 We just released our catalog of the winter 2018 classes, so be prepared to check that out at our table back there. And we are also having a few other upcoming talks. On October 10th at Main Street Manning Performing Arts Center in Burlington, Beth Haggert is going to be talking about living green roofs, about how to design and build those. They're all on Wednesday, so that's October 10th at 7pm. After that, October 24th at 7pm at Ideas in Waittsfield, the Waittsfield Common Center. Nancy Oakley from Willowbank Preservation School in Ontario. And I'm going to be talking about designing preservation methods for historic buildings. So I'd like to introduce Scott Bishop, who's going to tell us about designing public areas and ecosystems that benefit the environment around them. Scott is a landscape architect and founding principal of the Ship Land Design. And he is also a professor of practice in urban landscape and sustainable urban environments of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. In the past, he's also been a visiting critic and teacher at Syracuse University, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. So thank you very much for coming. Thanks for having me. It's been great to drive around and over a few mountains today from between here and Boston. Good to see dirt roads again on occasion. As mentioned, I'm a landscape architect, but I'm also a human ecologist. A lot of people don't even know what a landscape architect is, and then I tell them, hey, I'm a human ecologist, and that just makes things even more confusing. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that. I got my degree from human ecology from College of Atlantic and Bar Harbor, Maine. And as we know, as we all learn in life, you just keep on adding knowledge. You don't take it away. So even though I have a master's degree in landscape architecture, I still think a lot about how we deal with human ecology. And what does that really mean? So humans, that's us, right? That's the species Homo sapiens sapiens. Eco means home, and then logi or logic. So those are the three things that really make up human ecology. So it's about how we understand the relationship between humans and the environment. We can think about how other animals relate within the environment, but we actually only know what our relationship is with the environment. It's kind of a philosophical thing. And so that can be very interesting. Things are complex in the living world. In the built world or in architecture, we sometimes put bubbles around things, and that means that we're not thinking about the way that the living things create complex structures, right? There's still actually architectures that exist between living things. This is a food web of how a cod is built, right? So it takes all of these relationships in the world to create a cod, right? And as you take those things away or you alter those things in the environment, you can get rid of the cod, or you can make more cod. So this is actually how it happens. The interesting thing about this, and this is what I tell my students, is that this is in a relationship to not only the things that are in the water, but also the things that are in the air. So an ecological system is complex and it grows. It's seeming like it never ends. Our relationship with the environment is even more complex than a food web, because we're interacting with all of these things. These are network diagrams. I teach my students how to draw these so they can understand the relationships in the natural environment, but how we interact with them as humans, right? So this is looking at a fire regime and how we have stopped and started that fire regime, and it has different cause and effect relationships, as evident as the wildfires that exist in California, right? This one happens to be looking at wildfires in the front range of Colorado. The thing is, this is pretty much the end of that system. We get energy from the sun, so that helps us out quite a bit, which helps all the living things on the planet, but we don't really get off of this thing too much. We kind of throw some stuff up there, but there's really not people on those every once in a while. A couple of people go to the moon, but more or less this is a closed system, and whatever we do here kind of stays on here and starts to affect us in one way or another, beneficial or not. Sometimes it's hard for us to judge what that is. What we do know is we have a huge impact on the planet. This is what we look like from space. We are impacting the planet writ large, so obviously we have to start to think about that, and that's where that logic comes in, human ecology, right? Because if we aren't going to use our intelligence, we're going to end up like these guys, not a lot of brains and bacteria, and if left to their own devices, they are going to ship themselves to death in that petri dish, right? That's a closed system as well. My goal as a professor and a practitioner is to help to realize what those systems are and to create beneficial systems. We have to figure out ways that we can think about what we're doing so that we don't end up in situations that are irreversible. Some are almost already there at that point, so we have to figure out how we actually reverse some of those things. Part of that, I'm going to give you some parallels here about some of the work that I do at Northeastern, the Sustainable Urban Environments Program, and how that impacts some of my work out there in the real world. We can look at certain things. These may seem like pretty much non sequiturs. This is an Adesinia meritima. It's a gray mangrove. That's napalm. That's a shrimp, and that's a pregnant woman. What are the relationships between those? That's one of the things that we explore. Each given 10 topics in ecology, very broad. They look at an urban area or a series of urban areas that are captured by a region. This