Ground 34 - Brook McIlroy

Transcription

34
Landscape
Architect
Quarterly Features Partnering Up
08/
Expressing Heritage
12/
Round Table
Landscape Architecture in the Anthropocene Age
14/
CSLA Awards
20/
Publication # 40026106
OALA Awards
24/
Summer 2016
Issue 34
Section
.30
FPO
02
Contents
Up Front
Information on
the ground
Question:
03/
Partnering Up
A collaborative approach to
landscape performance research
Text by Lauren Mandel, ASLA
08/
Expressing Heritage
12/
Interview by Katherine Hamilton with Calvin Brook
Round Table
Landscape architecture in
the anthropocene age
14/
Moderated by Kate Nelischer,
Landscape Architectural Intern
CSLA Awards
20/
OALA Awards
24/
Student Corner
The lowdown on LABash 28/
Text by Adele Pierre
Plant Corner
Alternatives to invasive species
30/
Text by Sean James
32/ Research Corner
Endophytes for turf grass
Jocelyn Hirtes in conversation with
Dr. Manish Raizada
President’s
Message
Editorial Board
Message
President’s Message
Editorial Board Message
“If the 20th century belonged to architects, then the 21st
century belongs to landscape architects,” said Craig
Applegath, OAA, in June at the 2016 Grey to Green Conference in Toronto.
Throughout the OALA’s 48-year history, we have implemented
programs to ensure our members work professionally with
regards to the health and welfare of our clients and the
public. We have requirements for education, professional
development, and examination. We have bylaws, policies,
professional standards, disciplinary actions, and continuing education requirements for members to adhere to,
to ensure the delivery of professional services. With this
foundation, we are now working to be recognized through
modernized legislation that gives landscape architects selfregulation and a voice in government.
The OALA has embarked on a journey to pursue
legislation changes that will allow landscape architects to
be governed by a Professional Practice Act as opposed
to a Title Act. If implemented, the legislation will elevate
the profession and protect the public interest by enforcing
a standard that allows only skilled and knowledgeable
professionals to work as landscape architects in Ontario.
Our Practice Legislation Committee (PLC) along with the
Executive Committee (ExeCom) have engaged Brown &
Cohen Communications & Public Affairs to assist in bringing
the OALA’s ask to the legislature. Mills & Mills Law Firm
has also been engaged to support the legal drafting of a
Practice Act. With the help of Brown & Cohen, members of
parliament will hear about the work landscape architects do
in Ontario and the importance of a Practice Act so that they
can make an informed decision on our proposed bill when
it is presented to the legislature.
Artifact
Crafting care
TEXT by lorraine johnson
Brown & Cohen will also assist in building partnerships with
allied professions such as Landscape Ontario and the Certified Landscape Designers, Ontario Association of Architects,
the Professional Engineers of Ontario, and Ontario Professional Planners Institute, to name a few. These meetings
will solidify our working relationships with these professionals so that we can all have a better understanding of
each other’s work, and how we can best support each
other when approaching government.
Summer 2016
Issue 34
The pursuit of recognition is not easy. Working collaboratively
amongst our committees, volunteers, allied professionals,
clients, and politicians is key. There is much to do to bring
our bill to Ontario’s legislature. The PLC and ExeCom
are looking for your help and assistance. A number of
events are being scheduled and volunteers are needed.
Please advise a staff member or contact an OALA Councillor
should you be able to afford a bit of time. I thank you all for
your continued efforts on behalf of the OALA.
Notes
A miscellany of
news and events
34/
42/
Doris Chee, OALA
oala President
We all have questions. Grad school taught me to
wonder, “what is the better question?” rather than the
better answer. What questions are you asking yourself
as you go about your practice? The Editorial Board
wanted to raise the importance of question and ask
what the important questions are for our profession. Our
Round Table, moderated by Kate Nelischer, convened
some great minds to posit the burning questions
for landscape architects and try to frame everyday
questions in a new way.
Summer is time for the Awards issue. Take a look at
these winning projects and the inspiring people and
efforts that encourage us all to take our work and
creative pursuits a bit further. More and more each
year, these awards showcase the broadening scope
and capabilities of landscape architects. A huge
congratulations to all the recipients.
Have you checked out Ground online (www.groundmag.
ca) yet? Please do so when you can. Each interactive
article is accessible to peruse, share, link from and to,
and we have been sharing this content widely on our
burgeoning social media channels. Let us know what
you think.
This is my final issue as chair of the Editorial Board, and it
has been enjoyable, stimulating, stressful, and enriching.
I am moving on to other volunteer interests, though I will
miss the camaraderie and dialogue of working on a
great magazine. I am proud that we have accomplished
so much together: expanding our content to online
audiences, allied professions, and industry colleagues;
increasing exposure at local and provincial events;
embarking on a new subscription option for Ground (still
in development); and, above all, providing a forum for an
increasingly sophisticated discussion on how amazing
landscape architecture is and how much we all can
contribute to a more resilient, peaceful, and beautiful
Earth. All the very best to all of you.
Todd Smith, OALA
Chair, Editorial Board
Masthead
.34
Editor
Lorraine Johnson
2016 OALA
Governing Council
Photo Editor
Todd Smith
President
Doris Chee
OALA Editorial Board
Shannon Baker
Michael Cook
Eric Gordon
Ruthanne Henry
Jocelyn Hirtes
Vincent Javet
Han Liu
Graham MacInnes
Kate Nelischer
Robert Patterson
Denise Pinto
Tamar Pister
Phil Pothen
Todd Smith (chair)
Dalia Todary-Michael
Jane Welsh
Kathy Zhu
Vice President
Jane Welsh
Web Editor
Jennifer Foden
Art Direction/Design
www.typotherapy.com
Advertising Inquiries
advertising@oala.ca
416.231.4181
Cover
From Public Studio’s installation, 120
Mirrors, at Lee Lifeson Arts Park in
North York. See page 6.
Ground: Landscape Architect
Quarterly is published four times a
year by the Ontario Association of
Landscape Architects.
Ontario Association of
Landscape Architects
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Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2
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Copyright © 2016 by the Ontario
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All rights reserved
ISSN: 0847-3080
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Treasurer
Chris Hart
Secretary
David Duhan
Past President
Joanne Moran
Councillors
Stefan Fediuk
Kendall Flower
Sandra Neal
Associate Councillor—Senior
Maren Walker
Associate Councillor—Junior
Justin Whalen
Lay Councillor
Linda Thorne
Appointed Educator
University of Toronto
Peter North
Appointed Educator
University of Guelph
Sean Kelly
Student Representative
Jordan Duke
University of Guelph
Student Representative
Chen Zixiang
OALA Staff
Acting Executive Director
Aina Budrevics
Registrar
Ingrid Little
Coordinator
Sarah Manteuffel
OALA
OALA
About
About the OALA
Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published
by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects
and provides an open forum for the exchange of
ideas and information related to the profession of
landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article
proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission
guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca.
Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions.
The views expressed in the magazine are those
of the writers and not necessarily the views of the
OALA and its Governing Council.
The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects works
to promote and advance the profession of landscape
architecture and maintain standards of professional practice
consistent with the public interest. The OALA promotes
public understanding of the profession and the advancement of the practice of landscape architecture. In support
of the improvement and/or conservation of the natural,
cultural, social and built environments, the OALA undertakes
activities including promotion to governments,
professionals and developers of the standards and
benefits of landscape architecture.
Upcoming Issues of Ground
Ground 35 (Fall)
Edges
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Data
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October 10, 2016
Erratum
Due to an editing error, Fidenzio Salvatori’s name was
inadvertently left off the list of staff at the Site Planning Unit,
Ministry of Natural Resources Parks Branch, 1971-1978
(page 31 of Ground 33 [Spring 2016]). Apologies to Fidenzio
Salvatori and to the authors of the article, John Hicks and
Garrett Pittenger.
TO view additional content related to
Ground articles, Visit www.groundmag.ca.
.34
Advisory Panel
Andrew B. Anderson, BLA, MSc. World Heritage
Management Landscape & Heritage Expert, Oman
Botanic Garden
John Danahy, OALA, Associate Professor,
George Dark, OALA, FCSLA, ASLA, Principal,
Urban Strategies Inc., Toronto
Real Eguchi, OALA, Eguchi Associates Landscape
Architects, Toronto
Donna Hinde, OALA, FCSLA, Partner, The Planning
Partnership, Toronto
Ryan James, OALA, Senior Landscape Architect,
Novatech, Ottawa
Alissa North, OALA, Assistant Professor, University of
Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto
Peter North, OALA, Assistant Professor, University
of Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto
Nathan Perkins, MLA, PhD, ASLA, Associate
Professor, University of Guelph
Jim Vafiades, OALA, FCSLA, Senior Landscape Architect,
Stantec, Toronto
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Up Front
03
.34
Art
a luminescent canopy
Wandering through downtown London,
Ontario, where trendy restaurants alternate
with boarded-up facades and “For Lease”
signs, a visitor might make an unexpected
discovery: a small pedestrian laneway with
a ceiling of multi-coloured lights moving in
different directions, creating changing
patterns and shapes.
The opportunity to create a landscape
feature for mainly aesthetic purposes is rare.
The Market Lane light canopy is one such
example. Nestled between the Covent
Garden Market and Dundas Street (London’s
main street), this net of 1,400 LED lights
suspended on 13 strings and supported
by five steel arches creates dynamic
displays with moving, colour-shifting lights.
Different atmospheres are created to mark
the changing of the seasons, reflecting
special holidays and events. Colours
range from cool white and blues for winter
scenes, to deep, rich greens and reds for
the summer and fall displays. Lighting
effects vary from slow twinkling stars to a
fast race of colour down the laneway.
Market Lane was the site of a national
design competition in 2012 by the City of
London. A relatively small design project,
Market Lane was in a key location and
being redeveloped at a pivotal time in
advance of the 2013 ISU World Figure
Skating Championships being hosted by
the city. The light canopy was part of the
winning proposal entitled Figure Ground
by Joseph Fry, OALA, and his team at HAPA
Collaborative, a landscape architecture
firm in Vancouver, B.C. HAPA’s proposal
for Market Lane displayed a meandering
concrete bench and luminescent ottomans
along a riverbank garden, with a light sky
Up Front:
Information
on the
Ground
01
ceiling as centrepiece. The landscape
architects teamed up with EOS Light Media,
a lighting and media design firm also
from Vancouver, to create the light canopy.
According to the jury, this proposal distinguished itself as a leading-edge design
that captured the spirit of London and
responded to the need for a pedestrianfocused, day and night, all-season urban
environment. It also provided opportunities
for interaction with the surrounding
context and festival activity, and innovatively
responded to the community’s aspirations
for Market Lane.
In 2014, Fanshawe College opened its
new Centre for Digital and Performance Arts
(CDPA) in the Howard W. Rundle Building,
with a door on Market Lane. Although the
building construction started concurrently with
the completion of the lane and created some
challenges, it also offered opportunities. The
programmable light canopy is controlled
by a computer that is housed in the CDPA
building next door. The city and the college
have a partnership agreement in place to
coordinate the programming and maintenance of the light canopy. Planned for the
fall of 2016, theatre arts/technical production students will have the opportunity to
create their own designs and light shows
as part of their class curriculum using
MADRIX software. This opportunity to program the light canopy in a real-life situation
for specific requests in conjunction with the
partnership agreement is unique.
The system can also be synched to
music. This was tested during the last Nuit
Blanche/Dundas Street Festival event in
June, 2015, by Craig Blackley, technical
support for the theatre arts program. For the
occasion, the large side doors of the so called
“Black Box” (where students experiment with
theatrical performances and backstage
01/
The Market Lane light canopy in London, Ontario, creates dynamic displays with shifting colours and illumination.
IMAGE/
Five One Nine Photography
Up Front
04
.34
In a 2013 interview with the London Free
Press, Joseph Fry compared the site to a
kind of urban acupuncture. His view was
that, just like acupuncture—where a needle
can pinpoint a specific area in order to
heal the whole body—this specific design
intervention on a very small site can help
revitalize the entire downtown.
02
technical support) were opened onto the
lane and two DJ performances played out of
the Fanshawe College Stage. According to
some festival goers, Market Lane was alive
and pumped up! The DJs‘ music was linked
with the light canopy pulsating along with the
rhythm and bass. “Everyone here at the Centre looks forward to the new lighting display
that continues to greet us when we arrive and
leave the building,” says Blackley. “It’s quite
often that people will stop to view the lighting
display and take pictures as well, even more
so during live events being held outside.”
02/
IMAGE/
Five One Nine Photography
HAPA Collaborative’s renderings of the light canopy at night and during the day
IMAGE/
HAPA Collaborative
Downtown London is changing. Boardedup facades are being replaced by a new
generation of businesses and schools
targeting young bright minds. While the
original idea was to generate an aesthetically pleasing community space, one might
connect the dots and say it is now clear that
the unique light canopy is also serving a
higher purpose: illuminating the way for a
brighter future in London’s downtown.
Text by Julie Michaud, oala, who has worked in
the Environmental and Parks Planning section at the City of London since 2004.
