Landscape | IDEAS

A hundred years ago, landscape architect Arthur Comey proposed Houston’s first comprehensive city plan. In his plan, Comey envisioned the city’s bayous overlaid with a network of parks and trails. As he wrote, the “bayous and creek valleys readily lend themselves to trails and parks and cannot so advantageously be used for any other purpose.”… Read more »

But in the 1930’s, in response to major floods that engulfed the city, work began clearing, straightening and enlarging the bayous. Flood mitigation projects continued through the 1960s, in some cases eliminating all riparian vegetation and lining the channel with concrete. Construction of thoroughfares and freeways encouraged the spread of the city far beyond Comey’s plan and encroached on lands that might have been intended for bayou parkways.

However in the last 40 years, there has been a proliferation of grassroots organizations and programs to protect and enhance Houston bayous and reduce flooding in environmentally sustainable ways, including the Houston Parks Board, The Bayou Preservation Association, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the White Oak Bayou Association, the Brays Bayou Association, the Sims Bayou Coalition, the Cypress Creek Flood Control Coalition and the Greens Bayou Corridor Coalition, among others. These organizations, each with a unique point of view depending on the special circumstances of the bayou they represent, all work to influence the outcomes of the primary government agencies whose projects impact the bayous: the Harris County Flood Control District and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

One particular bayou success story has been that of the Buffalo Bayou Promenade. Sponsored by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the 1.2 mile long Buffalo Bayou Promenade is a critical link that connects Buffalo Bayou Park to Houston’s theater district and downtown. Prior to its creation, development had turned its back on this portion of the bayou. Freeway structures blocked light and shed sheets of water off their sides during rain storms. Pedestrians in this portion of the bayou were more than 30′ below the grade of the surrounding streets, out of view and with few access points. Invasive plantings were overgrown and created unsafe walking conditions.

Forward to today. Re-grading of the site helped to improve views into the park while reducing the impact of erosion and improving flood water conveyance. A system of stair and ramp connecting points at each roadway crossing provides safe, convenient and frequent access opportunities and commissioned artwork frames each park portal providing a link between the city’s art district and its historic channel. Buffalo Bayou Promenade is not only a successful park and pedestrian environment but it also provides the city of Houston with highly effective flood control and storm water management.

The success of Buffalo Bayou Promenade is just one story among many of the major change in awareness of the importance of Houston’s bayous. Major works are under way along Brays Bayou, Sims Bayou, Clear Creek, Cypress Creek and White Oak Bayou. These and others are testaments to the persistence of Arthur Comey’s vision and they demonstrate how parks and greenspaces can improve the economy, the environment and the health of the city.

But there is more work to do and there is no better time than the present. Property values throughout Houston will continue to climb and there is now the opportunity to purchase distressed properties along the city’s bayous in the hopes of further revitalizing and expanding Houston’s parks and greenspaces before those properties are sold for development or redevelopment.

The national non-profit organization Redfields to Greenfields hopes to help do just that. Their goal is to acquire adjoining properties along Houston’s major bayous and protect them and convert them from existing industrial or commercial use into greenspace and to help create one continuous greenbelt.

In addition, the Bayou Greenway Initiative – a $480 million effort led by the Houston Parks Board – is working to secure 4,900 acres of new greenspace that will control flooding, provide storm water management and more than 300 miles of continuous hike and bike trails along the bayous.

As a landscape architect and long-time Houston resident, I believe there is tremendous value in preserving, protecting and restoring the city’s bayous. Not only do the city’s bayous provide important natural habitat corridors for plants and wildlife, but Houston’s bayou’s are also an amazing, almost untapped recreational resource for a fast growing urban population and play a vital role in establishing the city’s identity well into its future.

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Posted by KevinShanley
in Bayou By Us
on 1 May, 2012

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In the decade since Salt Lake City hosted the Olympic Games, the City has continued its transformation into a very urban place. The strict grid of numbered streets that radiate from Temple Square has been an effective framework for the layers of sophisticated urban design and infrastructure investments. Thanks to one of the most comprehensive transit systems in the country and broad sidewalks that provide real estate for the City’s expanding urban forest, residents and visitors alike have embraced the walkable downtown.

I was in Salt Lake City last week for the grand opening event for our project at City Creek Center, which was a huge hit. 700 new housing units, 1 million square feet of revamped downtown office space, iconic shops and the novel stream that trickles through the new outdoor shopping street have been graciously lauded for the project’s success.

This project juxtaposes the seemingly natural and the very contrived. When we first met with our clients Taubman Centers and City Creek Reserve they talked about resurrecting the original City Creek which once flowed through the site, but has been buried underground since the development of the downtown area. At first we struggled to get beyond the semantics – you can’t restore the creek if there is an underground parking structure in its path – but we understood that they wanted to recreate the experience of the original pristine waterway. We wanted the creek to live up to the idea of a natural creek, but that it be rooted in a contemporary setting –requiring attention to the detailing and emphasis on the urban context.