one happens to be the region of the Mekong Delta. Then we look at how energy flows through those systems because really ecology is just the study of thermal dynamics in living things. Ecology is actually mathematical. It is a science. People think that it's just made up, but it's actually a science. We look at how energy flows through systems, and we can then trace our own behaviors within those systems. This particular student was trying to trace the impacts of the Vietnam War on the Mekong Delta ecology. That's one of the things that we ask as an ecologist. What are we doing? Don't just do something. Think about what are we doing? What is the practice of what we do? Where and how are we doing it? It's hard sometimes for architects to think that way because our practice is based on basically going, okay, this is a chair. This is how a chair is built. I can build a chair anywhere in the world, and that's what I'm going to do. That's why it's called parque. It's an off-parque type, and texture, which is the thing. Thinking about that more specifically actually helps us understand what's happening. What she looked at was the impact of that particular war on the human population, but on the ecology itself. We go through a mapping exercise. What you can see here are the orange areas are areas where they use Agent Orange to clear the forest, and the white area is where carpet bombing occurred in that area. Those are two major impacts. If you look at the scale of this map, this is really the whole Mekong Delta, and that's a massive amount of destruction that's occurring to an ecological system. Back to the network diagram, which helps us trace what actually happened, because we could say, well, whatever. We left there. We made some mistakes. Mistakes were made, and we took off. In looking at this more specifically in terms of the relationship, and I'm going to lead you through this, obviously deforestation happened due to the Agent Orange as well. The bombing, which was massive, created these kind of crater conditions, which meant that it actually, once the war was done, the ecology of this entire area was altered. Not only were the mangroves disappeared, what followed in succession was actually this guy, this fern. It's kind of a saltwater fern, and it's actually habitat for mud shrimp. The mud shrimp started breeding quite a bit due to that, and that's a food source. Shrimp farming was not a huge thing in Vietnam until after the Vietnam War, and then people started farming it, because the habitat for that shrimp existed due to the bombing. As well, they started actually creating fish ponds out of the bomb craters from the carpet bombing. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, those are two things that carry with them a lot of different chemicals. Agent Orange, as we all know, is straight up a contagion, a cancer-causing agent, as well as a neurological agent. Carpet bombing contains all the explosive. Explosives also contain a lot of bad chemicals. Everybody knows this, even the people that make them. And so those end up in the environment. Interestingly enough, because of the way that we altered that environment, it led to this increase of farming in Vietnam. We weren't really interacting with that until recently, and you can see here that the number one importer of Vietnamese shrimp happens to be the United States. So what do you think those shrimp contain? That's right. They contain the results of our own war. We're eating our own war, right? A little bit ironic. So how do we change that? And that's what I'm interested in, because you can stop there and you can beat yourself up and you can say, I hate humans, I'm done with humans, and that's no good either, right? Self-loathing is not actually a good thing. So how do we change? How do we make things productive? Utilizing these mappings, we can actually look for ways that we actually start to reverse that. And that's something that's really, really critical. How is it that we start to think about productivity? And so what she looked at is how can we restore the mangrove ecology, but they are still dependent upon that economy to support their country. So in a way, you have to think about how we hybridize our own, how we live on this planet, as well as how we actually think about creating change. So a lot of this is really about how you start to basically create very, very tight rows of mangroves. Mangroves are like super, super productive plants. They can uptake, they can fight or remediate in situ. They can pull up most of the contamination that we see, both from the Agent Orange and the dioxins from the bombs. And so in doing that, you're also stabilizing the condition. Their natural fish stock declined rapidly because of that situation. Mangroves are nurseries to basically tropical fish. All right, so how is it that we kind of insert that? And so my students go through a series of trying to understand, within the landscape, what is the scale that we could interact in? How is it that we kind of mix the shrimp, the mangroves, and the rice? The coordination of those things all together. And then we think about, these are really conceptual exercises. But we know that these things exist. So this is heavily research-based. And then we can start to say, all right, this is something that you'd probably want to look into if you're super interested in this facet. Otherwise, it's a point of learning, understanding how we interact in the world. All right, and then further, trying to understand how we interrelate with environments. We can say, this area should be left alone. That's great, but unfortunately, the things that we impact are at a much larger scale. So it's actually more beneficial that we think about how we live within those systems and create productive systems. So building as we are, we are part of this Earth. How is it that we interact with those systems? And so this leads me