Land Trusts
local community solutions
Re-inventing entrenched patterns of land use
and ownership is a mission that one Toronto
non-profit collective, incorporated in 2014, is
taking up in an effort to ensure their neighbourhood’s survival and prosperity. The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT) joins
the platform of Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
in North America, with a goal of protecting
people’s agency and well-being by enabling
non-profit ownership of land. This safeguards
its affordability, security, structural integrity,
economic diversity, equitable opportunity provisions, service accessibility, and a stabilized
sense of “home” in the neighbourhood.
Inspired by village gift systems in India, the
organizational model originated in the United
States in the 1950s and 1960s, encouraging
donations of land by wealthy landowners
to the village, making it possible to secure
access to farmland for poor, skilled farmers in
rural communities. CLTs expanded in the U.S.
as community support grew to sustain a slow
and steady build of affordable housing units.
On the other hand, in Canada, such housing
capacity was introduced by federal programs
and funding, which meant that a strong
network of private Community Land Trusts
was less established here.
The Market Lane light canopy in London, Ontario
03/
And he might be right. Three years later,
the City of London is planning to redesign
the first five blocks of Dundas Street into
a seamless flexible street called Dundas
Place. In addition, the Dundas Street
Festival is expanding from one to three
days, from September 16-18, 2016. And
that’s not all. The Back to the River design
competition is proposing a new vision for
the Thames River, and SHIFT: Our Rapid
Transit Initiative is rethinking how Londoners
move around the city. These plans are all
complemented by the many new residential
buildings and businesses being added to
the downtown core.
However, today there are about a dozen
CLTs operating across Canada, including
cooperative CLTs, lease-to-own CLTs, and
facilitative CLTs, all of which are primarily
taking charge to fill the affordable housing
03
Up Front
gap. As much as units and homes managed
through co-op housing corporations have
been flourishing, a strong network of support
for Community Land Trusts remains nascent
in Ontario. Despite this, the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust built its model from a
grassroots-inspired precedence far from
master planning and revitalization politics.
04
05
06
04-06/
The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, in partnership with Greenest City, is currently fundraising to acquire their first piece of land, the 87 Milky Way Garden, an existing urban agriculture site.
IMAGES/
Istoica
05
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TO view additional content for this article,
Visit www.groundmag.ca.
The seeds of PNLT’s initiative were planted
three years ago through a series of
mediations between multiple community
partners that were long-established within
the local Parkdale and west-end communities. “We identify as an organization of
organizations, especially in our formation,”
says Joshua Barndt, Development Coordinator at PNLT, when asked to describe
their community-rooted emergence. As
the neighbourhood was becoming more
valuable, a fast-paced gentrification was
imminent, and the question of how this
would affect aspects of the community in
the short- and long-term was urgent.
As the core partner and convenor of the
PNLT, the Parkdale Arts and Recreation
Centre (PARC) led the organizational facilitation, piloting a study in 2011, “Beyond Bread
and Butter,” that focused on an aged, rapidly
gentrified commercial strip on Queen Street
West. The study identified the changing food
security status of lower-income residents in
the Parkdale neighbourhood and proposed
a series of community-wide interventions led
by community efforts to deal with the negative
effects of gentrification. An unexpected finding
suggested that commercial properties could
particularly benefit from community land
ownership. This is due to the domino effect
that occurs when low-income businesses are
pushed out by spiraling rent increases and
commercial up-scaling, eventually affecting
the affordability of residential properties.
It became evident to local stakeholders
that the land issues could not be solved
independently. This sparked a further year of
engagements by PARC with more than 150
people from various agencies, organizations,
and resident groups, to weigh the priority of
establishing communal land ownership. The
efforts culminated in the appointment of the
initial board at the end of 2012.
Inspired by the Dudley Street Neighbourhood
Initiative’s approach and governance structure in Roxbury, near Boston, Massachusetts,
the initial board focused on representing
the diversity of Parkdale and ensuring the
full spectrum of the neighbourhood’s involvement. In the course of two years, this effort
has garnered support and engagement
from the surrounding community, with the
prospect of future land-acquisition projects.
Supported by a three-year capacity-building
grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation,
PNLT’s first mission is organizational development. PNLT’s first annual general meeting
was held in October, 2015, at which a board
was elected.
Looking to develop their land-acquisition strategy, the board is taking steps to seek support
from public and private sector experts within
the industry and Toronto Community Housing.
Priorities that reach beyond affordable housing include community gardens, commercial
space for non-profits and small businesses,
and community employment. With partners
like Greenest City on the board of directors,
there is huge value in re-imagining alternative approaches to typical uses of existing
public assets; for example, parks could be
used for food production, training programs,
and testing grounds for sustainable practices
such as soil remediation. Most recently, PNLT,
in partnership with Greenest City, has successfully launched a fundraising campaign to
cover costs of their first land acquisition, the
87 Milky Way Garden, an existing urban agricultural site in the Parkdale neighbourhood.
As a neighbourhood with a strong social
agency sector (there are more than 100 active
non-profit organizations in Parkdale), PNLT is
oriented towards a partnership model for their
future; while PNLT intends to own the land,
they would not manage it themselves but
would instead lease it to non-profit partners
who would take on the responsibility of
improvement work and operations.
PNLT recently retained a business consultant
to help them build an organizational business
plan by the end of the summer of 2016, which
would include initial strategy and realistic
logistics of land acquisition.
As Barndt puts it, “The message is why [not]
collectively find a way to generate a solution,
let’s not blame anyone in particular. I think
people have been super positive about it.”
Text by Dalia Todary-Michael, a member of the Ground Editorial Board, and a landscape architectural intern and strategist at Popovich Associates.
Up Front
.34
06
07
Parks
sound-based art
Lee Lifeson Arts Park, in North York’s
Willowdale neighbourhood, is a new type
of park that, like any good creative endeavour,
is a bit of an experiment. Bordered by Victoria
Park Avenue, Bathurst Street, Highway 401,
and Steeles Avenue, Willowdale was once
characterized by modest pre- and post-war
homes on large residential lots. But like
many other parts of Toronto, the area is
experiencing massive change, in the form of
new condo developments and housing stock
turnover, from bungalow to monster home.
This process has facilitated the addition of
many new parks to the area, funded by
development charges and Section 37 funds,
but it has also restricted their size. Though the
area of Lee Lifeson Arts Park is only about half
a city block, the design and programming
of the park speak to a desire by the local
government to serve the community in a
creative way.
Councillor John Filion, representative for
Ward 23 and Toronto’s official Arts Advocate,
says that being imaginative with small
spaces is fundamental to making successful
new parks in Willowdale. He describes the
process of acquiring new parkland in this
heavily urbanized district as “difficult,” but
says that this hasn’t stopped Willowdale from
adding a new park annually in recent years.
The strategy is to acquire residential lots to
expand existing parks and build new pocket
sites that add up to a network capable of
serving the community. This has resulted in
some great community-supported spaces
like Parkview Neighbourhood Garden,
a volunteer-run market garden that has
operated on a former vacant lot since 2008.
Filion hopes that the community around
Lee Lifeson Arts Park will feel that same
ownership over the park when it opens in
the summer of 2016. A five-minute walk from
North York Civic Centre, and an expansion
of Willowdale Park North, it will join a string
of linear parks that mark the piped and
channelized portion of Wilket Creek between
York Mills Road and Steeles. A life-long
supporter of the arts, Filion envisions it as an
outdoor incubator for the arts, a haven for
programming and performance, particularly
sound-based work.
With Planning Partnership as the prime
consultant, the park is designed to
incorporate permanent art installations,
temporary exhibits, and small-scale
performances. However, the residential
character of the surroundings will determine
their amplitude. Community consultation
determined that adjacent homeowners
were concerned about loud noises
potentially emanating from a park named
after members of the band Rush, Geddy
Lee and Alex Lifeson, former Willowdale
residents. As a result, the amphitheatre in the
northwest corner of the park will have small
performances only. (Amplified shows will
continue to take place at the nearby
Mel Lastman Square.) This demonstrates
the programming challenges of making a
small park work in a location like Willowdale.
The programming must be dense enough
to offer something to the community, but not
so much of a draw that crowds become a
problem in this residential area. Prescribing
tranquil creativity is a challenge.
North York Arts will be working to initiate
community programming in Lee Lifeson
Arts Park in the fall of 2016, as part of the City
of Toronto’s Cultural Hotspot Initiative. As a
signature project of the program, a series of
participatory events featuring youth, dance,
and music will be hosted in the park, with the
goal of engaging the community. Melissa
Foster, Program and Outreach Coordinator
for North York Arts, describes Lee Lifeson Arts
Park as a place that will come into its own as
the community begins to feel like they can
use it. The details of the fall programming
are still being developed, and Foster invites
people to share their ideas: “Come out in
September. People can contact us [North York
Arts] and Councillor Filion’s office if they have
ideas about happenings they would like to
see,” Foster says.
The permanent art works in the park
are already taking shape, with a mosaic
by architect Paul Roth and a three-part
installation by Public Studio, consisting of
architect Tamira Sawatzky and filmmaker
Elle Flanders, and their frequent collaborator
Up Front
07
.34
08
Anna Friz. Their piece, 120 Mirrors, was
conceived in response to a call for
permanent installations exploring the
park’s “art of sound” theme last year, and
selected through a public vote. The piece
draws on Friz’s background in sound
design and is inspired by the idea of parks
as gathering places for free speech and
the colonial history of the site.
09
10
07-10/
IMAGES/
Public Studio’s installation, 120 Mirrors, for Lee Lifeson Arts Park in North York is a sound-based piece inspired by the idea of parks as gathering spaces for free speech and the colonial history of the site.
Public Studio
The first part of Public Studio’s piece,
“Speak and Listen,” is composed of
underground speaking tubes through a
section of berms in the park’s southwest
corner, carrying sound vibrations between
participants at either end, in the fashion
of a tin-can telephone. The second part,
“The Hornucopia,” is a structure made of
multiple, different-sized horns that naturally
capture sound with their shape. Situated
among the densest plantings on the site,
the horns can be rotated to capture the
sounds of the park, from birds to performers.
Sawatzky describes the last part, “The Horn
of Reflection,” as a more inward-looking
piece, enshrouded by trees at the north end
of the park. It’s a large horn structure, scaled
for a participant to sit inside and listen to a
sound piece developed by Anna Friz. The
exterior of the horn is chrome, reflecting its
surroundings and referencing the overall
title of the work, 120 Mirrors. Inside the piece
is a list detailing the items at the heart of
the 1787 Toronto Purchase between the
Mississaugas of New Credit and the British
for the land used to establish Toronto.
This exchange of simple objects, including
mirrors, gun flints, and laced hats, for rights
to 250,808 acres of land, was disputed
for the next few hundred years, with a
settlement reached only in 2010. The three pieces are integrated into the
park, a requirement from the City of Toronto
that Sawatzky says aligned with their
desire to create elements you continually
encounter as you move through the park,
but it also posed some logistical challenges.
Sawatzky notes that Public Studio was
brought into the project after the completion
of the master plan and while land was still
being purchased for the park. The artists
would have liked the opportunity to work
with the design team earlier in the park
planning process, and Sawatzky describes
siting the work as a constant negotiation.
The hoarding around Lee Lifeson Arts Park
will be gone this summer, giving Willowdale
residents the opportunity to explore the
newest addition to their neighbourhood
and define how they want to use it. How
artists and the community take on its vision
is yet to be seen, but the evolution of the
new space will be worth following.
Text by Katie Strang, a landscape architectural intern at bsq design and a member of the Ground
Editorial Board.
Partnering Up
08
.34
01
A
collaborative
approach to
landscape
performance
research
of designers around the world that are
monitoring and evaluating the performance
of constructed landscapes in order to
gain a more robust understanding of their
environmental and social function and to
inform future design.
Text by Lauren Mandel, ASLA
In the face of changing climate, densifying
cities, and habitat degradation, constructed
landscapes need to be workhorses of
environmental function—managing
stormwater and fostering biodiversity,
for example—while simultaneously
supporting social needs. But how do we
know how effectively designed landscapes
are functioning?
Landscape performance research asks
the question: do built landscapes function
as well as we assume? Answering this
question requires an analytical, often scientific
approach to evaluating how effectively
constructed landscapes operate, usually in
terms of managing stormwater, building
healthy soils, fostering plant survivorship,
providing habitat, or engaging people. Some
researchers find added value in comparing
a landscape’s intended performance (for
01/
“As landscape architects, we are still unclear
as to whether or not our designs are
maximizing their contribution to the health
of our environment,” says Emily McCoy,
PLA, ASLA, associate principal and director
of integrative research at Andropogon
Associates, a landscape architecture and
ecological planning firm based in the United
States. McCoy is part of a growing number
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The Shoemaker Green park and “living laboratory” at the University of Pennsylvania
Andropogon Associates
Students working next to the Shoemaker Green rain garden
Barrett Doherty
Shoemaker Green’s integrated rain garden, tree trenches, and lawn with sub-grade stormwater storage
Barrett Doherty
Shoemaker Green was built atop the University of Pennsylvania’s decommissioned tennis courts, seen here.
Partnering Up
09
.34
effectively layered. Equally important is the
adaptive feedback loop that’s created when
landscapes are built, monitored, and then
analyzed to form the fodder for the next
generation of designs.