As it turns out, the man-made City Creek is now the largest flowing watercourse built on structure in the U.S., and it is also one of the most technical designs that SWA has undertaken in its 50-year history. We used local trade professionals and sources whenever possible including rock work by Outside the Lines and Kepco+, raw material from Utah’s Brown’s Canyon near Park City, and quarried by Delta Stone Co. Some 600 boulders were used for the creek, promenade seating areas and other aspects including the 17-foot cascade that takes the creek down from the upper level to the street level.

Where we had to supplement the locally cut stone, we relied completely on technology. Rock cut in Minnesota arrived and fit together perfectly with the rocks that were cut in China. I would argue that this landscape was just as technically precise as the architecture that surrounds it.

And the architecture is a fantastic complement. ZGF designed the residential towers. Local architecture firm, FFKR led the office design and Callison Architects in partnership with Hobbs + Black designed the retail center itself.
But, to me, the real story is on the street.

The context of the site goes beyond the immediate architecture. As a streetscape, the project heavily relies on its interaction with the city around it. The urban design challenge was in converting the supersize, vehicular Salt Lake City grid to a comfortable dimension for residents, office workers, shoppers and passersby. By giving boundaries to the city’s 22-foot-wide sidewalks and punctuating them with moments of garden nodes and places to sit, we were able to infill empty space with urban space. The new proportion not only has to relate to the surrounding architecture and infrastructure, but it is the cornerstone to creating an urban atmosphere that connects the meaning of the site and the project itself to the character of the city.

I like to think we were successful. Do you?

Weigh in on our Facebook page.

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Posted by ReneBihan
in Landscape is the Answer
on 17 April, 2012

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Landscape Urbanism (dot) com is looking for essays, thoughts, ideas and innovative approaches to landscape urbanism. The team of designers and thinkers at www.landscapeurbanism.com are looking for unique approaches to defining, understanding, communicating and practicing landscape urbanism. Some of the questions we are thinking of answering: Why does landscape urbanism matter? Why do designers do… Read more »

Posted by Sarah Peck
in Landscape Urbanism
on 4 April, 2012

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Experiencing severe coastal storms has always been part of living near the sea; however, current planning models and infrastructures are putting residents in positions equivalent to placing their heads in the sand. On September 13, 2008 Hurricane Ike struck the upper Texas coast, wreaking havoc on infrastructure and washing away entire communities. In response, SWA teamed with the University of Houston for Rice University’s SSPEED (Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Natural Disasters) Center to identify a system of solutions that equally considers structural and non-structural strategies.

The focus was to protect where appropriate and promote land uses resilient to environmental forces, where the viability of the landscape is an indication of effective, sustainable shields to flooding.

Hurricane Ike still narrowly missed the modeled “worst case scenario,” where storm waters would track up the densely populated west shore of Galveston Bay and into the heavily industrialized Houston Ship Channel. Labeled only as a category two storm by wind speed, Ike surpassed all inundation damage predictions for its designation and changed the lives of millions of people.

This one event, in a region populated by 6.5 million residents and frequented by hurricanes, sparked a sorely needed reassessment of historic storm preparedness . The first major proposal was the “Ike Dike”, a continuous dike to be built across the bay. This proposal came with high costs and potential for great environmental degradation. Once completed, the monumental dike would promote a false sense of safety, exponentially increasing the original post-Ike rush to rebuild and develop and exposing millions more to future risk in the still environmentally fragile bay. Before long, the concept was deemed a “moral hazard”.

What are needed instead are new approaches to effectively and sustainably protect and develop our modern coastlines by the integration of land use and necessary infrastructures.

The Coastal Resilience project aims to identify reasonable planning solutions to respond to Galveston Bay’s frequent tropical storms, hurricanes, and coast shaping forces. Currently, there is no clear understanding of the level of risks along the coastline, and even in the presence of clear information, it is human nature to underestimate high-level risks that occur infrequently. As a starting point, suggested non-structural responses included: improving and strictly enforcing building codes, hardening public infrastructure to be protected to a 100 year surge level, removing flood and wind subsidies in unprotected areas, buyout storm damaged properties after an additional flood, full disclosure for all future purchases, flood depth signage in all unprotected areas, better communication tools like readily available storm surge maps, and alternative land uses such as the creation of a national recreation area.

