The October 2022 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine is the annual awards issue devoted to showcasing the ASLA Student and Professional Award winners, as well as the ASLA Honors recipients.

The Student Awards jury, led by Mark Hough, FASLA, reviewed 459 projects in eight categories and named just 19 award winners, including five Awards of Excellence. Dennis Otsuji, FASLA, chaired the 11-member Professional Awards jury, which reviewed 506 submissions across seven categories and awarded 28.

The efforts of the Student Award winners revealed a growing concern over the impacts of climate change and the need to solve problems with a combination of rigorous research and imaginative designs. Students are clearly looking forward to a future in which landscape interventions can make a real difference on the local and global scales.

In the Professional Awards, look for projects that focus on social justice, climate resilience, site responsiveness, and financial feasibility. The winning teams vigorously pursued community input, often in inventive ways. Jurors were impressed with approaches that asked the right questions and laid a foundation on which other landscape architects could build.

Among the ASLA Honors is the Bradford Williams Medal. LAM’s Editorial Advisory Committee selects two Bradford Williams Medal awards each year, one published in LAM and one in a mainstream publication, that demonstrate excellence in writing about landscape architecture.

For writing in LAM, the winner is “Paths Forward,” by Katharine Logan, in LAM’s August 2021 issue, on the work of reconciliation in action in Canada.

For writing in the general media, the winner is “Manufacturing Nature,” by Eric Klinenberg, The New Yorker, August 9, 2021, on the work of Kate Orff, FASLA, and SCAPE.

As landscape architecture becomes more visible to the public in this era of climate emergency, the ability of journalists to write critically about the role of design and landscape is particularly vital.

Also in this issue:

Falon Mihalic’s sculpture charts the atmospheric forces that bind us.

By Zach Mortice

Falon Mihalic’s sculpture charts the atmospheric forces that bind us.

By Zach Mortice

Windbloom, a 12-foot-high sculpture and pavilion under construction near Houston by the artist and landscape architect Falon Mihalic, will give physical form to ephemeral weather processes—specifically, which way the wind blows. The site-specific piece will map the direction of local wind, and its biomorphic qualities will reflect the vitality and energy of the Gulf Coast skies it surveys.

The artist chose the colors of the sculpture’s 30-foot-wide plantlike array of petals to indicate the average wind direction, measured over one year, in Alief, the Houston suburb where it will be located. “It’s really just about connecting people to the local climate in an expressive way,” Mihalic says.

The sculpture, surrounded by a native butterfly garden designed by SWA Group, will be part of a public park on the site of a new multipurpose community center with a library, gym, skatepark, and childcare facilities.

A shading device from the hot Texas sun, Windbloom is given structure by green steel tendrils. Petals made of resin and polycarbonate attach to five concentric rings. In the inner ring, the petals are small, measuring just 6.5 inches, but in the last ring they are four times as long. Each is made from a layer of colored UV-stable resin (to protect against fading) placed between layers of polycarbonate. The concrete plaza will be a canvas for the rainbow of colors that shines through each petal—a soft mix of purples, blues, greens, and yellows that are the backbone of Mihalic’s artistic palette.

Inside the community center will be a poster Mihalic designed of a meteorological tool called a wind rose that maps the average wind direction in a place over a period of time; the colors on each part of the circular diagram indicate wind direction. Using data pulled from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Mihalic averaged the directions in Alief and applied the result to the sculpture, flipping the color from a default teal to yellow, green, or purple to indicate changes in direction.

“When you read [the poster] left to right—January through April, May to August, September to December—you can see that these are almost like stills from an animation,” Mihalic says. “They’re these frozen moments in time.” Translating the wind rose to the sculpture is a “way of dating the piece in a climate timeline.”

Mihalic sees Windbloom as a way to focus people’s vision on the Gulf Coast sky, where the immaterial can become dramatic and volatile. Often, she says, prevailing winds carry moisture from the Gulf of Mexico that stacks up into massive anvil clouds that flatten before it storms. But the wind directions Windbloom depicts also reference less-common phenomena. In the spring and summer, trade winds bring dust from the Sahara 5,000 miles away, a portion of the 100 million tons of dust that leaves Africa by air. In addition to creating a soupy haze that lowers visibility, the dust also downgrades Houston’s already terrible air quality. Connecting distant corners of the world through the wind “seems like a simple, harmless idea, but it’s not, because connecting to the wind is connecting us to particulate matter coming from the Sahara dust plume,” Mihalic says. “It connects us to harmful and beautiful ideas simultaneously.”

And sometimes the harmful and beautiful things the wind brings us are one and the same. A sunset when Saharan dust fills the sky, Mihalic says, “sometimes looks like we’re on a distant planet.” At other times, the sky is filled with “tufts of cotton candy that are shifting…to being in flames.” It’s a tableau that will undoubtedly look fantastical from the Windbloom viewing oculus, as sunset purples and pinks radiate through particles of dust from a world away, and through Mihalic’s sculpture, which can only be of its place.

A review of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space by Matthew Gandy.

By Anjulie Rao

A review of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space by Matthew Gandy.

By Anjulie Rao

There are more than 30,000 vacant lots in the city of Chicago—remnants of urban renewal’s disastrous execution and disinvestment. Where buildings once stood, acres of new life have emerged. Many of those empty lots have become overgrown—small prairies where remnants of building foundations peek out from plots of seeding grasses; thick, tender lamb’s-quarter; and purple flowering chicory. The lots are home to rats, skunks, raccoons, and the occasional possum. Chicago, like many postindustrial cities, grapples with how to develop these spaces, calling them wastelands.

Matthew Gandy, a professor of cultural and historical geography at King’s College in London, disagrees with that characterization. These seemingly unproductive lots are rich with life. His new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space, complicates vacant and postindustrial spaces through explorations of biodiversity in urban nature. Gandy carefully dissects the social and political roles nature plays within cities. He makes a case for wildness, seeing it as a remedy for the at times violent control municipalities and landscape professionals enact on the land while seeking to beautify, remediate, or develop vacant spaces. Tracing layers of cultural, philosophical, and social discourses about urban nature, the book prompts those working in the fields of ecology and landscapes to reconsider how we speak about and engage and interface with untamed urban spaces and their inhabitants.

Gandy structures Natura Urbana as a network of ideas, not a rote series of informational arcs. Each chapter creates the “constellations” suggested by title. These stories and ideas paint a broader portrait of urban plant and nonhuman animal life. The book is, at times, tedious; rarely are conclusions drawn, but instead questions are posed that prompt the reader to think critically about their understandings of urban nature. Invoking the work of artists and filmmakers is particularly crucial throughout the book; Gandy sees artistic interventions as key to thinking beyond one’s landscape practice to better engage with complicated subtleties. Chapters are laced with a pair of core tensions that reappear throughout the text: a tension between control of natural urban spaces and terrain vague—uncultivated spaces that contain enormous biodiversity—and a tension between human and nonhuman perspectives of nature. Gandy emphasizes a “multiperspectival” theory of urban landscapes to better include the viewpoints of nonhuman animal and plant life.

The latter tension is introduced in the chapter “Zoöpolis Redux” (named after the geographer Jennifer Wolch’s 1996 essay, “Zoöpolis”), in which Gandy theorizes through the lessons of animal presences in urban stockyards and their effects on public health. He looks at historical efforts to control predatory species and the evolutionary changes to animal behaviors and physical traits required to adapt to urban spaces. While rats, disease, and slaughterhouses might seem like less-than-ideal examples on which to build a case for nonhuman others, Gandy is making an argument about empathy.

“The existence of empathy between species rests on a diversity of ethical relations and kinship bonds that develop among humans and nonhuman others,” he writes. Paraphrasing Wolch’s work, the act of “renaturalization”—recovering lost urban nature through cultivation processes—can yield what she calls “reenchantment.” Or, as Gandy writes, an “emphasis on expanding the imaginative scope of encounters with other-than-human nature, including a variety of objects and material artifacts that are routinely ignored or overlooked.” He references Nicolette Krebitz’s 2016 film Wild, in which a woman domesticates a wild wolf by trapping and subduing it. Ultimately, however, it is she who becomes more feral as she lives alongside the wolf—a metaphor for how reenchantment doesn’t alter only our daily lives, but ourselves.

Gandy presents reenchantment as a vital building block toward empathy with nonhuman others. It serves as a point of tension between the concepts of wildness and maintenance: We carefully plant flowers in our cultivated gardens to attract wild honeybees, but we enact ordinances on vacant property that require we mow wild plant life that might house “pests.” But experiencing the presence of wild animals—those pests—within a city sparks a type of curiosity or concern about that animal’s own kingdom: Where does that skunk spend its day? Is the coyote eating feral cats? Human delight, curiosity, scientific study, and sensory experiences fostered by untamed urban nature subvert the value judgments (“unproductive” or “wasted” space) that have driven landscapes for generations. I often think of David Sedaris’s essay “Untamed,” which documents his relationship with Carol, a neighborly fox; or the recent interest in TikTok accounts dedicated to urban foraging—within “wild” urban nature we can experience discovery and delight. Gandy expands upon empathy with nonhuman others as an experience not only present within academic theory, but in the everyday lives of urban residents.