to some of the work that I have done, which is very much looking beyond what is just happening on a site. So as a landscape architect, you're given a site. Here's a site. All right, you go and make your cool thing, and then walk away. Thank you very much. It's not yours anymore, which some of that's still true. It's hard to give up projects. But this particular site, almost all of my sites have a checkered past, as you might imagine. This one was both a... This was all landfill, so this was once an estuary. This is between Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River. And it was also an incinerator at one point. It also had coal piles. It was stockpile for material. And we were given this project to think about how we would create a place in the situation that would get people to the waterfront, and it became kind of the first project that helped instigate redevelopment of this area called the Third Ward, which is now completely done. So it's a way to instigate development, but also a way for us to think about ecology. And in doing so, we were very interested in having people interact. One of the things that I do as a human ecologist, you have to see that. You guys do it all the time. But within the urban environment, it's much more difficult to find the great things that you guys have around you. So understanding how that interaction occur is going to help to educate people. But also the ordination of species that exist here are a direct relationship to the uses that had occurred and thinking about how we make productivity happen. So you can see that there's poplars in the foreground here. Those are helping to remediate that site. They're helping to clean it. And then lower down, you have a marsh. That marsh never ever existed there. That is not restoration ecology. That's the creation of an ecological system. We created that. We cut down the sheet pile wall. We let water come into that site. And we let water flow off of the site. So we're opening up that ecological system. And that was really the narrative of this. Besides the fact that we understand as landscape architects that seasonal change is really, really critical. And that those leaves, right, that detritus, that's also an important part of how ecological systems happen. So when you mow your lawn, you clean it up and you throw in a big pile of compost, that's fine. But you're not letting the whole system complete itself. But working on this, as well as snowmelt and other factors, right? So we created the steel marsh. You can see here that we actually cut into that sheet pile. That keeps the wave action down, but allows the water to flow through. This is when we first planned what we call the steel marsh. And this is what happened over time. So thinking about productivity in a way that's different, allowing people to interact with it. So it's not just about creating a marsh. It's about how you create a glowing bench that draws people to that marsh, just sit in that marsh and think about what's happening. And then this guy showed up. So this was something that was super curious. Does anybody know what this is? Just wondered. It's a yellow perch. So the Milwaukee River is pretty polluted. One of the things that we did that was really cool with that project is that we pumped water out of the river onto the site because it's neutrified. There's just like basically a bunch of CSOs combined sewer overflows because it's an older city that go into that river. So by pumping that water up from the river and using it as irrigation, plants are loving that. It's basically like natural fertilizer, right? It's the greenest grass of any project that I have. But also you're stripping those nutrients out. So we're using the entire site as a filter. But as that water went down the site, what happened is that all of the seeds, all of that clean water makes its way out of those slips that we cut in there. And this is not something that we actually thought about. And this guy showed up. The yellow perch is super, super sensitive to pollution. It shouldn't be there. It shouldn't be there at all because that river is way too polluted. But for whatever reason, because we were cleaning that site with an ecological system, people were pulling these right out on the other side of that sheet pile wall. So there's ways that we can make it better. That's the big story there. But also thinking about how that happened. So that circle of learning that takes place, can we actually think about ways to do that, to design that? And that's really what I thought about in this particular project. I'm like, okay, so now I can think about this entire kind of system. Let's think about the riverine ecology. Let's think about how the fish are working. Think about that relationship between the terrestrial and the aquatic. This is Grand Rapids, Michigan. We did a lot of planning work there along the river and in their downtown, looking to create, like, basically two huge river parks along the entire city, but having to figure out ways to do that because there's obviously already development that goes right up to the edge. They have fluctuations of about seasonally of about 20 feet. So there's a high velocity of that river. So this was the thing that I started to research in my own practice, which was like, how do we build that? So there's all of these relationships between the terrestrial environment and then basically these bigger fish, right? So how do we build a better fish? And what we found out is that the little shredders, the little microbes, all that stuff, if you get the right kind of tree species, in the fall, when the fish are running to spawn, steelhead, which is a big fish that comes here through the Great Lakes and then up the river, they'll drop that detritus. They'll drop that in the river. And the little microbes that are hanging on that leaf, the little shredders, all those guys, they fall into the water