The public’s role in the long-term success of any landscape project cannot be overstated. After all, it’s people who use these spaces; they are the true arbiters of a well-designed space over time. To create a successful open public space requires a strategic framework that is mutually beneficial for both developers and the public. To help this effort along, the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP) has established a zoning incentive program: Privately Owned Public Spaces, or POPS.

The primary goal of POPS is to unite function with aesthetics—to create public spaces that provide respite in the city’s dense urban fabric. In exchange for additional floor area or relief from setback restrictions the program requires a developer to provide user-friendly amenities to increase the experiential qualities of the open spaces adjacent to their properties. These spaces must meet stringent design standards to create public plazas that are open, inviting, accessible and safe.

Setting the standard for POPS, though not one itself, Manhattan’s 1967 Paley Park is a timeless landscape rich with public amenities like moveable seating, canopy trees for shade, green walls/planted areas, and water features (as permitted obstructions). Today’s zoning regulations encourage developers to build on these successes and provide public spaces that offer a variety of seating, vegetation, lighting, artwork, cafes, and other amenities. While typically located outdoors like the iconic Paley Park, POPS can sometimes be found in unique settings like lobbies, subway entrances, atriums, and building arcades.

I recently worked with fellow Green Team member Terrie Brightman on a POPS recertification permit for 2 Gold Street (Mathews Nielsen was the original designer in 2008). This time, the new process asked us to meet POPS requirements while pursuing strong and unique designs for these spaces.

The pavement extends to the street, uniting the the plaza with what would become a sidewalk.  Photo: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architctects

Circulation is a key aspect of POPS design. The stipulations for clear paths are stringent, with limited walkway obstructions that are meant to ease the pedestrian right of way. At 2 Gold Street, several circulation patterns are integral to the plaza’s design. The pavement extends to the street curbs and facilitates pedestrian movement into it, without hindering circulation at the site’s edges.

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I have mixed feelings about the sea of mail that inundates us around the holidays. Having worked with architecture firms for many years, I’ve had the card versus email greeting debate time and again (and, admittedly, landed on both sides over the years). But once in a while, I receive a card that reminds me what thought and intentionality can do for the “hard copy” format.

KieranTimberlake’s annual message of good wishes is a five panel, fold out card. On the one side there are elegant, muted-hue diagrams from five of the firm’s green roof projects, illustrating how the vegetation has evolved over time. The Middlebury College Atwater Commons project, for instance, is shown in 2003 and 2012; the other depictions vary in duration. All prompt careful study.

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Making Room, a new exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has struck a serious nerve with New Yorkers. The exhibit, which will be on view until September 15, shines a light on many of the city’s biggest housing problems, and puts on display several architectural proposals designed to alleviate them. Mayor Bloomberg has even gotten the city government involved, and is strongly pushing for many of the solutions it suggests.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tours the Making Room Exhibit on January 22, 2013. Photo Credit: Spencer T. Tucker.

The impetus for the exhibit was a set of figures uncovered by the Citizen’s Housing Planning Council (CHPC) that showed a disparity between the types of available housing in New York, which are primarily designed for traditional nuclear households, and the increasing demand for single and other non-traditional housing. Currently, only about 18 percent of the city’s population is part of a nuclear family household. Yet over half of New York is single, and the city lacks enough single bedroom and studio spaces to house them.

Coupled with this are decades-old city regulations that place restrictions on how and where people can live. For instance it is illegal for more than three unrelated adults to share a residence, or for someone to inhabit a living space smaller than 400 square feet. These restrictions mean that residents are resorting to their own improvised solutions, which are often dangerous or illegal, to be able to live in this outmoded housing stock. Topping it off, the city will need to absorb a projected increase of over 600,000 new residents in the next twenty years, most of whom will also not find the current housing stock appropriate.

Sensing this problem back in 2011, CHPC and the Architectural League invited five teams of architects to submit proposals for housing solutions that could alleviate these problems, keeping restrictive zoning ordinances a non-factor in their designs. The submissions took several different approaches, primarily focusing on flexibility of use, compact living quarters and shared spaces. One design, by Deborah Gans, proposed a series of conversions that could be performed on a single family home in Queens, which would allow the owners to rent out extra sections of the house when they no longer needed the space themselves.