“A focus on spontaneous forms of urban nature transcends the merely speculative or utilitarian potentialities of ostensibly empty spaces. By regarding nature differently, in both cultural and scientific terms, a set of counterdiscourses can be articulated that question the perverse emphasis on wastelands as sites simply awaiting erasure and redevelopment,” he writes in the chapter “Marginalia.” Indeed, Gandy asserts that the terminologies used to talk about urban nature in postindustrial cities are insufficient and reinforce a human-first perspective. He swaps terms like “wasteland” and “brownfield” for “edgelands” and “terrain vague” to better recognize the rich biodiversity in these spaces and invoke the aesthetics and sensory components of undesigned landscapes.

Controlled landscapes exist across an aesthetic spectrum, with neatly mowed lawns on the most contained side and untamed landscapes that require human interventions, such as Berlin’s Park am Gleisdreieck, on the other. (Gandy notes that the wild urban nature park employs people to pick up garbage and uses covert sprinklers.) In between are landscapes that create a simulacrum of control. Gandy uses the High Line as an example of postindustrial wastelands that “have been transformed into spaces of leisure.” The varying levels of wildness, often defined by cultural or economic value, provide urban commons, opportunities to uncover human cultures, and an aesthetic outside of a bourgeois relationship to nature in cities.

Until recently, the aesthetics of undesigned nature elicited unease among the general public, bureaucrats, and some landscape professionals; after all, these spaces don’t conform to the typical consumption–recreation uses found in cultivated urban nature such as neoromanticist parks and formal gardens (again, a symptom of human-first perspectives). But that uneasiness is a central component of experiencing enchantment: Untamed or spontaneous eruptions of urban nature open doors to new possibilities for how we might feel, what we might find in those undesigned places, and how we might behave there. Gandy suggests that embracing unease—leaning into more uncomfortable sentiments of enchantment—leads to considering how we might build an inclusive ecological community in that wild space. Unmanicured urban nature holds the potential to challenge not just normative economies or production, but also the histories of identity and belonging that the landscape profession often ignores.

Identity is addressed in the chapter “Ecologies of Difference,” in which Gandy begins to connect points of ecological study with histories of identity-based exclusion. Beginning in Berlin, he tracks how ecologists’ interests in “distinctively German landscapes” arose alongside the Nazi party. “By the 1930s,” he writes, “taxonomic distinctions between different vegetation patterns became increasingly regarded as the innate expression of regionally specific human cultures, and the ideological preoccupation with boundaries acquired an increasingly geopolitical edge.”

Although this practice died out after World War II, Berlin’s postwar ruins were engulfed by new plant life, yielding a new type of ecological consideration: the Multikulti. The term, he writes, was used in a 1972 documentary of Berlin’s Teufelsberg, “an artificial hill comprised of wartime rubble” that was known for its unique flora of global origins. Multikulti describes the multicultural biotrope that “conflicts with conceptions of German identity as relatively homogeneous, place-bound, and linguistically circumscribed.” Though Gandy argues that the early emergence of the Multikulti that emphasized issues of race and citizenship has devolved into empty celebration of “difference” expressed through food and festivals, the core takeaway here is that the cosmopolitan landscape sits opposite the ideologies of heterogeneity and assimilation—two tenets of colonization.

Colonization plays a significant role throughout the book, especially as an exclusionary force in urban landscapes. Gandy takes special care to discuss the role of whiteness in the natural historical archives and in urban environmental discourse. Because undesigned landscapes represent cosmopolitan urban ecologies, they could potentially point to a “postcolonial political sensibility.” Nonnative plants arrive on a particular site due to human and nonhuman migration, conflict, and travel—and, as with prewar German practices, their presences can signify landscapes of racism, discrimination, and xenophobia. As humans emigrate and resettle outside their native lands, so will the plant life that they bring—as familiar food to cultivate or as stowaways. Race, then, becomes a critical framing for cosmopolitan landscapes.

Race is a crucial intersection in the controlled versus cosmopolitan landscape, which we observed in 2020 when a Black bird-watcher in Central Park became a focus of national attention after a white woman telephoned the police when he requested that she leash her dog. In postindustrial American cities, its presence is felt when access to green space for Black residents comes in the form of vacant land, not parks.

On Chicago’s predominantly Black West Side, residents are sometimes blamed for not adequately caring for local parks and green spaces while being valorized for tending the gardens they plant on vacant lots that supply fresh produce in the tradition of pre-Great Migration farming. In the chapter 3 section “Black Ecologies,” Gandy suggests that these “diasporic spaces of memory that unsettle dominant cultural and environmental narratives” constitute a more pluralized ecological study, one that allows us to question issues of race and racism in the broader field. Again, it is the moments of unsettling or uneasiness that serve to provoke change.

Gandy uses the chapter to point to Black presence as out of place among white American and European cities. Although he cites the geographer Carolyn Finney and the concept of “double essentialization” (nonwhite people are often cast as disinterested in nature, while also associated with rural labor) in minority presences among the largely white-dominated landscape field, Gandy’s discussion of “othering” of racialized peoples in urban ecologies is a short section—almost too short considering the current wave of discourse surrounding the need for equity in the profession.

Particularly in the Global North, where nonwhite peoples are othered alongside cosmopolitan urban environments, there is an urgency to dig deeper into parallel marginalizations. Although Gandy dedicates the next chapter to “Forensic Ecologies”—a horizontal field that blurs science, citizenship, and data collection, presenting myriad examples of how everyday citizens’ actions intersect with state- or nonprofit-led land-clearance initiatives—what is missing in Natura Urbana is a discussion of the overlapping elements of “othering” in the case of grassroots efforts toward environmental justice. It’s well-documented that nonwhite neighborhoods are more often subject to environmental degradation, leading to destruction of biodiversity and low-quality human life. But instead of performing an analysis of how the other—both in race and in credential—can overlap to build environmental justice movements, Gandy again returns to empathy and environmental justice for nonhuman species. He revives the discussion of folding human and nonhuman perspectives into a posthuman protection that rearticulates the multiperspective tension from “Zoöpolis Redux” but overlooks grassroots minority groups who work as advocates for biodiverse and healthy environments.

It’s important to note that Natura Urbana is not an instruction manual or overbearing critique of landscape practices; much is left to be said in an intersectional analysis of race and marginalized spaces. But the conclusions drawn from the incredible research presented here feel less complicated than Gandy’s provocations: Urban terrain vague is an opportunity, not for bureaucrats or those who might call Chicago’s 30,000 empty lots “wastelands,” but for those looking to exercise their curiosity, for those seeking delight through a new genre of landscape aesthetics, for amateur botanists or beekeepers or bird-watchers. Cosmopolitanism isn’t just a function of cultural institutions or diversity, but the ways our environments intersect with socioecology. A city is the product of many living things: human, rat, flea, and chicory. Through Gandy’s lens, it’s all a part of an ecosystem of enchantment.

Anjulie Rao is a Chicago-based critic and journalist covering the built environment.

Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space, by Matthew Gandy; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2022; 432 pages, $30.

The beat goes on at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Upstate New York, the site of the legendary 1969 Woodstock music festival.

By Jane Margolies

The beat goes on at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Upstate New York, the site of the legendary 1969 Woodstock music festival.

By Jane Margolies

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which occupies more than 1,600 rolling acres in the Upstate New York town of Bethel, was abuzz on a recent afternoon. The comedian Bill Burr was scheduled to perform in two days’ time, and white party tents for the sale of cocktails were set up around the open-air amphitheater where he would be entertaining the crowd. Mowers roved over lawns bordered by blue spruce trees. Tickets were on sale for up to $359 for the best seats.

But in a quiet, woodsy corner of the Bethel Woods property, an endeavor related to an event that took place here more than a half century ago was underway: An archaeological crew was investigating a part of the site of the legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Bethel Woods encompasses the portion of the late Max Yasgur’s farm that was the setting for the festival that drew nearly half a million people to this rural area in the Catskills in the summer of 1969, riveting the nation and providing an enduring symbol of the power of peace, love, and rock and roll. The Museum at Bethel Woods, devoted to documenting and memorializing the event, had summoned the archaeologists to an area where large-scale artworks had been installed for the festival and camping took place. Among the items they turned up: a cooking pot, a glass milk bottle cap, and part of a Scotch plaid-patterned picnic basket set, not to mention several crushed Budweiser cans whose metal tab design dates them to the Woodstock era.