Structural or levee building opportunities sought to protect highly populated and culturally significant areas such as building an earthen levee that can protect against a 500 year return frequency (including a wave protection factor) to encourage development in the protected area. The resulting plan also identified an opportunity to tie the coastal defense infrastructure into the natural topography by rebuilding an existing roadway to specifications offering the desired 100 year flood protection and creating marshes, coastal dunes and waterfront parks to help heal the bay, promote habitat development, absorb the storm surges and sustain and protect the coastline. With this approach, isolated ‘pocket’ levee systems would only be needed in areas of existing high value development like the Houston Ship Channel. The great expense of land acquisition for post-disaster buyouts would be minimized and few populated areas would be excluded from protection. This would afford some development opportunities and also promote agriculture, recreation areas, eco-tourism and carbon sequestration opportunities outside the identified zones of protection.

This project identifies several responses to this reoccurring event and plans for the health, safety and welfare of the Galveston Bay region, subject to severe environmental forces. Each measure taken would be evaluated to maximize both the economic benefits to the local community and the potential for enhancement of the environment.

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Posted by The Coastal Resilience Team
in Landscape Infrastructure
on 19 March, 2012

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Landscape infrastructure is about seeing old things in new ways – new uses, functions and opportunities for the next generation of our essential systems. This month we look at four landscape infrastructure projects by four different design teams within SWA. Each week, here on the Landscape Infrastructure advocacy page, we’ll post a new project and… Read more »

Posted by GerdoAquino and Ying-YuHung
in Landscape Infrastructure
on 3 February, 2012

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Urban landscapes are most often designed within a limited range of expectations. Visually interesting, sometimes providing important ecosystem services, designed landscape environments should include other, richer possibilities. There are urban farms. There are community, rooftop and kitchen gardens. There are growing numbers of people interested in reducing the carbon and energy footprint of our foods…. Read more »

There are urban farms. There are community, rooftop and kitchen gardens. There are growing numbers of people interested in reducing the carbon and energy footprint of our foods. Even more dedicated people are actively engaged in efforts to provide sustainable local foods and healthier eating choices.

Groups and individuals are mobilizing to locate suitable land, organize communities and figure out ways to bring food and the process closer where people live in urban areas. These admirable efforts often focus on locating suitable, often under-utilized land, volunteer labor or people ready to support the vision, subscribe to the effort (CSA’s), provide opportunities for weekend-warrior gardeners (community gardens) or other creative mechanisms to bring food into our urban settings. These endeavors also include myriad educational and sales efforts enlisting legions of backyard gardeners into the fray.

While all of these activities are great, perhaps we are not fully seeing the forest through the trees (or the orchard through the windrow). There are thousands upon thousands of acres of land, currently landscaped with often ample budgets for maintenance that could be converted or adapted to include food-producing components. These lands are in public and private ownership and will require creativity and design to introduce changes to these non-farm landscapes, overcoming conventional expectations and sometimes cost and aesthetic barriers as well.

Our cities include vast areas of suburban residential landscapes: in yards, streets, parks and buffer lands. Corporate and institutional campuses typically include significant areas of landscaped grounds for visual interest, recreation, visual buffering and other functional uses for employees and visitors. Maintenance budgets for these types of sites are often in the $.50-1.00 per square foot per year (significant amounts when compared to many types of traditional farming operations). Introducing employee gardens or other food-producing landscapes could simply divert a portion of the money already spent on these single-purpose landscapes could provide a diversity of additional benefits. Particularly for corporate, medical or educational campuses with cafeterias, the on-site gardens could supplement daily food needs: Organic, of course, no transport costs and fresh! Imagine the dramatic allees of trees that often grace our landscape plans, still flowering in spring, but producing fruit in summer and fall? What if the climbing vines produced fruit? What if the pears and olives were the fruiting varieties, not the sterile or male only varieties–same landscape sensibilty from a formalistic standpoint perhaps, but richer in production and utility? What if parks and streetscapes, in addition to underutilized road and utility rights of way actually produced food? Many difficult questions need to be addressed, of course. Who takes care of these landscapes? Who picks the fruit? Who is the market and how does it get from tree/plant to consumer? These are important operational and logistical questions, but forward thinking designers, farmers and commercial landscape maintenance companies are exploring these issues, particularly the diverting of traditional landscape maintenance monies into “urban farming” efforts. Give our broad-based approach to design, landscape architects are the on the forefront of these trends: understanding and accommodating the unique operational needs of productive landscapes; balancing ecological functions, and considering the aesthetic and experiential result of our designs—to the benefit of our cities and communities.

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Posted by JoeRunco
in Urban Agriculture
on 27 January, 2012

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Posts Tagged: Landscape

Persistent Vision for the Bayous

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Call for Words

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Coastal Resilience Project: Galveston Bay

Four Infrastructure Futures for February

“Complete Landscapes”