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.