The activities occurring that afternoon underscored the two sides of Bethel Woods, which opened in 2006 and attracts about 250,000 visitors per year to its concerts and other events along with an unknown number of Woodstock pilgrims. On the one hand, it’s a seemingly well-oiled operation offering an impressive lineup of mostly musical acts, with the landscape shaped to facilitate the smooth running of events. At the same time, it’s a historic site with a small museum telling the story of the momentous happening here 53 years ago and providing programs related to that history. The two sides of the enterprise coexist, with common leadership and moments of poignant convergence—Woodstock alum Santana was also on Bethel Woods’s calendar, for instance, with Earth, Wind & Fire.

The landscape has more of the look and feel of a contemporary entertainment venue than a historic site, however. Parts of the original Woodstock topography have been compromised and some of the features that pay homage to the festival have evolved in a haphazard way. There are no interpretive markings for the famous stage from which Jimi Hendrix electrified the crowd with his rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Over time, several prominent landscape architects and practitioners in related fields have had a hand in the venture here. From 2000 to 2005, OLIN worked on the Bethel Woods master plan, with its winding path system, and produced design and construction documents for the project. The architecture firm Westlake Reed Leskosky (now merged with DLR Group) picked up where OLIN left off, installing the hardscape while landscape architects at the engineering firm CHA took charge of the softscape. The Vermont-based Heritage Landscapes, the recipient of the 2019 ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award, produced a cultural landscape report that helped secure the site a spot on the National Register of Historic Places and has informed subsequent preservation efforts, including the recent archaeological dig.

But to a very large extent it has been Bethel Woods’s billionaire founder, Alan Gerry, now age 92, who has left his imprint on the landscape. Gerry, who did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article, set up a foundation to create Bethel Woods and has been intimately involved at every turn, down to the selection and placement of plants (hence all the blue spruce). “He was very hands-on,” says Lucinda Sanders, FASLA, the chief executive officer and a partner at OLIN, who led the firm’s work on the project.

Gerry’s efforts spring from a deep commitment to the region. He was born and raised in the area and knew it when it was part of the booming midcentury borscht belt, where resorts drew Jewish families from New York City, about two hours south. Gerry opened a local TV repair shop and eventually built a sprawling cable television conglomerate that he sold to Time Warner in 1996. Seeking to stimulate revitalization in the region after the resorts declined, he conceived the idea of a performing arts center that would bring tourism to the area. In 1997, Gerry’s foundation bought 37 acres of what had been the Yasgur farm and purchased or leased adjacent parcels.

The same pastoral landscape had won over Woodstock’s organizers back in the spring of 1969, when they were casting about for a place to hold their festival after there was nowhere to be found for it in the town of Woodstock, their first choice for a location (hence the event’s name), and a deal for a site in another town fell through. Yasgur’s dairy farm encompassed an alfalfa field that sloped from a ridge down to a bowl, forming a natural amphitheater and providing the perfect place for a stage. The backdrop would be Filippini Pond, where festival attendees would go skinny-dipping or at least try to wash off mud after it rained during the three-day event. There were long, unobstructed views in every direction and plenty of space for camping.

With time running out before the festival was scheduled to begin, the organizers leased the farm property and one of them drew up a site plan. At the top of the ridge, behind the concert field, food tents would be set up. A wooded area next to the field would become the Bindy Bazaar, filled with makeshift vendor booths selling everything from roach clips to Indian-print bedspreads along trails named Groovy Way and Gentle Path. To one side of the woods would be the Playground—where the recent archaeology dig took place—dotted with environmental artworks created by students from the University of Miami from branches and stones found on-site. Although everyone remembers the music of Woodstock, the Playground is evidence that its organizers were interested in the visual arts as well.

The organizers hired help to ready the property for the arrival of what they estimated would be about 100,000 people. The alfalfa field was mowed, and a stage with enormous sound towers and a beautiful batwing fence were built. Greg Walter, a musician and author who at age 18 was on a crew that built out the Playground—including its tepee with tree limbs lashed together and a stone hanging down from ropes—helped forge trails through the Bindy Bazaar woods. He doesn’t remember seeing the festival organizers’ site plan; rather, he and others assigned to trail work simply followed animal tracks and the natural contours of the land and “put paths in where they looked right,” he recalls.

Woodstock’s organizers planned well for the event but underestimated how many people would show up. When between three and five times the number of people planned for descended on the site, there were shortages of food, water, and sanitary facilities. Despite the challenging conditions, however, the gathering remained peaceful at a time when other large events had turned violent. Patricia O’Donnell, FASLA, the founder and a partner of Heritage Landscapes, believes the serene rural setting helped promote calm at the festival: “The landscape supported the harmony of the event,” she says.

Afterward, the concert field became sacred ground to many who had attended the festival or were inspired by it. People started making pilgrimages here and have never stopped. Some make the trek annually so they can sit in a shaded area overlooking what was the concert field with a monument composed of a concrete block topped by cast-iron plaques and the famous festival motif of a bird perched on a guitar. People place stones, hand-painted with heartfelt messages, at the base of an oak tree in the monument area. And on what was the concert field, they sometimes spread the ashes of deceased loved ones for whom attending Woodstock was a life-altering experience.

It was this magic that Gerry sought to tap into when he purchased the site and its surroundings. He assembled a design team that initially included the architect Richard Meier along with OLIN and CHA. (Westlake Reed Leskosky eventually replaced Meier, whose pavilion design was ultimately deemed too expensive.) Gerry and his team wisely opted not to build on the Woodstock concert field—that was “a no-touch zone,” Sanders says. Near it, but on the other side of the ridge, was another bowl, which is where the new 5,000-seat performing arts pavilion went. From the Woodstock field, the pavilion is not visible and vice versa.

Just as the Woodstock organizers had sought to orchestrate the movement of festivalgoers through the site in 1969, so, too, did the team planning Bethel Woods decades later. Vast parking lots were sited beside the road leading to the property—the “beginning of the journey,” Sanders says. From there, people would proceed to a visitor center at the top of the ridge, where Woodstock’s food tents once stood. Paths would loop around the building (which houses the museum), skirt a small open-air amphitheater—today one of the loveliest spots on the campus—and descend to the large pavilion, passing event tents, restrooms, and a stream along the way.

For the overall feel of the landscape, OLIN had a more “agrarian vision,” Sanders says. Proposed plans included swaths of seasonal wildflowers and a focus on native plants; Gerry’s concept was more “gardenesque,” she says, with a picturesque pond and a spouting water feature. Today, circular pits filled with wood chips surround nearly every tree, which facilitates mowing and adds to the tidy feel of the campus. A building that serves as a base of maintenance operations sits in front of Filippini Pond, marring the historic view. Rows of blue spruce everywhere also interrupt vistas.

Some began to grow concerned that the historic site was at risk of being further compromised. Wade Lawrence, the first museum director and curator, believed a preservation plan should be in place and recalls making the case to Gerry and the board established to run Bethel Woods after it became a nonprofit organization in 2012. He says he pitched preservation as a smart business move. “Heritage tourism is a big business,” he says.

In 2014, Heritage Landscapes was hired to create a cultural landscape report, and O’Donnell and her staff began digging through the museum archives and prowling the grounds.

Although cultural landscape reports generally focus almost exclusively on the physical conditions of a site, a big chunk of the 227-page Heritage Landscapes report on the Woodstock grounds was devoted to placing the festival in the context of the social, political, and cultural ferment in the United States during the 1960s, including the protests against the Vietnam war, the struggles for civil rights and voting rights, and the environmental movement. And while the concert field had always been the focus of attention, the report opened the aperture wider, showing how the field connected to the Bindy Bazaar and other areas of the site and the broader milieu. It called attention to specific site features deserving attention, such as the Message Tree, a towering red maple to which festivalgoers had tacked up notes in an attempt to find each other in the sea of humanity. The report argued for protecting the historic core of the site and made several recommendations to improve the legibility of key features.

The impact of the report, released in 2015, was swift. By 2017, the site had been placed on the National Register—a plaque is now installed near the entrance to the visitor center. An archaeological team from Binghamton University had begun what would be an ongoing investigation of the Bindy Bazaar woods in hopes of identifying remnants of the 1969 trails and vendor booths. And by 2019—the 50th anniversary of Woodstock—a portion of the trails through the woods had been re-created and reproductions of the original Groovy Way and Gentle Path signs were installed. An artist yarn-bombed some of the trees for the anniversary celebration, the vividly colored designs harking back to the crocheted tunics that hippies wore to Woodstock. Some of the yarn works still cling to the trees today.

