.” —JONAH SUSSKIND FOREGROUND /NOW 32 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024
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36 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY EDSA; COURTESY AGENCY LANDSCAPE + PLANNING; GARRETT STONE; EVAN MATHER, FASLA FOREGROUND / OFFICE Landscape architecture offices are competing for creative, productive talent in spheres much broader than their peer groups inother designoffices.Thismeans the stakes arehigherto showcommitment and earnit back among their staffandnew recruits. Entrants to the profession these days show a desire, principals and practice consultants say, for genuine enrollment in their firms and to support the firm’s evolution. People want to know more and be able to ask more questions. MarjannePearsonis the founder ofTalentstar, anorganizational strategy consultancy to design firms based in Petaluma, California. With 30-plus years of familiarity with the design fields, she notes a genWHO NEEDS TO KNOW? FIRMS ARE SHARING PROJECT CONTRACTS AND BUDGETS MORE OPENLYACROSS TEAMS AS A MATTER OF STAFF ENGAGEMENT. BY BRADFORD MCKEE erational shift toward distributive models of leadership and project management. Strategic knowledge is “not closely held by the directors of a firm, because that’s not how it works anymore,” Pearson told me. “There’s additionaldelegationto anew level of leadership. It’s a new need to look at the energy grid ofresources and knowledge so that everyone within the firm has accessibility to allow people to understand the ‘why’” in the work they’re doing. LAM talked with four management-level landscape architects about their views around sharing knowledge in offices striving to cultivate and hang on to talented people. These interviews have been edited and condensed. PAUL KISSINGER, FASLA, CEO, Kissinger Design, Dexter, Michigan SUSANNAH ROSS, ASLA, director, landscape architect, Agency Landscape + Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts GREG TUZZOLO, managing director, STIMSON, Cambridge, Massachusetts JENNIFER ZELL, ASLA, director of Los Angeles operations and director of Regenerative Design Studio, MIG, Los Angeles
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38 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 COURTESY EDSA What are the basic factors of a typical project that anyone working on it should be able to tell you on their feet? PAUL KISSINGER, FASLA:They have to know the contract. They have to knowwhatthe fees are.And theyhave to know what the deliverables are. Everybody onthe teamshouldknowthat without a shadow of a doubt. If they don’t know the deliverables, and the client calls to ask for x, y, or z, and they just go ahead and do that, well, why did you do that? They say, “Because the client asked.” Well, I don’t care if the client asks. This is not in our contract. It’s kind of basic. “Well, you never showed me the contract. How am I supposed to know that?” JENNIFER ZELL, ASLA: Everyone who works on a project obviously needs to know the location, a little bit about the context and who the client is, what the market is, and what our scope of work is. Schedules also, but they always flex. And also, where we are in the range of services— schematic design, design development. Everyone on the project needs to know those basics. And anyone can look to know what the project budget is. GREG TUZZOLO: I’ll focus on the person right out of school: Here is your first project.Theyneed to understand scope and process.Thenthere are the fees. Not everyone needs to be fully aware of that. That can come, you know, soon. They need to be aware of time management. Our process is designed to be civil and support a work-life balance. We allocate staff resources based on 42 hours a week. I don’t know how firms can chronically overtax their people. Do they plan with the expectation that people are going to work 60 hours a week? Maybe they are? SUSANNAH ROSS, ASLA: Everybody has access to information about the project. Whether we push it to the folks at the juniorlevel well enough, I kind of wonder, but ideally, they would all know the location, the client, the key partners on the team, the size, the scope. You know, is it a master plan? Is it a downtown plan? Is it going through to construction administration? The fee, we don’t hide that from anyone. I don’t know that it’s something we get into with junior staff, but we don’t hide it. FOREGROUND /OFFICE LEFT Paul Kissinger, FASLA, who retired from EDSA after 30 years, thinks it’s crucial for project staff to know what is and isn’t in the contract.
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40 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 COURTESY AGENCY LANDSCAPE + PLANNING What types of project information are generally privileged only to seniorleaders in the firm? And why? ZELL: Really all project-related infor- mation that makes a project manager good at theirjob is available to them. What’s not is more financial—the overall financial picture. I find the more information you have, the more tools you have to manage your project. It’s my job to empower and help project managers get good at managing their projects. A lot of the tools are right there in the contract. ROSS: I was asking [Agency’s co- founders] Gina [Ford, FASLA] and Brie [Hensold, Honorary ASLA] this morning: Is there anything we wouldn’t tell folks? The only thing we could come up with is if the proj- ect has drama on the client side, be- cause that’s a confidential matterfor the client. Oh, and we’re pretty clear if we have a really lean budget on a project. And if we get to the end of a project and we’re out of fee, I don’t keep that quiet. FOREGROUND /OFFICE RIGHT Susannah Ross, ASLA, of Agency Landscape + Planning, wants people on a project to know how much or how little budget it has and when there’s none left.