Landscape architects like McCoy are often
interested in investigating multiple research
questions on a given project, and while
some fall within the realm of her expertise,
such as plant survivorship, she often
relies upon partners within the academic
research community to explore the subject
matter with which she’s less familiar, such
as infiltration. Thought leaders at design
firms including Mithûn, Biohabitats Inc., and
02
example, a rain garden that’s designed
to infiltrate 1,000 gallons of water in 36
hours) to the site’s post-construction,
measureable performance (the actual time
it takes the rain garden to infiltrate 1,000
gallons of stormwater) in order to gauge
the design’s effectiveness.
“The pressure to produce more resilient and
functional designs is increasing dramatically,”
says McCoy, who holds a B.S. in ecology
and began monitoring Andropogon’s
built work in 2012, particularly in light of
mounting performance-driven municipal
regulations. Embracing these multi-functional,
performative landscapes—where a riverfront
walk mitigates storm surges, or a social
space sequesters carbon—bolsters a
creative use of space in which environmental
function and programmatic goals can be
03
04
Partnering Up
10
.34
07
professor David R. Vann, PhD, who mentors
students who perform research on the site’s
rain garden, tree trenches, and lawn with
sub-grade stormwater storage.
05
Reed Hilderbrand similarly value academic
partnerships when conducting research. José
Almiñana, PLA, FASLA, a landscape architect
at Andropogon since 1983 and current
principal, explains that collaborating with
academics is critical because it advances the
caliber of landscape performance research
by “imbuing a sense of scientific rigour…
[and] fostering multidisciplinary associations
and new transdisciplinary solutions.”
Additionally, these partnerships may expand
expertise, funding, and work hours beyond
the resources of a typical design firm.
While partnerships between designers and
researchers are essential in strengthening the
scientific underpinnings of design decisions,
the formation of these unions often holds
the mystique and precariousness of matchmaking. Many designers recognize the critical
performance questions at hand but don’t
have the scientific expertise to investigate the
questions or don’t know how to find partners
within the scientific community. Scientists,
PhD candidates, and graduate students
may experience the opposite problem,
whereby they hold interest in investigating
a certain area of landscape performance
but lack access to a research site. Campus
landscapes may offer a truncated matchmaking process by uniting interested faculty
members and landscape architects during
the pre-design phases. For other project types,
partnerships often blossom from networking,
The Shoemaker Green monitoring efforts
target water (quality, quantity, plant
transpiration rates); soil (compaction,
infiltration, biology, moisture, pH, organic
matter); plants (vigour, species suitability); and
human use (occupancy, behaviour). To tackle
this ambitious breadth of research, McCoy
orchestrated a sizeable, interdisciplinary team
consisting of designers (two Andropogon
principals and a landscape designer, in
addition to McCoy); academics (Drs. Vann
and Calabria, from the university’s Earth and
Environmental Science Department, and five
students); and stewardship professionals (the
university’s director of facilities, two facilities
personnel, an irrigation consultant, and the
site’s maintenance contractor). Throughout the
long-term study period, various partners have
waxed and waned, but the essential trinity
has remained static: designer, academic,
and stewardship professional.
06
or simple online sleuthing, to reveal which
researchers contributed to completed
landscape performance studies.
In 2012, McCoy embarked on a five-year
landscape performance study at Shoemaker
Green—a 2.75-acre, non-infiltrating park
in Philadelphia—in collaboration with
the University of Pennsylvania’s Earth
and Environmental Science and Facilities
departments. As the urban park’s landscape
architect, Andropogon worked to satisfy the
university’s desire for a highly monitored, highperformance campus landscape that was
imbedded with instrumentation for specific
post-occupancy research. “Shoemaker
Green provides an excellent on-campus
opportunity for cross-disciplinary studies
for exploring stormwater collection and
treatment within a vibrant urban social
setting,” says collaborating university
Out of a myriad of ecological and sociological
research, from compost-tea application
analysis to behaviour mapping, one of the
most important findings for designers and
policy makers deals with transpiration: the
rate at which plants release water into the
atmosphere. Municipalities with stormwater
crediting systems that consider transpiration
generally offer a flat credit per tree rather
than correlating credits to transpiration
performance by species. At Shoemaker
Green, however, researchers monitored
the site’s tree species and turf grass using a
porometer (a device that measures a leaf’s
stomatal openings) and found statistically
significant variation in transpiration rates
between species within the urban landscape.
For example, a native floodplain tree species
such as swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor)
was found to transpire up to 35 gallons of
water per day during the peak growing
Partnering Up
season, compared to a tulip tree (Liriodendron
tulipifera), which transpired as little as 2.44
gallons per day during the same season. This
data can now function as part of an adaptive
feedback loop for Andropogon, the university,
and potentially for regulators as well.
In addition to academic institutions such as
the University of Pennsylvania, several other
entities embrace landscape performance
research. The Landscape Architecture
Foundation (LAF), a non-profit organization
based in Washington, D.C., has focused
on bridging knowledge and practice within
the American design community since
1966. “In order to participate fully in solutions
now,” says LAF executive director Barbara
Deutsch, FASLA, “designers must go beyond
representing their work with features and
improvements [and instead] use quantified
benefits to fully participate in certification
programs, meet regulatory requirements,
and satisfy clients by reducing their risk.” LAF
offers resources under its online Landscape
Performance Series (landscapeperformance.
org), including a global database of
performance investigation case studies, a
fast fact library, and benefits toolkit. The
case study investigations encourage
interdisciplinary partnerships by requiring
collaboration between each selected project’s
designer, an academic research fellow, and
student research assistant. Andropogon
has participated as the design partner in six
case study investigations, and LAF recently
selected Shoemaker Green as a 2016 case
study in collaboration with professor Nicolas
Pevzner and research assistant Sean McKay
11
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from the University of Pennsylvania School of
Design. Almiñana values LAF’s effectiveness
in disseminating research findings to
the broader design community when
noting that, “LAF has provided landscape
architects with a locus for communication
and sharing knowledge about the social and
environmental contributions made by projects
created by landscape architects.”
The Sustainable SITES Initiative (SITES) is a
landscape rating system, akin to LEED, that
encourages designers and researchers
to “partner up” by requiring performance
monitoring. The system—developed by the
American Society of Landscape Architects, The
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The
University of Texas at Austin, and the United
States Botanic Garden—offers guidelines and
performance benchmarks for sustainable
land design, construction, and maintenance.
The SITES reference guide, rating system,
score card, and case studies are available on
the organization’s website (sustainablesites.
org). The Living Building Challenge (LBC)—a
certification program that emphasizes
sustainability in the built environment—
08
10
similarly requires post-occupancy monitoring.
The LBC website (living-future.org/lbc) offers
useful tools including certification information,
case studies, and data collection templates.
Andropogon embeds research in the design
process. The firm’s Integrative Research
Department often tasks Andropogon’s
landscape architects with formulating
research questions during early design
stages, identifying potential relationships with
researcher partners, and strategizing the
integration of supporting green infrastructure
into the design. This approach allows
McCoy and her colleagues to input rigorous
research findings into an adaptive feedback
loop and confidently cultivate evidencebased designs that are in and of themselves,
ripe for research.
BIO/ Lauren Mandel, ASLA, is a landscape designer and researcher at Andropogon Associates and author of EAT UP: The Inside
Scoop on Rooftop Agriculture (New Society Publishers, 2013). She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Environmental Science.
05/
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Barrett Doherty
06/
University of Pennsylvania professor and facilities personnel jointly measuring soil moisture with a tensiometer at Shoemaker Green
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Shoemaker Green manages runoff from adjacent buildings and portions of the right-of-way.
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09
Lawn with sub-grade stormwater storage and tree tranches next to preserved, mature trees at Shoemaker Green
Engineered soils at Shoemaker Green create a known baseline for performance
monitoring.
Shoemaker Green during construction (left) and upon completion (right)
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania
The highly orchestrated movement of water through Shoemaker Green
Expressing
Heritage
12
.34
01
02
Katherine Hamilton interviews
architect Calvin Brook on his
firm’s multi–award-winning
Thunder Bay project, Prince
Arthur’s Landing
interview by Katherine Hamilton with Calvin Brook
03
01/
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Celebration Circle, Prince Arthur’s Landing, Thunder Bay
Brook McIlroy
Fire Circle
Brook McIlroy
Pond pavilion poety
Brook McIlroy
Expressing
Heritage
Prince Arthur’s Landing is an ambitious
waterfront project recently built in Thunder
Bay. It incorporates buildings, landscapes,
and integrated public art that collectively embrace the deep cultural roots of indigenous
peoples and their legacy of ten millennia of
settlement along the Lake Superior shoreline.
The firm Brook McIlroy has received more
than twenty awards for the project. Katherine
Hamilton recently spoke with Calvin Brook,
founder and a principal of the firm Brook
McIlroy, about the project.
Katherine Hamilton (KH): I understand
that Brook McIlroy has designed and
created revitalization plans for a number
of waterfront projects. What makes Prince
Arthur’s Landing unique?
Calvin Brook (CB): This particular location is
home to one of Canada’s most historically
significant sites. The north shore of Lake
Superior is the spot where water-based
transportation routes from the Atlantic Ocean
transferred to land-based routes, which led to
the depths of North America. Prince Arthur’s
Landing is the site of the historical port that
became the hinge point for these travellers.
Notably, John A. Macdonald‘s troops travelled
through this port on their way to Rupert’s Land
[Manitoba] to quell the Red River Rebellion.
The site was also well-used during the fur
trade years.
The vastness of the Great Lake Superior,
the view of the iconic Sleeping Giant (Nanibijjou), the mountainous skyline, the rugged
shoreline, and cultural history together create
a rich sense of place that resonated with us.
Many of the sites we design have some sort
of a history, but this particular site was deeply
steeped in Canadian history and cultural
significance. Indigenous place-making
became the driving force for the design.
KH: How did the design process evolve?
CB: The consultation process for this project
was very intense and controversial. The vision
the City of Thunder Bay had, prior to Brook
McIlroy being awarded the project, was that
of mixed-use eclectic, with a blend of tourism,
business, and industry—basically revitalizing the mixed-use site that was already in
existence. There was significant resistance by
the community to reintroducing commercial
and residential uses to the park space within
13
.34
the waterfront area. In order to introduce this
change, a rich values-based process was
employed to create a place that was uniquely
about the history of Thunder Bay, where the
resources unique to this community could be
utilized. Both sides eventually came together,
and the project has become an expression
of the combined history of the people of
Thunder Bay and the Aboriginal peoples’
imprint on the region.
KH: Who was consulted during the planning
and design process?
CB: The architecture, public art, and landscapes that define the waterfront evolved
from a series of workshops hosted by the
City of Thunder Bay. These workshops drew
together representatives from the Fort William
First Nation, communities of the RobinsonSuperior Treaty, and the Red Sky Metis. JP
Gladu, President & CEO of the Canadian
Council for Aboriginal Business, facilitated the
Aboriginal engagement process, and our
firm was the lead architect and landscape
architect on the project. We were subsequently able to form a collaborative team with
Aboriginal designer Ryan Gorrie.
KH: What are some of the design
features that resulted from the engagement processes?
CB: Throughout the project, indigenous
cultural practices and sustainable practices
have been followed. The two principal
buildings are LEED certified and the
public art installations, Aboriginal Gardens,
Inclusive Circle, and the Spirit Garden are
all grounded in the local people and their
history. The project has developed into
a celebration of Aboriginal culture. The
installations were designed and created
using the collective vision that emerged
from the workshops. The design motifs are
subtle and unassuming and blend seamlessly with the natural surroundings. Poetry
and prose honouring Aboriginal history,
using circles to represent inclusiveness,
employing local materials, and leveraging
the expertise of artists are methods we
employed to create a waterfront park that
is inclusive to all. The gathering circle at the
end of Pier 2 employs all these methods in
one installation—the 24-metre-diameter
circular wall is engraved with the poem
Round Dance, composed by Aboriginal
writer Sarain Stump: Don’t break this circle/
Before the song is over/Because all of our
people/Even the ones long gone/Are
holding hands.
The waterfront at Prince Arthur’s Landing
has become an iconic gathering place for the
community and is used all year long. One of
the most notable elements of the project is
the Sprit Garden, which typifies an Aboriginal
bentwood building technique and employs
sustainable building practices through the
use of the wooden members. The supports
for the structure were hand built by George
Price, who was originally from the local Fort
William First Nation.
KH: Are there further plans for the Prince
Arthur’s Landing waterfront development in
Thunder Bay?
CB: A second phase is planned for the
project, and one of the key recommendations
of the Phase 2 plan is to name this segment
of the waterfront Wiingash (Sweet Grass) Park.
This next phase will continue the narrative of
acknowledging the founding peoples and
will continue to celebrate the richness of the
Native culture and express it within a public
space. Though the theme is much the same
as Phase 1, the character will be much more
natural, incorporating more outdoor activities
and fewer structures.
KH: Your firm’s direction and leadership for
this project has been an outstanding and
progressive example of reconciliation that is
both relevant and timely. Can you tell us in
your own words what belonging looks like
to you?
CB: If nothing of your culture, history, language
or art is visible within the public spaces of
your town or city—how can you ever feel
welcome there? There is a deep history
of indigenous place-making at the scale
of communities, structures, and landscapes
that we can draw on for inspiration. Places
that can draw Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people together in an inclusive circle. Places
that can better support and represent who
we are, and want to be, as Canadians.
