EVENTSCAPE [WINTER 2008]
Department of Landscape Architecture | Quarterly Newsletter

DEPARTMENT NEWS

International Children's Park

Youths, elderly residents, community representatives, and city staff packed the dance room inside the International/Chinatown Community Center last December to take the first look at the design alternatives for improving the International Children's Park. The designs were created collaboratively by UW BLA students and high school students from the WILD (Wilderness Inner-city Leadership Development) Youth Program of the International District Housing Alliance, in a quarter-long project for the Cultural Landscape Studio led by Associate Professor Jeff Hou.

The function of the park had been compromised by poor visibility and outdated structure and equipments. Located in a dense, mixed-use area, an improved park will be a much needed asset for the neighborhood's immigrant residents and children from the nearby daycare centers.

Funded through a Small-and-Simple grant from the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, the project was initiated and envisioned by the Friends of International Children's Park to bring residents and visitors of the district back to the park.

Guatemala Design/Build

Associate Professor Daniel Winterbottom recently returned with his students from Guatemala, where they spent the fall quarter designing and building an adventure play garden for a school in Guatemala City.  Working with Safe Passage, a non-profit based in Guatemala City, and with the families that work scavenging scrap in the garbage dump, they spent 3 weeks designing and 6 weeks building the play garden.  This project follows an entry courtyard, completed in 2006, that received an ASLA Student Award. Plans are being developed to return with students in the winter 2009 quarter to design and build an outdoor classroom in the same site. In their design, a raised play structure weaves through a grove of existing eucalyptus trees. Bridgeways connect a series of gathering and play spaces. Imagery cut out in the walls support the teaching in the classroom. Conventional elements such as slides are incorporated into the structure. Paths weave through planted areas so children are connected to nature, a rare experience in the barrio of Zone 3. This oasis will support and nurture these children that face a daily assault of substance and parental abuse, gang recruitment, hunger, and extreme poverty. The university students are exposed to the daily realities of the third world and have a chance through this unique service learning program to give back to a community in need.

FACULTY NEWS

Associate Professor Jeff Hou recently joined the Board of the Association for Commmunity Design. His review of "Designing Public Consensus" (by Barbara Faga, FASLA, 2006) was published in the September 2007 issue of the Landscape Architecture Magazine. He also contributed a book chapter titled "Community Processes: the Catalytic Agency of Service Learning Studio" in Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future, published by Urban International Press (2007). Jeff will be presenting a paper titled "Interconnected Changes: Ta'u Dwellings and Settlements in Transition" at the 4th International Seminar on Vernacular Settlements to be held at the CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India.

Associate Professor Nancy Rottle is directing the new Green Futures Lab (GFL), which focuses on urban green infrastructure research and design and which recently facilitated a 100-year Green Legacy planning process for the community of Lake Forest Park. The lab is working with non-profit International Sustainable Solutions and the Copenhagen office of Gehl Associates on a "Public Spaces Public Life" study of Seattle's downtown pedestrian environment. In the fall Nancy led a graduate design studio that explored how campus landscape development can most optimally employ sustainable design principles and practices, using the young UW Tacoma campus as the project case. She is simultaneously mentoring a group of capstone Environmental Management students on a sustainability assessment and vision plan for the Woodland Park Zoo, and is sharing learning and resources between that interdisciplinary group and the graduate studio.  She and Associate Professor Marina Alberti are co-editing a forthcoming issue of Places with a section theme of Climate Change and Place.

Assistant Professor Thaisa Way was recently awarded a grant from the Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation to support her forthcoming publication "Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design."  She was recently approved as a member of the Historic Preservation Certificate faculty and will be teaching a course with Kathryn Rogers Merlino (Architecture) in the Spring on cultural landscapes and vernacular architecture.

