Working with OLIN (and what I realized about the landscape architecture profession)

Summers as a graduate student are meant for travel, study, and work, mostly. It is time for us to see what the world has to offer beyond the tedium of epic crit sessions and the filters of Google Scholar. I came to UBC/SALA two years ago with some experience as a practitioner in the field, but could not pass up a particular opportunity to be an intern again.

For the first time, the annual OLIN summer internship this year had a theme. That theme–Green Infrastructure–is central to my thesis topic, so I took that as a strong sign and applied to one of the two slots open to schools other than the University of Pennsylvania and Purdue University. After learning of my acceptance, road-tripping across the US from coast to coast, and moving into an un-air-conditioned West Philly attic apartment during one of the hottest summers on record, my ten weeks with them began.

OLIN is one of the largest North American firms that practices strictly landscape architecture. You cannot grow to their size throughout the current economic recession, without being a big deal. When I arrived to their penthouse studio overlooking Independence National Historic Park, where the United States began over two centuries ago, this became immediately apparent. Our first two weeks as interns were composed of what they were terming the Green Infrastructure Charrette. We were to re-envision the entire school grounds of an elementary school using green infrastructure (GI) to establish ecological, social, and economic sustainability. First thing on day two, we met with the client stakeholder group, the school’s principal and teachers, and toured the school building and grounds. To start day three, we met with the Philadelphia Water Department. After, and with designs we had just begun to consider, we prepared for our first critique in front of client group members, project managers, and partners with the firm. With long hours it went like this, and we soon got to know the best dinner takeout restaurants in Center City Philadelphia.

For my billable intern duties that followed, there were CAD details and spec work for a 100% submittal for a new plaza for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art… diagramming for a brownfield masterplanning project in the Napa region of California… visioning and more diagramming for projects in Tokyo and then back along the eastern seaboard of the US. I was an intern again, and it felt good to be honing my sketching and drafting skills. I soon however, began to reminisce about the whirlwind that was my first two weeks.

The Green Infrastructure Charrette was highly rewarding. It satisfied an altruistic ideal, taught me that there was much more to GI than managing and cleaning stormwater, and was provided the amazing opportunity of designing for children. However, I soon realized that the theme of the internship was not particularly going to weave itself through the remainder of my work, and this disappointed me. The blame for this does not fall in the lap of my summer employer and teacher. Rather, I learned that GI still barely touches the body of work of our entire profession. Whether it is the prevalence of professional rut, where professions fall victim to the routine and insularity that makes cross-disciplinary collaboration and new learning difficult, or something else, GI is still a novelty.

To help shift this paradigm, OLIN hired a partner whose focus is to help see that GI is considered for each project as it passes from the marketing department to the designers. To date, they have a few high-profile GI built projects to tout, such as MIT’s Stata Center and Yale’s Kroon Hall, as well as several projects under construction, such as Canal Park in Washington DC and Dilworth Plaza in Philadelphia. Further, they aim to do more and occasionally push the envelope by taking on visioning projects, namely their answer to the Living City Design Competition, titled Patchwork.

Towards the end of my brief, yet enriching experience with OLIN, my requests to work more with the theme of the internship were answered. This time, I had the privilege to work with Steve Benz, the Director of Green Infrastructure, on more visioning work and a series of reports that addressed the needs of both community and the larger natural systems of which we are all a part. During my road trip back across Canada, camping in one park to the next, I considered the experience, was grateful for it, but was left sensing an ocean of disconnection between research and implementation. I could not help but consider the unsettling implications of the inability for firms, even award-winning firms such as OLIN who actively seek out such projects, to produce a portfolio that exhibits GI as the mainstream.

For the sake of  future generations, green infrastructure needs be pervasive, not just novel. In November of last year during his address at the at the UBC/CIRS Accelerating Sustainability Conference, David Suzuki pondered the global eco-crisis by asking: “Is it too late?” In his next breath, he replied, “It is late, very late…but it will never be too late for me.” While landscape architecture may indeed be one of the professions leading the fight for a more sustainable human enterprise, we still have much more work to do.

My CityStudio Experience: A Final Word

I was raised to uphold modesty with conviction. Perhaps this originated in how my parents were raised, and how their parents were raised, and how all this has been passed down without much question. The framework of this stems from a religious faith that values selflessness above all else and the pursuit of treating others as you would prefer they treat you. I have broken this chain in the sense that I no longer practice the religious tradition of my family. However, this important lesson, along with the inherited modesty, still exists within me.