BIO/
Calvin Brook is an architect, urban designer, and planner, and co-founder of brook mcilroy, a firm with offices in toronto and thunder bay.
Katherine Hamilton, BLA, is a long-time resident of Thunder Bay who works in the land acquisition/management industry.
Round Table
.34
Moderated by Kate Nelischer, Landscape Architectural Intern
Held as a public
forum at the
University of
Toronto, on
April 25, 2016,
this Round Table
explores the
future of the
profession
14
Round Table
BIOS/
Adrienne Hall, Landscape Architectural Intern, is an artist and designer working in the overlapping fields of art, spatial research, and landscape architecture. She received her Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph,
and will be entering the Interdisciplinary Master of
Fine Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2016. She has worked on various public and private landscape architecture projects in Toronto at NAK Design Strategies.
Alex Josephson co-founded PARTISANS in 2012 after studying architecture at the University of Waterloo, the University of Rome, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA). PARTISANS is an intrepid practice comprised of architects, artists, thinkers, and cultural enthusiasts whose work across all scales is rooted in deliberate acts of craftsmanship and
storytelling. The studio’s projects have been
featured in international publications, such as Wallpaper, Dezeen, Frame, and designboom, won
numerous awards, including the R+D Award,
Canadian Interiors’ Best of Canada Award and 2015
Project of the Year, and the Ontario Association
of Architects’ Best Emerging Practice and Design
Excellence awards, and shortlisted by MCHAP and
the World Architecture Festival. The only Canadian
to have ever received the New York Prize Fellowship at the Van Alen Institute, Alex was recently
named Best Emerging Designer by Canada’s Design
Exchange. He currently lectures at the University
of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture,
landscape, and design.
Nina-Marie Lister is Associate Professor of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto. From 2009-2013 she was Visiting Professor in Landscape Architecture and Urban
Planning at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, and in 2014, Visiting Professor
of Landscape Architecture at the University of
Toronto. A Registered Professional Planner (MCIP,
RPP) with a background in resource management, ecology, and environmental planning,
Lister is the founding principal of plandform, a creative studio practice exploring the relationship between landscape, ecology, and urbanism.
Her research, teaching, and practice focus on
the confluence of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes within contemporary
metropolitan regions. Through this, she has developed three streams of applied research and
design: adaptive ecological design for ecosystem complexity and biodiversity conservation; parklands and waterfronts in post-industrial landscapes; and urban food systems and productive/
edible landscapes. Kate Nelischer, Landscape Architectural Intern, is a Senior Public Consultation Coordinator
at the City of Toronto, and a member of the Ground Editorial Board.
Alissa North, oala, is the Director of the Master
of Landscape Architecture Program at Daniels faculty of architecture, landscape, and design
at the university of toronto, where she is an
Associate Professor. A Founding Partner of the Toronto landscape architecture practice North Design Office Inc., she is committed to designing urban environments to engender vibrant communities and ecologies.
Cecelia Paine, oala, is a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph where she currently teaches community design and professional practice. Active in professional bodies, Cecelia has served as president of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and
the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects,
was the founding editor of Canada’s professional magazine, Landscapes Paysages, and
is immediate past-president of the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation. She is a Fellow
of both the Canadian society of landscape architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects.
15
.34
Kate Nelischer (KN): We’re looking at
the future of landscape architecture, and
exploring what questions haven’t been
asked and what questions should be
asked. Looking to the future must be done
with one eye on the past, so I’m wondering:
what are some of the key questions
surrounding the profession of yesterday,
today, and tomorrow?
Alex Josephson (AJ): I think the primary
difference between now and ten years
ago is that the distinctions between
specialties are now disappearing. In the
1970s, everybody specialized, and now
there is convergence. In all of our projects, we seem to be witnessing a blurring
of boundaries between landscape and
architecture. Obviously, there are regulatory reasons that we’re separate, but we’re
coming together again. For the future, it
seems to me that landscape architects and
landscape designers could really tap into
new technologies, processes, and methodologies, and actually implement them far
more smoothly than architects because the
performative vectors in landscape tend to
be more concentrated.
Nina-Marie Lister (NML): I’m a trained
ecologist and I’m also a planner, so I tend
to share a perspective on landscape that
has to do with scale, which is familiar to
those of you who are practising landscape
architects. There’s a resonance of scale, you
might say. But there’s also a dissonance for
me because I tend to work with processes
that are very long-term. They’re ecological
in nature. Looking back on the profession of
landscape architecture, I would say that in
the 1960s or 70s, we came to a time of crisis
and concern about the ways in which landscape architects might be called to action to
intervene in those systems—to make them
safer and healthier, and so on.
In the past twenty years, at least for the
time in which I’ve been practising at that
interstitial space of urbanist meta-ecology,
landscape has been redescribed as the
city itself. Looking forward from this vantage
point, it’s time to question the role of landscape within the urban landscape itself.
What are the roles of ecological processes?
What is the role of the wild? Who speaks
for ideas of wild, wildness, and wilderness
when we have cities that are ever larger
in size? What is the role of the landscape
architect in commenting on the place of
nature, the ideas of nature, both within and
outside the city? These are really challenging
questions. They’re also very pressing. If the
urban landscape is the only landscape that
future generations will ever really know,
how do we navigate and mediate the role
of the wild within cities? These are questions
of form as well as function, because they
relate to the way in which we design and
build with those landscapes. Infrastructure
is being redefined as alive and living, which
means that landscape architects have a
pivotal role—one that will increasingly be
more transdisciplinary, where the boundaries
are, if not dissolved, challenged.
Alissa North (AN): In a certain way, things
haven’t really changed. If you were to read
the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted today,
not knowing the time period in which he
was writing, the questions and the problems sound very much the same as they
do today. However, even a decade ago
we were constantly speaking about ideas
as polarized: for instance, nature versus
culture; art against science; ecology versus
society. But I think we’re at the point now,
in the anthropocene age, of recognizing
that those sets of binaries, in which we’re
constantly putting ourselves in oppositional
problematics, don’t work. Rather, we’re
really looking at a sort of single nature.
That’s where I think landscape architecture
is heading toward.
In architecture right now there’s an obsession with technology. Landscape architects
are a bit further behind in this, but I think
there’s going to be a leapfrogging ahead—
for example, with sensor technologies and
being able to operate and adjust landscape
responses in real-time.
Round Table
Adrienne Hall (AH): The critical questions
we’re discussing today were central to
the questions the profession of landscape
architecture, in North America, was founded
upon. From the very beginning, Olmsted did
have a very critical understanding of what
nature meant, and that all the landscapes
he created were constructed natures.
One of the biggest challenges we face
as constructors of “nature” relates to the
public’s understanding of what is wild
and what is manmade.
I think that landscape architects have
recognized, in the past twenty years,
the importance of becoming much more
educated about ecology and natural
systems, but perhaps we actually need to
know much more about the greater social
systems that are governing the anthropocene age—things like economics and
cultural migration. We have a very shallow
understanding or analysis of who’s going
to be inhabiting our spaces.
Cecelia Paine (CP): A book that just
came out, called The Death of Professions,
argues that the need for professions is
dying. That’s something to think about.
Another important issue is the question of
just who we’re designing for. Olmsted was
designing public parks, parks for everyone,
and yet he was really designing for the one
percent… People all over the world are
impoverished. How do we deal with some
of the bigger issues that are influencing
millions of people around the world?
KN: It’s interesting to think about the
process by which Olmsted designed those
iconic landscapes such as Central Park in
New York City, and how different this is from
what we do today. A lot of the work I do, for
example, is focused on public consultation.
I’m wondering what the panel thinks about
how that public process creates design, and
if it creates better design? Are we are going
along the right track in engaging people in
our processes? Are we creating any better
landscapes than, say, Central Park, which
.34
was created without any public consultation,
or, as Cecelia said, not even really considering
the people who actually live there?
AJ: In my experience, processes of
engagement are there to pacify a group
of people who care about something. But
fundamentally, these public consultations
are done after the designs are already
done. You can move a tree here, move
a setback there, change the colour, but
fundamentally, the big things have already
been decided.
NML: The real question is: what is the
role of design relative to a much more
meaningful and enriched engagement
of the public? There is a problem with not
understanding integrated, complex systems and how we design a city. Landscape
architecture is one sliver of that; the public
engagement process is another tiny sliver
of that. These questions are layered and
complex, they’re not easy to answer. What
might the roles of our professionals look like
if we really took seriously what the publics,
plural, want in our cities? I don’t purport to
have the answer, but I think it’s important to
ask these questions in an honest way that
gets at where the problems lie, for sure.
Consultation isn’t solving problems of urban
resilience, for example.
AJ: We tried an experiment recently in
which we went with an anthropologist
to a neighbourhood and actually started
consulting. I feel like a group of people can
realistically tackle roughly ten square blocks.
You can get a good snapshot of the unique
possibilities of a place before you then go
into the consultation, and that can inform
the design so much more than a blanket
design aesthetic treatment.
AN: Scale is so important for issues of
public consultation: how many people can
come together to answer the fundamental
questions on a project? We’re working on
the master plan for our kid’s schoolyard. It’s
easy—you send out a survey, it’s
16
done online, kids and parents can click on
whether they want the frog playground
piece of equipment or something else…
But you know what? It comes down to
separating out priorities that may not be
so apparent in certain ways. On much
larger projects, how do you ask the
questions in the right way to get feedback
that can be valuable?
AH: There are a lot of in-depth and
complicated issues to address when you’re
dealing with the public that landscape
architects can’t expect to know all about.
Instead of engaging someone who is
simply a facilitator, why not engage someone who’s an ecologist or a sociologist, or
a social worker, or someone who works
at the United Way neighbourhood office for
that project—someone who has much more
on-the-ground knowledge of the place?
Another layer is that we need to look at who
we are as designers and how we can bring
diversity to the spaces we’re designing. You
get a broader understanding of place from
different backgrounds. But the profession is
still predominantly white, and mostly male.
AN: The demographics for graduates are
predominantly female, but you tend to lose
them very quickly when you get into the
motherhood years.
CP: If you look at people of my age, the
profession is male dominated. If you look at
people Alissa’s age it’s probably half and
half, and for the younger generation, it’s
probably dominated by women.
AH: Maybe gender is actually not the most
important thing? I’m thinking more of ethnic
diversity, economic diversity.
KN: The American Society of Landscape
Architects did a survey: in 2012, 82 percent
of the practising landscape architects in the
United States were white.
Round Table
AH: I’m not surprised—it’s a different situation in the States, where higher education
is really a privilege and it’s much more
expensive than Canadian universities.
CP: We stopped requiring portfolios for
applicants to our BLA program. We ended
up with a more diverse student body. That’s
one of the big reasons why we stopped
requiring a portfolio. They’re discriminatory.
Only wealthy people can afford to study art
and prepare portfolios.
NML: Representation in any profession is
a loaded question. You need to ask who
are in positions of power, who’s getting the
work, who are the top-grossing principals
and the influence of their work, and who’s
teaching, and how many are at the rank
of full professor, how many are publishing,
and how many are taking on advanced
graduate students? When you start disaggregating the data, you get a different
picture. Certainly we are not particularly well
represented in terms of the diversity of populations we serve. This relates to the points
that have been raised already regarding
the dissolving of the edges of the profession—the places for us to merge our talents
and be very strategic about how we inform
ourselves of the clientele we serve. We
need more nuanced research. That’s my
suggestion regarding whether you find an
anthropologist or a sociologist to put on your
teams. The value of research is that it leads
to the possibility of a richer, more nuanced
evidence-informed practice. And the evidence you’re gathering helps you to know
your clientele better, helps you to know your
publics better. And the formalization of that
research into the academy and into practice
is hugely valuable and timely, and, frankly,
not very well done in landscape architecture
to date, though not for any lack of desire.
CP: Practitioners are not using the research
that’s available to them. But an argument
can be made that the academy is not
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doing the research that practitioners feel is
relevant to them. I think that the merging of
research and design is what will truly make
us a discipline and a profession. I mean,
can you imagine doctors not keeping up
with what the journals are saying?
AJ: My firm has an R and D shop. Beyond
the fact that working with people in other
professions makes your practice better, I
just find it more enjoyable to work that way.
It’s enriching.
Our firm applies for all these grants. But
there’s nobody on the funding agencies’
juries to adjudicate an architecture research
grant. It’s lumped in with fine arts grants,
and the juries look at the proposal and say,
that’s not an artwork.
CP: There’s a team from the Canadian
Society of Landscape Architects trying to
have landscape architecture research recognized by the national research councils.
AJ: We exist in limbo in another sense,
as well, because the Ministry of Tourism,
Culture and Sport took out landscape
design, landscape architecture, architectural
design, and interior design from their entire
cultural platform.
AH: I think you have to separate being a
profession and being an industry. Going
back to the 1970s or 80s, a lot of people
were and still are working as an industry on
a very service-based platform as consultants
to commercial clients concentrated on a very
narrow economic bottom line. In this kind
of position, many practices are not driven
to use research that academics are doing
because of the industry business model.
CP: In our undergraduate capstone course
this spring, every student had to be able to
provide evidence for their design, and it had
to be peer-reviewed evidence. We think
people should be able to create research
results and be able to read, understand,
and use them.
