EVENTSCAPE
UW Department of Landscape Architecture Biannual Newsletter, Autumn 2009

HEADLINES

Global Design/Build Program Video
This Autumn, a video featuring the Landscape Architecture International Design/Build Program was released on YouTube and can also be viewed here:

4th International Architectural Biennale Rotterdam
Work of the Winter 2009 Community Design Studio, led by Jeff Hou, was one of the 45 selected entries that are on display at the Parallel Cases Exhibition, a part of the 4th International Architectural Biennale Rotterdam, under the theme of Open Space: Designing Co-existence. The event opened on September 25th, and will end in January 2010. The studio developed tactics and strategies to revitalize King Street that connects Chinatown and Little Saigon in Seattle's International District. The implementation of the plan is now being spearheaded by IDEAspace, a community-based design center run by Seattle Chinatown-International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda).

Parallel Cases on exhibit until January 2010, Rotterdam

Guatemala Garden of Hope featured in Green Communities Exhibition, Washington D.C.
This summer, The Guatemala Garden of Hope, a student-driven, design-build project coordinated by Professor Daniel Winterbottom, was one of 6 projects featured in the Green Communities exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington DC.

The Guatemala Garden of Hope at the National Building Museum

Associate Professor Daniel Winterbottom Receives 2009 ASLA Award
The Department of Landscape Architecture congratulates Associate Professor Daniel Winterbottom as recipient of the 2009 Community Service Award presented by the American Society of Landscape Architects. This national award recognizes an individual who has provided sustained, pro bono service to the community demonstrating sound principles or values of landscape architecture. Prof. Winterbottom brings the benefits of landscape architecture to poor, marginalized, and underserved populations. He teaches the students under his guidance how to use low-tech, cost-effective, sustainable materials in the creation of these design/build projects. Their built landscapes have benefited people in prisons, poor communities in Mexico and Guatemala, cancer centers and other underserved groups.

Green Roof Methods Evaluation
In partnership with Snyder Roofing of Washington, Assistant Professors Ken Yocom and Ben Spencer along with department students began in June 2009 a long-term evaluation project assessing the effectiveness of green roof strategies for the Puget Sound, Georgia Basin Lowlands. Over the next five years, the research team will evaluate a newly installed green roof at the Snyder Roofing Headquarters in Snohomish, WA. The 30'x100' roof has been subdivided into five test plots each receiving a different vegetated roof treatment. Stay tuned for on-going results!

Research team members Danielle L. Pierce, MLA '09 and Dave Bramer, MLA '11 pose in front of the weather station, currently on loan from Magnusson Klemencic Associates, and a test plot designed by Carlisle SynTec and installed by Coastal Specified Products.

STUDENTS + STUDIOS

Welcome New Students!
On September 28th, 13 new MLA students and 18 new BLA students gathered with department faculty at the Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center in Bellevue to begin two exciting days of orientation activities. Dean Daniel Friedman and Department Chair Jeff Hou welcomed the students and spoke of their influential futures as landscape architects in shaping a sustainable world. Hailing from numerous states across the country and as far away as Taiwan, these new classes represent diverse backgrounds in education and experience. Among those are environmental studies, political science, sociology, horticulture, advertising, visual arts, and architecture.

New BLA and MLA students at the Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center for Orientation on September 28th.


Since the first week of orientation the new students have become immersed in the program. Along with stimulating classroom and studio hours, the students have ventured out on field trips with Associate Professors Iain Robertson and Julie Johnson to discover the Bloedel Reserve and Gasworks Park. Special guest lecturer, Rich Haag delighted students by joining them at Gasworks Park to give them a personal tour and slide show of the park's design and development.