column. The fish don't eat while they're breeding. And so the best way to feed a fish while they're spawning is to actually get those microbes into the water column. So as they breathe, they're actually eating. And so we could set up that system along this river corridor so that if we found the right species that had the right critters on them, that basically we would be feeding that fish, right? Which builds a better fish. Which builds a better ecological system, right? Upward migrations, like building a better cod. Same idea, right? And so this is the project that I'm currently working on. It's called Lion's Edge. There's actually a plaza component to it as well. But it's allowing people also to interact with this riverine environment. It does a lot of things. It does things in four seasons as well. That's one of the things that I really try to highlight in my work. It's understanding and getting people out, but in order to build trees within a flood wall that has to at least on a yearly basis deal with 20 feet of change and within a 100-year flood has to deal with nearly 30 feet of flooding from the base elevation, we have to be really, really crafty about how we actually build this because trees don't naturally want to grow in concrete walls that are four feet thick, right? So this is a structure that we have to build in order to create that habitat. It's a complex project, not only from its components and parts, but also from the way that it operates. So these are actually taxodiums. They haven't been living in Michigan at least for, I don't know, the past 10 million years. But people ask me, are they native? I'm like, yes they are. They have been there before, right? How do we classify that? Is that something that we classify by the last glacial period? Regardless, the point is that these are really big workhorses. They also help to fight or remediate. Just like any plant, there are carbon sink, right? They're going to convert carbon dioxide, especially those in urban environment, sugars and starches that help build the tree to release oxygen. It's one of the coolest things about trees is that they actually make the stuff that we breathe. And then they also create a rhizosphere that creates another level of microbial activity. So how do we bring life back to urban soils? It's by having big trees. Those needles, as I talked about before, they flow down the terraces that we created, and they go right into the river. In the sewer, we're allowing that water to flow openly into the ecological into the larger ecological processes. And so this all works, right? It all works together to basically help feed a fish. It also polishes and cleans stormwater. We're taking the water off of the roofs in the surrounding plaza area. We're putting that in a cistern and we're using that for irrigation. And as it works its way down, there are no points where the hardscape allows the water to run off without intercepting a terrace. It's actually more complex than this now, but this is our first attempt at understanding how we would create a structure so that we could have these terraces but also allow for a root volume. Trees need approximately 1,800 square cubic feet of soil in order to be a big tree. Unlike what you see in the urban area where they give them like a 6x6 tree pit, that's not enough, right? So we have to convince everybody that's like, you got to build a flood wall and you got to build it big to say, no, actually what we have to do is build an ecology and then build a flood wall around it. You change the hierarchy. What we see so often today is that there's one problem that floods and the answer is make it a big wall. And that's actually creating more problems because you haven't asked the right question. So much of what I asked my students to do is to ask the right questions. How do we go about this? How do we understand the complexities? Because if you just do a one-to-one, you're always going to get the wrong answer. And so this is a very, very complex system, but not only are we lifting up that entire terror system, we're allowing for this thing to function in a manner that the flood wall does as well. It's also allowing that water to get filtered as it floods. So you can see here it actually deals with a 100-year flood plane. It doesn't look like the other flood walls. It actually allows people to inhabit this place as well. It allows the trees to grow and it allows people to experience this. So it's a lot of programming that we can fit in a fairly small space allowing people to utilize that river as a gateway. And they're looking at restoring that entire river, taking out all the dams, and creating a whitewater course. So this becomes the gateway to the downtown from that particular course. All right, so back to some of the work that my students do. So these are my landscape architecture students and my architecture students. We do something called comprehensive design where we basically look at large sites. This is Boston area in case you don't recognize it. And these, right, so this is basically I won't touch it. This is like downtown Boston. But these are some of the bigger open spaces that still exist in and around Boston. Very, very critical, right? Boston has some of the largest green spaces adjacent to urban areas in North America. So the idea is that we will think about these areas. Some of them are compromised. Some of them are being developed. And we use a team where they think together about how they solve some of these issues, not only from a landscape perspective but an architecture perspective. So how is it that these things become interrelated? And so this is one example of this. This is a Katie and Molly's project. This is right on the riverfront near Boston, one of the areas where you have what you see happening in Boston now is you have gentrification and a lot of residential development. But it's amongst a bunch of industrial