BY MICHAEL DUMIAK

Trees in the landscape around Ypres, in Belgium, mark stubborn boundaries of the first World War.

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Off the Menin Road in Flanders, Belgium, there is a lane leading to a working farm and a stand of trees. This copse is called Railway Wood.

On a raw day in early spring, the wind runs through the wood over the adjoining field, rustling the leaves of a slight elm sapling at the side of the lane. The elm is protected by a steel frame, and it is marked with a red-trimmed sign. The tree stands in a spot that looked very different once upon a time, from June 1915 to July 1917. At that point there were no trees, none with leaves, or branches, or tops, anyway, and this place was called the Idiot Trench.

The elm flagged number 78 is one of 138 planted in a rough semicircle around the old city of Ypres, Ieper as it is known in Flemish, Ypern in German, or “Wipers,” as it was called by the British troops who fought here in the hundreds of thousands during World War I. The red piping on the Idiot Trench elm marks the German line. It was named by British maps marking it. The “I” sector started with that letter: Idiot followed Idea, Identity, and so on. A hundred yards away there is another elm, trimmed in blue, tree 77, on a spot along the British line.

Omgeving took away garden and trees at the Caterpillar Crater site. The goal: to make what happened there more clear. Photo courtesy Yannick Milpas for Omgeving.

The Ypres regional government and curators at the In Flanders Fields Museum commissioned the elms for the centenary of the beginning of the war, in 2014, and again to mark the subsequent first use of chlorine gas in the war, which happened just northeast of the city in 1915. They dot a line curving along the eastern flank of Ypres, a front that shifted back and forth over the fields during the course of the four-year war, though never moving very much. From 1914 to 1918 this was the site of four major battles at the cost of 800,000 dead soldiers and untold civilians. The final cost will never really be known. As the 100-year anniversary of the war armistice approached last November, the elm commissioners put down more of these Remembrance Trees, also called Herdenkingsbomen, Arbre de Mémoire, Gedenkbaum.

These trees draw a specific and particular experience in a viewer, hard to describe, related to but different from the experience evoked by standing in front of a grand object like the Menin Gate, the archway at the entrance to the city inscribed with 54,395 names of missing soldiers from Britain and its Commonwealth. They also mark another try at answering an old and recurring question, one raised as soon as the guns fell silent on World War I on the morning of November 11, 1918.

“How do you capture such an immeasurably large number?” asks Robert France, a Canadian environmental scientist and writer.

France spent the last four summers walking the Western Front from Mulhouse, near the Swiss border, across northern France through Ypres and to its end on the Belgian coast of the English Channel. As a scholar of landscape history, memorial, burial, and pilgrimage, France explores ideas maybe as familiar to the chalk hill builders at Avebury 4,000 years ago as to those looking over the Flanders fields blasted into lunar pits: What is memorial and how, in this case through the mud and blood around Ypres, to express the inexpressible?

New Zealand artillerymen fire from a shell hole about a mile east of Railway Wood, October 1917. Photo courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library.

Ypres Salient, the name given the bulging front around the medieval city (or dent in the line, from the German perspective), extended for about 17 miles around Ypres like the lip of a saucer. It was the result of early maneuvering after the German army advanced through Belgium, briefly occupied Ypres, and then dug into the higher ground (higher being 200 feet above sea level) outside the city. As the Allied Powers defended the city to hold the coastline and avoid being flanked, the Ypres Salient became an awful, sucking stalemate. The area drew half a million visitors in 2017.

There are other parts of Europe, says In Flanders Fields Museum Coordinator Piet Chielens, where World War I battlefields installed themselves in the landscape. (In fact there are still 65 square miles in northern France called the Zone Rouge made uninhabitable from World War I munitions and organic decay, the soil composition altered. All across this band of territory what is called the “iron harvest” still produces century-old metals.) It’s a bit different in Flanders, that area being inhabited so densely. The local populace stirred quickly after the war and, facing a grim economic situation, perhaps even hunger, wanted to get back to work. The war imprint around Ypres became a step removed from its primary settings. Land went back to use. The layers of memory passed into and became expressed by sculpted monuments and the more than 100 war cemeteries found today across the Salient.