Research on the Bindy Bazaar has continued under Neal Hitch, who became the senior curator of the museum in 2020, after Lawrence retired. The pandemic, which shut down Bethel Woods to visitors for 22 months, provided an opportunity to focus on the landscape, Hitch says. Using information from the archaeological investigations and careful comparison of historic photos with conditions in the woods today, the museum has been able to identify several of the original vendor booths and other possible cultural features. Now, with the most recent dig, Hitch has expanded the scope of research to include part of the Playground.

As for the Message Tree, which is languishing, the report recommended that it be tended to and propagated. Two cables have been installed to hold its major branches together, and Bethel Woods sent cuttings to Summer Hill Nursery, in Madison, Connecticut. Tip cuttings resulted in two rooted cuttings, but they did not survive. Grafted cuttings, however, have done well. One idea is to use them to create a grove of trees somewhere at Bethel Woods; another is to bestow trees upon donors who make significant financial contributions. So far, one of the trees has been planted at Bethel Woods, on a part of the Woodstock lawn visible from a new overlook. It appears to be flourishing inside its chicken-wire fencing, but its location seems random and there is no sign describing the tree’s provenance.

Heritage Landscapes had proposed a simple design for the new outlook, but what was installed consists of a meandering yellow brick path ending in a circular peace sign composed of pavers of varying hues. “Our paving contractor said, what if?” recalls Eric Frances, the CEO of Bethel Woods and a member of its governing board. “And we thought the idea was cool and let him do it.” The design may be a little hokey, but it could well launch a thousand social-media posts.

Some recommendations in Heritage Landscape’s report haven’t gotten any traction, at least not yet. Two relate to the Woodstock concert field, which despite its humble beginnings has become so immaculate that nary a dandelion is ever allowed to show its head, and when you first drive up to Bethel Woods, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve inadvertently ended up at a golf course. The report recommended regrading a section of the field to restore the historic topography and planting it all as a low meadow; that certainly would be more in keeping with the lawn’s rough-and-ready appearance at Woodstock but is at odds with the manicured approach Bethel Woods has embraced.

The report also called for marking and interpreting the footprint of the Woodstock festival stage to help visitors understand its location, scale, and features. Heritage Landscapes subsequently came up with a schematic design involving an Americans with Disabilities Act–accessible platform at grade “so that people could stand there and do their air guitar,” O’Donnell says. Vertical elements would show where the sound towers had stood, for example. But Bethel Woods is still puzzling over the best way to mark the spot and how to do it in a manner that will not interfere with its ever more ambitious concert plans.

Bethel Woods is currently in the process of obtaining approvals for two campgrounds on parcels it controls (both outside the historic core). Its goal is to create 4,600 campsites with a capacity of 13,000, with the first phase of about 500 sites to open next year. A glamping area would be within walking distance of the performance pavilion, so people will be able to take in a show and then wander back to their tents. The other location will have hookups for trailers and RVs. These camping facilities will enable Bethel Woods to plan multiday concerts, with people able to stay overnight for the duration of the events, Frances says.

Whether or not that ever happens, Gerry has already succeeded in creating an economic and cultural engine in the area. Bethel Woods has an annual operating budget of $13 to $15 million, with funding from ticket sales and other sources. There are about 50 full-time, year-round employees, Frances says, and that number swells in the summer with food service and security workers for concerts. The center offers educational programs that include docent-led tours and photography classes.

Frances says that the concerts in the performing arts pavilion honor the legacy of Woodstock by continuing the music tradition the 1969 festival started. “The correct use of the site from a historic perspective,” he adds, “is bringing music here and people here.”

Preservation efforts are another way to honor a site that played an important role in American history. “This landscape gave a sense of ownership and power to a youth culture at a time of great volatility, when the social fabric was being rent apart with Vietnam and civil rights disputes,” O’Donnell says. “Here we have an event that actually shifts the vector of history. To me, that’s why this place is so important. As a landscape that created that shift, we need to celebrate it.”

Jane Margolies is a freelance reporter in New York and a contributing editor for LAM.

Recapturing Woodstock’s 1969 Trails

Archaeological teams from Binghamton University, working under Maria O’Donovan, the director of the school’s master of arts program in public archaeology, have played a crucial role in the preservation efforts at Bethel Woods. Over the course of four projects, they’ve been searching out hidden clues to what happened on the Woodstock site in the summer of 1969.

Their work in the Bindy Bazaar has been especially productive. Photos taken of the woods during the Woodstock festival showed that strands of Christmas tree lights had been strung from trees along the trails. O’Donovan and her crews, hoping to find some traces of that electrical wiring, used a metal detector to sweep the area. The device made a beeping sound when passing over buried fallen wire. After brushing away leaves, they found much of the old lighting wire lying right on the ground, where it apparently had fallen from the trees sometime after the festival. Staples and glass insulators still attached to trees from which the wires were strung serve as further proof of trail locations. As leaves and deadwood are cleared away, the old path system has been re-emerging, enabling visitors to the site to explore an area that was a vital part of the festival. —JM

By any count, Presidio Tunnel Tops had an unusual number of women in construction and project leadership. They say there are good reasons for that.

By Anne C Godfrey

By any count, Presidio Tunnel Tops had an unusual number of women in construction and project leadership. They say there are good reasons for that.

By Anne C Godfrey

An unexpected amount of rain fell on the Presidio Tunnel Tops construction site this past October. The rain was a mixed blessing; though welcomed by parched San Francisco Bay Area residents, it had damaged parts of the job site. Kerry Huang, ASLA, a senior associate at James Corner Field Operations (JCFO), the project’s design partner and landscape architect, said that layers of soil and plants were torn out of one of the embankments, despite the recent installation of erosion control blankets. Huang is a construction manager for Tunnel Tops, one of an unusual number of women who are project managers on this high-profile project.

Managing the daily occurrence of unpredictable events defines the construction phase of any project, and effective problem-solving is the coin of the realm. Project managers representing the client, the design team, and the general contractor are responsible for moving construction forward, one day at a time. A project manager who works with adversity, communicates clearly, and draws from a deep wealth of skills and expertise cultivates trust on the team. And trust keeps everyone moving toward the finish line.

Tunnel Tops opened to much fanfare in July. Designed by JCFO for the Partnership for the Presidio, Tunnel Tops is the long-term vision of the late Michael Painter, the founder of the landscape architecture firm MPA Design: a series of parks along and on top of tunnels built over a regraded section of Highway 101, known as Presidio Parkway, which runs along the northern edge of a historic former army base. The suite of diverse projects—Quartermaster Reach marsh, Battery Bluff, and Tunnel Tops—creates a connected park sequence with Crissy Field. The project was highly complex and required coordinating with the California Department of Transportation to design and construct extensive soil improvements below the tunnels and embankment to mitigate the compressible bay muds. Coordinating the input of multiple participants, including the National Park Service, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Presidio Trust (those collectively making up the Partnership for the Presidio), as well as the City and County of San Francisco and community organizations, has also been central to this project.

The number of women in leadership roles on Tunnel Tops, especially in construction-related positions, is still uncommon. The situation is viewed as a rare triumph, although the deeper reasons for that are unexplored.

Women in construction management have varying stories, come to the profession through different paths, and experience different successes and barriers. “Good project managers are able, when things go wrong, to keep the fingers from flying around and pointing at each other,” explains Lily Siu, then a civil engineer for Magnusson Klemencic Associates, the civil site and structural engineer for the project. She says the project managers for the Presidio Trust “all have the skills to really bring people together and keep things calm.”

“Relationships are really the thing that makes this whole thing work,” says Paula Cabot, a senior project manager for Tunnel Tops. Cabot has been with the trust since 2016. Previously, she worked on notable projects such as the J. Paul Getty Trust’s renovation of the Getty Villa, for which she also served as a senior project manager.

Rania Rayes is a senior project manager for the trust and Tunnel Tops and worked on both the design development and construction side of Tunnel Tops. “The experience on the project’s been very challenging, but it’s been extremely rewarding in so many ways because of the relationships with the other team members on all sides of the project,” she says. Rayes came to the trust 17 years ago from private practice as a landscape architect in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lauren Connolly, the senior project manager of construction for Tunnel Tops, says her job is all about getting everybody behind a common goal by finding a balance between respecting people’s knowledge and making sure they do their jobs correctly. “I won’t tell you how to do your job, but I will tell you that you have to follow the documents,” says Connolly, who worked on heavy civil engineering projects before she came to the client side.

A theme persisted across conversations about the project: The managers are excellent communicators and support collaboration across the team. Are women inherently better at this? There are mixed opinions about this idea among the women involved; behind the excellent communication skills demonstrated by the team is the amount of experience and expertise each manager brings with her.

Cabot attributes success to managers who can help “different personalities [become] united in their view of what needs to happen on a construction site.” She wonders how much gender is tied to collaboration. She looks more to skill, experience, and cooperation for moving a project forward. Huang concurs. It’s not the gender that makes the managers on this project unique, she says, it’s that “the group of people on this project are all so talented and dedicated and smart.” With that, she says, “you’re going to have a successful project.”

