Wanting to take a firmer stance on acknowledging the climate impacts of our projects and profession, OLIN Labs used the anchor of Climate Week 2023 to curate a series of internal discussions, with invited guest speakers, to help us take stock of the state of our practice, current trends, and define and discuss our research, practice, and operational objectives for the future.
The Climate Week program was organized around four main topics: Carbon Accounting, Carbon + Communities, Carbon + Biodiversity, and Carbon + Operations. Guest speakers included landscape architects, engineers, and ecologists from academia and practice, coming together in short informal conversations with representatives from OLIN and Labs leadership, and studio members. Following the talks, OLINites were asked to think critically about opportunities for advancing climate goals through our work. Prompts included: What feels possible? What feels impossible? Where can we learn? Where can we advocate? Each evening, select films from the Environmental Film Festival, offered for free through Climate Week NYC, were screened, framing even broader implications of the climate crisis on a national and global scale.
OLIN’s Dan Krall, Rebecca Popowsky and Josh Leaskey discuss Carbon + Operations with Rob Kuper, from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture on September 21 during Climate Week.
Climate Week at OLIN also featured a preview of OLIN Lab’s internal Carbon Audit. Through this initiative, OLIN studio members Moya Sun, RLA, Hangxing Liu, Emily Bunker, Yingfan Jia, and Marzia Micali evaluated four OLIN projects, past and present, through the carbon accounting applications Carbon Conscience and Pathfinder. Their research was presented during Climate Week, presenting specific metrics regarding the climate implications of our work. Their ongoing research will evolve into a “carbon curriculum” for OLINites that will broaden our collective knowledge of the carbon impacts of design decisions at every phase.
OLIN Labs will carry the energy of this inspiring week forward into future Labs initiatives and research projects. Stay tuned for future updates to follow!
OLIN Partner, Hallie Boyce, and Project Architect, Stephen Kieran, of KieranTimberlake, sat down with Folger Library to discuss the new developments for the library’s landscape as they enter the next phase of building renovation.
The landscape updates, which began in 2014, replaced the paved vehicular drop-off and hedged lawn with a series of at-grade and sunken outdoor spaces to create a modern take on an Elizabethan garden. Features are organized in a rectilinear geometry of paths through a ground plane of evergreen groundcovers, a renovated historic lawn plinth, and focal point entry gardens welcoming visitors from the east and west, each featuring a center panel of seasonally diverse shrub plantings.
Hallie worked closely with OLIN key team members, Sarah Miller and Judy Venonsky, to ensure that Shakespeare’s love of nature shines through the landscape design, while using a contemporary approach to encourage visitor exploration and social interaction.
Michael Miller at the future South Wetlands Park site | Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.
OLIN is proud to announce the elevation of Marni Burns and Michael Miller to the role of Partner. We have had the good fortune of both Marni and Michael’s significant contributions to OLIN throughout their careers. Starting at OLIN as landscape designers, they each rose through the ranks to Associate where they have helped lead notable projects including Sojourner Truth State Park, ResilienCity Park, South Wetlands Park, and Origin Park. While each attends to their projects in a distinctive fashion, Marni and Michael share a passion for revitalizing ecologies and cultivating communities through the transformation of urban, post-industrial, and vulnerable landscapes. Their experience and growth at OLIN is due, in no small part, to the relationships they have built with you, our professional community, over their many years of practice at OLIN. They are in a new position to nurture and expand those relationships, so we would like to take this opportunity to let you get to know them even better. We are pleased to share their unique stories with you.
MICHAEL MILLER Michael’s work is focused on the transformation of urban and post-industrial landscapes. He seeks to create a deep connection between people and an authentic urban nature: one that is functional, healing, and experientially powerful, but that is also honest about its impure origins and our complex future on this planet. “As landscape architects, we have the ability to provide that slice of magic no matter where you are.” Since joining OLIN in 2010, Michael has helped envision and create critical park spaces for cities and communities including Origin Park on the Ohio River in Clarksville, IN, First Buffalo River Marina in Buffalo, NY’s Outer Harbor, and South Wetlands Park on Philadelphia’s Delaware River.
Michael credits the landscape he was raised in, and the experiences he had there, for leading him to landscape architecture. He grew up on a 75-acre farm in the North Carolina Mountains and from a young age maintained the land alongside his parents. Michael recalled, “Having grown up in a place that was so beautiful and powerful is what made me fall in love with the landscape, and for me, that is something I want to provide… to everyone.” Although he is now a confirmed Philadelphian he has worked to keep the land in the family and protect it from development pressure in what has become a vacation destination for the South’s growing cities.
Michael first became interested in urbanism as a way to sustainably manage growth and avoid overdevelopment of places like where he grew up. This led to an interest in making cities more healthy and livable – and the crucial role that natural systems play in this goal. Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies with a concentration in Planning from Stanford University. After graduating and working as planner in both the public and private sectors, Michael decided to further pursue this integration of nature into urban contexts through dual master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design.
During his time at Penn, Michael made his initial connection with OLIN Partner –and now mentor– Lucinda Sanders. She invited Michael to OLIN as an intern where he assisted on a wide range of projects working with many designers in the studio. He recalls, “I knew, when taking on this internship, it would complement the conceptual, large-scale thinking emphasized at Penn with OLIN’s legacy of attention to detail, craft, and the human scale.”
Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy
After graduation, Michael joined OLIN full time as a landscape designer, working on a range of projects from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia to a campus master plan for the Peddie School and developing an interest in community engagement practices. Over years of experience, his interests and expertise broadened to projects of vastly greater scale and impact such as the 30th Street Station District Plan in Philadelphia, the Green Over Gray infrastructure plan in Cleveland, and Hunts Point Lifelines, OLIN’s winning entry in the New York region Rebuild by Design resilience competition.
Michael is a founding member of OLIN Labs, an emerging community of designers within OLIN committed to elevating the practice of landscape architecture through research, development, and education. As the leader of People Lab, one of five interdependent groups, Michael spearheads initiatives and supports other designers to rigorously and empathetically inform the relationship between the places they design and the people that live with them. Through social science research and education, he and other team members serve as a resource for project teams, advocate for evidence-based design and social justice, and provide a bridge between academia and practice. Michael applies both his ever-deepening experience in project design and his Labs work to serve as a lecturer and studio critic at his alma mater, the Weitzman School.
In his new role as an OLIN Partner, Michael is leading large-scale park and planning projects with a renewed energy to integrate nature and cities and to create that ‘slice of magic’ for the people who live there. Michael says these projects “…bridge the systems thinking and complexities of urban design and planning with the powerful sense of place that can be achieved through site-specific design that integrates wildness and craft.” This excitement for the large scale and the power of a wild urban place motivates his work on the expansive Origin Park – a project that realizes his desire to deliver an experience of nature’s beauty while revealing the rich ecological and cultural legacy of the site. At the same time, he is leading a resilience planning effort for the tidal reaches of the Philadelphia region focused on the compounding effects of climate and industrial risk in environmental justice communities. He believes that cities need nature, and nature needs cities. He believes that we as humans need the best of both, and that there is no end of good work to do.