Aerial photo of Ypres (in the distance) taken September 11, 1915, from a German aircraft. Photo courtesy In Flanders Fields Museum.

“You needed to look closer to find that there are still abundant traces left in the land,” Chielens says. “You need to be guided into it.” The way the lines formed around the front, the zigzagged, dragon-teethed trenches following the scramble for high ground, the hundreds of millions of shells that churned the Salient into a blasted soup, created a footprint nearly, but not quite, identical to the land itself. There should be a way, Chielens and his colleagues figured, to come up with a system showing this. This was their first idea, their principle. The elms became their answer.

It sounds straightforward enough. It wasn’t.

“Each square meter here in Belgium is claimed by different groups: for housing, for industry, for agriculture, for leisure, for nature. And be aware: Every single group is going to claim it,” Chielens says. A decade ago the museum and local government launched an international competition to create a kind of memory park along the front, perhaps with hedges or tree rows that would give the line. It drew a lot of interest—and a lot of opposition. By the early 2010s the ideas were evolving.

“You have to be very modest in this debate. We then thought it could be enough to have anchor points,” Chielens recalls. “It was not very brave. But it could be enough,” he says. They could plant trees wherever there was a road cutting through the front lines. “Nobody could be against that, no agricultural land was going to be taken away, no grants for industry would be taken away.” It was a simple way of doing things, and it succeeded. By 2012 he and city environmental official Lieven Stubbe were managing a plan for the project.

Image © Google Earth.

At that point Chielens was working with Birger Stichelbaut, an archaeologist at Ghent University with expertise in visual analysis of World War I-era aerial photography. The two collaborated on museum exhibits matching aerial shots of wartime Ypres and its surroundings to contemporary digital images and maps. This led to a smartphone app mapped to the numbered tree locations. At first the idea was to use oaks on the German side of the lines, linden on the Allied side. But advocates on both sides wanted the oak. So Stubbe and Chielens went with elm for everyone: They would pick out a cultivar resistant to the Dutch elm disease that by 1990 had wiped out most European mature elms, a culling from which the continent is still recovering.

The walking system became the elms, the signs, the images, the app.

It was on one of his summer walks that Robert France came across his own name on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing. It was just coincidence, but it was an eerie one. The Menin Gate is a massive arch of Portland limestone leading through the city rampart over the Menin Road. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, it is sculpted, Roman, monumental, mournful, heavy.

Landscape architects at Omgeving created a boardwalk along the lines at Hill 60, where German and Allied forces faced off for four years. Photo courtesy Yannick Milpas for Omgeving.

The years after the armistice saw controversy about even rebuilding Ypres. Winston Churchill, Britain’s war secretary in 1919, wanted it kept in ruins, a shrine to the war. The concept of the missing was ushered in during World War I: that something might happen in an area to a large number of combatants rendering fates and burial sites unknowable, in no specific place. Eulogy becomes elusive. “He is not missing. He is here,” Field Marshal Herbert Plumer said at the Menin Gate’s inauguration in 1927. For the British side, these names are everywhere through the arch, even to Indian water bearers. The British poet Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the Salient, saw it otherwise. He called it a sepulchre of crime. Buglers still play the “Last Post” at the gate every night.

“I am interested in how the landscape recovers from war and how people memorialize death,” says France. He’s taught landscape ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; he organized a symposium on restoration and the southern marsh of Iraq, devastated after a rebellion against Saddam Hussein. Walking the long Western Front led him to a variety of experiences, including finding human bone in a field near a small memorial. “One of the challenges in something like the Menin Gate is that you are overwhelmed by the numbers,” France says.

Image by Omgeving.