Rick Haag speaks to new students at Gasworks Park in October


Associate Professor Iain Robertson introduces the new students to the landscape typologies of the Bloedel Reserve

Hong Kong + Tokyo: UW Exploration Seminar
With help from BE doctoral student Shumei Huang and MUP student Nathan Tseng, Chair and Associate Professor Jeff Hou completed his third Exploration Seminar this past summer in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Titled Asian Cities, Hybrid Urbanism, the traveling seminar examines how the urban forms and processes of Tokyo and Hong Kong respectively support the everyday life of their millions of residents and workers; how they reflect their distinct urban culture; and how they function as complex and hybrid urban systems. In Hong Kong, students visited the business and commercial districts as well as market streets and dense residential neighborhoods. They also traveled to rural villages in the New Territories and a fishing village on an outlying island. For more information, visit http://courses.washington.edu/asiacity/

photo taken in front of the Blue House, a historic tenement building in Wanchai, Hong Kong

2009 Autumn Colloquium: What is Urban Ecological Design?
This Autumn the Faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture is sponsoring a colloquium that engages the question, "What is Ecological Design?" The weekly dialogues approach this question from the perspective of the four program foci: Ecological Infrastructure; Ecological Literacy; Culturally-based Placemaking; and Human and Environmental Health. The Autumn Colloquium meets Mondays from 12:00-1:00 in Gould 100.Colloquim Poster

FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS

Faculty members at the Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center for the2009 New Student Orientation

Associate Professor Jeff Hou was appointed to the position of department chair beginning this fall quarter. Prof. Hou joined the faculty of the CBE Department of Landscape Architecture in 2001. He has a multidisciplinary background in architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and public art. Prof. Hou received his PhD in Environmental Planning and Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley; his Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania; and his Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union.

This past spring and summer, Associate Professor Jeff Hou co-taught the College's inaugural Built Environments Lab (BE Lab) with Prof. Dan Abramson in the Department of Urban Design and Planning. The interdisciplinary field studio focused on a culturally and historically significant village less than two hours' drive from the epicenter of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

Associate Professor Lynne Manzo and graduate students from her Research Methods class are working with the Seattle Parks Foundation this autumn to develop a Parks Evaluation Toolkit to assess Seattle's public parks. This innovative project will develop evaluation criteria and a set of methods that can be used to evaluate Seattle's parks, adding critical inside into what makes urban open space successful. In addition, Associate Professor Manzo and her colleague Associate Professor Rachel Kleit from the UW Evans School have launched a major community study examining the impacts of the redevelopment of a public housing site on former residents. This 4-yr funded study will track original residents and assess their housing, health and well-being outcomes over time.

On October 28th Assistant Professor Ben Spencer and his wife Jenn welcomed the arrival of their son, William Brown Spencer!!! Congratulations to the new family!

Ben spent an exciting and productive summer in Peru. During July he was in Lima meeting with NGOs working in the city's informal urban settlements and working with UW's Department of Global Health to initiate a distributed infrastructure projects in the Community of Lomas de Zapallal. In August, he relocated to Lambayeque in Northern Peru to work at the Ventarron archeologoical site with the Community of Ventarron and an interdisciplinary team to develop a master plan, establish a community-based, eco-tourism industry and design associated landscapes and bamboo/adobe structures. His work in Ventarron is slated for publication in the Actas del Encuentro de la Catedra UNESCO de Bogotà de Mayo 2009.

Professor Emeritus David Streatfield is a member of a scholarship committee assembled by the Art Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara that recently received a Getty Grant to conduct new research and prepare essays for a new book featuring the work of Cliff May. Professor Streatfield has also been serving as a consultant historian on the restoration of Sicilian Court at Scripps College, Claremont, California. The restoration has been largely completed.

