Interior Design Minimalist

Early last week, on the heels of the Sustainable Sites Initiative updated system launch, the International Living Building Institute offered the updated version of the Living Building Challenge, v2.0 - which offers a comprehensive building rating system for not just green, but regenerative buildings.


:: image via ilbi

The new system offers a much more robust system that incorporates local food production, expands the notion of sites and access to nature, limits gated communities and incorporates a number of other equity issues. The other major difference is that the results of certification are based on the end result, not the planned result as is standard in many projects. This is part of the reason there is not an officially designated Living Building to date - but many are in various stages of development around the world - on the race to be the first. I'm excited to take a look and see these new changes.

While I'm happy to see the expanded scope, I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't continue to move forward with the separate Living Sites and Infrastructure Challenge - but instead incorporated these ideas into v2.0 of the LBC. Combining sites and buildings makes a lot of sense and the LBCv2.0 integrates the two in a much needed way that is lacking in the majority of system approaches. As a way of measuring landscape projects, it's often hard to remove the building from site scale projects (thus they are not even ratable) - making the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI) the only viable game in town as a purely site-specific system.

There's plenty of rating systems out there, so time will tell the overall relevance and reach - but they tend to fall into two categories. Those in the first category attempt to respond the complexity and cost of LEED by offering a more accessible, yet watered down rating that has less impact, and thus less relevance. LEED remains the industry standard, but for those who want to push the boundaries of green beyond mere sustainability, there is luckily these alternatives out there. As LEED inches forward at a conservative snails pace by incrementally incorporated somewhat minor updates and additions to new versions, I foresee SSI and the Living Building Challenge filling some of the vacuum.

They may not gain the same market share as LEED - but will truly define what regenerative design will be for both buildings and sites - something that cannot happen now that LEED has become the defacto standard and is driven by market forces as much as a green agenda.

The fabulous RMIT based journal KERB has recently announced a new competition called PlastiCity FantastiCity, to envision a new urbanism. From the site: "The competition re-envisions city systems to explore fantastical opportunities that enable groundbreaking and fun projects which shake the design world. A multi-disciplinary approach is encouraged though not required and we are sure that with help from you and your site we can hit our target audience."



The most telling idea of what the competition is about is through the definitions of the two terms - both mashups/portmanteaux with some interesting ideas:

PlastiCity (pro-noun)

1. The theory that a space’s most beautiful quality can often be the way in which it is continually made by those who inhabit it.
2. The projection of a speculative world into a pragmatic application.

1. A world of limitless possibilities.
2. The city that exists in your mind, living in your wildest dreams and your most peculiar sketches.

From some sneak peeks of the latest update to the Sustainable Sites Initiative (more from L+U here), I was both excited about the next iteration and establishment of more rigorous set of criteria, and a bit curious how it was going to maintain some of the necessary distance, inclusivity and poetry that is lacking in many other site rating systems. I'm not sure how I feel about the new split between the guidelines and the 'case' for sustainable sites



The full text from the Sustainable Sites website:

"The Sustainable Sites Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009 is the product of more than four years of work by a diverse group of experts in soils, hydrology, vegetation, materials and human health and well-being. It is expanded and updated from the Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks –Draft 2008, which was released in November 2008. The Initiative developed criteria for sustainable land practices that will enable built landscapes to support natural ecological functions by protecting existing ecosystems and regenerating ecological capacity where it has been lost. This report focuses on measuring and rewarding a project that protects, restores and regenerates ecosystem services – benefits provided by natural ecosystems such as cleaning air and water, climate regulation and human health benefits.

The Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009 includes a rating system for the credits which the pilot process will test for refinement before a formal release to the market place. The Rating System contains 15 prerequisites and 51 credits that cover all stages of the site development process from site selection to landscape maintenance. If you are interested in becoming a pilot project to test this Rating System, please apply here. Feedback from the pilot projects will be used to create a reference guide which will provide suggestions on how projects achieved the sustainability goals of specific credits.

The companion document titled The Case for Sustainable Landscapes provides a set of arguments—economic, environmental, and social—for the adoption of sustainable land practices, additional background on the science behind the performance criteria in the guidelines and performance benchmarks, the purpose and principles of the Sustainable Sites Initiative, and a sampling of some of the case studies the Initiative has followed."