Chris Stevens, ASLA, is a landscape architect for the Historic American Landscapes Survey at the National Park Service. Stevens was part of a Heritage Documentation Programs team documenting, scanning, photographing, and drawing World War I American cemeteries and memorials in France and Belgium. He notes a variety of preservation and interpretation. At Gettysburg, for instance, the park service is peeling away successional vegetation to restore the battlefield-era forest and field configuration. Stateside commemorative parks for World War I, as with Heroes Grove at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or Cleveland’s Liberty Row of oaks along Lake Erie, slip into the surroundings over time. The American cemetery and garden at Flanders Field, designed by Paul Cret and administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission, remain as formal as it gets. “If a stone gets even slight wear they replace it,” Stevens says.

Monuments like the Menin Gate use their own gravity to create a place. Context is an influence, but the actual placement of the object could be anywhere. Marking a scar on the land, though, connects it to an event. It has to be specific.

On the southeast round of the Ypres Salient, elm number 96 is marked “Caterpillar.” It is steps away from a pond in the bottom of a massive bowl in a clearing formed in 1917 by 35 tons of explosive detonated by British tunnelers mining under the Germans. Luc Wallays and his colleagues at Omgeving, a landscape architecture studio in Antwerp, Belgium, designed paths around this site and a nearby area where the Allied and German lines were only 50 feet apart: the length of an office corridor.

Omgeving worked on these sites preparing for the centennial commemorations. Wallays realized, in talking to his parents and grandparents who come from the area, that there is still a lot of unease. “They want to forget about it,” he says. “People do not want to live in a war scene. They do not want to be in constant contact with the difficult time they had during these events. A small park is fine, but don’t make it too big.”

ComingWorldRememberMe, a 2018 temporary installation at the Bluff. Thousands of participants made the small clay sculptures in workshops as part of the project. Image © Koen Vanmechelen/Photo by Alex Deyaert.

Last November participants in the landscape project ComingWorldRememberMe by Koen Vanmechelen began to pick up hundreds of thousands of small sculptures arranged in a temporary installation on a nature reserve in what was no-man’s-land, a bitterly contested, torn apart but never won field called Palingbeek on the southeastern Salient. The sculptures filled a field and represented those who died in and around Ypres between 1914 and 1918.

These large numbers are now leaving the field. It is going back to nature. Meanwhile, the remembrance elms—now numbering 300—are being speckled through Flanders, north toward Nieuwpoort and the coast and south toward the French border.

The centenary is receding. One hundred years ago this spring, the belligerents were working on the Treaty of Versailles to end the conflict, the war to end all wars, which would not.

A platform rises over a field in what was once no-man’s-land, at the Bluff along the Ypres Salient. It is now reverting to its place as a small nature reserve. Image © Koen Vanmechelen/Photo by Alex Deyaert.

Michael Dumiak writes about architecture, design, and science and is based in Berlin. He is the author and editor of Woods and the Sea: Estonian Design and the Virtual Frontier.

BY JONATHAN LERNER

An enchanting but failing maple allée gets a second life.

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

An allée can dignify an arrival, draw the eye to a focal point, even partition an open space. To do any of these effectively, it must appear linear, uniform, and repetitive. Of course, composed of living trees it can’t really be flawless; still, it ought to give the illusion of perfection. So there’s a problem if some of an allée’s constituent trees fail to thrive, leaving gaps and slumps in an assemblage meant to appear continuous and taut. That’s what was happening at Storm King.

The Storm King Art Center occupies 500 acres of rolling terrain about 50 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Highlands, a region of lushly vegetated, softly eroded low mountains. More than 100 monumental works by renowned artists are sited permanently throughout Storm King’s woods and meadows. There’s plenty of space between them, and room for seasonal installations as well. “That to me is breathtaking,” says Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA. “You experience almost every work of sculpture on its own.”

Storm King is arguably America’s most important sculpture park, though it’s not the largest. That distinction probably belongs to the Tippet Rise Art Center, on 12,000 considerably starker, rougher Montana acres (see “The Major Scale,” LAM, June 2018), which won a 2018 ASLA Professional Honor Award in the General Design category. There visitors are invited to explore by hiking, mountain biking, or taking a two-and-a-half-hour van tour. At Storm King, you may rent a bike or hop on a tram that circles through the grounds, but the principal method of locomotion is walking—strolling, actually, which differs from hiking or mountain biking both energetically and emotionally.

