This is admittedly a true soapbox entry, but hell with it. There is a little spot I pass to and from work everyday that is just south of the Hawthorn Bridge on the waterfront. It was, until about a year ago, the only grassy area in the vicinity with a terrific view of the city. For this reason, it was a popular place to sit and enjoy the view—especially sunsets. People also gathered there for fireworks and picnicking.  Lovers kissed and snuggled on the bench.

Then, someone had a very bad idea. Let’s create a thicket of native trees and shrubs there! Soon thereafter it came to be. Now we have a mess of plants that will have no significant ecological effect, except to shade a little bit of pathway. Great, more shade. Those clouds were really getting bright. I value ecology for many reasons. I even have a degree in Environmental Studies, but this little installation really bugs me because it’s quintessential ecological dogmatism. Yet, what makes it criminal is how poorly it serves ecological goals. It fails completely as a landscape. My intuition tells me that BES just decided to do what they wanted to and didn’t bother to ask the public, to whom they are responsible. Now we have a thicket of trees and shrubs that don’t enhance anything except someone’s agenda.  So, put your cameras away, watch the fireworks of local cable access, and for you lovers: go kiss in another city’s sunset. 

It’s a bad idea gone wrong. Aren’t we already licensed to do eco-roofs, therapy gardens and sustainable design? Some firms decide to specialize and others do not, so they can be competitive and do the types of work they desire. Those who specialize in eco-roofs should, theoretically, have a competitive advantage over firms that do not specialize. On the other hand, maybe they are finding they do not. So let it be. Eco-roofs are new to North America. We are in a natural learning process. What is now complicated and risky will soon be simple and safe. We don’t need to over-react to this situation and create a specialty license.

There is a notion that our world is getting more complicated or that the rate of technological change is increasing. Therefore, specialties are simply a natural evolution of any profession. This may be true. For example, a family practitioner of medicine cannot walk into a surgery room to perform brain surgery. These skills are highly differentiated. In regards to eco-roofs, what it boils down to for me is that they are made of plants, soil, drainage and irrigation. This is what we already do. The proposed specialties for landscape architecture are just not different enough.

I don’t quite buy into the idea that landscape architects are generalists and that our breath of knowledge is a touchstone of our profession. We do commonly span scales of design from neighborhood master plans to steel detailing, but breath of scale should not be confused with breath of knowledge. In comparison, because architects quite often “prime” projects, they too must retain an amazing breath of knowledge of all the professions. My argument is simply no specialty licenses yet–and it’s not even close.  Our profession just is not complicated enough. Because an integrated design understanding is essential to good designs, we must strive to keep the profession intact as long as possible. Landscape Architects and the ASLA should be looking for opportunities to expand and learn more, not less.

ASLA must stand up against the insurance companies who are looking to benefit financially. Insurance companies are business looking, as we all do, for niches in which to make money. Let me remind ASLA that their mission is to advocate for our profession’s livelihood, not insurance companies. Let’s not choose to live in fear and have confidence in ourselves to do good design. ASLA needs to help accurately determine the risks to buildings from eco-roofs.

Concerning the notion of a sustainable design specialty license, it is clear to me that those who are not doing sustainable design won’t be in business much longer. Enough said.

Testing is always an issue. The tests intend to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. That is great. If eco-roofs or sustainability is risky, common or both, why are they not on the test? They should be integrated into one of the existing tests. 

My proposal: A landscape architecture license covers all the proposed specialties, however if a person wants to get a “specialty license” they could pass one of the exams and call themselves a Landscape Architect in Training.

Breaking news: The days of being able to ride your horse throughout the Oregon territory without a thought to where you ride, make camp, or leave rubbish and waste is gone. Yep, sorry to be the party crasher, but great citizens of Oregon we need fences to control the hoards and herds, even in our cities’ public places. What in God’s green earth are you talking about? Well, before you reach for your lynch rope or 6 shooter, let me explain.

The saying, “good fences make good neighbors”, has never been more true for today’s landscapes. We have all enjoyed the benefits of fences in our residential and agrarian landscapes, yet they have not been adopted in our public places. Why? I think many of our cities’ public landscapes are fundamentally the bastard of an English landscape aesthetic and a wild-west ethic toward property ownership. This unholy union results in our planting areas being abused because no one seems to care for them. People want to walk, wherever they want and we let them–all over our plant beds! This may sound a bit trivial, but the abuse it real and widespread. We are slave to understaffed, under-funded, albeit, hardworking maintenance departments. We all need a break. Perhaps worse of all, we spend untold tax dollars mending the harm to these areas. It’s the tragedy of the commons (yes, again) and we need to recognize that restrictions are necessary to our landscape’s long-term survival.