A rendering of a street of converted single family homes in Astoria, Queens. The conversions would allow the original owners to rent space in their homes that otherwise be would underutilized, while still maintaining adequate space and privacy for owner and renter. Rendering by Gans Studio. Courtesy MCNY. Read more…

Our introductory Green Team blog addressed a common misconception: There is no space left for new landscapes in New York City, the dense urban expanse that is our home turf. In fact, there are available spaces, but they’re likely to come with some complex problems. Finding ourselves wrestling with small, challenging, and limited spaces, we sometimes take an unexpected approach. We look up!

Our initial site analysis for New York projects—and others—entails, in part, identifying ALL available space than can be improved. Crisp, white walls may be de rigueur for the interior artist, but they are far too banal for a vibrant, metropolitan landscape. By using a site’s vertical surfaces, we can expand the benefits of a project to include increased planting areas, aesthetically appealing live or inanimate screens, thoughtfully designed edge conditions, improved views, reduced cooling requirements for adjacent buildings, and the mitigation of urban heat island effect (UHI), thus furthering the definition of “the space.”

The design of exterior vertical surfaces can take on many forms and configurations including green screens, green walls, cable trellis systems, wall-mounted planters, trellises, and planters housing fastigiate (columnar) species, to name a few. The selection of the proper treatment for these surfaces is based on sun/shade conditions, design intent, the structural capacity of the surface to receive the enhancement, available soil volume for plants, and so on. If we propose a woven wire or cable trellis system, we must consider the method of its attachment to the building’s surface as well as whether the receiving wall or support structure can sustain its weight load in addition to the living, twining plants that will grow over the plane. Some factors that influence plant selection, as well as the ultimate success of the installation, are planters, soil volume, irrigation, and solar orientation.

We work with a wide variety of systems and approaches on vertical landscapes throughout the city. At Spring Street Plaza, a 200-foot-long wall abutting the adjacent building was designed and installed to allow us to use a vertical screen system for vines. This wall provided the structural support for the vegetated system while ensuring that no portion of the work was attached to or interfered with the structure of the neighboring property (our post on property lines talks about the consequences of this). Once installed, the green screen, with its dense vine cover comprising six vine species, provided a sense of enclosure for the plaza, acting as a vegetated backdrop to the small “rooms” of the plaza design. The wire grid also provided structure for the installation of custom light tubes into the screen, creating a playful effect of illuminated planting at night. The 10-foot height of the new wall—a pedestrian scale intervention— also helps deemphasize the presence of the adjacent building.

A view south across one of the seating “rooms” of the plaza showing the vine-covered green screen along the western edge of the site. Photo courtesy Elizabeth Felicella

Light tubes inserted into pockets in the wire grid screen accent the vines and illuminate the site. Photo courtesy Elizabeth Felicella

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The city of Zhengzhou in central China recently opened the doors of a new 60-story skyscraper, now the tallest building in the city, providing a new centerpiece for the surrounding area. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the circular tower known as Greenland Plaza is shrouded in a screen of aluminum panels and incorporates a roof-mounted heliostat. Both features are designed to maximize daylight inside the structure, reducing the amount of energy used and heat generated.

Exterior of Greenland Plaza by day. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

Greenland Plaza by night. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

The aluminum screens, which obscure the building’s glass walls when viewed from below, are mounted with an outward lean, and calibrated to reflect the greatest amount of daylight through the windows. At night, the panels switch duties, and shine with artificial light that illuminates the entire façade like a beacon.

Glass and aluminum cover the building’s exterior. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

The heliostat, another sunlight-driven feature, is mounted on the roof, and uses mirrors to evenly redirect daylight down into the atrium of the building’s upper floors. The use of this technology allows natural light to fill the large interior space rather than electrical lighting. A computer-monitored system measures the interior sunlight and contributes additional electrical lighting when necessary.