AN: U of T’s research is really impacting
practice right now though the GRIT Lab,
where, on the green roof, the testing of
green roof permutations allows the lab to
directly influence policy. This is a landscapearchitect-led, multidisciplinary study with
ecologists, engineers, and multiple PhD
students, and they’re publishing results on
various permutations that have never been
tested before in Toronto. Academics need
to be thinking about their research agendas
in a way that actually can and will have
impact on the cities in which they’re located.
AH: Now that we have a mandatory
continuing education requirement for OALA
membership, that’s a huge step, though
it was quite difficult to pass. The idea of
expanding your knowledge and keeping
up with current research seems like a
no-brainer, but it’s something that
is actually new to being a practising
professional landscape architect.
AN: I remember the first time I went to
an ASLA meeting, as an undergraduate
student, and I was overwhelmed by the
expo floor—just blown away at the scale
of everything you could specify and put into
a design. I think it’s incumbent upon us to
think about how we want to transform this
world and the tools that are going to allow
us to do that in a way that’s not just about a
pick-and-choose solution.
NML: It’s absolutely important and incumbent on those of us who have positions
within the academy to train professionals,
but also to ask important research questions
that no one gets paid to ask.
But be careful what you wish for… As
someone who holds grants funded by the
federal government, I can tell you that the
minute you start to draw boundaries in
research around what the profession is, you
will also be told what the profession is not.
And so while we have this luxurious position
of being able to team up with our professional allies, we can do things like be clever
Round Table
about who fronts the grant under which
category. We then have to sometimes twist
our research question because we know
that’s how the reviewers are going to look at
it, but we can ask very broad questions and
we can challenge and push back because
we’re not so categorically defined.
As well, when we ask for research- or
evidence-informed practice and research,
we want to be sure that the research
questions are not so finely tuned as to
make them entirely widget-based, so that
they become market-based solutions that
wind up on the expo floor. This is not the
solution for building knowledge, right? It’s
policy-relevant and maybe or maybe not
practice-relevant, but we still need a canon
of research that opens up questions that
are never going to be marketable. Frankly,
I think the profession’s a long way from that.
AH: I would love to see engineering come
together much more with landscape and
architecture studies.
CP: When I started out, engineers were
always the bad guys. Now that companies
like AECOM and Stantec are absorbing so
many of us, they have come to like working
with us. Especially with the green infrastructure movement, they’ve become very
good partners for landscape architects,
and they create tremendous opportunities
for us. There’s been a huge transition from
running away from engineers to really welcoming the opportunity to work with them,
and vice versa.
AJ: In his book The Revolt of the Masses,
Ortega y Gasset said that the death of
civilization is actually the specialized man,
and the self-satisfied man. If the professions
are dying, maybe it’s a good thing?
KN: The question really is: what’s the core
of landscape architecture?
NML: And what is it shifting towards? When
every fact that we used to have to memorize
is now something that’s on your phone, at
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your fingertips, do we not need to process
knowledge differently? Are there different
types of knowledge that become more
important because they’re not immediately
accessible? As an analogy, if I’m going into
surgery, I probably want a surgeon who
knows a lot without having to check his or
her iPhone before operating on me.
We also have interactive possibilities of
working in real time where information is
being updated, so it’s not a question of
holding things in our heads—we hold
different kinds of information and cognitive
pathways. So it stands to reason that we
would practise differently, and that the core
of what’s considered essential knowledge
will shift. Though I still hope you have to
learn about plants. I still hope you know
something about the material palette of
your profession, as architects know about
material palettes in theirs.
AN: It’s a way of thinking that may not be
unique to landscape architects. The idea of
lateral thinking as a way to solve complex
problems is a broad way of thinking about
knowledge, and then the specific technical
aspects within that larger realm of thinking
are basically what make you a landscape
architect. You have to have knowledge of all
those individual technical aspects and then
be able to draw upon any of those tools
within this method of lateral thinking that
allows you to always figure out a solution to
complex problems. That’s something that
landscape architects are incredibly good at.
An engineer has a very specific lens, and a
landscape architect can say, what if we look
at it this way instead?
CP: UBC is taking the process we use as
landscape architects, the structure of the
design process, and teaching business
students to think more broadly.
AN: We really need to claim that process
as ours. It’s a design way of thinking, and
we can’t let go of that as being one of
our key competencies, our overarching
key competency.
AJ: Everybody’s going to figure out the
equation, but it’s actually just design.
NML: Quick, agile visual communication is
invaluable in the climate in which we find
ourselves. Being able to tell a story visually,
being able to explain a process—whether
it’s with a diagram or a design—is incredibly valuable in a multi-lingual, very diverse,
ethnocultural country—that is, being able to
sit with a group of people with diverse backgrounds, and explain a process, propose
an idea, with a very simple device called
a pencil. This is very old fashioned, and it
sounds so facile that you forget it’s a powerful thing, right?
AN: I don’t believe that the LARE exam is an
accurate judgment of that skill, and I believe
our students do have that skill.
NML: If the gatekeepers of what constitutes the profession are asking very
different questions than the people who
are entering the practice, then there’s a
disconnect. We need to define what is the
core of landscape architecture and relate
that to the gatekeepers, because that
will determine whether you’re inside or
outside of the field. We need to determine
the blurry edges and the creative tensions
between the edge and the centre. This is
moving all the time in a world that is fastpaced, diverse, and complex.
AN: Landscape architects need to start
defining—not just responding to—the
projects that are important for our current
contemporary conditions. An example is
what George Dark is doing, where he’s
working with Evergreen to create a new
park in Toronto’s Don Valley. It’s not a park
that is ready to be put out as an RFP by
the City of Toronto, but it’s a need for the
city that’s actually going to solve several
contemporary issues. George is working
on defining that need. If we’re always just
sitting and waiting for a call, for the RFP,
we’re always going to be the last ones to
join the project, versus going in and saying this is the type of work that landscape
Round Table
architects can do, this is what we’re expert
in. George figured this out a long time ago,
and I think it’s a really necessary agenda
if we want to elevate our profession in any
significant way.
amazing examples of neighbourhoods
utterly transformed by the introduction of
nature to their lives. Would anyone like to
comment on what could be done for Toronto
if this power were unleashed?
NML: There’s a moment for landscape
architecture to claim a stake in the shaping
of that space, but also to show the relevance of that to the city system as a whole.
Evergreen is a convener and a host, but
the idea is owned by the collective and by
the city, but landscape architecture is at the
centre of it.
AN: I published a book called Operative
Landscapes: Building Communities Through
Public Space, and it’s based on the idea that
if we design public space so that the community can grow and iterate their ideals on that
public space, then the space will constantly
be able to renew itself into continued relevancy. We can’t keep thinking that there’s a
bank account someone will give us; instead,
we need to find our own projects.
KN: I’d like to open up the floor to questions
from the audience.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I believe there’s an
important role for landscape architects to
be a bit more entrepreneurial in how they
approach work. What are your thoughts
on the role of pro bono work, what’s being
called public interest design?
AH: There’s an organization called P-REX,
run by Alan Berger, and their refined
model is very research-based, posing
very large-scale questions—very much
the opposite of site-based practice. One of
their major clients has been Toyota, and
they’re looking at what urbanization and
suburbanization might look like in the next
ten or twenty years.
NML: We have to find more entrepreneurial
ways of moving our research out into practice. There’s a social innovation component
for those of us who are academics, or who
have one foot in the academy and one foot
in practice. There are all kinds of new niches
emerging, ways to leverage our work out
into practice and still maintain an ability to
innovate or change that practice through a
connection to research.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Landscape architecture has the ability to transform communities,
to change our world in urban settings in positive ways. Take the example of a run-down
park system in the city. There are so many
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AUDIENCE QUESTION: At the beginning of
this discussion, it was noted that we’re in the
age of the anthropocene, of global climate
change, and that these changes have to do
with life systems and organisms. How will you
address the future of that change?
CP: I had a student a couple of years ago
who looked at the City of Toronto’s plant list,
the plants they recommend to developers,
and the student looked at it in terms of the
models of climate change that are out there,
and found that more than half of the plants
will not survive in forty years. The research
is published in Landscapes Paysages if you
want to read it.
AH: One thing we can do is to educate the
public. One of our skills relates to visual communication and visual synthesis in a fast way.
Helping the public conceive of nature as
being something inclusive of the urban mess
we live in is a huge challenge.
NML: This question brings us right back to the
beginning of the conversation and identifying
the challenges ahead. If one of the challenges in the age of the anthropocene is that
nature is us and we are nature, then I’d also
urge caution, because while we can know a
lot about novel ecosystems—and a lot of us
spend time studying those changes, particularly in terms of constituent ecosystems in the
urban fabric and how they relate to ideas
of ecosystems that are not dominated
by people, ecosystems that are shrinking—we need to ask: what are we without
the rest of the species around us? Do we
continue defining our living urban experience only by cockroaches and blue jays
and rats, or is there something else to the
constituent species around us that matters?
That’s a social and cultural question. We
have to ask how much we value this very
wide spectrum of landscapes, from an
urban wild to another wild, and how we as
humans relate to ideas about nature.
While you can and should invest time in
understanding the novelty of the urban
ecosystem, and while there is tremendous
potential for public place-making and biomimicry and green infrastructure and all
the other things that landscape architects
are good at, we forget that there are many
other species on which we depend fundamentally for life support. That information
is a grey zone for landscape architects.
But there’s a vast amount of knowledge
that we might consider tapping into. What
might our role be to help navigate through
all this information, whether though communication or shining a light on a place to
value it?
Maybe it doesn’t even need design.
Maybe it needs a different kind of energy.
But it is part of the suite of questions that
landscape architects are equipped to deal
with, and I hope that you pose them, and
pose them articulately and somewhat
urgently with the professions that are there
to help with these collaborations.
With thanks to the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of architecture, Landscape, and Design for hosting Ground’s Round Table as a public event.
CSLA
Awards
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20
CSLA Awards
Canadian Society of Landscape Architects
Awards of Excellence—
Ontario Region
The Canadian Society of
Landscape Architects Awards
of Excellence are given for
outstanding accomplishment
in landscape architecture.
Congratulations to the following
OALA members whose projects
received awards.
02
03
Project Name:
University of Ottawa Campus Master Plan
Consultant:
Urban Strategies Inc.
Category:
Planning & Analysis | Large-Scale Design
Project Description:
The University of Ottawa Campus Master
Plan will guide the transformation of its
environment, image, and experience. It will
restructure the university’s mobility network
and enhance its open space system to
create a cohesive and memorable campus.
01
CSLA
Awards
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04
05
Project Name:
The West Don Lands
Consultant:
The Planning Partnership and PFS Studio
Category:
Public Landscapes Designed by
a Landscape Architect
06
Project Name:
Peace Garden at Nathan Phillips Square,
Toronto
Consultant:
PLANT Architect Inc.|Perkins + Will Canada
in Joint Venture with Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architecture and Adrian Blackwell
Urban Projects
Category:
Public Landscapes Designed by
Echoing the form of two cupped hands,
the new Peace Garden frames a lush
and intimate public garden focused on
the “project of peace” with a restored
pavilion and iconography. It transforms a
noisy space into a calm and richly planted
destination in which to linger.
07
01-03/
University of Ottawa Campus Master Plan
04-05/
The West Don Lands, Toronto
IMAGES/
IMAGES/
06-07/
IMAGES/
Courtesy of Urban Strategies Inc.
Courtesy of The Planning Partnership and PFS Studio
Peace Garden at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto
Courtesy of PLANT Architect Inc.
Between the Don River and the Distillery
District, a new neighbourhood is emerging
from a former industrial area into a vibrant
place to live, work, and explore, marking
a shift in thinking about how large-scale,
mixed-use projects can put the public
realm and pedestrians first.
CSLA
Awards
.34
22
CSLA Awards
08
09
Project Name:
230 Sackville
Consultant:
Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.
Category:
Residential Landscapes Designed by
230 Sackville’s multilevel urban landscape
offers ecological, aesthetic, and social
benefits within the Regent Park Revitalization.
Rooftop gardens foster community interaction
by creating unique spaces for residents of
all ages to connect with nature in the heart
of the city.
10
Project Name:
Bayview Glen Sustainable Neighbourhood
Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP)
Consultant:
Schollen & Company Inc.
Category:
New Directions | Conceptual Work
11
08-09/
IMAGES/
10-12/
IMAGES/
230 Sackville, Toronto
Courtesy of Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.
Bayview Glen Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP)
Courtesy of Schollen & Company Inc.
12
The Bayview Glen Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP) was initiated
by the Toronto and Region Conservation
Authority and the City of Markham to create
a sustainability strategy for an established
suburban community. The SNAP proposed
innovative solutions to manage runoff,
mitigate flooding, improve energy efficiency,
and enhance natural heritage through
community-based retrofit initiatives.
CSLA
Awards
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15
16
In addition to the National
Awards, the jury attributed
honorary mentions to the
following projects:
13
Project Name:
City of Kitchener: Cultural Heritage
Landscapes
Consultant:
The Landplan Collaborative Ltd.
Category:
Research | Communication
The purpose of this study is to provide a
working, readily accessible inventory of
the City of Kitchener’s cultural heritage
landscapes, beyond the recognition of
individual heritage properties, which will
serve as a planning tool in the assessment
and management of these resources as
the community changes and evolves.