In the blogosphere, this is old news now. It's been a week since I heard about the death of landscape architectural icon Lawrence Halprin - actually the day after while in a meeting where part of the topic was discussing the iconic nature of his park sequence in Portland as inspiration for a small plaza I am designing. We looked at the inspiration - not the copying of the forms - and I of course found my way back to his sketches of the sequence.


:: image via Halprin Landscape Conservancy

I was reminded of one of the items that originally to Portland - as we had learned about the work, particularly those in the sequence below. Eager to see some real 'landscape architecture' I hurriedly visited downtown to see these in person soon after moving to town. How disappointing in person, to see the gray, life-less, broken space of the Auditorium Forecourt Fountain (now Keller Fountain) as it was shut down pending repairs to pumping equipment. I was deflated, and walked the sequence seeing this project in it's full rainy, gray splendor with not a person in sight. It was a formative experience in disconnection with the aura of a space and the designer vs. the space in action.


:: image via Halprin Landscape Conservancy

To my wonderful surprise, I visited a year later, at the height of summer, pumps functioning, and the space was literally crawling with people. Then I realized that I was only seeing one facet of the story - not the entire design, or the changes in use over time, and seasons, and day and night. I had a similar experience the first time I visited the Keller Auditorium for a play and sat at intermission looking over the fountain lit in an eerie glow - providing the forecourt not just from outside but within the building itself, connecting architecture and landscape.


:: Keller (Forecourt) Fountain - image via artscatter

The first day of 'Intro to Landscape Architecture' class I was teaching at Portland State, we took a tour of the sequence as a primer on what the profession is all about - and I was amazed that many of the students hadn't known about the spaces (mere blocks from campus) and what the opinions of the space were - both good and bad. Even without knowing, the spaces can still teach.



:: Pettygrove Park - image via Oregon Sustainability Center


:: Lovejoy Fountain - image via World is Round

The other aspect I loved in school and still today is the lively sketches. These are not art per se, but serious and whimsical studies and exercises in seeing and understanding. These taught me that it's important to look and draw, and that the benefit to yourself is the point, not some form of artistic integrity. They also showed a realization of contextual forms and processes and generators of design inspiration. And they become beautiful because you see the inspiration expressed and abstracted within the designs.


:: image via Halprin Landscape Conservancy

A final snippet of story came on a visit to Seattle to see Freeway Park as well, which was amazing and beautiful in places, and a similar expression of abstracted concrete mountains. It was also a true expression of a dated, somewhat irrelevant and possibly dangerous space that harbored unsavory elements and activities - and perhaps was not part of the original context. This made me wonder about the longevity and relevance of spaces and the need to protect and restore icons - but also our need to let some of them go (or at least change to meet the times). It's a tricky thing for landscape architects to design timeless - when our materials are always changing.


:: image via hugeasscity

Strange how the formative aspects of life in landscape architecture get played out in time and history. I actually also had an opportunity to redo one of the Halprin-(esque perhaps) projects done with SOM on some towers in the auditorium district (the now remodeled Harrison West complex) - and the limits of concrete, ivy, and trees in making space for people - and how the 60s and 70s, much like in architecture created some great, and some laughable projects.

This affected me like the passing of Ian McHarg a few years back, which struck hard. came when I was amidst a complex, layered, mapping exercise which directly reflected the legacy of integrated planning, and for me personally that the access to many disparate layers of data - together - is a powerful notion. McHarg and Halprin were much more accessible heroes than Olmsted - because they were living in the same world that I was as a youthful LA.

More good reading on the subject is found at the Oregonian, Art Scatter, Portland Architecture, and Inspiration Wall. I've been remiss on reading the blogs lately - but imagine there is an outpouring of wonderful stories - which are deserved. I learned much from Halprin's work and went through amazement, disappointment, reality, and acknowledgment that landscape and taste changes, and that all good design draws from place, engages people in many ways, and is timeless... much like city itself. I wasn't quite as obsessed with the man and his work as some others locally - nor did I visit the spaces often, but nonetheless personally he will be misse. Thankfull, he will not be forgotten in the many works and a legacy of design inspirations (and those inspired, such as myself) that he left behind.