This summer Assistant Professor Thaisa Way gave talks at the Guggenheim in New York City as part of a symposium on architectural history and writing sponsored by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Dr. Way also spoke at the University of Virginia, University of Maryland, Chatham University, and the University of British Columbia. This fall she is a speaker for a conference SHAPING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE: NEW YORK CITY & THE REGION where she will talk about the work of women in the designing of public spaces and landscapes. She is also speaking at the 13th National Conference on Planning History on her work in defining a feminist critique of the garden city movement. Dr. Way also received a Royalty Research Grant from the University of Washington this summer to pursue her research on the work and legacy of Richard Haag. She is currently filming some of Haag's landscapes as a teaching tool and a way to explore movement in the landscape. She published a short piece on his own edible landscape, a part of his interest in nutrimental horticulture in the September issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine. Dr. Way is planning on writing a book on Haag's work as it framed and shaped urban ecological design. As we look to the future and consider the challenges of creating a healthy environment, we have much to learn from our past.

This past August, Assistant Professor Ken Yocom traveled to Gangwon Province, Republic of Korea to facilitate a one-week training seminar on Urban Ecological Restoration Practices at the International Urban Training Center, sponsored by the UN-Habitat program. As the program grows, this becomes Ken's fourth training seminar in the past three years. Recent participants from this year's seminar travelled from 16 developing countries from South and Southeast Asia and Africa.

Ken Yocom with IUTC participants in Korea

BOOK RELEASES

Associate Professors Jeff Hou and Julie Johnson celebrated the publication of their new book Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle's Urban Community (co-authored with Laura Lawson; University of Washington Press 2009) at the Benefit event of the Landscape Architecture Foundation on September 18th, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion Stage at Millennium Park in Chicago. The book is co-published by the Landscape Architecture Program as a part of its "Land and Community Design Case Study Series". While in Chicago, Jeff and Julie also presented findings from the book at the ASLA Annual Meeting in a panel joined by Laura Lawson.

Thaisa Way's new book , Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century (UVa Press), came out in the spring with support from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, a David Coffin award from the Landscape Studies Foundation, and the College of Built Environments. Dr. Way has been invited to lecture on her work at universities, public gardens, and conferences across the country. A book review in Landscape Architecture Magazine (November 2009) claimed it should become "required reading for all students of landscape architecture." The reviewer concluded by describing the book as "groundbreaking and innovative" and that it "will surely resonate with most people practicing, teaching and writing about landscape architecture today."

Professor Emeritus Daniel Streissguth of the Department of Architecture and wife Ann Streissguth, professor and Director of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences were featured in University Week celebrating the release of their new book, In Love with a Hillside Garden. The book features the Streissguth's one-acre garden, their personal gardening philosophy and rich illustrations.

Associate Professor Kelleann Foster of Penn State University launched her new book, Becoming a Landscape Architect: A Guide to Careers in Design in September at the ASLA Conference, Chicago. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the profession and features two notable UW Landscape Architecture alumnae Jennifer Guthrie BLA '93 and Barbara Deutsch MLA '97 who discuss the importance of their UW education.

ALUMNI ACCOLADES

Barbara Deutsch, MLA '97 has been selected as the new executive director of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF). Liz Birkholz, MLA '04 has been appointed Chair of the ASLA's Public Relations and Communications Advisory Committee. Aaron Luoma, MLA '08 is serving an annual term on City of Seattle's Landmark Preservation Board through the Get Engaged program.

Stephanie Hurley, MLA '04 and Megan Wilson Stromberg's, MLA '04 chapter "Residential Street Design with Watersheds in Mind: Towards Ecological Streets" was just published in the Handbook of Regenerative Landscape Design: Integrative Studies in Water Management & Land Development by Robert France.

Anna Bastin McKee, MLA '92 has received a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers grant to travel in December to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In the spring she will exhibit artwork created from her experience and focused on ice coring science, ice sheet landscapes and climate change. In addition, she will visit a number of middle schools to give presentations. Follow Anna's progress through her blog

Susanne Friedman, MLA '97 has been featured in the premiere issue of ARTOCRATIC, a free online magazine of essays, interviews, fiction, poetry and visual art. View Susanne's most recent encaustic paintings at: www.artocratic.com/home/home.html

Please share your news with the department and alumni by emailing JoAnne Edwards.