14
Project Name:
City of Toronto: The Grow More Manual
Consultant:
Forest and Field Landscape Architecture
Category:
Research | Communication
Downtown Fenwick Revitalization
(The Planning Partnership, David Leinster)
—
Queens Quay Central Waterfront
Revitalization (West8 + DTAH in joint
venture, Jelle Therry)
—
The recipient of the 2016 Jury’s Award
of Excellence and a National Award is
Lansdowne Park, designed by PFS Studio
of British Columbia, but the project is
situated in Ontario (in Ottawa).
—
13/
IMAGE/
14/
The Grow More Manual is a pocket-sized,
portable planning and implementation guide
for allotment and community gardening in the
City of Toronto. This accessible guide presents
democratic and efficient elements that are
easy to understand, construct, use and re-use,
providing each gardener with an equal
opportunity to grow.
City of Kitchener: Cultural Heritage Landscapes
Courtesy of The Landplan Collaborative Ltd.
City of Toronto: The Grow More Manual
IMAGE/
Courtesy of Forest and Field Landscape Architecture
15-16/
Lansdowne Park, Ottawa
IMAGES/
Courtesy of PFS Studio
OALA
Awards
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2016
OALA
AWARDS
Congratulations to all
those honoured with 2016
OALA Recognition Awards, and
a special thanks to the OALA
Awards Committee:
Sarah Culp, Nelson Edwards, Jim Melvin, Joanne Moran (chair), Linda Thorne, Maren Walker, and Jane Welsh.
OALA
Awards
25
.34
OALA Awards
OALA Public Practice Award:
This award recognizes the outstanding
leadership of a member of the
profession in public practice who
promotes and enhances landscape
architecture by working for improved
understanding and appreciation of the
work of landscape architects in both
public and private practice.
Marion Rabeau
Marion Rabeau has successfully brought
the discussion of the need for asset
management, specifically in relation to
park infrastructure, to the forefront at the
City of Burlington. With her knowledge of
park planning, design, and construction,
she has taken the lead for the Parks
and Open Space section, Capital Works
Department, to develop and implement
an asset management system for park
infrastructure. This innovative work
makes it possible to estimate funding
requirements into the future to maintain
park infrastructure at the required level
of service, ensuring that funding for park
infrastructure is considered along with
other funding requirements for competing
asset categories in the city.
Steve Barnhart
Steve Barnhart has worked for the City
of Hamilton for 12 years. Ten of those
years were spent as part of Landscape
Architectural Services in Public Works, where
his quiet and reserved manner subtly
inspired the people around him. A mentor
to many, Steve was promoted to manager
of the section in 2010. He is knowledgeable
in the fields of planning and landscape
architecture, and is able to balance the
small details with big picture ideas. Steve
has played a key role in the construction of
numerous unique stormwater management
techniques, many of which were reviewed
and followed by other municipalities and
Conservation Authorities.
DAVID ERB MEMORIAL AWARD:
The award is named after David Erb, who
was an outstanding volunteer in furthering
the goals of the OALA, and his examples set
a truly high standard. The award is the best
way to acknowledge the one outstanding
OALA member each year whose volunteer
contributions over a number of years have
made a real difference.
Tim McCormick
Tim McCormick is a passionate advocate
for our profession. He is committed to
outreach initiatives that serve to strengthen
the OALA’s partnership with the accredited
programs of landscape architecture in
Ontario and is encouraging the future
generation of emerging professionals. His
volunteerism reflects a strong commitment
to the future of our Association. Aside
from his OALA service, Tim has also
made himself available “on call” to attend
landscape architecture course class
sessions, as needed. He is appreciated
by university faculty as well as several
generations of students.
OALA AWARD FOR SERVICE
TO THE ENVIRONMENT: This award is given to a non-landscape
architectural individual, group, organization,
or agency in the Province of Ontario to
recognize and encourage a special or
unusual contribution to the sensitive,
sustainable design for human use of
the environment. The contribution must
emulate the fundamental principles of the
OALA and the OALA Mission Statement
and go beyond the normal levels of
community action in preserving, protecting,
or improving the environment.
Waterfront Regeneration Trust (WRT)
The WRT is governed by a Board with
Hon. David Crombie, an Honorary
Member of the OALA, as the Founding
Chair; D. Keith Laushway, Chair; and
Marlaine Koehler as Executive Director.
The WRT was established as a charity in
1992 to develop, enhance, and expand
the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail. It
has since included the promotion and
development of a Greenway Trail through
the Ontario Greenbelt to further the healthy
environment and lifestyle of Ontarians.
OALA
Awards
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26
OALA Awards
OALA Certificate Of Merit For
Service To The Environment:
This certificate is given to a nonlandscape architectural individual, group,
organization, or agency in Ontario to
recognize and encourage a special or
unusual contribution to the sensitive,
sustainable design for human use of the
environment. Contributions may have
had a local, regional, or provincial impact
through policy, planning, or design, or as
an implemented project.
Town of Milton and Conservation Halton
for the Restoration Framework: Stream
Corridors and Natural Area Buffers for the
Boyne and Derry Green Subwatershed of Sixteen Mile and Indian Creeks
The Restoration Framework is the culmination
of Sixteen Mile Creek and associated
subwatershed studies conducted by the
Town of Milton in support of new Secondary
Plans since 1998. The recent Boyne Survey
and Derry Green Business Park Secondary
Plans, which will ultimately support 50,000
new residents and add 470 ha to Milton’s
employment lands, were developed
under a concurrent Subwatershed Update
Study. In 2011 the Town took the lead to
provide guidance for detailed site-specific
landscape plans for these restoration works.
The restoration framework was ultimately
developed to guide the design of the new
riparian corridors and buffers in an adaptive,
cost-effective manner, in order to create a
system of connected ecological features and
wildlife functions.
OALA CARL BORGSTROM AWARD FOR SERVICE TO THE ENVIRONMENt:
This award is given to individual landscape
architects or a landscape architectural
group to recognize and encourage special
or unusual contribution to the sensitive,
sustainable design for human use of the
environment. This award is named in
honour of Carl Borgstrom who, of all OALA’s
founders, was the most actively in tune with
the natural landscape.
Dougan & Associates Ecological Consulting & Design
Dougan & Associates Ecological Consulting
& Design was founded by James Dougan in
1981. As an ecologist and Honorary Member
of the OALA, Jim’s deep understanding of
ecology and his vision for what a healthy
landscape could be led him to hire a
landscape architect as his first employee.
Since that time, the firm has grown from
a sole proprietorship to 16 employees
with expertise in landscape architecture,
terrestrial ecology, and GIS. Based in Guelph,
Ontario, Dougan & Associates provides a
wide range of services to the public and
private sectors.
OALA JACK COPELAND AWARD FOR ASSOCIATE LEADERSHIP AND CONTRIBUTION: This award recognizes the outstanding
leadership and contribution of an Associate
for going above and beyond to assist fellow
Associates. Activities include, but are not
limited to, tutorials, LARE exam help, special
tasks, OALA Library, special events, meeting
Associates and others, including being an
Associate representative on OALA Council.
This award is named after Jack Copeland,
who passed away in 2013. Jack was an
active Ottawa-area member who was an
enthusiastic advocate for Associate members.
Maren Walker
Since joining the OALA as an Associate
member, Maren has been involved in
Association activities. She joined the OALA
Council in the spring of 2015 and has
worked to ensure that Associates have
the resources they need to become full
members of the OALA. She has organized
and facilitated LARE workshops and has
improved upon the workshop coordination
to ensure they are both effective and
productive. Maren has located the
most current online and downloadable
resources to assist Associates in preparing
for the LARE while aiding in the operation
of the newly founded online support
forums for members who are studying.
Aside from her role as the Associate
representative Maren is also an active
member of the Social Committee working
to organize events for OALA members
throughout the year and encouraging
Associate participation.
OALA
Awards
OALA HONORARY MEMBER AWARD: The Honorary category of membership
is for non-landscape architects whom
Council wishes to recognize for
outstanding contributions in their own
fields that improve the quality of natural
and human environments.
Robert Gordon
Robert Gordon is the recent past Dean of
the Ontario Agricultural College and also
a professor in the School of Environmental
Sciences. He was appointed on August 1,
2008, and was serving his second five-year
term until October, 2015, when he took
a position at Wilfred Laurier University in
Waterloo. As a researcher, Dean Gordon
focused on environmental resource
management at the farm level. He has
dedicated the latter part of his career to
the advancement of OAC, its departments,
campuses, and research stations, as
well as supporting Ontario’s agriculture
and food industries and our environment
and rural communities. Returning to the
University of Guelph as the 14th Dean
of OAC, he took leadership just as large
financial cuts were imposed on the
college. Dean Gordon proved to be a
champion for the continued viability of
the School of Environmental Design and
Rural Development (SEDRD), which is
home to Guelph’s landscape architecture,
planning and capacity development, and
extension programs.
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OALA EMERITUS MEMBER: Emeritus members are full members
of the OALA who have ceased full-time
practice and who are nominated by
another full member in recognition of
their years of service to the profession.
Owen Scott
Owen Scott has been an OALA member
since 1968 and a CSLA member since
1966, being elected to Fellowship in the
CSLA in 1977. He has served as President
of the OALA (1973-1975), the CSLA (19761978), and the Ontario Chapter of the
American Society of Landscape Architects
(1984). He and his wife, Barbara, edited
and published the country’s official
landscape architectural magazine and
journal, Landscape Architecture Canada,
from 1975 to 1981, for which he was
honoured with a CSLA Communications
Award in 1980. He also served as chair
of the memorable CSLA Congress in
Kitchener in 1973, Secretary/Treasurer
of the CSLA College of Fellows from
1979 to 1989, member of the CSLA
Accreditation Council, and numerous
other committees. His contributions to the
community include chairing the City of
Guelph’s LACAC (now Heritage Guelph),
director of the Canadian Association of
Heritage Professionals, member of both
the Advisory Board of the Architectural
Conservancy of Ontario and the Advisory
Council for the Centre for Canadian
Historical Horticultural Studies.
OALA PINNACLE AWARD FOR LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURAL
EXCELLENCE:
This award recognizes an OALA member
and his or her professional work. It singles out
specific projects to draw attention to a body
of work which demonstrates outstanding
professional accomplishment.
Cecelia Paine
Cecelia has been an active member of the
OALA for more than three decades, and
during this period has made a substantive
and remarkable contribution to the profession
of landscape architecture and to our related
landscape architectural associations, namely
CSLA and LACF. Cecilia is a passionate
landscape architect who has been committed
to the profession over her long career. Her
lifelong association with our profession began
in the private sector, practising in Chicago
and then in Ottawa over a period of 18 years.
Throughout the course of her career, Cecelia
has received numerous juried awards in
areas of professional practice, ranging from
landscape architecture and planning to
research, teaching, and communication.
She has served as President of both the
OALA and the CSLA and was on both
governing boards for several years.
Her significant service to the profession
has been acknowledged with special
recognitions including the prestigious national
Schwabenbauer Award in 2009. Also, in
evidence of her recognized commitment
and contributions, Cecelia has been made
a Fellow of both the CSLA and the ASLA.
Student Corner
28
.34
01
Networking,
presentations,
parties, after-parties,
after-after parties—an
attendee dishes on
this annual event
01/
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Ohio State University landscape architecture studio
Cyrille Viola
The bicycle shelters in downtown Columbus sport green roofs.
Adele Pierre
Student Corner
29
.34
text by Adele Pierre
Why attend LABash? That’s the question we
were asking ourselves as we piled into a
van at end of term to head down to Columbus, Ohio. Five of us MLA students had just
presented our final project for community
design studio, and one of our number was in
the final stages of writing a thesis. We were
tired and bleary-eyed, not sure we were up
for a long drive and conference. We arrived
in Columbus in the evening, met up with
six University of Guelph BLA students who
had driven down as well, caught site of the
smiling face of Amanda Berry, OALA, at one
of the sponsor booths, and then set out to
meet more than 300 landscape architecture
students from across the continent.
LABash originated in 1970 at the University
of Guelph, and each year it is planned,
organized, and run by students for students.
Because our programs are studio-based,
landscape architecture schools tend to
be small in size. LABash brings together
hundreds of students and professionals—
a broad community connecting through
inspiring talks, informative seminars, good
meals, and great parties.
The opening keynote address was given
by Brad McKee, editor of Landscape
Architecture Magazine. He set the tone for
the conference, speaking eloquently about
the need for social justice through use of
land. After citing instances of environmental
degradation, particularly lead pollution in
his home town of Desloges, Missouri, he
ended his talk with reference to the work of
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FCSLA, who is
planning, building, and planting with deep
respect for land and culture.
The evening concluded with what proved to
be a recurring theme: lots of food and drink
accompanied by animated conversation.
Where are you from? What school? What kind
of courses and projects? What will you do
after? For Laura Williams, a student at the
University of Guelph, “The best part about
LABash was networking with like-minded
students from across North America. It’s
inspiring to talk to talented people with similar
interests who want to create positive change
in the world.”
02
Throughout the weekend, the keynote
speakers stressed the importance of creating
positive change, not through massive projects, but by improving existing spaces and
connecting people to place. Shannon Nichol
of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol spoke about the
Pike-Pine Renaissance project in Seattle,
creating connectivity from a neighbourhood
to the waterfront by overcoming the barrier
of a busy commercial street. Laura Solano
presented the Michael Van Valkenburgh
Associates, Inc. master plan for the Lower
Don Lands in Toronto, showing the creation
of a healthy ecosystem at the mouth of the
Don River while providing green space for
residents nearby. The speakers were not
shy about presenting the challenges of their
projects and reminding us of the importance
of thorough analysis both of land and culture.