The heliostat, located at the top of the building. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

Daylight is directed into the atrium. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.
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In our previous post, “Tree Tag…You’re It”, we let you in on the details of what landscape architects call “tree tagging,” as well as my spring experience with tulip poplars, and some of the challenges we face in the field during the selection process. Here we discuss the post-tagging process.

The landscape architect’s job doesn’t end when she leaves the nursery. The trees we’ve selected must be maintained, cared for, and prepped in anticipation of delivering them to the project for installation. This multi-step process involves digging up the trees from the field, preparing each tree by its root condition, packaging, delivery, and finally, installation.

Tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) tagged in spring 2012 were alive and well at the nursery in the fall …and had grown over an inch in caliper in five months!

Digging Times

Digging trees is dictated by the calendar year and season, as well as by planned installation schedules, and even specific plant types.

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichtum) trees tagged in the field are dug and balled in burlap by machinery in early spring, prior to the planting season.

A tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), for instance, isn’t a picky tree, but others certainly are. Trees we call “fall dig hazards” drop their leaves well into the season—they don’t go dormant until very late in the fall. These finicky species include hawthorn, sweetgum, cherry, and pear trees. Read more…

How many times in the last week, or even in the last day, have you looked at your smart phone, iPad, car, television, some type of technology, and said, “I love you”?

We often treat machines as if they are living things, sometimes with tender loving care, and sometimes with a good swat. But why react so strongly towards inanimate objects?

We humans have an inherent desire, an urge to affiliate with other living forms, a bond called the biophilia hypothesis. This urge to bond with other living things might explain why we respond to our technologies with so much emotion as well as why we’re obsessed with creating life-like technology; the more alive it seems, the greater the potential for love.

Living things not only inspire love, they also inspire knowledge, and life can even do work for us. This year at Greenbuild, you can tour a machine that looks to life for inspiration, and to how living things can help human life. Called the Living Machine, it is a system for treating wastewater at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission building.

“The Living Machine system incorporates a series of wetland cells, or basins, filled with special gravel that promotes the development of micro-ecosystems. As water moves through the system, the cells are alternately flooded and drained to create multiple tidal cycles each day, much like we find in nature, resulting in high quality reusable water,” -Living Machine

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Jeff Stein, photo by Jared Green

At 42 Arcosanti, a community north of Phoenix, Arizona has been celebrated, yet generally ignored, by the world at large. Nevertheless, the place that architect Paolo Soleri and his followers buit in the desert, survives. Indeed, it can teach us enormously important lessons about cities, buildings, people, nature, and authenticity of place. Jeff Stein, AIA, is president of the Cosanti Foundation. He has taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Wentworth Institute, and was dean of Boston Architectural College for seven years. He attended his first building workshop at Arcosanti in 1975. Here he gives some revealing answers about how an urban system can function as a super-organism, how historic context can shape a place and its life, as well as thoughts on the efficient use of land, growing plants and making moisture in the desert, and many other timely topics.

Jared Green: Arcosanti is a living, experimental laboratory for the “arcology” theories of Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, who recently won the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. Arcology, a literal joining of the words architecture and ecology, calls for a new alternative to today’s “hyperconsumption,” a self-reliant urban system that functions like a super-organism. How are the theories of arcology working out in practice out here in the desert at Arcosanti?

Jeff Stein: They’re working out really well but at a very small level. Arcosanti, some 42 years after it first was begun in 1970, is just a tiny fragment of what it intends to become — a town for a few thousand people. Right now, we’re at a population of a little less than 100. It’s pretty easy at that small scale to join architecture and ecology, but we have in mind some bigger ideas. While they certainly come from Paolo Soleri, they also come from Henry David Thoreau.

Before I moved to Arcosanti this past year, my wife and I lived near Walden Pond for about a decade. The contrast between that place and this is pretty interesting, but the ideas that Thoreau and Soleri both have had are pretty congruous. Thoreau said, “Give me a wildness no civilization can endure,” which isn’t quite what we’re after exactly, but you could understand his attitude back then. There is wildness that no civilization can endure. Instead what we’re after is trying to create the beginnings of a civilization that wildness can endure.

