The Bruner Foundation team wrapped up our site visits to the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence finalists with a trip to The Steel Yard in Providence, Rhode Island. Submitted by Klopfer Martin Design Group, the Steel Yard is an ongoing redevelopment of an historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, workforce training, and small-scale manufacturing.

The landscaped courtyard—“The Yard”—provides space for fabrication and events.  Photograph: The Steel Yard

Along with Congo Street Initiative and Inspiration Kitchens, the Steel Yard incorporates the rehabilitation of existing buildings and the use of recycled materials; like Via Verde and Louisville Waterfront Park, it is a brownfield site. The unseasonably cold weather we’ve experienced on most of our trips persisted during our visit to Providence. While the outdoor courtyard was quiet, indoors, people were occupied with creative metalworking and craft making while we met with staff, board members, program partners, community representatives, and funders from the Steel Yard.

Welding classes and workshops are offered. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Located in Providence’s Industrial Valley along the Woonasquatucket River just west of downtown, the Steel Yard occupies the site of Providence Iron and Steel Company, a 100-year old business that closed in 2001.The property was purchased by two graduates of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), who lived in the adjoining Monohasset Mill artists’ live/work complex. The 3.5-acre site, with its gantry cranes and rough brick and metal buildings, became an ad hoc community and gathering space for people interested in creative, industrial arts. Read more…

Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts introduced the idea of opening up a broader perspective on architecture, landscape, and urban design that I’m calling “a new humanism”.

Parts 3 through 9 outlined the first step – tracing out the evolutionary origins of innate skills, propensities, and motivations that lead us to respond to built environments the ways we do – from the competitive drive for individual security, survival and prosperity to the equally deep-seated cooperative impulses that lead us to settle in communities. They explored our powerful links to the natural world, the continuous search for order and orientation and the creativity that gives us a unique niche in every ecosystem we invade.

Part 10 now starts a series of eight posts that take a deeper look at “experience” itself – what is it like to be there – focusing on how the evolved mind that encounters architecture works in practice.

First though, a note about words:  “Architecture” is simply a brief way to say architecture, landscapes, and urban places – “the built environment.”  And I use the term “designers” as an abbreviated way to say “architects, landscape architects, land planners, urban designers, interior designers, and the decision-making clients and governments who direct them.”  This does not, of course, imply a hierarchy of professions, but the word “architecture” has a general sense of an overall, organized structure of things.  Likewise, I am not implying the common distinction between architecture as “high art” and “mere building”.  We live in both – and mostly in the latter.  The total built environment is the art and science that no one can escape.

“Encounters” is more complex.  The whole body is involved.  Like searchlights, all of the senses are continually seeking out information – promises of pleasure and opportunity, threats and trouble, orientation and aids to navigation.  And forms, light, color, sounds, warmth and movement, become sequences of “cues,” signs and symbols that call up memories and beliefs, magnified by our body-state and linked-in emotions. The searches and these sensations naturally become interlaced, consciously and unconsciously, with other streams of thought and feelings already flowing, “in here”, along channels shaped by our specific role or purposes of the moment. In a sense, it’s like the theater with playwright, director/actors, and audience interacting to create “experience”.

Vierzenheiligen – a Bavarian Baroque church, a blaze of light immediately
engages the whole mind and body – and promises still more

Read more…

In our last Green Team post, Planting for the Future, we described the importance of the planting environment in a comprehensive landscape design. Trees create the planting framework and structure for a site at the macro level, so their selection and placement are crucial aspects of the design process. This post is the first of two that describe what landscape architects look for when picking the perfect tree—we call this “tree tagging”—and some of the challenges we face in the field during the selection process.

A tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) with a straight trunk and pyramidal canopy is ready to be tagged. Photo by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects

Finding a Fit

After tree species are vetted for a project and the desired plant list is completed, there comes a time when a landscape architect moves out from behind her drawing set, turns off AutoCAD, and heads out to a nursery—“department stores” for plant materials—to examine trees growing in ground and to make selections.

Typically, the designer is accompanied to the nursery by the landscape contractor, who acts as a liaison between the designer and the nursery manager to locate plant material specified for the job. Because plant availability ranges across nurseries and geographic regions, it is not uncommon for a designer to select and tag plant material from multiple nurseries, which can be a time-consuming—albeit crucial—process.

A typical tree tag, locked on a honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos cv. Inermis), showing the unique embossed number for record. Photo by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects

Read more…

Richard A. Glaser is an urban planner and landscape architect. He’s worked on everything from a landscaped backyard swimming pool to entire cities in the Middle East. He worked for large Philadelphia offices like Lou Kahn’s and for Marcel Breuer (planning Sadat City in Egypt). He worked in partnerships and as a sole practitioner.

Swimming pool & landscape: Richard A. Glaser, Landscape Architect Read more…

Although 2012 Game Changer Tim Duggan would never describe them that way, the series of events that led him into landscape architecture almost feels like some sort of divine intervention. Some time in the late 1990s, Duggan was working on a backyard project in suburban Kansas City (Tim’s late father was a concrete contractor). It involved moving three hundred pound stone stairs. A nosy neighbor walked over and asked, “Who did this design?” Duggan said, “I did” and showed him the drawing. “I hear you’re going back to K-State and I wanted to let you know that they have a pretty good program,” the neighbor said. “So if you want to move these rocks around the rest of your life, that’s fine. But if you want to draw those rocks and tell other people where to put them, then you should look into landscape architecture.” Read more…