Yifan's LA Journal 2018

Thoughts of this course at the end of semester

I am very glad that I have a chance to take this class this year. In this class I enhanced my willing to be a landscape designer. By digging into those projects and thoughts of different designers and firms, I get a broader eyesight with the multiple types of landscape projects and purposes. When we were doing the podcast project, we have a chance to discuss the the project not only on the advantage but also the defects and further thinking with folks which inspired me a lot for my future design ideas. By doing podcast ourselves, we got an opportunity to learn a new skill and develop it, which is interesting to me as well. The lectures we listened in class from all of those landscape summits are inspired, those professional designers provided us their far reaching ideas in field made me learnt a lot. Also in those field trips to well know landscape firms and interesting museums made me more interested in landscape design. The entangled landscape profile assignment pushed me into a new thing mode which is try not to exclude humanity from the whole landscape system. It is a fault that thinking landscape design as a only nature stuff, human is a part of nature it is coexist with ecological habitats. At the same time, everything is connect with each other directly or indirectly so that we should not miss every single part in the whole entanglement system. 

Leventhal Map Center & Mapparium

In the field trip to Leventhal map center, which located on the first floor of the Library’s historic McKim Building in Copley Square. It includes an exhibition gallery that features changing thematic exhibitions, a public learning center with research books, and a reading room for rare map research. I got a chance to take a look of many precious historical maps of Boston, for example a series of map of emerald necklace, and blue hill reservation. By looking at those delicate hand drawing map, I felt that I can even see the changes year by year in this city, I can tell how public engaged, how they contributed to the wonderful land we are living on. What also interested me is the reading corner inset in the walls, which provided a place for children to learning more about those maps. The digital also showed how we using the modern technology to map things compared with those historical maps.

After that, we went to the Mapparium in the Christian Science center. By hearing the commentator’s introducing, I knew that this place was built by Mary Baker,  who was an influential American author, teacher, and religious leader, noted for her groundbreaking ideas about spirituality and health, which she named Christian Science. She articulated those ideas in her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. Four years later she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, which today has branch churches and societies around the world. In 1908 she launched The Christian Science Monitor, a leading international newspaper, the recipient, to date, of seven Pulitzer Prizes. Inside the Mapparium, a space covered by  glass colorful world map completely, inside there we heard the voiceover about the thought about the world is never change itself, what changing is the human’s mind. What’s more, in that glass space, we can hear interesting echo because the sphere shape of that space make voice transfers in a equal speed, even if you whispered there some one can hear you clearly.

In that field trip, I learnt a lot interesting history facts about how things change over years and years, even though everything seems change all the time, but there are always something never change.

Entangled Landscape 

This semester we were introduced to a great book which called   Swamplife by Laura A. Ogden. This book   tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites, gladesmen, epitomized in tales of the Everglades’ most famous outlaws, the Ashley Gang. With such legends and lore on one side, and outsized efforts at drainage and development on the other, Swamplife strikes a rare balance, offering a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades—and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.

In the book, I saw an indirect relationship between the human and non human both surviving on the same life. It is impossible to exclude any of them from the entanglement relationship.   Everglades, as a landscape, comes into being through the shifting dynamics of multiple species, including people (hunters and scientists), alligators and mangroves.  As part of this central concern, author used some ideas from philosophy  to experiment with writing landscape ethnography. She was also interested in doing justice to the lives of rural, working-class people who are associated with the Everglades, while at the same time playing a bit with the myth of the Everglades outlaw. 

Nowadays, many people advocate to protect the wildlife by simply forbid human intervene which is ignorant in my perspective, they haven’t thought about that human is still a part of animal, and is important in the food chain. Others cannot live without human. Even though some bad behavior of human like over development,  waste of nature resource and logging and so on should be governed but it doesn’t equal to kick human out of this cycle.