Here at Arcosanti we’re only building on a few acres of a 4,000 acre land preserve. Some 3,985 of those acres are intended to remain wild. While at the center there isn’t a group of hermits but a lively cultural center. Arcosanti is meant for a few thousand people– not just as retirees living in apartments who have to drive 20 miles for groceries — but a living, working community whose architecture is gaining some light and heat in the wintertime and shading itself in the summertime, and whose solar greenhouses are recycling organic waste and growing food for the population and producing heat energy to power the town itself.

Arcosanti, photo courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation

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If they are to thrive, all living things—plants included—require space to grow and reproduce. Unlike other forms of life that can move to optimum conditions, plants are unable to relocate themselves to ensure their survival. When it comes to urban landscape design, plants are initially dependent on the designer who chooses their location. Over time, they rely on a caretaker to maintain their health.

As a recent graduate new to the practice of landscape architecture, I am learning that there are circumstances that can breed conflict between landscape architects and real estate developers. Developers usually prefer an “instant” landscape ripe with lush, mature plantings rather than one that grows into its space and strives for sustainability. And so I’m consistently reminded that the key to long-term project success and a healthy designer-client relationship lies in finding a balance between the client’s satisfaction and the expertise of the landscape architect.

The perils of “instant” landscapes: Trees planted too close together experience stymied growth.
Credit: Mathews Nielsen

At Mathews Nielsen, we have recently worked on a number of projects that required either a landscape renovation (complete or partial) or a newly designed landscape. In most cases, the developers—our clients—prefer instant landscapes. Visually appealing, they offer immediate gratification and, at least initially, more bang for the buck. Dynamic plant masses can provide enticing counterpoints to static buildings, instantly attracting potential residents to a development. But these advantages are quickly undermined by the disadvantages to the landscape’s longevity.

The benefits of sustainable landscapes: Proper spacing allows plants to thrive over time.
Credit: Mathews Nielsen

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Midtown section of the plan with building labels

Freeways have sliced through the hearts of many communities, creating derelict wastelands that destroy neighborhoods and sever connections. Our cities have buried, covered, or dismantled the massive structures required for high-speed automobile infrastructure. With our virtual vacuum of public finance for such projects going forward, we need to ask: What’s the prognosis for more such transformative, big-budget efforts? And what methods work best to integrate ribbons of concrete into our communities?

Let’s look at some instructive examples. Seattle’s Downtown Freeway Park, designed three decades ago by Lawrence Halprin, bridged Interstate 5 with five acres of green space; the city’s more recent Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi Architects and Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture, spans a waterfront arterial with an art-filled urban park. In San Francisco, removal of the Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake produced a grand boulevard, designed by ROMA Design Group, offering transit, bike lanes, promenades, and revitalized real estate. And the nation’s most expensive highway project—Boston’s Big Dig, which rerouted I-93 into a 3.5-mile tunnel through the heart of the city—left behind a 27-acre urban greenway reconnecting city to waterfront, a $15 billion price tag, and a mixed legacy of design flaws, accidents, and cost overruns.

Emerging projects continue to explore ways to tame the freeway. Dallas’ 5.2-acre Klyde Warren Park, designed by James Burnett and Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and due to open this fall at a cost of about $100 million, will bridge downtown’s below-grade freeway with new urban green space. Los Angeles is contemplating two plans for capping portions of the 101 Freeway with planted concrete lids—the 44-acre Hollywood Freeway Cap Park and the 80-acre Downtown 101 Freeway Cap Park. Funding is not yet secured. Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Santa Monica are also considering plans.

Atlanta Connector Transformation Project Overall Plan

The Atlanta Connector Transformation Project provides another, less costly approach. Rather than burying, removing or covering up the I-75/85 Connector—a five-mile stretch famous for its snarl of traffic and frequent flooding that brings Atlanta to a standstill—the project acknowledges that the Connector will remain the city’s most significant and visible infrastructural corridor for the foreseeable future. Because of the realities of transportation funding, the project will not seek to make the Connector disappear; rather it will use the Connector as a transformative piece of the city’s open space network.

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