Rayes believes that women more generally bring valuable qualities to this experience. “We’ve all worked so harmoniously together,” she says. “Having many women on the team may make that possible. We’re very patient, we have some great communication skills…. I just think that these are attributes that a lot of women have, and they want to be team players.”

Connolly believes the idea of women being good collaborators cuts both ways. “As a woman, it helps because we’re a little more empathetic, we’re a little more likely to try to make everybody get along and figure it out. [But] sometimes that works to our detriment,” because women can spend too much time making sure everyone is getting along and not taking care of themselves.

Is there a hesitancy to make too much of some acculturated differences between how women and men communicate or work together? Siu says it’s complicated to tie certain traits to a particular gender. “It’s hard to dismantle the dynamics; you have to approach what makes it this way. To celebrate the difference, you have to call out difference.” There is a desire to both embrace and describe traits that are more strongly tied to women, such as effective communication and cooperation, and also a desire to uncouple those associations, because sometimes they bind or keep the stereotypes alive. Many of the sources interviewed pointed to men they have worked with in construction who are excellent communicators, and some women who have been obstructive to a problem-solving process. I thought about my experiences on-site as well, and it was easy to see how all of us had stories about how anyone, of any gender, could unite or divide people on a project.

Examining expectations of leadership is a different tack into this complex discussion. The default characterization of leadership still leans toward loud, outgoing, and talkative—having all the answers and dominating the conversation. Genevieve Bantle, the associate director of landscape rehabilitation at the trust, who managed the Quartermaster Reach marsh project, questions this stereotype. “I’m very conscious that leadership doesn’t look one way and doesn’t act one way, and that there are different ways to lead. Just because the person isn’t how you think they should be for that role doesn’t mean they aren’t good at it.”

Rayes has grappled with the prevailing definition of leadership as well. “If you’re not by nature very self-confident and strong, it’s more challenging when there is such a strong stereotype. You have to find your space and fight for people to acknowledge your strengths.”

For Siu, working with this team has been different than past experiences. “People were much more willing to listen to other people—no one dominated the conversation.” The typical large meetings were seldom forums for one or two people to tell everyone else what was going to happen. Instead, questions could be raised by all parties as a way to explore solutions for any of the problems on the table. This method supports Bantle’s observation about what makes a good project manager: “A lot of listening and not assuming that you know what’s right going into the conversation.” As a project comes close to an ending, Cabot and Connolly say it’s about keeping people motivated to do the work well, to feel good about what they have accomplished, and, as the reward, to eventually go home.

Perhaps things are shifting in terms of how companies identify qualities of leadership. Lori Dunn-Guion, a vice president and division manager for Swinerton, the general contractor for Tunnel Tops, says the COVID-19 pandemic helped her reevaluate what constitutes valuable traits in a manager. “How do we put value in our leaders around the quality, not quantity, of hours put in?” She connects this to the idea that working long hours, 10 to 14 hours a day, automatically makes a person a good leader. Redefining what makes good leadership combined with building more flexibility into the day are ways Dunn-Guion thinks Swinerton supports women. For example, Dunn-Guion’s pickup time for her daughter is part of the shared schedule, so everyone is clear, and more realistic, about when she is available. “They say to me, ‘Hey, Lori, we are ending this meeting now, because you need to go pick up your child.’”

Construction is grueling and demanding. As a project nears its end, the days often become longer and longer. Cabot explains that “a lot of life has to get really pared down and get very streamlined” at this phase. “You prioritize those things that are really important to you.”

There is burnout. The need for work–life balance often drives career-changing choices familiar to many women in the workforce. During this project, a female project manager for Swinerton left, in part because she found the work–life balance was too exhausting, especially with her four-hour commute from the South Bay. Connolly observes, “Others said she wants to spend more time with her kids, and I’m like, ‘She also doesn’t want to spend her entire life in the car.’”

With such a high-visibility, decades-in-the-making project, there is far more to manage than construction. As the senior project manager, Cabot represents the Presidio Trust long after the construction fencing is locked for the day by giving interviews, participating in tours, meeting with donors, and attending events. During our second Zoom interview, the finish line for the project kept stretching further and further into the future. Still suited up from another day on-site, she adjusted her chair, ran her fingers through her hard hat–flattened hair, and rested her elbows on the desk. Talking with me was just one more thing on her endless list of tasks.

Cabot and Bantle talked about the difficulty in taking a breather after a long project finishes. “There’s no break between; you go from one [project] to the next, and there is not much time to recover,” Cabot says. This circumstance creates a situation in which women go from job to job, employer to employer, to create space between those large projects. Cabot did this earlier in her career and took a longer break after finishing her work at the Getty. Bantle also feels the crunch after an intense project ends. “I wish we would get to some point where there was an ability to take a larger chunk of time off,” she says.

Working in construction management is clearly an intentional career path these women have chosen. The demands are extensive. Sexism is still a sensitive topic—some women I interviewed shared stories off the record about past situations that have influenced how they navigate work now. When it comes to the number of women managing construction, the Presidio Tunnel Tops project is still an anomaly. The women interviewed told me that it is the first project they have worked on that includes many other women in leadership roles, on all sides: client, designer, and contractor.

Different generations have had different experiences. Cabot, Rayes, and Bantle have all worked in construction for more than 20 years and were often outliers. When Rayes first came to the Presidio Trust, she was the only woman on her team. Bantle has never reported to a woman. Connolly, in her forties, has worked with more women during the course of her career and attended the California Polytechnic State University’s construction management program with other women. Huang and Siu, both in their thirties, work in environments where many women hold leadership roles. Siu now works at the woman-owned firm LPD Engineering. JCFO had seven women leading construction administration at press time.

Yet, some basic things still haven’t changed much. Many safety equipment items are made for men and then retrofitted for women. Safety harnesses are generally not designed for women’s bodies. Hard hats don’t accommodate braids, buns, ponytails, dreadlocks, or other volume hairstyles. Sufficient steel-toed work boots do exist for women, but items like vests, eye protection, and gloves are still harder to find when smaller sizes are required. Simple things like porta-potties designated for women or a place to change clothing are sometimes forgotten, requiring women to ask for them on the job site.

Still, for many women, construction management is their calling. “You know there’s been some hard days when you’re standing in a ditch filling up with water and you don’t even know it’s Friday at 5:00. That’s when you know you’re in construction,” Connolly says. “You’re the only one there. You’re like, ‘I guess I’m gonna have to deal with this.’ You’re dragging around fence panels” to cordon off the area, “and you’re [thinking] I wish I did something else.” She adds quickly and emphatically, “and then I’m like, I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

Anne C Godfrey is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

For new master plan, MNLA embraced Smith College’s ethos of participation.

By Jonathan Lerner

For new master plan, MNLA embraced Smith College’s ethos of participation.

By Jonathan Lerner

In 1871, Sophia Smith devoted an inherited fortune to realizing her dream, a women’s college to equal those for men. Today the institution bearing her name enrolls some 2,100 female undergraduates (and a few hundred grad students, including some men). Smith College is in Northampton, Massachusetts, a town of about 30,000 where idealistic visions flow luxuriant. In the 1840s, a short-lived utopian community tried raising silkworms there and spawned an improbable effort to grow sugar beets to undermine the South’s slavery-dependent agriculture economy. Several Northampton hospitals once specialized hopefully in “the water cure” for ailments like scarlet fever. The town was also a significant locus of abolitionism and a node on the Underground Railroad. The college has a close relationship with the city and region, physically and culturally. Its 147-acre campus lacks a defined boundary. Instead, on three sides it blends into adjacent residential streets and borders a commercial center. The fourth side slopes down to a bend in a river, across which are the green expanses of a floodplain (the college sports field), a wooded ridge, and, in the near distance, the Holyoke and Tom mountains. The river was dammed to power mills, and the resulting oxbow impoundment, which now provides flood control, is a Smith icon, lending an elysian feel to views of the campus and the memories of generations of alumnae. It is called, without irony, Paradise Pond.

Many students at elite colleges like Smith are idealistic activists. If a wrong can be righted, why not? “You’re at a stage in your life when you realize you’re part of a much bigger world, so your consciousness expands greatly. Students feel a call to action,” says Signe Nielsen, FASLA, herself a 1972 Smith graduate. Studying at Smith encourages this inclination. There is a “culture of consultation and involvement. It’s become an expectation,” says Dano Weisbord, the college’s associate vice president for campus planning and sustainability. So, an unusually strong community input process accompanied the research for a new landscape master plan by MNLA, the firm of which Nielsen is a founding principal. “The campus is deeply tied to the sense of identity of the institution,” Weisbord says. “You don’t go messing with this without significant engagement.”