Field trip to Reed Hilderbrand

Reed Hilderbrand practices landscape architecture as an art of purposeful transformation. Active since the mid-1990s, the firm is engaged in diverse commissions—urban centers, museum landscapes, academic campuses, commercial developments, and private residences—throughout North America and in Europe. More than seventy design awards distinguish this growing body of work, including The Architect’s Newspaper’s Best Landscape of 2015 Award and the American Society of Landscape Architect’s Firm of the Year Award.

We viewed many projects they did, the staff told us that many of them has a chance to do the project on their own to exercise their skill. In that process they learnt a lot in communicating with land owners, users, and government.

Everyone has an entangled landscape

After reading Sawmplife, I am very inspired from author’s thoughts. I think that everyone has their own entangled place and every thing in the world is entangled with each other. Sometimes we just want to find a clear relationship between things, but in most cases, the relation among things are not easy to be defined as we thought. Each single element cannot be exclude from the whole network, we should consider the cause effect comprehensively.

Speaking of a place I am entangled with, is the restaurant one the ground floor of our residential community. In there, you can always see lots of people gather there, not only eating but also just talking and meeting. Even though it is a small place, there is always lively. In the past, the urban district of Beijing was full of those ground floor stores which build in the first floor of a residential building without permission, but that kind of business is the easiest and cheapest way to earn money and was popular in community. However, currently, Beijing city is doing the renovation of city appearance which means those illegal ground floor shops need to be moved out, the restaurant near my community is just one of those. After it moved out, there is no place for neighborhoods to get together and have fun. The streets becomes void and inanition. What they removed is not just the illegal architecture but also the atmosphere of humanity and culture which is the real beauty of city that should be protected. The overly designed city is not good for the city’s appearance as well. Although the look is important, but the more important thing is the feeling when you are in this city. Memory is a big part of human’s life, we should protect them carefully, a city without culture and memory is just like a barely tree without its leaves, which means nothing. 

Trip to Sasaki Landscape Firm

Sasaki landscape firm is a well known one in the field, which also won lots of awards those years located in Watertown, MA. I had saw many of their excellent projects before, so that I was so exciting to see where they work in. The friendly staff told us they have a large team about 300 people not only in US but also oversea in China. They also have many departments other than Landscape, like urban planning, architecture, and interior design, civil engineering, graphic design and so on. 

Walking inside the firm, the decoration in each corner of the workplace is creative and free, just like the working atmosphere there. I was appreciated that I have a chance to hear one of their on-going project presentation. I noticed that everyone in the firm is welcome to come by to share their opinion, which is very inclusive.Besides, they also very glad that our NU students to ask question about the project made me felt a lot enthusiasm. Some of design is about waterfront re-design, some of is revive an old poor city’s culture and economy, but all of those projects are trying to use landscape design to link the separated human or natural factors to create positive effect to the site.  

One of their design principle is connecting humanity with wild by using their design. And they believe that the world is transforming in a fast speed,  the places in which we live our lives are more than physical spaces; they are the context and the content of our experience. Today, simultaneous revolutions of mobility, connectivity, and identity are changing our experience of the world and, along with it, our relationship to place. Now, more than ever before, what they create will shape the way we live.  They want to consolidate the relationship between human and nature to save our planet and bring harmony. Proving that landscape design has the ability to achieve the ecological balance. 

I was very inspired after visiting their workplace, not only learnt a lot from their working flows but also their idea about designing with nature and respect nature. In my future landscape career I felt more responsible to fulfill those goals following those predecessor's step.

Trip to Interfluve

This week we went to visit one of the dam removal project of interfluve company in Massachusetts.  

Interfluve started in 1983 as a way to restore damaged trout streams to bring back the fish populations. They introduced a unique team approach to the field of wildlife restoration, with a wide array of disciplines working on their projects. They follow the same approach today, housing hydrologists, ecologists, geomorphologists, and a wide variety of engineers on their team.