Sure, there are other solutions. We can plant flexible-stemmed plants, thorny plants, maintain hedges, build seat walls, put up little signs asking people to keep out, assign sentries to our public parks, or just pave it. None of these are very appetizing to me. We need a better arrow in our quiver. The rest of the world has one, actually two–short metal fences, and bollards and chain. Hereto I will call these heroic defenders of public space fence and bollard. Fence and bollard are used in many large, medium and small towns throughout the world with great success. These are simple, time-tested beautiful strategies to keep the hoards and herds at bay. Oregon, the final frontier and bastion of free will now must too socialize. 

Fences and bollards in Oregon are not without precedent. For example, the University of Oregon with its 20,000+ independently-minded students uses bollards and chain with much success. Without them, the campus would be run amok. Too many other campuses however, would rather adopt one of the other strategies perhaps for fear of communicating to parents that the school is overcrowded, restricts expression or fails to teach responsibility to students. Bollocks.

In our cities’ older public parks, like the Chapman and Lawnsdale Squares in Portland, bollards and chain successfully create space without disrupting views and as sense of ownership and access. We need to use this as a model in order to continue to provide planting areas in urban areas. We cannot afford to do anything else, nor should our urban experience suffer for it. In my mind it is simply a matter of social acceptance. 

Over the last decades we have been witness to what seems to be a terminal decline in public funding–while our state’s population has doubled since 1960. Part of the reason I wanted to become a landscape architect was to do my part to enhance our public life—a pseudo political goal to benefit middle-class American. For this reason, I challenge landscape architects to recommend fence and bollard for public landscapes. Their time has come.

I thought February’s LAM Critic at Large article, titled The Monument in the Age of Political Correctness, was thoughtful and well written. I would also like to share some of my views in an attempt to continue the dialogue. 
Contrary to the author, I think that the Vietnam Veterans Memorials is firmly couched in the history of war memorials and rituals of commemorating soldiers. This opinion is manifest in the memorial in at least three ways. First, the memorial, which cuts in the ground, is understood as a scare. This was and continues to be a popular and powerful metaphor describing people and nations healing. This concept is tightly bound to our basic human perception that scares are a sign of injury and healing.
Secondly, the memorial invites the leaving of gifts. This tradition is predicated on the belief that the living must help the dead negotiate the liminal space between death and the after life. Many different cultures have shared this idea for millennia. Each culture understands that leaving gifts at the memorial is sending that gift to a dead person to help them move to their final destination. Leaving gifts is also a form of active forgetting and healing.
 Finally, when a soldier dies for his country, the country pays him back with honor. Maya Lin, did not simply appease the public by conventionally listing the names by their military rank as in the World War I memorial. Instead, by listing soldiers’ names in chronological order of death, Lin further continued the development towards emphasizing individual soldiers. This is a not a completely radical idea, but one that is masterfully, if not auspiciously, situated in the developing history of U.S. soldiering.
It is important to understand that memory and memorials are not stable things. In cases where commemoration continues for many years, the act of remembering becomes the memorial and ritualized remembering itself becomes a shared event. This transformation indicates that it is not static memories that allow remembering, but dynamic ones. Memory and memorials must change to stay alive. 
We as designers and as a society must be willing to allow the meanings of memorials to change. The fact that the Vietnam Memorial shies away from historic forms, does not mean its minimalist design is short-sighted. To the contrary, the Vietnam Veterans memorial invites fundament commemorating rituals that should provide a healthy basis for change.
If there is a problem with recent national memorials, it is not that they are minimal or universal. If there is a problem, it is that the memorials do not express deeply understood concepts for how our nation repays honor or what about the persons need commemorating or how commemorators understand death. The commission of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial understood these things and for this reason, I believe some of the blame or acclaim for recent memorials should fall on the memorial commissioners. 
When the public’s view of a memorial is not shared, it should indicate to the commissioners and designers to more fully express fundamental commemorating activities in an effort to find common ground. Esoteric memorials just confuse and even antagonize the situation. I do not mean to say that we need standard symbology and realistic forms, because the real power of memorials is its capacity to invite continual interpretation. The beauty of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not just lie in its ability to challenge common conceptions of memorials and commemoration, but in recognizing that the life of memory exists through the activity that brings it into being. For this reason, it may be that the controversy surrounding the September 11th memorial will be as meaningful and important to our nation as the memorial itself. 

When I first moved to Portland just over two years ago I heard about the south waterfront development and the continued proliferation of condominium developments in the pearl. The urban environmentalist side of me thought it was great that developers were convinced that Portland was primed for dense city core developments. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to understand who would prefer to spend $400 grand to live in a condo instead of a house with back yard, storage and the peace and quiet of a residential village, which are abundant near downtown.