Smith’s campus design had previously been addressed by a number of illustrious landscape architects, though their counsel wasn’t always taken, and it has been compromised by fragmentary incremental change. The original 1893 design was by the Olmsted firm, in its picturesque aesthetic, but it was not fully implemented. Curving drives and some lawn-and-tree spaces survive, though many views they would have privileged are now obstructed. “We do have our original tree set,” Weisbord says. (Smith’s campus is a Level III Arboretum, which designates sites with at least 500 species of trees, a curator, and substantial educational programming.) “But they’re all end of life, 120 years old. That’s a strange moment. And a huge opportunity.”

A 1914 plan by John Nolen proposed overlaying a more formal organization. It was not implemented in the core campus, though his concept was used for the Quad, a symmetrical, architecturally traditional dorm and courtyard complex. The college did adopt a plan in 1996, meant to channel the Olmsted sensibility, created by Rolland/Towers (precursor to Towers|Golde) in collaboration with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. (Shavaun Towers, FASLA, was then the college landscape architect. Oberlander and Towers both also graduated from Smith.) But over the years, factors such as infill construction, piecemeal property acquisitions, and the intrusion of cars and scattered parking lots have created circulation disconnects, pedestrian-vehicle conflict points, interrupted views, and other problems.

Two sets of concerns that may have been lower profile a few decades ago are acute today and can be tackled —if not necessarily resolved—by landscape planning: climate change impacts and diversity and inclusion. The most recent available data indicates that 36 percent of Smith’s students are people of color or biracial. There is also considerable diversity in identity expression; students live in 41 “houses,” some with as few as 10 residents, that enable selection by affinity. There are houses that “cultivate and foster a sense of belonging” for Black students as well as for other students of color, for those who abstain from drug and alcohol use, and for those who wish to share in a food co-op, for example. Addressing a third pressing concern, “Smith has been thinking critically about how the infrastructure facilitates learning,” says Tim Johnson, the director of the college’s botanic garden. These issues prompted the master plan’s trio of thematic goals: The campus should be adaptive, inclusive, and—via the landscape itself—educational.

A flash point regarding inclusion occurred in 2018, when a Black student eating lunch in a closed dorm was asked to leave by a janitor and a security guard, both white. “There was a huge hullabaloo,” Nielsen says. “The administration was trying to heal that scar. One thought was if students would come together around a cause, it might help.” It surely couldn’t have hurt that the master plan process, begun the following year, involved so much of the Smith community in a creative and forward-looking endeavor.

Smith has a landscape studies program, offering a minor in the subject. Research projects conducted by a dozen students preceding the master plan effort, including a gap analysis of the 1996 plan, informed the request for qualifications from consultants. Once MNLA had been selected, four students worked closely with the firm to sound out student desires, making class presentations, holding house meetings, and tabling at the Campus Center. One of those, Greta Mundt, now a graduate student in landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, notes the educational value of this outreach itself: “People had strong opinions about this place we live and learn in, but hadn’t always realized that there were changes that could be made, or what kind of thought goes into it.”

Multiple tactics, beyond that student-to-student contact, were used. Eight maps, each addressing a question such as “What routes do you take?” or “Where are the areas where you feel uncomfortable?” were displayed at the Campus Center along with color-keyed stickers for comments. These drew nearly 800 responses. MNLA produced three editions of an online magazine, Groundswell, that included interactive maps, renderings of possible interventions, explanations of the planning process, and preference surveys. For example, one was “Should Smith prioritize preserving the extensive use of lawns or creating ecologically performative landscapes?” followed by a dozen possible actions. These questions were also posed to people with institutional relationships to the college, including Northampton’s planning department, the college art museum, the student government, and elsewhere. Instagram posts received thousands of views and comments. Input came from alumnae and Northampton residents and from faculty and staff. “The unkempt river’s edge and maintenance area give a bad first impression to visiting teams,” someone in the athletics department wrote. From the astronomy department: “People and plants need darkness. Lighting should not focus on more light but on the right light uniformity.” A staffer in events management said, “There has been a tremendous growth in outdoor programming. We need support for these events, including water and power.” A nifty low-tech engagement effort was collaging. Students could place cutouts of movable furniture, hammocks, interpretive signage, sculptures, and more onto photos of important campus locations, and could cross out things they didn’t like. “Not everybody is very talkative, but give them paper and cutouts and glue, and they’ll sit there for an hour,” Nielsen says.

Today, any campus plan by competent landscape architects would include strategies such as eliminating invasive species, specifying porous paving, and ensuring Americans with Disabilities Act compliance.

What kinds of unexpected needs and suggestions did this unusually extensive inquiry reveal? “We came to understand the desire for what I think of as neighborhood hubs,” Johnson says, “and for increased and movable seating, the idea that individuals should get a degree of autonomy in altering the experience.” Similarly, the plan recognizes affinity groups’ desire for intimate and ceremonial spaces. It also proposes transforming a central lawn into a representation of the campus’s landscape history. “Part of the sense of place and identity is interest in the history of the place itself,” Weisbord says. “I don’t know if that would have come from any planner doing this work without the engagement.” This space would nod to Olmsted by realigning the curve of a drive, reference local Indigenous history with forms such as traditional planting mounds, and reflect the 1996 plan with a flowering understory of shade-tolerant species. It would also introduce contemporary features like movable furniture, a bioswale edge, sculpture installations, and interpretive signage.

Nielsen was surprised to learn that some students felt intimidated by gates and fences, even the low post-and-chain barriers that can be easily stepped over that surround some lawns. “I know what it means culturally, but this is the first project that ever asked me to think about what inclusiveness means spatially,” she says. “What says to you, ‘You don’t belong’?” She also didn’t expect that in considering alternate visions for 12 key locations—deemed to be light, intermediate, or intensive alterations—many people preferred the third. “There’s a real desire for the campus to embrace sustainability, habitat, a more interesting learning environment.

“We did finally go out on a limb and suggest that they eliminate the pond and renaturalize the river,” Nielsen says. “The alumnae? Of course: ‘Forget about it!’” (Perhaps that reluctance is also idealism, but the idealism of nostalgia.)

As to the goal of landscape as education, there are calls for spaces that work as outdoor classrooms and interactive signage. More subtle but more intriguing is the understanding that “you walk across our campus and say, what’s important? Today what you would take away is, ‘Specimen trees and turfgrass is the way to do this; I know because that’s what Smith is doing,’” Weisbord says. “But a landscape that shows where stormwater is going, that plants may be groves of trees rather than [single species], indicates that these are the ways nature works. You don’t even need to go into the classroom to understand.”

In addition to the light, intermediate, and intensive options, the plan proposes modest, inexpensive pilot projects such as a butterfly garden that will give grounds staff a chance to learn meadow maintenance. A driveway turnaround will be repurposed into a gathering and performance space, a tactical urbanism action with paint, planters, furniture, and a stage. The plan was also delivered with a staggeringly detailed 357-page implementation and management guide that works something like an algorithm: Every action is related to multiple others. As in, if you do A, it’s also an opportunity to do B and C, and you really must do D.

The plan “has a couple of big ideas, but it’s designed to give us a lot of flexibility as we look ahead to 20 years that are going to be very volatile environmentally, economically, and socially. This is a dynamic plan that’s going to help us navigate the uncertainty,” Johnson says. “But in some ways, it’s anticlimactic. Our community saw it unfolding in real time.”

LAM contributing editor Jonathan Lerner’s novel Lily Narcissus will be out in October from Unsolicited Press.

A Virginia landscape architect thinks cannabis farms could be the state’s next tourist attraction.

By Kim O’Connell

A Virginia landscape architect thinks cannabis farms could be the state’s next tourist attraction.

By Kim O’Connell

On a farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, the first thing you might notice is the smell. Some say it’s citrusy, others say it’s piney, and still others say it’s skunky. Most visitors find it pleasantly earthy. This is the Cannabreeze Hemp Farm, nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Like the wineries and breweries that have cropped up around the Northern Virginia countryside in recent years, luring patrons from Washington, D.C., and the surrounding suburbs, Cannabreeze hopes to one day become an agritourism destination—and destigmatize cannabis in the process.

Kirk Bereuter, ASLA, a landscape architect and the principal of his own firm in Alexandria, Virginia, designed a master plan for Cannabreeze that he says is an example of a promising new practice area for the profession. Bereuter’s portfolio includes residential and institutional work, as well as winery design, and he’s now worked with a handful of hemp farmers on visioning and planning for their facilities.

“When I saw the news that Virginia was moving to legalize marijuana, I thought to myself, ‘This is potentially really big,’” Bereuter says. “A winery is such an interesting animal in terms of a design project because it combines so many different things: the potential for passive recreation, the distinctness of each property, and each property having its own history. So I approached these farmers and said, ‘What would you think about doing something that potentially enhances your business model,’ taking all these ideas from the winery example, but applying them to a destination experience with a hemp farm.”

