Join OLIN at the 2019 Conference on Landscape Architecture

#ASLA2019 is here! We're thrilled to be in San Diego for this year's Conference on Landscape Architecture. We have much to celebrate, from the release of Fresh Water, co-authored by Associate Jessica Henson, to our Partner Hallie Boyce's elevation to the esteemed Council of Fellows. Check out our guide below—we look forward to seeing you there!

EDUCATION SESSIONS

Puerto Rico: Holding on to the Future/Aferrado al Futuro
Saturday 11/16, 11:00am - 12:15pm
Richard Roark, ASLA, LEED AP/SITES AP, Partner
The future is under consideration in Puerto Rico. An unprecedented level of federal recovery funds have been allocated to the island, but the outcomes will be told through the priorities and plans that follow. This will be an inflection point that will have profound impacts on land, water, infrastructure, and the diverse communities who hold the future of the island.

Fact Check: Assessing Landscape Performance in Research and Practice
Sunday 11/17, 9:00am - 10:00am
Skip Graffam, FASLA, Partner
Amid today’s science denial and “alternative facts,” it is imperative for landscape architects to advocate and prove design impacts with evidence. This panel shares experience in evaluating design and assessing landscape performance through collaborative research in practice, focusing on post-occupancy evaluation of environmental, social, and economic performance.

The ReImagined River: Fifty-One Miles of Connected Open Space
Monday 11/18, 8:00am - 9:30am
Jessica Henson, ASLA, Associate
One million people live within a mile of the Los Angeles River, which currently serves a singular purpose of flood control. Los Angeles County is reimagining the river as multibenefit and updating its 1996 master plan. This session explores the project, which is integrating robust community engagement, politics, hydrology, and design.

Integrating Ecology and Technology to Maximize Beneficial Impacts
Monday 11/18, 8:30am - 10:00am
Judy Venonsky, ASLA, Associate / Living Systems Specialist
Plant choices have far-reaching environmental and social impacts, and innovative solutions are found in the synapses between ecology and digital technology. The potential exists for modeling natural systems with parametric design by creating a common language between these two disciplines, unleashing the power of both for all landscape architects.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Landscape Architecture Foundation Annual Benefit
Friday 11/15, 7:00pm - 10:30pm
Join the Landscape Architecture Foundation at the Prado at Balboa Park for its 34th Annual Benefit! Join top designers and leaders from practice, academia, and industry, including OLIN CEO and Partner Lucinda Sanders, FASLA, Co-Founder and Facilitator for LAF's Fellowship for Leadership and Innovation, for this festive evening with local food and amazing company. The benefit will celebrate the 2019 LAF Olmsted Scholars and showcase the recipients of the $25,000 LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership and their transformative projects.

Fresh Water Author Meet-and-Greet at the EXPO
Saturday 11/16, 9:30am - 11:00am
OLIN Associate Jessica Henson, ASLA, and Mary Pat McGuire, ASLA, Principal Designer at The Water Lab and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at UIUC, will be signing copies of their new book Fresh Water. The geographical and hydrosocial context of the major inland North American watersheds—the Mississippi, the Great Lakes Basin-St. Lawrence and the Nelson—remains an under-explored field for design research. Fresh Water assembles scholarly papers from designers that reframe complex issues of industrial agriculture, energy production, urban sewersheds, water law, transportation tributaries, and cross-watershed diversions, to propose new inland water futures.

ASLA Council of Fellows Investiture Dinner
Sunday 11/17, 7:00pm
Join friends and colleagues for an elegant evening to honor the newest members of the ASLA Council of Fellows, including OLIN Partner Hallie Boyce. Fellowship is among the highest honors the ASLA bestows on members and recognizes the contributions of these individuals to their profession and society at large based on their works, leadership and management, knowledge, and service.

OLIN to Lead Planning and Design of New Wetlands Park in South Philadelphia

OLIN has been selected by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation to lead the planning and design of a new Wetlands Park along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia. The project will focus on the area just south of Washington Avenue, encompassing Piers 64, 67, 68, and 70. First envisioned in OLIN’s Master Plan for the Central Delaware, the ecological park is the latest addition to the growing number of reinvigorated public spaces along the Waterfront and will seek to preserve and enhance existing natural assets while creating adequate public access for all. Read the full press release here.

OLIN Interns Support A Resilient Puerto Rico

The annual OLIN summer intern project provides an opportunity for both interns and design staff to work on community-driven pro bono design work that has real-world impact. And this summer, our 2019 interns had the opportunity to take this work abroad both to help inform design and planning efforts in complex environments and to give back to a vulnerable community.

Since 2017, OLIN has been engaged in an ongoing advocacy effort called Resilience Infrastructure and Sustainable Environments for Puerto Rico – or RISE PR – with Puerto Rico-based landscape architecture firm, ECo Design Studio led by Edmundo Colón Izquierdo. Puerto Rico is at a tipping point with its infrastructure and urban land use, threatening water quality, compromising critical natural assets, and diminishing capacity for flood protection. The current recovery efforts have become partially stagnated by broken networks, existing supply chain challenges, and failing built systems. It has also been stymied by a lack of capacity in planning and design, the slow pace of federal funding, and a lack of commonly shared goals for reducing hazards and improving the territorial economy. Without new planning efforts, Puerto Rico must rely on decades-old flood mitigation programs that will channelize urban rivers and further degrade the island’s environmental assets.

In support of RISE PR, our summer interns worked closely with design and ECo staff to create profiles for urban rivers in Puerto Rico that are targeted for flood mitigation by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The profiles, available through a web-based interactive atlas, identify plans that will depict physical landscape characteristics, community and culture, land use, and projections of future risks and opportunities. The interns also compiled a “kit of parts” for potential landscape operations in various conditions along the rivers.

On July 16th of this year, our interns had the opportunity to visit four of the five rivers of focus across the eastern and northeastern region of Puerto Rico in support of their project work. They conducted research of the rivers and the surrounding context through photo and visual analysis and sketching, and met with several local organizations to gain further insight into the impacted communities.

The final web-based atlas will further support the RISE PR initiative as well as other OLIN project work – in particular, OLIN Labs. The intern project is an example of new innovative methods and tools that can be used for communicating complex and layered analysis and planning concepts with clients and communities in web-based formats. The interactive portal will also offer the opportunity to push innovation studio-wide and benefit OLIN project work moving forward.

A huge thank you to OLIN staff for their help with this year’s project:

Richard Roark
Abdallah Tabet
Rebecca Popowsky
Anneliza Kaufer
Nate Wooten
Andrew Dobshinsky
Sofia Nikolaidou
Sarai Williams
And, of course, to our 2019 Interns:
Josh Ketchum, Rob Levinthal, Hangxing Liu, and Yutong Zhan

“I have to say, I am amazed by the sharing consensus rooted in OLIN’s daily work, and I felt lucky to be given the opportunity to work across different typologies and scales. RISE PR, as our intern project, not only strengthened my skills in framing questions through a landscape lens but also taught me a new way to express that narrative in an interactive and immersive way through ESRI story map. Working with OLIN’s talented team this summer is unforgettable.”

– Hangxing Liu, OLIN Summer 2019 Intern