Friday and Saturday were filled with informative sessions and tours. The sessions were
incredibly diverse, with 53 professionals
offering advice on topics such as: the need
for nature in play; designing an office space;
creating budgets; Green Street initiatives;
working in an interdisciplinary firm; BIM (building information modelling); the importance of
construction knowledge (very important); and
composting. Many of the topics were familiar
to us but took on new meaning when shared
with colleagues from diverse locations.
University of Guelph student Cyrille Viola opted
to go on a tour of the Ohio State landscape
architecture studio: “I enjoyed the opportunity
to see the type and scope of projects the
students are working on, and the technologies that are being used in the classroom,
particularly the 3D printers. I also enjoyed
experiencing the landscape architecture
culture outside of Canada.” Saturday morning
featured a career fair, and professionals
offered to meet with students for one on one
portfolio review. Karen Shlemkevich, another
University of Guelph student, came back
energized from a productive session of good
criticism and positive feedback. She found out
later that her reviewer, Chad Danos, is the
current president of the ASLA.
The conference was inspiring, educational,
and, above all, a chance to broaden our
perspectives in a warm and receptive community. Mealtimes and social events were
times to meet new people, talk to students
and professionals, and have a great time.
The social events each evening were hosted
in unique venues, the parties were fun, and
everyone was invited to the after-party, then
the after-after party. The students of Ohio
State proved to be warm and welcoming
hosts, and during the closing ceremony they
handed over planning of LABash 2017 to the
University of Maryland.
Will it be worth going? Absolutely.
BIO/
Adele Pierre is an MLA candidate at the University of Guelph, with a special interest in the use of Geodesign tools and technologies to manage urban stormwater. She is also a professional violinist and landscape designer, living the good life on an
acreage in Haldimand County where she and her husband have a large vegetable garden, laying hens, honey bees, and an extensive collection of native flowering shrubs and perennials to feed the bees.
Plant Corner
30
.34
text by Sean James
Of the non-native plants that arrive
in Canada, whether accidentally or
deliberately through nursery introduction,
only one percent becomes a problem. Of
that one percent, 60 percent are brought
in for ornamental purposes—in other
words, by us.
While there are situations in which nonnative species aren’t likely to escape into
natural areas and disrupt native plants,
there are many locations, even in cities, such
as along ravines, where enormous damage
can be done to wildlife, plant diversity, and
even soil stability.
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Norway maple (Acer platanoides ‘Crimson King’) is an invasive non-
native tree.
Sean James
Pennsylvania sedge (Carex
pensylvanica)
Sean James
Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum)
Sean James
04/
Flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus) fall colour
IMAGE/
Sean James
05/
Freeman maple (Acer X freemanii)
IMAGE/
Sean James
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Forest Pansy redbud (Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’)
IMAGE/
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better adapted to local climates and pests,
ultimately making landscapes more resilient.
It’s often said that the public demands
certain species even though they can
damage the environment. For example,
many nurseries still grow the non-native,
invasive Crimson King Norway maple
because of perceived demand. However,
people’s likes, dislikes, and expectations/
preconceptions can be changed through
education. It’s important to spread the
message that native plants are often
Let’s start with dry shade, a notoriously
difficult growing condition. The following
natives are excellent choices. Solomon’s
seal (Polygonatum biflorum) has amazing
architecture and delicate spring flowers.
Flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus)
spreads slowly in dry shade, forming a fourfoot-tall thicket with great, bold texture, bright
magenta flowers in June, and soft yellow fall
colour. It can be fairly aggressive in fertile
soil, or areas that are irrigated, but it’s the
perfect plant for dry areas. It’s also food for
wildlife, though its fruit is usually too dry for
humans to eat. Pennsylvania sedge (Carex
pensylvanica) offers great texture and is
semi-evergreen. Each of these suggestions
is an excellent alternative to plants that
invade our wild areas (and are difficult to
keep in check in our landscapes) such as
the non-native goutweed, periwinkle, and
English ivy.
So, what are some great native and noninvasive alternatives to invasive species?
Sean James
Red oak (Quercus rubra) fall colour
Sean James
Chokeberry (Aronia abutifolia ‘Brilliantissima’) fall colour Sean James
Grey-twigged dogwood (Cornus
racemosa) fall colour
IMAGE/
Sean James
11/
Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) and monarch
02
Sean James
Blue flag iris (Iris versicolor)
IMAGE/
Sean James
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Fragrant waterlily (Nymphaea odorata)
IMAGE/
In rural areas, it’s easy for introduced seeds
to make the leap from the landscape to
the field or forest. This is especially the case
with wind-borne seeds and with berries that
birds eat and transport.
Schubert cherry (Prunus virginiana ‘Schubert’)
IMAGE/
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04
Sean James
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01
Sean James
03
There’s an irony with natives for dry shade
in that even though they’re bulletproof once
established, they need much more attention
for the first year in order to get their roots
deep into the soil. Mulching helps with
this, but people need to be taught how to
water properly if the xeriscape is to survive.
Barring rainfall, xeriscape plants need half
an inch of irrigation, twice a week, for the
first two months, and an inch a week for the
remainder of the first year. This encourages
roots to reach deep into the soil, one of
several characteristics that give xerophytic
plants their drought tolerance.
Plant Corner
31
.34
rich burgundy fall colour, and interesting
seed heads in winter. Chokeberry (Aronia
sp.) also has many seasons of interest, and
the various nativars of ninebark (Physocarpus
opulifolius cvs.) are great in many settings,
including rain gardens.
08
stunning fall colour and bring beauty to the
garden, attracting butterflies and birds and
increasing biodiversity, thereby keeping pest
populations down.
05
Trees and shrubs? The invasive tree that
does the most damage is Norway maple,
since it germinates so easily and casts
dense shade, making the establishment of
groundcover plants difficult. Norway maple
is a biological black hole—so few native
creatures can make use of it for food. An
alternative is the cultivar of the native cherry
tree, Schubert cherry (Prunus virginiana
12
09
10
06
The Ontario Invasive Plant Council, with
the help of Landscape Ontario and many
others, has put together a booklet, Grow
Me Instead, which lays out some invasive
species and some native and non-invasive
alternatives. It is available for free download
at ontarioinvasiveplants.ca.
07
‘Schubert’), which provides beautiful purple
colour. (A drawback is its susceptibility to
black knot, a fungal disease; however,
if pruned in August, the disease doesn’t
spread.) Forest Pansy redbud (Cercis
canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’) is also excellent
in sheltered areas and offers remarkable
spring flowers. Red oak (Quercus rubra) and
Freeman maple (Acer X freemanii cvs.) offer
Invasive wetland plants such as yellow 13
flag (Iris pseudacorus), yellow floating heart
(Nymphoides peltata), and flowering rush
(Butomus umbellatus) are all prone to
escaping from our gardens to the wild. Great
alternatives to these species include blue
flag (Iris versicolor), which tolerates a wide
variety of situations including salty roadside
bioswales and rain gardens; fragrant
waterlily (Nymphaea odorata), which grows
and blooms strongly and smells like peaches
and cream; and pickerelweed (Pontederia
cordata), a butterfly magnet that blooms in
mid-summer.
11
There are several excellent alternatives to the
commonly planted invasive shrubs Russian
olive, burning bush, and honeysuckle. Greytwig dogwood (Cornus racemosa) offers early
summer flowers, ivory berries for the birds,
BIO/
Sean James is a graduate of the Niagara Parks School of Horticulture, the owner of Fern Ridge Landscaping & Eco-consulting, and Chair of Landscape Ontario’s Environmental Stewardship Committee.
Research
Corner
32
.34
Jocelyn Hirtes in
conversation with
Dr. Manish Raizada,
a researcher at the
University of Guelph,
on his research
into low-cost
technologies that
reduce the need for
synthetic pesticides
Jocelyn Hirtes (JH): You’ve done a significant
amount of work with crops such as corn, and
you have expanded your research to include
alternatives to pesticides for other crops,
including turf grass. I’d like to discuss the
biological control of weeds such as
dandelions in turf grass using probiotic
microbes. I understand your research involves
discovering novel endophytes that can be
used as probiotics. Could you explain what
novel endophytes are?
Manish Raizada (MR): An endophyte is a
microbe, typically a bacteria or a fungus,
that inhabits the internal tissues of a plant
without causing disease. They’re analogous
to the probiotic microbes that inhabit the
human intestinal tract which, for example,
help us to digest milk. If you were to look
at any particular plant tissue, root, shoot, or
seed, they have dozens to hundreds of different species of naturally living bacteria or
fungi. These endophytes are in a symbiotic
relationship with their host plant. Their functions appear to be to help the plant combat
disease and pests, and to acquire nutrients
from the soil. Other research suggests that
they even help the plant resist certain types
of stress, such as drought. Endophytes,
in general, seem to represent a relatively
untapped reservoir of technology for agriculture, including turf grass systems, but
most endophytes remain to be explored.
We think this is on the order of thousands,
maybe tens of thousands, if not hundreds
of thousands of species living inside plants
that remain to be explored. I think it’s a very
exciting era that we’re entering into.
JH: What led you to undertake this research?
MR: We had discovered a couple of hundred
bacterial endophytes that live inside different
corn varieties, including wild relatives. We
did initial tests to determine if these microbes
could help plants increase their growth. We
happened to only have access to potatoes in
which the naturally occurring microbes had
been removed. So we injected the endophytes from the corn into the potatoes, and to
our surprise it actually inhibited the growth of
potato rather than increasing it. Potato comes
from a very different genetic family than corn.
They’re evolutionarily distant by about a hundred and fifty million years. Corn and other
grasses are monocots, which means single
seed, whereas potato belongs to the dicot
family, or two seeds. Think of peanuts—they
are dicots. When you eat a peanut, there’s
two halves to the peanut.
So, we then had this idea. Given that turf
grass (a monocot) is closely related to corn,
and dandelion (a dicot) is closely related to
potato, we thought that if we were to spray
endophytes in a turf field, it would have no
negative effect on turf grass (and might even
help the turf grass), but it might suppress the
dandelion. And, in fact, that’s what turned out
to be the case.
JH: Does this method suppress any
other weeds or have you just worked
with dandelions?
MR: We’re just doing those experiments
right now, so I can’t say anything conclusive
at this point.
JH: Are there any products on the market
now or that will soon come to market? How
will the endophytes actually get into the
plants? Will they be injected?
MR: Yes, there are some products on the
market. Golf courses already spray their turf
grass with microbes. They may not be endophytes, however. The product would be available as a powder, or would be mixed with
another substance like clay, and you would
add water to it. You would need a backpack
Research
Corner
sprayer to apply it. The liquid solution would
get in through the tiny natural cracks in the
plant’s surface, at branch unions or through
the stomata, which are the microscopic pores
on a leaf surface. Since some endophytes
work better at a specific temperature—for
example, some at 35 degrees, some at 22
degrees—the spray could be a mix of endophytes. Biotech industries and the endophyte
industry think this is an important topic. People
want specific herbicides. These endophytes
are specific, too.
JH: Would this application be for commercial
uses, like sod farms, or could homeowners
conceivably use these products on their
front lawns?
MR: This would definitely be easier for
commercial use than for homeowners, but
the potential application is definitely there.
Especially where pesticides have been
banned for residential use.
JH: Do you anticipate having to obtain
federal approval for the use of this product,
or because it’s a natural, non-harmful
product, would there be no regulation? Also,
do you think there would be any push back
from the pesticide industry against this more
low-cost technology?
MR: With regard to the first question, yes,
this is under federal regulation, and so if
we have success in the field, it will need to
be approved by the federal government
before it can be released commercially. That
is not a short process, and it is not a cheap
process. With regard to the second part of
your question, large biotech companies are
now investing hundreds of millions of dollars
into endophytes, as well as other microbes.
They actually see this as a future growth
technology. GMOs have become so expensive—it takes about five hundred million
dollars now to get one GMO to market—and
because there’s push back in terms of public
acceptance, the companies are now looking
towards other technologies. The nice thing is
33
.34
that these microbes are a rare example
of a technology that the organic industry likes
and favours. I don’t think there will be push
back from some pesticide companies. Quite
the opposite. I think there’s actually a lot of
support for this—they view it as a new growth
business. I don’t want to claim that these
microbes will take the place of pesticides,
but I think there’s a place for them. In areas
that have pesticide bans, this technology is a
good option, potentially.
essential. The traditional pesticide industry
spends a lot of time with the formulation—
for example, to make it stick to the plant,
to make sure the chemical is stable under
different temperature conditions. Our
industry, the endophyte industry, has to
do the same thing, and it does take some
time and resources to do that.
Unlike a herbicide or pesticide, a potential
advantage of these microbes is that they
could have a multipurpose trait. As an
example, we have a microbe that appears
to combat dandelions. But if you spray it
onto a turf field, it also suppresses the most
important disease of turf grass called Dollar
Spot disease. It’s quite possible, in addition,
that this microbe might have some nutrient
benefits. It might help the plant acquire
nutrients from the soil.