A wonderful addition to the International Urban Garden Competition “Bilbao Jardín 2009”, by Diana Balmori of New York-based Balmori Associates and a design that literally 'climbs the stairs' with a undulating vegetated strip and cor-ten walls splaying out in a wider planter at the lowest landing.


:: image via Bustler - Photo: Iwan Baan

Some of the designers explanatory text, via Bustler: "The garden climbs the stairs, running in undulating lines of different textures and colors. Envisioned as a dynamic urban space; it moves in time and with the seasons. Its lush planting cascades down as though the garden was flowing or melting, bleeding the colors into each other. In one gesture, it narrates a story of landscape taking over and expanding over the Public Space and Architecture, therefore transforming the way that the stairs and the space is perceived and read by the user. It is a garden of contrasts: the contrast between native and exotic plants, between the red flowers and the green grass, between the green grass and the grey paving. In form, the garden engages the horizontal plaza with the rising vertical plane of the steps and the upright gesture of Eduardo Chillida’s sculpture. Like the famous Spanish Steps in Rome, the garden is not only designed for visitors to ascend and descend, but for them to linger, and just be."


:: images via Bustler - Photo: Iwan Baan

It's an elegantly simple composition, and definitely takes advantage of the 'topography' of the stairway and foreshortening perspectives utilized to create a constantly changing perspective of vegetation in a somewhat grand, but otherwise barren staircase area left between the architectural objects. Check out more images including construction photos on Bustler.




:: images via Bustler - Photo: Iwan Baan

Just when I think Twitter is a roiling mass of wasted time and energy, I get a link or two that make me reconsider. One of these, spotted by @landmatters is for a site that obviously has been under my radar called Terragrams - an ongoing podcast series for landscape architecture hosted by landscape architect Craig Verzone.



From their site: "Terragrams is a podcast series disseminating discussions about the landscape. As our societal conscience and appreciation of the landscape heightens, Terragrams provides a wide portal into landscape architecture and the lives and thoughts of the professionals who shape it. The project aims at capturing, distributing and archiving these voices. It is an easily accessible, open audio digital archive aimed at collecting first-hand, face-to-face conversations between and about people in and around the field."

The cast of characters featured is a veritable who's who of landscape architecture - captured in audio for your listening pleasure. Highlights (for me at least) include Julie Bargmann, James Corner, Elizabeth Meyer, Richard Forman, Chris Reed , Liat Margolis, and the latest iteration by Ken Smith . Good stuff, and more good interviews to come.

The ideas competition Off Grid 2.0, sponsored by the California Architecture Foundation, recently announced a slate of winning entries under the theme 'Healing the Damaged Edge'. Definitely take some time to get into the full size PDFs as these thumbnails don't give one the full picture, and there aren't any project statements. A range of graphic styles and interesting ideas that fit into the concept of what the 'edge' is and can become.



Some background via the competition site: "The 24-hour life of the urban fabric of our communities is affecting not only the natural environment, but human health and wellbeing. As the human "footprint" continues to expand, issues surrounding sustainability rise to the forefront. The design and construction industry’s efforts to improve building performance are slowly being adopted…but now is the time to develop unique solutions to respond to these global problems. ... The competition involves finding sustainable solutions for urban infill projects with a zero carbon footprint. These solutions do not necessarily require a built solution – concepts could include providing innovative community development strategies, development of sustainable public policies, infill development concepts, natural resource conservation, multicultural issues, or creation of new materials or systems."

Professional Honor Award + Top Award Winner
by Phoebe Schenker, Emily Bello, Janika McFeely, EHDD Architecture



Professional Merit Award:
Yevgeniy Ossipov, Anderson Anderson Architecture





Special Jury Commendation:
Andrew Dunbar, Zoee Astrachan, Arjun Bhat, Jon Ganey, James Munden, Darren Perry, Amy Wolff - Interstice Architects





Student Honor Award:
Garrett Van Leeuwen, Cal Poly Pomona





Student Merit Award:
Katinka Suedkamp and Laura Duhachek, NewSchool of Art and Architecture



Thanks to Darren Perry at Interstice Architects for the heads up on this one.