landscapes, right? It's still a mix that's occurring. And this is one of those big areas. This is actually close to where the Big Wind Casino is going. But it's also a field depot for the airport. And what we do is they take a building type so that you would say they had, I believe, they had wood frame construction. I'm almost positive. And then they get one species and then they have to figure out how the species ecology might fit into a building system. So they got populous and I'd give them hybrid popular, not deltoids. Right, so that's basically an aspen species. What happens with poplars is that they're the workhorse. So they could be used for pulp. They can be used for creating lumber. Super fast growing tree. You can grow 100 foot tree in a hybrid popular in 10 years. And so they studied ways that you can distribute grid systems based upon how you might grow these trees for different uses. And they also started to understand ecology. And so what they were doing was trying to figure out how they could fight or remediate that large site that we were showing. And this shows the timeline by which they might do that. As well, they thought about different site strategies. Right, so not only can you just do the one thing where you create a popular forest, but you can actually use different species that are intercropping to take care of different contamination. And they put that over time so we can understand a reasonable timeline for cleaning up a site. And then where those things might happen in relationship to where future development might occur, trying to make sure that the uses match the level of remediation that needs to happen. They then get down to a site-specific exercise where they really look at a building typology and a landscape that surrounds that typology and trying to understand really how that all works together. Because there's so much waste in the processing of a popular for either wood or even just taking it down because it's being fighter-remegated, they thought of a way that they could actually harness the energy that exists during composting to help empower the site. So it really becomes a programmatic driver. They were thinking about how you could actually, you know, how big would the site need to be in order to start to create some of those relationships that occur? And then how would you start to create a building that relates to that specific landscape? So this kind of, this area here is actually the compost area. You can draw heat from the compost then heats the building. The building itself is made out of poplars that were harvested over 10 years. And then we look at those energy systems and see how they relate. You can use poplars to shade the structure itself, creating insulated values as well as keeping out southern sunlight. And so this whole thing becomes an exercise in trying to understand how two things that aren't related may become relatable and help to create a better understanding about how you build in the world. So maybe you want to know about how I build in the world. This is one of the projects that I worked on as well. This is in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's a city duck. It's actually kind of like their central park. They took an area which was a bunch of these two buildings were warehouses. That was a defunct rail line. There was no relationship between the water and the side of the city. And so we helped them figure out ways that they could create that relationship again. That's super, super critical and how we think about human ecology. Just get to people don't even know that the river is there, right? Get people to realize that there's something there and then it becomes an asset. And this has helped fuel the growth of their downtown. We also have a lot of people who like wood on piles that go out into the river and also create programmatic areas really critical for people to have events. They have over 300 events here now every year. And they also allow people to go from their boats up to the different restaurants in the city as well as back down from the city into the water. We also have people who like wood, you guys like wood from for obvious reasons, right? This stuff helps us out in terms of the planet. And the more that we can use wood, the more that we start to get a handle on really what is a practice of gardening, right? Forestry is a practice of gardening. And so understanding those relationships become really important. This is sustainable and still being shipped around the world, right? So these are the things that we start to think about. How do we, you know, we do something once, we do it the best that we can and then we think about how we did it and we evaluate it and go, can we do that any better? Because there are other ways that we can do that. And so again, you can see these kind of cool forms, but there's also each of these benches intercepts storm water in a similar way that the terraces did in Grand Rapids and they make sure that the water is polished in the soil before it goes into the river. So even though this is all hardscape, there is a biological function that's occurring just underneath the surface. And the relationship is then created, right? And then people understand water in a different way and they become champions of that water, right? And you create that positive, that net positive gain. Again, critical in human ecology and then that relationship continues to grow as well as it relates to the identity of the city. So this one, this little guy here is one of the first projects that we started out at Bishop Land Design and I actually is a park, it's a little playground in my neighborhood. So the way that I got this project is I went to the community meeting and I said, yeah, I'll design that. I'll do the concept design for free because it's in my neighborhood and I can't stand somebody else replacing that park. So we worked with the community