MR: The monetary cost may end up being
less expensive, but it depends on the extent
that the endophyte can persist across seasons. That’s something we’re also studying.
What we’re hoping is that once you spray
it onto a lawn, the endophyte will persist
in turf, or possibly even in the soil, across
seasons, so you get a multi-season benefit.
If that happens, then this technology will be
cheaper. If that does not happen, I don’t
think it will be cheaper. The other opportunity
is its multifunction benefit. If it does provide
multifunction benefit, then depending on
what those benefits are, that might bring the
overall costs down for the owner of that field
in terms of maintenance.
JH: Will this work as well as regular herbicides in terms of suppressing weed growth?
MR: It may not be as good as a herbicide,
but it may provide additional benefit. We don’t
know for sure at this point, but in general
what we see in our endophyte research for
different problems is that it’s not always 100
percent reliable. These are biological organisms, so if it’s a very hot day, or if it’s not humid
enough, or if you’re spraying with some
other chemical that might damage these
microbes—all of these things combined can
create variability. One of our missions is to
understand how this environmental variability
impacts the microbes’ effectiveness, and if
there’s any way to mitigate that. For example,
we’re combining different microbes—one
may work well at 23 degrees Celsius, another
works great at 35 degrees Celsius. So that’s
one way of doing it, by pyramiding microbes.
Another is by changing the spray formulation—for example, adding some nutrients
to the spray, or even coating microbes
with a sugar-type agent, a gel-type agent
that protects them before they can enter
the plant. The spray formulation is really
JH: Do you anticipate that this would actually
cost less than a traditional herbicide?
JH: Thank you very much for you time,
Dr. Raizada.
MR: Thank you. I’d like to add that this
research was supported by the Ontario
Turf Grass Research Foundation, as well
as a grant by the Agriculture Adaptation
Council, of Agriculture and Agri-Food,
Canada. Dylan Harding is the person
actually doing the research.
Notes
Notes:
A
Miscellany
of News
and
Events
34
.34
books
A number of interesting books have come
to Ground’s attention. Victory Gardens for
Bees (Douglas & McIntyre), by Vancouver
beekeeper and artist Lori Weidenhammer,
investigates the honey bee crisis and offers
plans for bee-friendly gardens and plants.
Architect and newspaper columnist Avi
Friedman’s A View From the Porch: Rethinking Home and Community Design (Véhicule
Press) presents a series of essays about
car-oriented urban design and alternatives.
Thoreau’s Wildflowers (Yale University Press),
edited by Geoff Wisner, with illustrations by
Barry Moser, is a selection of Thoreau’s flower
and nature writings, along with philosophical
musings. Guerrilla gardening—the practice
of cultivating land, without permission, for
urban agriculture—is a relatively neglected
topic in academic literature. Informal Urban
Agriculture: The Secret Lives of Guerrilla
Gardeners (Springer), by Michael Hardman
and Peter J. Larkham, explores this underground movement, presenting the stories
and the philosophies of people and groups
engaged in this somewhat controversial
activity. Permaculture and Climate Change
Adaptation (Permanent Publications), by
Thomas Henfrey and Gil Penha-Lopes, draws
on case studies to provide detailed descriptions of practical applications of permaculture,
a design system for sustainable human habitats. Urban Revolutions: A Woman’s Guide
to Two-Wheeled Transportation (Microcosm
Publishing), by New Orleans transportation planner Emilie Bahr, demystifies urban
bicycling and explores what it means for a
city to be bike-friendly. Landscape designer
Margie Ruddick delivers an inspirational
guide to innovative landscape design that
integrates ecology, urban planning, and
culture in Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes (Island Press).
Planting in a Post-WIld World (Timber Press),
by two leading voices in ecological landscape
design, Claudia West and Thomas Rainer,
presents a powerful alternative to traditional
horticulture: designed plantings that function
like naturally occurring plant communities
and are resilient, beautiful, and diverse. Terra
Preta: How the World’s Most Fertile Soil Can
Help Reverse Climate Change and Reduce
World Hunger (Greystone Books), by Ute
Scheub, Haiko Pieplow, Hans-Peter Schmidt,
and Kathleen Draper, explores how the key
component of terra preta, biochar (charcoal
made from organic wastes exposed to heat
in a low-oxygen environment), could solve
two of the greatest problems facing the
world: climate change and the hunger crisis.
The book includes instructions on how to
make terra preta at home on the smallest of
garden plots, in urban or rural settings.
parks
Running until September 30, 2016, Arts in
the Parks is a series of events that brings
arts to parks across Toronto. Hosted by
the Toronto Arts Foundation, the free
series encourages community building
and enjoyment of local parks through
dance, music, theatre, film, and temporary
installations. For more information, visit
www.artsintheparksto.org.
exhibitions
in/FUTURE: A Transformative Art Experience,
presented by Art Spin in association with
Small World Music Festival, will be held at
Ontario Place, in Toronto, in September,
2016. Innovative arts organizations and
more than 40 individual artists will come
together to animate Ontario Place’s indoor
and outdoor pavilions, including the site’s
iconic Cinesphere. Visit www.infuture.ca
for more information.
green roofs
“CitiesAlive: 14th Annual Green Roof &
Wall Conference” will be held in Washington, D.C., on November 1-4, 2016. The
event will focus on stormwater management—policies, technologies, design, and
best management practice. For more
information, visit www.citiesalive.org.
Notes
Jerry walked through most of his adult life
with his wife, best friend, and soul mate,
Leida. Their 40th wedding anniversary
would have been on June 12 of this year.
Jerry was a dedicated and loving father to
his children, John and Alison. He shared his
love and acceptance freely and was seen
by many as a mentor and father figure.
01
in memoriam
Gerald George Englar
Gerald George Englar, who celebrated his
80th birthday this past winter, passed away
on May 15, 2016. To the end, Jerry exuded
a positive attitude and an appreciation of
life. He lived with cancer for 23 years and
instead of allowing this disease to define
him and beat him down, he embraced the
challenge and experienced every moment
to its fullest.
Jerry’s exuberance for life was infectious:
he spurred on creativity and action in
others. Among many of Jerry’s great
passions were art and music. Trained as
a landscape architect at Michigan State
University and Harvard University (1965),
Jerry had a zeal and talent for drawing. He
was a prolific painter and many of his great
works depicted panoramic landscapes and
structures from his home on the Toronto
Islands. Jerry decided to pursue a career in
landscape architecture as it combined two
of the things he loved most: drawing and
gardening. Jerry worked in private practice
and was also a tenured professor at the
University of Toronto.
01/
IMAGE/
35
.34
Gerald George Englar
Courtesy of Alison Englar-Carlson
Jerry could often be heard singing and
playing the horn or the ukulele. He played
weekly with his buddies on music nights
and was always up for a good street
parade or protest about politics or the
environment. Jerry provided a glowing
example of living life through his commitment to professional and personal excellence. He touched the world in a positive
light in many ways, leaving a legacy of
art, music, joy, style, and love.
ravines
The City of Toronto is consulting with the
public on a Ravine Strategy, which is being
co-led by Garth Armour, OALA, Parks,
Forestry and Recreation, and Jane Welsh,
OALA, City Planning. The final strategy will
be released in the spring of 2017. For more
information, visit www.toronto.ca/ravine.
restoration
“Urban Ravine Restoration: Plants, Plans and
Progress,” a one-day symposium being held
at the Toronto Botanical Garden on October
28, 2016, will bring together advocates,
scientists, and stewards to discuss exciting
ravine-focused initiatives and research.
Visit www.torontobotanicalgarden.ca/
symposium for more information and
to register.
awards
A new garden awards program has been
inaugurated in Hamilton. The Monarch
Awards recognize gardeners who contribute
to a biodiverse and sustainable environment,
including pollinator habitat, native plants, and
rainwater capture. For more information, visit
www.monarchawardshamilton.org.
magazines
Great summer reading can be found in
Scapegoat, a magazine that explores architecture, landscape, and political economy.
The recent issue’s theme is Night, looking at
the aesthetics, politics, and technologies of
the urban night. For more information, visit
www.scapegoatjournal.org.
new members
The Ontario Association of Landscape
Architects is proud to recognize and
welcome the following new full members
to the Association:
Colin Baddeley
Darcie McIsaac *
Christopher Baker
Angela Mourao
Kirstenn Brown *
Nicholas Onody
Sandra Cappuccitti
Sabrina Parent
Erik Coleman *
Kyle Poole *
Tonya Crawford
Jessica Russell Euser
Heather Cullen
Devin Segal
Ding Ding
Sarah Taslimi
Audrey Fung
Shane Taylor
Jude Gaboury *
Leila Fazel Todd *
Gillian Hutchison
Mark Zuzinjak
Brian Jacobs
Asterisk (*) denotes Full Members without
the use of professional seal.
conferences
The Ontario Invasive Plant Council
and the Carolinian Canada Coalition are
joining forces to host OIPC’s Invasive Plant
Conference/Annual General Meeting and
Carolinian Canada’s annual Ecosystem
Recovery Forum at the Toronto Botanical
Garden, October 25-26, 2016. “Restoring
Resilience: Big Impacts Across Small Spaces”
will focus on recovering ecosystem health at
all scales, from backyards to landscapes, in
the context of changing climate, biodiversity
loss, invasive species, and the growing
disconnect between society and nature.
The keynote speaker is Douglas Tallamy,
author of Bringing Nature Home. For more
information, visit www.caroliniancanada.ca.
ON ALL-NATURAL GRASS (at a fraction of the cost)
With all the scientific research
available, it is hard to believe an
artificial turf surface would be a
consideration over natural grass
playing surfaces. Artificial turf
hazards include serious health
issues, accelerated sport injuries
and the crazy thing is, it costs you
way more in the long run.
Thanks to Greenhorizons Sod Farms,
the cost to install and maintain a
properly engineered natural grass
field, including year after year
maintenance, comes at a fraction
of the cost of an artificial turf
surface over its projected life
expectancy.
In fact, to take this to the
ridiculous, an entire natural turfgrass field could be replaced every
year at a significantly lower cost
than installing and maintaining an
artificial turf field.
Greenhorizons experienced Turf
Management team have a proven
track record for getting it done
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together with professionals, they
will be as involved with your team
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grade the site, prep the soil layers,
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turf-grass Sod for your application,
then install and establish it.
Greenhorizons can even guarantee
establishment with their exclusive
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for safer, healthier playing
surfaces then the fake alternative.
So play ball and call Greenhorizons!
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Actual photo of real grass temporarily installed at the Rogers Centre
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PERGOLA
Aluminum Construction
• Custom sizes available
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lighting and heating
96” x 96” x 87” H
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Stretch & Go: Fitness Equipment
Limited range of motion stretching exercises work out the stress
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PLANT A BIG IDEA.
WATCH IT CHANGE A CITY.
We don’t just want more urban trees –
We want them to last.
The Silva Cell’s open, modular design protects
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This means healthier, longer-lived trees and a
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www.deeproot.com
LEXICON
WASTE & RECYCLING
Lexicon is a multifunctional furniture system which
inspires unique designs and configurations that
enrich the ambiance of public spaces.
Lexicon Waste and Recycling units are flexible
enough for both interior and exterior application;
the perfect addition to our Lexicon Bench Series.
OALA - SUMMER 2016 ISSUE
8.5 x 5.5 half / horizontal - full colour
CMYK breakdown of the porous pave blue is cmyk 78/38/0/48
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2016
2016
G LF
DAY
SAVE THE DATE!
The 14th Annual OALA Golf Day will be taking place at the Royal Ontario Golf Club
Friday, August 12th, 2016
we hope to see you there!
Artifact
42
.34
03
01
text by Lorraine Johnson
Visual artist Christina Kingsbury and poet
Anna Bowen’s collaborative project at the
former Eastview Landfill site in Guelph,
Ontario, straddles sculpture and craft, in a
creatively declarative gesture of healing.
With public participation, Kingsbury
stitched together a 2,000-square-foot
quilt, composed of handmade paper
embedded with local native seeds, and,
in 2014-2015, laid it over the damaged
land(fill). Anna Bowen’s poetry evocatively
explores the artist’s work and dozens of
stories collected on and about the site.
With decomposition comes renewal—a
pollinator garden that flourishes as the
paper decays, seeded with possibilities.
ReMediate, an exhibition at the Boarding
House Gallery in Guelph until July 23, 2016,
documents the collective labours of this
project through video, poetry, photography,
and installation. A book (of photographs,
Anna Bowen’s poems, and an essay) about
the project, published by Publication Studio
Guelph and the Art Gallery of Guelph,
is also available.
BIO/ Lorraine Johnson is the editor of Ground.
02
01/
IMAGE/
02/
IMAGE/
03/
IMAGE/
04/
IMAGE/
Anna Bowen’s poetry was presented on site in 2014 and 2015 as an audio installation. Selections of her text were also printed directly onto the quilt.
Scott McGovern
More than 40 different species of native plants were seeded into the quilt.
Scott McGovern
Tallgrass prairie and meadow ecosystems provide ample forage and nesting habitat for pollinators. Robert Kingsbury
The Eastview Landfill site was historically wetland and, in part, farmland. The landfill was in operation from 1961 to 2003 and contains 4 1/2 million tonnes of waste.
Anna Bowen
04
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THE POSSIBILITIES
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Ground 34 - Brook McIlroy

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