As I began to shape my professional career, before this latest round of schooling, I noticed how positions of leadership were offered to me. Whether it was a promotion to take on a managerial role in a design office, or a nomination to be the spokesperson for a small group to argue an issue, people asked that I step up where I was not necessarily already taking initiative. I have always loved the idea of being part of positive change-making, but being a change-agent, upon which a sharpened focus and a heavier burden is placed, has never has sat comfortably with me.

One of the key things I have learned thus far during my three terms in graduate school, and especially with my latest term as a member of CityStudio, is how cultural change does not arrive on its own. Rather, it is made. This simple idea has always rung true with me, but most recently has made it abundantly clear that if I wish to see change, I need to embody it. The days of performing quiet work behind the scenes will not be a luxury for me if I hope to contribute to addressing the big challenges facing our world today in any substantial way. While I know there still is room here for modesty in personality, ways of being involving words like keen, ardent, and eager now court my thoughts of making change. I know, now more clearly than ever, what it takes to be a change-agent.

This lesson for me was carried throughout my experience as a member of The Long Table Series group. From the inception of the group’s creation–helping to corral five people from three disparate groups into one with layered strength–to co-producing the production of the pilot event for The Long Table Series, I have continually found myself in the role of manager…of art director…of curator…and of positions that commanded a suppression of my past ways of being reserved. I must be careful to give recognition to each member of my group, as everyone played a pivotal role to the success of our project, but (I am proud to admit how) my specific contribution was one that involved a role embodied with leadership and vision.

Throughout the semester, with both as a member of the five-person group and with the entire CityStudio core, I practiced listening. From this grew my strength in dialogue. From this grew my ability to lead. Still, I recognize how I need to continually grow my ability to identify and embrace opportunities for leadership. More importantly, I am learning to identify which of such opportunities are more suited for me to take on.

Thanks to CityStudio and everyone who has contributed to its introduction to the world, I have reached a new level of awareness within myself. I am ready to be challenged more, and I am ready to continue to challenge others. Because the issues facing our world are complex, and many quite dire, we must continue identifying our strengths while challenging one another. For me this is what CityStudio was and is about. My fellow classmates and I collaborated around learning and growing together, while identifying and lending our strengths towards ideas to help make human existence sustainable. For our efforts, which were each filled with passion, conviction, and scholarship, I believe the entire first CityStudio cohort should be commended.

Two Questions, One Answer (CityStudio #12)

This week in CityStudio, we have been asked to consider the following two questions: 1. How does your work contribute to the Greenest City Goals?, and 2. How have you changed as a result of this course? At first glance, each of these two questions can appear commonplace and distant from the uniqueness of this course. As one who comes to the program with 10 years of studio design experience as an instructor as well as a practitioner, I have been thoroughly impressed with its uniqueness. Professional practice rarely sources its ideas directly from the classroom. Likewise, the classroom rarely has its ideas implemented in the world beyond the campus. CityStudio bridges these two worlds and this intersection. This is unique and has the potential to be quite powerful.

However, what is interesting about each of these questions is how CityStudio is not the topics in question. Rather, my work and my personal growth are. Upon greater reflection, the wording of these questions makes perfect sense. CityStudio is, after all, a classroom. It should be a vessel for learning and not the subject.

How, then, has my work contributed to the Greenest City Goals? The answer is that it began this summer when I accepted a position that placed me at the center of the Clean Water goal. Since this assignment, which afforded me a perspective from the minds and hearts of those working daily with issues related to potable water supply (consumption) and wastewater removal (cleanliness), the concerns of water has sat front and center in all of my work.

Just this week, during a conversation with a city staff member whose job relates to wastewater removal, I learned something interesting. For the event that my classmates and I are planning for December 10th, we aim to tell the full story of Vancouver's water. As part of this narrative, we are creating maps that illustrate the full cycle of water–its input and output. When I asked for maps illustrating this, I was told they did not exist. Vancouver supplies all of its inhabitants with potable water that is virtually free, and yet it has never marketed its product or attempted to explain its life.

With its Greenest City Goals, the City of Vancouver aims to spread sustainable knowledge. With this, it hopes to foster subsequent sustainable practice across all sectors, to help tackle each of the ten goals. I learned this week how the city has been virtually mute with regards to spreading sustainable knowledge about water consumption and cleanliness. (As my answer to the first question,) this niche is where I find myself. (As my answer to the second,) I accept the role of helping to fill this niche because I understand, more than I ever have, the role the story of water can play in achieving urban sustainability. 