The cannabis plant has long been used in the making of marijuana or cannabidiol (CBD) products that are smoked, eaten, or used topically. The word “hemp” is often used interchangeably with cannabis, but hemp tends to connote the plant’s usage in fiber products such as rope, paper, and textiles. As marijuana has been legalized in various states over the past decade, and since the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the controlled substances list, hemp farming has exploded in popularity. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, the value of hemp production in 2021 was about $824 million. And the industry is still largely in its infancy.

Bereuter’s master plan for Cannabreeze includes a geodome amphitheater for music performances, a members-only clubhouse, space for Airbnb rentals, demonstration gardens, improved entrance and access spaces, and more. In addition to the financial benefits, making the farm more attractive as a tourist destination allows for more educational opportunities about cannabis as well, says Jeff Boogaard, the owner of Cannabreeze.

“We spend way more time educating than we do selling,” Boogaard says. “We thought, ‘How do we get people to like this plant again and feel like it’s something that should be embraced?’” To that end, Boogaard recently opened a tasting room, and “the park,” as Boogaard calls the event spaces, will be open to members later this year.

The value of hemp goes far beyond recreation, Bereuter says. “Hemp by itself could probably replace trees as a paper source,” he says. “It’s a far more renewable crop. It takes far less resources to grow. It’s used in so many different manufacturing materials. It creates so many different jobs—green industry jobs. I think the more people become educated about hemp, the more they’ll realize it’s such a beneficial material.”

Getting the best from precast concrete requires a little flexibility. 

By John Payne, ASLA, and James Dudley

Getting the best from precast concrete requires a little flexibility. 

By John Payne, ASLA, and James Dudley

Precast concrete, which is concrete that is cast into its final form before it is installed, has long been used in architecture and engineering for myriad forms and applications. These include bridge trusses, ornamental cladding, and prestressed beams. The casting process takes place within the regulated confines of a facility, with tightly controlled concrete mixes and material ingredients resulting in greater control and consistency, making it a real attraction to both designers and builders. Precast has advantages when it comes to sustainability as well, including savings in formwork material, the need for fewer chemical admixtures to deal with exterior environmental factors such as cold or heat, the use of organic alternatives to form-release agents, and lower water use because precast concrete has a lower water-to-cement ratio, among others. Landscape architects are specifying precast more and more for those very reasons as well.

Precast allows for consistent finishes, complex forms, and uniformity among pieces that may otherwise be difficult to achieve in the field. It is, however, likely to cost more in the long run, especially if you do not have economy of scale. It will generally take longer to review, mock up, fabricate, ship, and install compared to form-up, cast-in-place concrete. Complicated geometries and the need for exquisite and consistent detailing would make precasting preferable to cast-in-place. The local or regional skills of cast-in-place contractors could also be a consideration. For less complicated forms, if you can tap into a pool of talented cast-in-place concrete contractors, the decision to go with one or the other may be less clear.

And then there is the project timeline: Does it allow the time needed to prototype, fabricate, and install the precast at the quantities the project requires? This process, depending on the complexity of the forms, skill of the precaster, and quantities needed, can take from six to 12 months before installation. Lastly, managing the cost of your precast concrete project is one of the biggest challenges to using this material. Designers need to look for inefficiencies in the design that can drive up the cost, including the complexity of the precast shape, the number of pieces that require unique molds, or the size of the pieces themselves. Reducing the quantity of unique pieces can streamline the production process by decreasing both the number of concrete forms that must be fabricated and the precast piece production time. It may be possible to combine two or even three separate pieces into one, or to create sweeping curves with straight pieces rather than curving ones, which are more difficult to build molds for. Very large pieces may not be able to be produced or may require additional accommodations for storage or transport, which can add cost to the project.

Given the extra cost and time involved in precast elements, there are several things to consider when deciding whether to choose precast over other approaches. These include aspects of design, materials, fabrication, and installation.

Landscape architects should consider design and installation at the same time. You can imagine and design amazing shapes and elements, but without consideration for how they will be assembled or installed, you could run into problems down the road that could drive up costs and resource time. For example, the layout of the precast elements may not be as precise as your drawings, which can cause a number of issues that will be discussed later.

As with any material, the more the designer understands about the characteristics, potential, and limitations of precast concrete, the more likely you are to produce a better design. Early collaboration with precast fabricators allows you to understand the precast process before you embark on the design development phase, which can pay dividends in meeting the consistency and quality expected. There are decisions to be made about mold material and construction, because the material that a mold is made of will determine how many times it can be reused. A reusable mold may limit the variations to the shape and form of your elements, but the trade-off is the savings you may see from its reuse. A reusable mold will likely cost more to create up front but can produce more castings in a shorter period. The risk of defects in pieces coming out of the same mold should be lower as well. Often a combination of both reusable and single-use molds will allow the greatest amount of design variation. When weighing the options for mold types, consider if the same piece can be used in various ways or if each piece really needs to be unique.

The shape of a piece of precast can be a limiting factor as well. When casting the concrete piece, there should be sufficient means to allow entrapped air to escape the mold. Pockets within a three-dimensional form may not only produce air bubbles on the finished surface but may also make it impossible to successfully extract a final product undamaged. A design that includes a draft angle—a taper of the vertical walls of the mold—will assist with the release of the concrete element.

In the fabrication process, incremental prototyping can help ensure a consistent product that is going to meet your design intent. However, it takes time and effort, so it must be budgeted for within the overall project timeline. Prototype reviews should take place at the manufacturing facility, where ideally the designer has already visited and reviewed the process and developed relationships with the team there. We recommend conducting an initial visit to the fabrication facility with the designer, construction manager, and fabrication leadership before any fabrication is done. Discuss the process from beginning to end, including how the production line works and production rates, quality control/craftsmanship (in production and forming materials), equipment (concrete mixing, lifting, and movement of pieces), and materials storage and handling (outdoor to indoor storage, proper ingredients, handling of the ingredients). There should be a single point of contact at the fabrication facility to work through issues that could arise. Let that individual communicate to their team how to handle issues as they come up.

A careful review of the first prototypes is essential because they are the pieces around which the forms will be constructed. This review is followed by formwork prototype inspections, then the final cast concrete shapes. Designers should keep an eye out for consistent finishes throughout the piece, edges and corners that meet the design intent (sharp, fillet, or rounded), sufficient structural integrity to resist the loads and stress from the production process, and the ability of the form to be reused with a consistent product outcome.

The final prototype review involves placing the production pieces together to mimic their installed configuration on-site. Seeing the units adjacent to one another lets the team gauge fit, alignment, mounting, and handling. This is a good time to bring in the installation contractor, as they can be essential in providing the fabricator with comments on its overall handling and installation. Changes can be made before mass production to avoid potential installation conflicts or damage on-site. This prototype review is the last step before the production phase.

The installation mock-up is a critical step. We prefer combined installations whenever possible, to show and understand how various elements such as precast, adjacent paving, and plantings will interact during and after installation. For instance, a decision to install an expansion joint along the interface between a precast curb and the asphalt pavement was validated when it became clear that even the half-inch joint helped the asphalt installers keep their plate compactor away from the edge of the precast, preventing damage to the precast during the pavement installation. The contractor may have insights that the designer never thought of that may improve the installation process. Also, because accidents can always happen, make sure that the installation mock-up includes steps for repairing damaged pieces. As painful as it is, ask the mason to take a whack out of the precast module and show how they would repair it and, just as important, how it looks after the repair material has cured.

Joint tolerances between pieces can be a challenge when you are laying out forms that are constrained by fixed objects like buildings or that need to form a closed shape. Stephen Carlucci is an associate at Mithun who developed a flush precast curb unit that could be cut in the field without appearing rough-cut and allowed greater tolerance for remaining space within a closed-loop layout. He also designed cutouts on the underside of the individual pieces to accommodate lifting straps to make pulling the straps out from under the piece easy after placement.

Adding “bumpers,” small protrusions that are invisible after installation, on the joint edge of precast elements can protect pieces during installation and help assure regular joint spacing. If there are straight pieces with parallel edges used to make a curving layout, consider how tight a radius that curve can have before the joints between elements exceed your tolerance, resulting in an unsightly faceted appearance. For vertical installations, considerations for the anchoring system, backing, waterproofing, and drainage need to be addressed at the design stage. The use of clips versus direct adherence of the elements needs to be thought through, not only for aesthetics but also from an installation and cost perspective.

Designers should educate owners about maintenance requirements for precast. This is directly tied to the level of overall care that the owner wants for the landscape. Maintenance requires time, and time requires a budget. Both the designer and the client must be clear-eyed on how the precast element is going to age. Pristine design renderings will not capture the effects of weather, foliage, and staining on the precast over time.