I had grown up in the bay area and recently spent two years there near the height of the housing boom. From that experience, it was clear to me from that people were not moving to Portland to buy condos. They were moving to Portland to buy houses. If they preferred to live in a condo they would be in the bay area or Vancouver, B.C. Interestingly, though Portland fell in love with Vancouver. Vancouver was the sexy international model of dense urban living. Vancouver was building high profile urban centers, yet those centers were, and continued to be designed to fit a Tokyo-like density with condos as small as 500 to 600 square feet. This generally works for Vancouver because it meets cultural expectations. So, we have a situation where Vancouver is modeling after Tokyo, and Portland is modeling after Vancouver. This linkage has a huge disconnect because Portland is not Tokyo, nor do we want to be Tokyo. It’s not even close.

I am convinced that a vast, vast majority of people who look to move to Oregon have not grown up in urban centers like Tokyo and therefore have not been socially programmed to prefer condos–of any size. Oregonians are after large private outdoor spaces, not 10 ft x 5 ft decks. People move to Portland to start families. If they didn’t want to start a family Portlanders would be in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsome can do little to keep family-oriented couples from fleeing. In contrast, when my wife and I moved to Portland it seemed like the city was hosting a perpetual child stroller parade and ever bakery had a recipe for fertile croissants.

So, frankly I think Portland made a mistake by emulating Vancouver and by trying to make the large leap over the chasm between single family residential and condo towers. Portland is currently hanging onto the rim on the far side of the chasm looking for traction. In my estimation, condos in this quantity in Portland are about two centuries early.

Instead we should have looked south to San Francisco and its beautiful row houses. Did our mistrust of Californians blind us? My brother having just come from Chicago thought west San Francisco felt like a giant beach town, not a major city. Row houses are the perfect mid-density model that is needed in Portland because it allows for back yards, mix use and multiple stories. Portland should put down the condo stamp and start brushing in row houses as soon as possible.

It is a well known problem that cities have difficulty keeping young families living in their urban cores. San Francisco’s and Vancouver’s celebrity status alone makes raising families and expensive proposition regardless of housing type. Portland is different.  Portland can capitalize on its unique position as family centric urban area.  No other city on the west coast can match us. We need to stop mimicking Vancouver and start capitalizing on our identity.

Consider for a second a potential row house type that I think would be financially lucrative and urban. Image a 3 story shared-wall row houses with commercial consuming 75% of the bottom floor. The other 25% would be private access to a 25’ x 50’ backyard and car port with an alley in the rear.
Row houses seem like common sense to me. I grew up in suburbia. I like back yards and I like to ride my bike to work. My wife and I will be shopping for our first house this spring and if Portland had a nice selection of row houses that were cheaper than single family residential houses, we consider buying one. We will probably never buy a condo. 

You get what you pay for….if you’re lucky. This is certainly the case when it comes to our current public low-bid system. The result is often built work that is devoid of the cooperation of ideas between designer and builder that leads to inspiring and well-crafted built work. It is clear to me that low-bid systems do not lead to the best value for the public’s money because the projects are designed and built to the lowest common denominator. The low-bid system, by providing a measure of security for public money, undermines the important trust between contractor and designer. Low-bid projects lead to low-brow public places built on a foundation of liability and deceit. Read the rest of this entry »

“Scores Temporarily Unavailable”… “Scores Temporarily Unavailable”…“Scores Temporarily Unavailable”. Several times a day for over a week in mid-august, I checked CLARB’s exam reporting web site and found these words–again and again. This is so typical, I thought, and perfectly suited for the maddening process of obtaining a landscape architecture license. The LARE: the exams that tested my patience and checkbook more than anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, the Cascadia chapter of the US Green Building Council (USGBC) released the Living Building Challenge. The Living Building Challenge asks the green building industry to envision buildings that are as close to sustainable as possible. It is described as a new highest level of LEED certification—something akin to Platinum Plus. The Living Building level does not have lists of criteria like the current LEED versions. Instead, builders must meet 16 prerequisites, which are measured one year after construction. This method intends to be simple, flexible and performance-based and ultimately serve as a constellation to guide LEED v3.0 Read the rest of this entry »

Oregon and particularly Portland has helped lead the nation in sustainability, but many cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago are quickly catching up. The time is long gone that we can rest on our laurels. If leading the nation in sustainable practices, which is increasingly thought of as Oregon’s best chance for future economic prosperity, is to continue, we need to keep moving forward with good water policy and water conservation measures. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weekends ago, I was up in Seattle and toured Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/OSP/.  My favorite piece was the Richard Serra’s ‘Wake’, but what really got me thinking about waterfronts was the ‘Typewriter Eraser’ by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.  When I saw the Typewriting Eraser, I immediately thought of San Francisco’s ‘Cupid’s Span’ near the Ferry Building and it became clear that both Seattle and San Francisco have fully embraced landmark art on their waterfronts–leaving Portland in the dust. Read the rest of this entry »