which are my neighbors, right? And we figured out how we're going to program this. So this is another critical component of human ecology and that's how we create outreach. How do we actually talk about this? It's not just about what I want to do as a designer, it's about how we think about programming. Programming comes from the people, right? The people that are surrounding that area comes from the people that know what the constraints are and so as the process goes, try to figure out what that is. So there's a series of landforms that we like to create but we also, the interesting kind of outcome of this is that this whole thing was just fenced off. So if you're in an urban environment and you have a fenced off area and there's some lawn in it, some wood chips around equipment, what do you think is going to go and live in there? Dogs, not kids, right? And once the dog, people are going to just let their dog in there and they're going to walk away. They're my neighbors. I know they're doing it. I know the dogs but I'm not there to say that's bad. It's just that that's a common use when you put up a fence. It's just, it's going to be the response in an urban environment. So what we've said is take the fence down. This isn't for, this is a playground. It's not for dogs. You can walk your dog anywhere. You can walk your dog in this park. You just can't lead it off lead. And so how is it that we do that? How is it that we create an area for kids? This is a two to five year old playground. How does that we do that without having fences? So we came up with this idea. Here you can kind of see that translation of that plan into the park itself and then you can see these two areas as control points. So you figure how fast can a two year old run? Not that fast. You should be there. A parent should be there if you have a two to five year old. You don't just put them in the fence and walk away. You're going to be sitting there watching them. And so we figure it out a way that we could use these control points and still allow people to view their kids. And this was the thing that we created. Not only is it a fence, but it's also a bench. So we call it the fence. And this fence surrounds the play area. It leaves the rest of the other areas open. Good ecological lesson right there. And it allows these kids to interact and their parents to actually have a place to sit. Right now it's super hot. There's nowhere to sit. So it's kind of unpleasant for parents. And it was covered in dog crap. So I had to solve those problems. This is the fence. And this goes to the idea of what we build. So we basically, in our office, we use 3D modeling software. And we're like, okay, so how is it that we're going to think about this? So we start out with this concept. Pretty easy. In fact, this was the concept right here. I have a sketch of this. It's just like, I want to make this little thing super simple. That is self-supporting as long as you attach it to a foundation. And then we can do all these other cool things with the different pieces that will create the form that we want to. And so we draw it once, draw it as a line drawing. Then I have people in my office we actually build prototypes before we even go into other drawings. So okay, what did you think this was really going to do? I thought it was going to be like this, this and this. Okay, go ahead. Go and build it. Alright. That's not working. Because this doesn't go like that. Because there's no gravity in 3D modeling software. There's none of the forces. You have to model forces in a 3D model if you want to understand forces. But it's just as easy for us to actually think about it. So in the process of this, which is our prototype these are some of my employees standing down, going yeah, we finally built a little piece of it. We basically create these. These are shop drawings. Which is something that most landscape architecture offices do not create. You just send that sketch that I showed you in the beginning. You send that to somebody else. Obviously it's a little bit more detailed than that. You send some version or iteration of this thing. And then your woodworker is going to create that shop drawing or whoever that goes and we have manufacturing partners that we use and then it goes to a different company. Which I also own, but either way. It's a way to port this thing to make sure we get exactly what we want. These are just examples of the detailed shop drawings. These go down to pieces. These go down to understanding exactly how each one of the pieces are cut. All of those letters respond to a schedule. All of those have exact cut marks. They all have exact cut angles. It shows how it's attached to the foundation. In fact, it goes down to angles, links. This is about 250 pages. And it even tells you the parts and pieces. It's like an Ikea catalog. These are the things that you need. And then it goes to our manufacturing partners. We go and we visit them and we're like, okay, do you get what we're saying? Are you evaluating this right? How many mistakes do we make? We go back. We change the drawings a little bit. We send them back to them so it's back and forth in terms of that process. We start building these pieces. They're actually segmented. In case one piece gets ruined, they can pull it out of the entire system and get a new piece made and go back to it. So this is one of them going together. You've got to have the guys on site. Here's the problem. When you build something, that's exact. You have to make sure the foundation is actually going to match the thing. The guys that were manufacturing this were about a thousand miles away from where it's going to be installed. Ideally, that's not the way we do it, right? But this is the way that the world works. We had to actually go and check that foundation like six different times, make sure the elevation is right, make sure the shape would match the exact thing