Designers can advise the client about sealants and take the outcome into consideration in the design and fabrication phases. There are any number of precast cleaners and protective sealants available on the market, and they generally fall into two categories: permeating and topical. Permeating sealants chemically bond with the precast and prevent intrusion of water and staining elements into the concrete, and they last for about five years. Topical sealants, on the other hand, adhere to the surface of the precast and create a barrier unto themselves. They generally do not last as long as permeating sealants (expect one year) but are less costly up front; the increased application interval may negate the initial savings, however. If the client wants a protective sealer applied, it should be tested early in the design process; the prototyping or installation mock-up stage are two opportunities. Sealants may discolor the precast, and you must decide if this is acceptable. Furthermore, the client must understand that this is not a “one-and-done” proposition; for the system to work properly, it must be reapplied, and the edges must be cleaned on a rotating basis.

Precast concrete offers many opportunities to create beautiful, consistent landscape elements. Understanding the precasting process will help the client, designer, and contractor realize a high-quality design. Understanding the material, fabrication, and installation processes can inform good design and assure quality throughout the project.

John Payne, ASLA, is a principal at SiteWorks and runs its Olympia, Washington, office. James Dudley is an assistant superintendent for a development, general contracting, and construction management firm.

At the University of Pittsburgh, a Complete Street caps a series of student-centered outdoor spaces.

By Timothy A. Schuler

At the University of Pittsburgh, a Complete Street caps a series of student-centered outdoor spaces.

By Timothy A. Schuler

In the mid-1950s, the fast-growing University of Pittsburgh acquired two historic properties: the Hotel Schenley, built in 1898, and the Schenley Apartments, built between 1922 and 1924. The buildings were renovated for use as dormitories—and later, in the case of the hotel, a student union—but the spaces around them were left largely untouched, updated over the years to meet local codes but otherwise given little thought.

In 2015, the parking garage beneath the former apartments, now known as the Schenley Quadrangle, began to leak, and as is so often the case, it took an infrastructure failure belowground to spark a reconsideration of what was happening on the surface.

There wasn’t a lot. Students circumnavigated the areas between the five residence halls via narrow, brick-paved porticoes that skirted wide, vehicular roundabouts with metered parking around the edges. Ad hoc accessibility measures, such as temporary ramps between the grade-separated courtyards, failed to create sufficient connectivity—or even meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The university hired the landscape architects at LaQuatra Bonci Associates (LBA) to study the outdoor spaces at Schenley Quad and develop pedestrian-focused alternatives. Although some students fretted over the loss of parking and their preferred rideshare pickup and drop-off points, a campus-wide survey conducted in 2018 had revealed that, by and large, the student body wanted more open space on campus. While LBA sketched out potential schemes for the quad, however, another piece of vehicular infrastructure near the historic center of the campus emerged as its own problem area.

The Schenley buildings are separated from Pitt’s 42-story Cathedral of Learning—arguably the front door of the campus—by Bigelow Boulevard, a roughly 100-foot-wide, four-lane city street. Over the years, students’ use of an unsignaled midblock crosswalk had emerged as a flash point between the university and the surrounding community. “Twenty-seven thousand people cross that street every day,” including approximately 10,000 students at midblock, says Ron Leibow, the university’s director of capital projects. The street design was dangerous for students and chaotic for drivers, he says. “Frankly, it’s been a little bit of a toxic space. Our kids are in college. They don’t give a shit about traffic. They cross when they want.”

Some in the community wanted the midblock crossing removed. Others suggested that the university take over the street, removing it from the city grid altogether. Dan McDowell, a senior associate at LBA and the lead designer on the project, describes the existing conditions as like a game of Frogger. University leaders knew they needed to do something. “We need[ed] to improve pedestrian safety on that street,” Leibow says. “It is incumbent on us to make a safe place to move about.”

As community tensions flared, the university asked LBA to develop a more comprehensive plan for the outdoor spaces connecting the campus’s historic core, including the crossing on Bigelow Boulevard. As they did so, the landscape architects saw an opportunity to rethink the entire sequence from Schenley Quad to the Cathedral of Learning.

The result, built in phases and completed in December 2020, is a series of interconnected, people-focused plazas and courtyards that bring cohesion to a formerly disconnected landscape at the heart of campus. Within Schenley Quad, metered parking stalls and vehicular drop-off zones have been replaced with paved pedestrian plazas, curved concrete benches, movable tables, and small islands of green space. New, prominently placed ramps—precisely sized to accommodate the enormous blue carts used on move-in day—alleviate previous accessibility issues.

North of the student union, LBA raised the entire ground plane 18 inches to incorporate new stormwater and energy infrastructure and reduce the grade change between the entrance and the landscape. Punctuated by pops of colorful plantings, a wide, oval-shaped plaza—ovals are a motif within the new spaces—has permeable pavers to manage 3,500 cubic feet of stormwater while also accommodating existing events, such as a weekly farmers’ market.

A newly created terrace adjacent to an existing Starbucks, with high-top bar seating and charging stations, overlooks the plaza and accommodates outdoor study. “The student has changed dramatically from 15 years ago,” Leibow says. “They have everything in their backpack, and when it’s nice out they want to leave a building and have nice spaces to go check their email.”

From the plaza, the new landscape features spill out around the front of the student union, marrying the outdoor spaces west of Bigelow with a new Complete Street along the boulevard between Forbes and Fifth Avenues. With protected bike lanes, redesigned bus stops, and rain gardens that run nearly the length of the block and handle an additional 5,150 cubic feet of stormwater runoff, the Complete Street is one of the first to be built since Pittsburgh’s city council adopted a Complete Streets Policy in 2016.

For students, the most important feature is a midblock speed table, which raises the crosswalk and, with the help of impenetrable-looking concrete planters, naturally slows traffic. LBA also relocated the midblock crossing to a new axis that extends from the front of the student union to the steps of the Cathedral of Learning, establishing a new and more prominent connection between the buildings.

Jeremy Brown, a project manager at LBA, says the idea to completely take apart the street and put it back together emerged over the course of the design process, in which the team sought to address the crossing while also improving the existing bike lanes and managing stormwater. “It sort of grew and grew and grew, and at one point, somebody said, ‘We’re making a Complete Street; let’s look at this like a Complete Street and make sure we’re not missing any little corners,’” Brown says.

Built in a public–public partnership between the university and the city, the $24 million upgrade was seen as a way to improve pedestrian safety while delivering on the city’s commitment to building streets that are safe for all users.

For LBA, the success of the project is a reminder that universities in dense, urban environments can still find ways to create new spaces for students. “They’re harder to find [and] more logistically difficult to navigate,” Brown says. “But with good leadership, particularly from the university, spaces can be found and created.”

Timothy A. Schuler is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor to the magazine. He lives in Honolulu.

$1 billion in funding to reconnect divided communities is coming.

By Zach Mortice

Landscape architects are ingrained systems thinkers and experts on how to balance infrastructure and the ecological imperatives of climate change, all while improving transit networks that bind people together. Significant portions of the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that became law late last year will be filtering down to communities, and landscape

$1 billion in funding to reconnect divided communities is coming.

By Zach Mortice

Landscape architects are ingrained systems thinkers and experts on how to balance infrastructure and the ecological imperatives of climate change, all while improving transit networks that bind people together. Significant portions of the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that became law late last year will be filtering down to communities, and landscape architects bring experience and expertise to these types of projects, including the removal of highways, streetscape design, greenway planning, and especially those projects that seek to address incidences of transit infrastructure exacerbating existing economic and demographic inequalities.

As part of its Reconnecting Communities Pilot Discretionary Grant Program, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) will distribute $1 billion over the next five years, including $195 million just this year, for the planning and construction of projects that equitably advance community connectivity. This work, central to what landscape architects have been doing for decades, will happen via the retrofit, removal, or replacement of transit infrastructure to reduce barriers to mobility, access, and economic development.

On Wednesday, May 19, the DOT will host a webinar, “Getting Ready for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Discretionary Grant Program,” to brief potential grant applicants on how the program will work and the application process. Registration is free and open to the public.

The types of eligible projects could include the analysis of street networks, alternative roadway designs, and transit network capacity, as well as analyses of how such changes will affect local economies and the environment. States, local governments, federally recognized Tribal governments, metropolitan planning organizations, and nonprofits are eligible for this grant program. Technical assistance will be prioritized for economically disadvantaged communities. For more information on the program and the role landscape architects can play, read “Landscape Architects Are Poised to Lead the New Era of Infrastructure,” by Roxanne Blackwell, Hon. ASLA.

Registration for the webinar and more information can be found here.

“Getting Ready for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Discretionary Grant Program”

May 19, 1:30 p.m. EST

U.S. Department of Transportation