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42 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 TUZZOLO: Overall firm profitability. Principals’ performance.Project portfolio performance. Essentially, like, hey, he or she earned this much this year. Total revenue is generally held pretty close.Certainly personnel stuff and hiring-related stuff is confidential. At the project level, successes and failures generally are shared, sometimes the specifics on project budgets and overages. That’s about the boundary, where we kind of say, we’ll talk about this in this group and not globally. Once you’re a project manager, you can get in and see just about any project. KISSINGER: I’m oversimplifying the accounting, but if I take the money I’ve got versus the bills that I have, what I have left is income, or profit, right? That’s the number that’s not generally shared. It might be shared in a global way, like, “We billed this much money.” But if you shared, you know, “Wemade $Xmillionlast year,” people start calculating:Those guys are making tons ofmoney!And it’snot ever that straightforward.And I would say the ownership structure ofthe firm is not shared—and that’s not related to project management. Do project managers generally know, or are they able to know, every critical factorsurrounding a given project,e.g., how close it is to budget, or going over, etc.? TUZZOLO: Project principals and project managers have access to the same informationunless there’s some high-level conversationthat aprincipal needs to have with another principal. Our principals rely on the project managers to hold the ship together— they have learned to delegate a lot. There’s really nothing withheld from the project managers, including the totalfinancialperformance oftheproject. They’re required to report on that every week in an overall way. That’s a routine thing, and I think it works. ROSS: We have a sheet that tracks the budget for every project. And we don’t do time sheets. That’s a huge thing that people don’t understand. We look at a project and the fee and the schedule, and we project out over a year what we’re going to be able to bill monthly, and then that translates directly to the work plan we set up. And if the project pauses or slows, those numbers have to adjust, and the workflow has to adjust. And there is no dollar amount per principal that’s expected. It’s just everyone together kind of pushing the whole firm. KISSINGER: A hundred percent, project managers have to know [the project’s budget status], because if you’re relying on the principal as the only one who knows that information, you’ve got a team that’s running blind. So project managers should know where to find the information and be taught how to look at it. ZELL: We use Deltek Vision, and there are a lot of dashboards and tools and reports you can generate to tell you where you are within the budget. FOREGROUND /OFFICE “IF THE PROJECT PAUSES OR SLOWS, [THE] NUMBERS HAVE TO ADJUST, AND THE WORKFLOW HAS TO ADJUST.” —SUSANNAH ROSS, ASLA
44 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 GARRETT STONE But all of the data is sometimes hard for project managers to sift and sort and prioritize. So sharing a lot of informationismost beneficialwhenthe project managers have the ability to synthesize it to inform the decisions they make in managing the project and managing others. Where might communications break down owing to the withholding of certain vital project information? What impact might this breakdown have on the project’s success, and on profitability? KISSINGER: At one firm I know, the modelwas that youhad contractmanagers and design managers.It’s like a circle of kids whispering a secret in the next person’s ear. At the end, the message isn’t entirely clear.At EDSA, you are managing both contracts and design. You have a principal who is involved from the beginning through the life of a project. If you have a contract-only manager, they’re worried about budgets and deliverables. They may or may not be—I never worked to thismodel—worried about design. And you have a design team that might not be as in tune with the deliverables as a contract manager. I find it impossible to separate the two. ZELL: Communications break down whenvitalprojectinformationiswithheld. We try to head this off by equipping peoplewiththe informationthey need. I think “vital” is the key word here, and where the impacts show up will be in client expectations. If information is missing and not acted on, client expectations can’t be met. Missing informationleaves toomuch gray area, requiring a consultant to FOREGROUND /OFFICE LEFT Greg Tuzzolo, a managing director at STIMSON, says specific successes and failures on a given project are shared selectively among other project teams.
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46 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE MAR 2024 EVAN MATHER, FASLA fill in the gaps in understanding of client expectations. Shared info gets teams to shared understanding. And not meeting client expectations will always have a ripple effect on a project’s bottom line. ROSS: Project managers do all their own invoices. It occurred to us recently thatwe didn’treallyhave a good forumforthe projectmanagers forreporting back to leadership about how projects are doing, so that’s something we’re going to institute, though it’s nothing we don’t already do in a more informal way. Also, we need to do a betterjob of kicking offinternally and getting everybody onthe teamup to speed with what the project manager and principal already know, like the history of the project, the marketing, the team, the scope, the site, the schedule. We’re often so rushed we just throw people in and get them going without that foundation. TUZZOLO: The information breakdown I’m experiencing, and we are collectively experiencing, is that everyone now has their own particular approach to working in the office or remotely. It has a kind of chaotic, unpredictable effect on the chain of communication.In an ideal scenario, we’re all in a room, right? We’re all focused. And the person you’re looking to speak to is always available and ready to receive your information. And that’s just not reality anymore. At the same time, Zoom has allowed us to do so much more. What would have happened if we’d had COVID in 2010, or 2000? The world would have literally shut down. But we were more profitable than ever during COVID. We got more work done. Because we’re visual—or call it mixed media—there’s always going to be a fluency question about how information moves from one mode to another. BRADFORD MCKEE IS A WRITER AND EDITOR IN WASHINGTON, D.C. FOREGROUND /OFFICE RIGHT Jennifer Zell, ASLA, a director of MIG, said that sharing too much budget detail with junior staff can be needlessly burdensome.
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