Designing For The Future, Part 2 (LP&M #10)

I traveled home to Pennsylvania last week. The trip measured a distance of nearly 3,500 kilometres. The Boeing 777 I was a passenger on burns approximately 37 litres of kerosene aeroplane fuel every kilometre, totaling 129,574 litres of fuel for this particular trip. Therefore, on average, throughout the flight, the plane consumed nearly 8 litres of fuel every second. I do not recall ordering 1.3 litres of fossil fuel from the flight attendants each minute, but that is what it cost each of the 365 passengers to bring us so unnaturally fast across the continent of North America.

This act, when viewed this way, feels supremely wasteful. Fossil fuels are a unique luxury that the human race will arguably never know again, and we are squandering them. As one of the 365 on that flight, I did this knowingly, but reframed it and weighed values and my desire to be with my immediate family won out. I make such a trip only once per year, and yet I still do it and think very little of this unsustainable luxury the modern world has grown accustomed to. When will we be forced to slow down? When will the skies be clear of everything devoid of birds and clouds again? When will we, as the collective human race, recognize the need and the richness in settling in place?

Big challenges require big solutions. To echo the sentiments of global climate change activist Bill McKibben, who I had the pleasure of seeing speak twice this term, explains how sometimes reconciliations need to be made to achieve the greater good. The education and exposure to ideas that I am receiving by living so far away from those I love has justified my stay here in Vancouver and with the University of British Columbia. I will one day return to the eastern seaboard of North America, but I know that when I do, I will carry with me things I have learned that have the power to the human establishment transition into a more unpredictable era. 

Life on this planet is embedded in the ecosphere, and as with every complex system, there will always be unknown unknowns. Unfortunately, the old paradigm of a belief in finding a singularity in problems and solutions is a falsity. Unfortunately, mechanical thinking cannot be applied to our immense challenges–with economy and with climate.

Of the many things I have learned in this course, I now understand more fully how challenges associated with sustainability are entirely about collaboration and dynamism. Complex challenges cannot be understood or addressed by one mind's thoughts or one person's actions. Sustainability calls for capacity to adapt and for collaboration throughout all professions and walks of life. True collaboration calls for identifying knowledge in others. It requires a trust in others and in their strengths. Everything is constantly shifting in nature…we must collectively shift with it if we hope to plan for a sustainable human enterprise.

Starting vs. Joining (CityStudio #11)

During the summer of 1998, just after finishing up my year of art school foundations courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I began to rethink my decision that a major in illustration was the best route to take. Part of this shift in thought may have come from the fact that I wasn't publishing comic books in my spare time, or transcribing in picture form the frivolities of pop culture instead of writing prose about (topics no less than) overconsumption, but mostly I realized it came from my fear of being self-employed.

I come from a family of teachers, of military servicemen, and of doctors and nurses. Each has joined a school, a branch of the armed forces, or a medical practice. Not one seems to have started or changed such an establishment. Entrepreneurialism, albeit an American ideal, seems to not be in my blood. Some research shows that this trait, at least in part, can be genetic. The cited study, performed by the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College in London, states how "37 percent to 48 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic." This is interesting, but I want to know more about the other 63 to 52 percent. 

In a way, I have spent a good part of my life thinking of the science of genetics as a scapegoat or a means by which to occasionally subvert challenges in favor of familiarity and comfort. It is time I begin to think of opportunity and of life in terms of the percentages that do not refer to genetic predisposition.

Last week I spoke of my idea of "establishing a business that creates products with meaning, in a healthy and meaningful way". This idea has already stuck. I do not plan on letting it leave my consciousness. However, I am curious about this threshold that I have not yet fully crossed. Indeed, I have tiptoed into this land of starting over joining, but never with both feet. I have created art and exhibited it (more than once). I have been a part-time freelance designer and photographer. I have picked up my life and moved 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometres) here to graduate school in Vancouver to, in some ways, begin anew…

I feel it is time for part and parcel; time for both feet. The why not has everything to do with fear of the first time and with failure. Yet, I know well how I learn best from making mistakes and revisiting failures. My experiences with CityStudio have afforded me the confidence to seriously consider using both feet to soon take some leaps I have not yet taken. After all, the world needs us to take risks now…to help revert the risks we have burdening it with for generations.

Beyond CityStudio (CityStudio #10)

With only less than a month remaining in the term, my mind has already begun to ponder the what next. There has been much learning, and there will be the first installation of the Long Table Series, but I am from the cloth of those who keep reaching a bit further. With the nearing of each milestone completion, I begin to fix my sights and prepare for the transition into, hopefully, something embodying two steps forward.

Lately, I find myself getting a bit ahead of myself, thinking of work and time beyond acquiring my masters without yet having begun my thesis. This week it happened again.