One of their engineer toured us through the project, what they were doing is basically move the aged dam which destroyed the original ecological cycle here, to revival the habitat here. 

Interfluve’s work in the Urban Sphere is an extension of their river restoration projects, but in collaboration with Landscape architects and Urban planners. They’ve worked with firms including Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, TLS Landscape Architecture, and Sasaki as consultants helping with the creation of hydraulic and hydrologic systems, with working on the design of stormwater filtration and flood protection in high-risk sites, and to develop ideas on landscape design that stay within the constraints of the given environment. They describe their urban work as “connecting people to rivers – and restoring ecological function to highly altered systems.”

As an engineering firm, their goal is similar to those landscape firms , rather than designing they are implementing the ideas into reality. Those engineers should able to understand how how water system, habitats, human works in the area they constructing on in order to keep the balance between those factors.

I was really admire those people about how well they circled around designers and land owner and also the nature to truly realize the project which needs a lot patience and more experience in multiple fields. Not only designers, the engineers are contributing to save the world. In my opinion, a successful project should has smart design and perfect collaborative at same time. It is important to communicate well with every partner in the team. 

Kate Orff:

In Kate’s declaration, she clarified the importance of public engagement in the design process. Among the different services that Kate Orff’s SCAPE studio offers, Public Engagement is among the most emphasized. They believe that communities are completely integral to the design process. In light of this, SCAPE organizes and facilitates productive public processes and creates open and accessible engagement tools for their Clients, with the greater goal of enabling dialogue and ethos of civic participation. For example, Town Branch Water Walk public exhibition in Lexington, Kentucky. This project was the result of a grant received from the Department of Environmental Quality to develop a public education campaign about urban water system that could complement the Town Branch redevelopment project. The project serves as self-guided tour of downtown Lexington’s formerly hidden water body (Town Branch Creek) coupled with content gathered by students from the University of Kentucky. The design intervention is not a physical landscape, but a communication tool utilizing podcasts, maps, and walks to offer an engaging and interpretive experience. By sharing how water system and the people are locally and globally interrelated, the Town Branch Water Walk successfully links the history, culture, and ecology of the city. For the development of future landscape design should combine the social needs with ecological consideration to create a holistic,collaborative, contextual working process.  Kate Orff’s activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, and scholars worldwide.She studied political and social in undergraduate school, and that background affected her in the future landscape design which she called eco-feminism, and she also tried to connect feminism into design. For the public engagement idea, she tried not only to directly make people engage but tried to have people think about the city a little bit more than just accepting what is given to them. She thought she need to proactively build constituencies for the projects. 

James Corner:

James Corner is a great landscape designer in my opinion, lots of his works are very fancy and sustainable which usually located in big coastal cities like New York, Seattle, and Miami and so on. His design projects are showing a special commitment to the design of a vibrant and dynamic public realm, informed by th interactive ecology between people and nature. Ultimate goal is to bring beauty, engagement, health and vitality to the different kinds of environments in which people live and interact.  However, some of his projects are too “fancy” to practice, for example the one in China Dachong Village, the existing site is a relatively poor area, he purposed to add high level business after re-planning the site. I think that there is a less consideration of public engagement, he should think more about what the residents want there rather than his own ideal thoughts. All in all I appreciate most of his works because they did revival the original site and solve the environmental issue with the aesthetic method. His view points in declaration, he strengthen the specific aspect of landscape than other fields like engineer, landscape is a combination of beauty and desire and pleasure rather than only an object, which is more about quality than quantity. For landscape architects we should create the place that can accommodate everybody into, and people want to go there instead of they have to. 

Charles Birnbaum:

Charles discussed about the role landscape architect play in the cultural value aspect and how to set up the duty and figure for the future in many other related fields like education and academic and so on. Landscape architecture should expand its “awareness” to the public realm. I agree with him that landscape do has cultural value and this part should be pay attention to.  It is important to reserve our historical landscape and always “look back” to history. He listed a few details in the old version of declaration and books to advocate for the significance of past for future development. We can learn from the past and improve from the past so that to build a better nature that’s why we need to read past, and protect past. Especially in landscape design currently, people pay more attention to future than past, but properly “look back” can help us to make decision in what should do and what not. 