that was going to end up on site. Then you can see the thing coming in little piece by piece here. They all kind of get lined up. The nice thing about this particular form is you can tell when you screw up. Always a great little trick in design. Then you can see how this thing all goes together. This is a special kind of treated wood. It also is treated with a natural penetrating stain that is created from... It's like an orange-based thinner and a tongue oil combination. You can eat it basically. You can drink it if you want to. It would taste really bad. Then you can see the playground equipment within this. We're still in progress of planting. It was so hot this summer that they didn't get the planting done on time. Then you can see the kind of total form coming together. That's from soup to nuts. I'm going to lead. What's the playground surface? That is poured in place rubber. It's basically a combination of recycled tires. There's a lot of material that we're looking at using. This is about how you kind of create your palette. There's another material that we've been exploring. That's a grass mat, which allows for you to grow something in between, but it still has a fall zone. A lot of the issues that we deal with, and we can probably get this in the Q&A, is just how you deal with code versus how you deal with sustainable materials and execution. This particular playground at least the playground portion just opened up a couple weeks ago. That's how long it takes to actually go from design to building things. It takes a long time. The city deck project that I showed you before, that takes seven years of my life to build that one. When we think about this as another group of folks that were in the comprehensive design studio, and I like to end with this just because it's a way to think about how we interact with the world again, writ large. One of it is choosing the site. We shouldn't always be choosing the sites that are the green field sites, the sites that are easy. We should actually be thinking about how we choose the hard sites. That's actually like a huge landfill. They thought about how we could actually start to process the landfill itself by utilizing a building as a filtration system. In essence, it's a really cool idea and it's based in a lot of research. There's work now that's being done where they're injecting things into landfills. The problem with landfills is they're just a big burrito and you can't get anything in there and so it just sits in there. Nothing's happening. Leachate collects on the bottom. You get some gas from processing but you could make that much more reactive. They found a few examples of research papers where they were injecting water and sugars and things like that into the landfill itself and that was creating natural gas but also the leachate was then coming out of the landfill and eventually this is going to actually clean the landfill itself. All of the things that were in the landfill would be processed via biological mechanisms but as you're doing that they thought of this building that then would capture that. You can see the retention area they're capturing storm water injecting it into the landfill. They're allowing the leachate to come in to be processed into the building. That particular building and then they're allowing that water once processed to flow into the landscape that open system and how light itself is creating the capacity to process the leachate and how they cool the building via this process and again these are very very conceptual ideas but they also help the next generation these guys actually called me he says I'm working on a project where we're doing a building on a landfill and I actually started to use some of the ideas that I learned in this class which I don't know where else they're teaching this stuff but I'm glad that he's actually interacting in the world with that knowledge because that's my best hope for all of my students is that they can do a better job than I did right and that they're able to interact in the world in a better way that I have as well as creating a wonderful place so as we say we've got to stay positive think about the net positive that we can create in the world even though some of them are hard fought it's always worthwhile it's got questions yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes so with the Grand Rapids project we did research specifically to figure out what kind of species would be best for the fish and as it happens the deciduous evergreens which is a taxodium they have a lot of sap suckers and sap suckers they're some of the best ones for those fish and so they're going to go and attack that tree but then they drop their needles in the fall and those are the ones that the fish will work out we'll see that one's going to be built starting in the spring but yeah we use research I have access to a great number of journals being both in academia and a practitioner and a resource because that's what we have that's the logic part of what we do a lot of times people are faulted especially in design fields we're just like coming up with crazy ideas and that's not always true there's a lot of design research that occurs within the design profession but as a human ecologist and as a landscape architect we design with living things it's a lot more complicated right to plan a tree there it's not just a form it's a function that we have to design with the topic of the Toxodium are those also the trees that were threatened in a different area or declined in a different area that you had mentioned when you were talking right there those are not but they have an interesting the Toxodiums have an interesting story which is their native environment is basically like most of the southern coast right so Louisiana that's where you're going to see these are the big cypresses that you see that have the big knees and all of that and so they had a