Associate Professor Daniel Winterbottom has two articles published in Landscape Architecture Magazine: "Landscapes of Compassion: Working in the Margins"  (December 2007)  and "Landscapes of Compassion: In Guatemala Gardens of Hope"   (February 2008). He gave a talk in January at Longue Vue House and Gardens entitled "Working on the Margins: Gardens for Communities on the Fringe".  Daniel has a chapter, "Community Garden Handbook", in a book entitled Designing for Small Spaces, soon to be published by the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

STUDENT NEWS

Fall Brown Bag Series

On November 1, Beth Erdey, Western Recruitment Manager from the Student Conservation Association (SCA), presented the multiple opportunities available to students through the SCA. The SCA offers students expense-paid internships across the country, with openings available in natural resources, cultural resources, environmental education, life sciences, public policy, and technology.  For more information on SCA internship opportunities, please contact Beth Erdey or visit their website for internship postings.

Professors Jeff Hou and Julie Johnson also presented their recent case study research on Seattle Community gardens.  The work is part of a larger collection of case studies funded by a grant from the Landscape Architecture foundation. Hou and Johnson's work examines the design and development of urban community gardens as place making for healthy, active and sustainable communities.  The project highlighted six community garden sites, each varied in history, size, location, demographics and political challenges.  The professors revealed the importance of participation and community building as key components to the strength of each garden.

Other Student News

In August and September 2007, nine students in the College of Architecture & Urban Planning (CAUP) visited various cities of Siberian and European Russia as part of an urban planning Exploration Seminar led by Professor Christopher Campbell. In early September, eight of those students departed…and one remained. Second-year MLA student Maria Taylor spent her fall quarter in Krasnoyarsk, located in central Siberia, where she split her time between attending classes at the Krasnoyarsk Urban Planning & Architecture Academy and conducting independent research in preparation for her master's thesis. Maria's research focuses on the adaptation of the local urban design & planning framework to the new urban realities of post-perestroika Russia, looking at the macro-scale role of Krasnoyarsk's Master Plan and at micro- or site-scale influences on individual design projects.

ALUMNI NEWS

David St. John (MLA '96) is a Government Relations Administrator for the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, focusing on regional natural resource planning issues including endangered species recovery and ecosystem protection and restoration. He is currently on loan as a strategic advisor to the newly formed Puget Sound Partnership. The Partnership is in the midst of an ambitious program to set priorities and catalyze public and private sector actions to restore the health of Puget Sound by 2020. The Partnership will be working with communities around Puget Sound to complete the 2020 Action Agenda and submit it to the Governor by September 2008.

Katey Bean (MLA '06) and Alison Maitland Scheetz published "Greening Crown Hill: Crown Hill Improvement and Art Master Plan" in June 2007. They were hired by the Crown Hill Business Association to develop this report to help guide neighborhood and pedestrian improvements in the neighborhood, with an eye towards strengthening Crown Hill's identity as a unique neighborhood in North Seattle. This publication was featured at the Ballard Seafoodfest and Sustainable Ballard events this year, and it has also been well-received by the Crown Hill Neighbors group and the Sustainable Crown Hill group.

Grant and Ilze Jones recently won the Richard Neutra Medal for Professional Excellence. Richard Neutra, one of modernism's most important architects, pioneered the field of human behavior and the design of the built environment. He considered his most important contribution to be his practice, research, and writing on the possibility of survival through design. His definitive work on the subject, Survival by Design (Oxford University Press, 1954), was seminal in the growth of the ecological/sustainable design movement. The Neutra Medal, conferred by the Neutra family and California State Polytechnic University (where Neutra taught), recognizes those who have made influential contributions to the body of knowledge in environmental design. The Neutra Medal will give Grant and Ilze Jones overdue recognition as environmental luminaries of national and international consequence for numerous innovations in river planning, aesthetic science, context-sensitive highway design, green infrastructure, cultural landscapes, integration of architecture and landscape architecture, and the most recent Intrinsic Landscape Resources Information System, through the Jones and Jones practice. Notable past Neutra winners include the likes of Al Gore (Earth in the Balance); Ian McHarg, inventor of GIS; and Samual Mockbee, founder of Rural Studio.