Charles Waldheim:  

After reading the declaration by Berger I found that he gave out the similar statements as other landscape designers. He thought that landscape architects have the responsibility to solve the crisis rather than step back. He also suggested as the 1966 declaration wrote that landscape designers should grasp knowledge from multiple fields like science, technology, and engineering, and math and so on in order to make good design that needs to consider all of those aspects. He pointed that using a scientific thinking to solve the crisis is essential.  City needs to be renewed counter the fast speed global warming issue.

Our group was researching about Kelly Shannon, she mainly focuses on the coastal area and she suggested to retreat and rebuild the habitat around coastal even though it may not go to truly fixed, but she strongly suggested to advocate environment law and using landscape design to protect the ecology texture. What’s more she mentioned the consequence of climate change which will not only bring us natural disaster and then will affect social, industry, agriculture development which will cause chemical factory explode, food shortage, and unemployment and so on. Her works and researches are purposing to use the landscape structure to build a resilient system to reduce the pace of global warming.

Kongjian Yu is a famous landscape architect in China, his design idea is called sponge city which is about how to using urban water management system to save more water resource in landscape design. His design also cares about asthenic aspect, he combines Chinese traditional elements in to his works which makes his works distinct and beautiful.  His idea’s operation is similar to David’s which is also build a system first and fit the architectures in to that system. Many of his works shows an incorporation of nature, human and god, he always respect the tendency of wild world so trying to mix design into it and not to disturb the natural tendency as much as possible.

Nawre’s researches are mostly about the accessibility of natural resource in those developing cities. However, there are too much theories rather than practices, even though the theories are very good points, the absence of visual illustration and real project is hard to understanding the idea fully. Nawre always learn from the examples in developing country like India, about the water management issue. Anyway, there is not much examples, and even drawings so the concept is hard to be understand.

In Martha’s speech she focused on scientific and technology aspects and provided more relatively general and “big” solutions contour climate change crisis like forging an international effort to cool the Arctic, suppress methane and aggressively remove CO2 from the atmosphere, taking immediate and extremely drastic action to entirely curb global carbon dioxide emissions, evolving rapidly towards completely renewable energy resources which she provided those three rules in her presentation. I think it is hard to begin with what she said, although I am totally agree with her that the global warming issue is irresistible so that we have to act as soon as possible. But I think the advice should be more practical and easy to start with, in my opinion, especially the third suggestion, it is hard to find a replacement energy resource which is renewable that soon.

However, comparing to the presentation David gave his declaration was more about how to improve living quality for those people who live in informal city neighborhoods and used that as a starting point to solve the issue gradually with the expanding of the system he purposed as a design strategy and then the issue like water management, food production and education and so on will be better with the design carrying out longer. He considered the problem solving more from the human’s view.

On the other side, Nina’s approach is different from David. She saw the relationship between human and wild as a main entry point, she thought it is important to make the new landscape designs “back” to nature. A good design is rooted from wild nature, so that tying wild with human is the key point. She upheld the adaptive design which is resilient and works like a buffer between human and nature, people can actually see the “working” landscape. She insisted that human and wild are all a part of nature, so that if we are losing the wild which means that the crisis is coming close. The resilient design is “safe to fail” but since it follows how nature processes, the system will solve the crisis from a long-term perspective. To conclude, she thought that the connectivity that bring ecology back into landscape design rather than making a “still” design is the core. I am totally agree with what she purposed and after reviewing her “hypar nature “project I think this idea will truly work in a sustainable and ecology way. Human and ecosystem is coexist relationship. We have to take care of them in order to save ourselves.