The surrealist ideas of Dali came to him upon the edges dreams. My ideas, corporeal ideas, commonly come to me as I am jogging in my Finnish runners through the streets of East Van or commuting due West to school by bicycle or back to prepare dinner. It was during a night ride this week that inspired the creation of a document titled, BIG_ideas. In it were the following words:


A business.

Design and manufacture a new kind of rain barrel
Design and manufacture portable apiary toolkits
Design and manufacture _____X_____

Fabricate all items using cradle to cradle principles
Fabricate all items using recycled/repurposed/nontoxic materials
Fabricate locally/source locally

Sell items to city/town/community that seeks implementation of a pilot program
Sell items to address a systemic challenge needing a new paradigm
Sell items with the promise of additional consultation

Consult as an educator
Consult as a community facilitator
Consult as a researcher

Deliver a functional product
Deliver empowerment and new thought
Deliver positive systemic change

Utilize profit to propagate bigger ideas and more positive change…


It appears to be happening. My past schooling and professional experiences as an industrial designer are beginning to step onto the field of my current focus and approach to design. I decided it was time for graduate school because I decided it was time to go bigger. I know well the potential for profundity in the details and in the human-scale, but my pursuit now personifies macro design and the local-, national-, and biospheric-scale. I aim to steer this subconscious stirring into personal growth.

I have tried to steer clear of doing that which people have asked me to do with my current schooling, have thought I was good at for the past decade, but perhaps there is something to embracing some of this. Perhaps this is the point to the exercise Moura Quayle introduced to the CityStudio cohort last week. Answering the questions, "What do you like to do?…What do you dislike doing?" and, in this case, "What do people keep asking you to do that you would rather not do?" has relevance here. Indeed, everything we make comes from somewhere. Embracing aspects of my work in the past could certainly strengthen my ideas of the present.

This big idea of establishing a business that creates products with meaning, in a healthy and meaningful way…then offering not only the product, but the professional capacity to help facilitate change around the product and within communities…begins to build upon my past. It appears it is never too early to begin to think about building, and building upon, legacy.

Designing For The Future, Part 1 (LP&M #9)

In October, I submitted an essay to this year's Tattersfield Scholarship call for entries titled, Embracing Entropy: A Look Into A Modified Design Aesthetic. "Embracing entropy," I argue, "means doing less with more while aligning processes of nature with those of humankind. Embracing entropy ultimately means designing for change, disassembly and reuse, and with a lighter hand." While it was not selected as the winning piece this year, its core message continues to stir within me, especially within the context of this course, Landscape Planning and Management for Sustainable Landscapes.

Landscape planning and management essentially practices projection of land use and development. Sustainable landscapes, as understood throughout this course, are those where human and natural systems can exist in concert while achieving the "highest level of utility, productivity, beauty, and stability." The anticipation of this pairing to produce sustainable landscapes requires that work be performed dynamically and with understanding that ecological systems are open systems, where energies can enter into or leave the system at any given time. Currently, Earth, in both its human and natural systems–the global economy and the climate–is facing unprecedented energy flows that could produce shifts in known paradigms at any given moment.

The global economy has never been so complex and so interconnected as it is today. Complementarily, the CO2 levels in the planet's atmosphere have never been so great during the existence of humanity. Without belaboring the details of how these systems have arrived at this juncture, the consequence is that each are currently geared more for collapse than we have ever known them to be. Does, then, a status quo for ways of doing business still exist for professions embedded within each of these systems? Furthermore, if it is true that professional practice profits primarily from standardization, how might the future of the professions of planning and landscape architecture be sustained? I would argue that answers for each of these questions lie within the embracing entropy argument.

Future constraints of the planning and landscape architecture professions can be simple to envision. There will continually exist less raw resources (as populations rise and demands increase), including both the human construct of money and the physical construct of resources such as oil…and there will exist a climate with increasing unpredictability. With less to build with and more to build for, a new status quo will arise. Professional standardization, in pursuit of profit and economic sustainability, will most likely find its closest ally in nature. In place of manufactured (and resource-intensive) pastoral and modern aesthetics, such workhorse landscape typologies as reconstructed wetlands and riparian corridors could become poster children for development. They could offer a glimpse of this new aesthetic that allows natural processes take care of themselves and the landscape in our rapidly changing world.

Before the advent of reductionist thought brought on by the Age of Enlightenment, the belief that nature knew best was more prevalent throughout the collective global society. The pendulum swing may have taken a few centuries to complete, but it appears that it's headed back this way. The seemingly inevitable transition into new paradigms for climate, resources, and economy requires an embracing of this ancient ideal.