much bigger range depending upon when the ice ages come they fluctuate just as any tree species does they kind of move back and forth and so what we do know is that the climate is changing Grand Rapids in particular is going to get warmer and wetter and as that happens and as you all I'm sure are aware of this like your maples are leaving they're going to Canada we're out thanks and that's due directly to climate change and so in that way we have to actually think about that it's not a far term thing it's within a couple of lifetimes that we need to understand they're all going to go away and so we need to think about resiliency in that way and it's a native tree in the south it was a native tree that lived there millions of years ago it was just wiped out by successive ice ages it does not spread until the climate is right which is a really cool adaptation that it has so it can drop as many little crazy pine cones that it has but it's not going to become an invasive species it's only going to live on that site up until the time that the climate catches up with it which means that it will probably be adapted to whatever is living there as well so there's kind of that we're kind of thinking about this thing as well which is just critical I think in what we do if you're still planting sugar maples in your designs which a lot of people are it's like sorry you got like 50 years on that and it's gone I have a question about that when you were designing especially with these more compact parks where you're fitting a lot of ecology to a relatively small space and the space is going to the demands in that space are going to change due to climate, due to urbanism all sorts of things when you're working in such a small space especially how far up are you looking this is a part that's going to be here forever or we're designing this for a community for the next 50 years or how do you think about time I mean that is that's kind of an ongoing question for sure that we continue to ask ourselves because there's a material renewal kind of cycle which is realistic nothing lasts forever and nobody wants to pay for the things that almost last forever so we're too expensive so what is it that we can do to create things that can be renewed and there's options to think about and that's another reason why I'm very interested in as much wood as we can use because that allows for flexibility in that like a re-evaluation even though so that targets us if we use thermally modified wood or or FSC hardwoods we're getting into a four year range that's reasonable because maybe that does change my park doesn't have to last forever right the point being is that the park is there that's some of the biggest moves that we make the things that I feel the best about in landscape architecture is that we convert something that wasn't an open space or functioning ecologically and we convert that into a space that does so it's like the little victories small ones count especially somewhere like Green Bay where you're like that was a railroad like that was just a series of railroad ties and it wasn't doing anything and then we made it into a space that was performative both for the city but also for right also for the river itself if we can continue to do that just like we are trying to do in Grand Rapids continue to like remove the light industrial from the river front restore the floodplain we're reversing that time and so I think that's the point there's little victories and there's bigger victories the planning work that I do I can vision the big victory and you're like there you go and I'm like that's going to be 100 years before they're done but at least it gives people a goal and I didn't show much of my planning work other than the Grand Rapids project but that is also different scales so if we're doing planning it's usually 50 years to 100 years but people get very weird about 100 years like once you get outside of the lifespan of a human everyone's like don't care which is one of our problems right it's a huge problem I mean if we could get people to realize that we could probably stop the adverse effects of climate change but it's very very difficult so hopefully you all do but like those are the things that I get to think about with my students in a sustainable urban environment we're like okay if we needed to balance carbon like how many trees do we have to plant in the eastern forest to just accommodate for the carbon footprint of Boston right and then we'll do the math and we're like how do we need this many acres do we even have enough land to fix the problems that we've created so some of those bigger land use equations are a lot of fun and I also teach another class called the ecological city that also looks at that same idea where we say alright this is basically you could make the best thing that you want to but it's still going to be made out of right now still going to be made out of concrete and steel like huge carbon footprint materials right they're going to be operating in some way so how is it that we understand resources and relationships to cities I know you guys love where you live I would love it if I lived here too but most of us understand that if we all just spread diffusely and try to get a couple acres we would use our resources just like that so cities are really really critical density is really really critical how do we make spaces like that livable how do we make them ecologically functional and how is it that we start to calculate what that is so that all of the other land uses that surround because it's a philosophical question what is the city if the city is drawing from global resources it becomes a whole different question it's not just a collection of buildings it's actually this complex relationship between goods and resources and energy it's an ecology right same thing that I showed you you could just replace the cod with city it's the same thing