Virtually no traces of development mar the views from the park. Courtesy Storm King Art Center/Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

There are sinuous footpaths at Storm King. People are also encouraged to wander freely among the trees and across the fields, or through the sweeps of native grasses that have become something of a landscape signature for the institution. There are also several allées that beg to be entered and strolled down—and who can resist the touch of elegance doing so conveys to simply walking? The shortest one, lined with true sugar maples, is along Museum Road, which leads to an imposing hilltop house built in 1935 in the manner of a Norman chateau, now containing the park’s offices and galleries. Cars also use Museum Road, though, so it’s less alluring for a promenade on foot.

Another allée is planted in pin oaks. It runs for more than a mile along the bottom of a shallow valley—leading past Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall and Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, perhaps the two most famous works in the park. This allée is near, and parallel to, the park’s western boundary, which happens to be the New York State Thruway. The third allée, called Maple Allée, is shorter than that, but more prominent. On axis with a pair of French doors that open from a gallery in the museum building, it cuts diagonally across the expansive former farm fields at the heart of the park. Remarkably, aside from the Thruway, which is pretty well screened by a border of trees, there is virtually no other intrusion of the developed world in the long vistas you get at Storm King. Beyond the property itself your eyes travel toward the mostly forested and protected surrounding hills. Topography hides even the near-adjacent Hudson River town of Cornwall. It hides the river itself, too, though the viewshed encompasses ridges on its far shore. The unseen river, almost two miles wide here, does make itself present, but reflectively, in the distinctive clear light for which the Hudson Valley is celebrated. In this vast, seemingly natural setting, Storm King’s three allées provide a suggestion of structure and balance. Crisply and simply rectilinear, they contrast with both the artworks’ complex geometric and biomorphic forms and the seemingly limitless contours of the land. But Maple Allée was in trouble.

Image by Reed Hilderbrand.

Maple Allée was designed and planted in 1968, eight years after Storm King opened, by the sculpture park’s landscape architect, William Rutherford. Its trees were also sugar maples, but a cultivar called Green Mountain. “They were still relatively new trees, bred to be broad and bright and flashy, quickly,” says Anthony Davidowitz, Storm King’s deputy director of operations, administration, and legal affairs. “They hadn’t gone through a full life cycle,” so some problems inherent to the variety weren’t yet understood. They tend to develop girdling roots, for example. And then there were issues with how they were planted, with their root balls wrapped in burlap, in unprepared soil—which at one end of the allée stays too moist.

“Sugar maples don’t like the wet. And in age, the [cultivar’s] branches compete with each other for space. The problems we were seeing were persistent,” says Hilderbrand, whose firm Reed Hilderbrand was brought in to find a solution. The design team included Rebekah Sturges, ASLA, and Meg Griscom, ASLA. “We took the position that ‘you probably need to cut down a lot of trees—but if you cut them down you’re going to have to put them back. We can reform your practices, improve the soil, and change the species, but Storm King’s métier really is sculpture and land, and that includes these plantations.’”

The pin oak allée sustained some storm injuries a few years ago, but overall is in decent shape. A few of the sugar maples on Museum Road would be replaced; they were failing “because of girdling roots, soil issues, and a wind storm that caused quite a bit of damage,” the park’s director of facilities and conservation specialist Mike Seaman says. More critically, at the damp lower end of Maple Allée, the Green Mountain cultivars were puny and dying.

The first issues in addressing the problems of that allée were in the realms of design and horticulture. For the staff and board, “the interesting journey was getting from ‘something needs to happen’ to ‘this is what’s going to happen.’ There were so many variations, from ‘chop it all down’ to ‘let’s have a much more complex, broader planting, with an S curve through it,’” Davidowitz recalls. “Then going through the tree material, and asking what’s important from that line of trees, which is different from the Museum Road Allée, where the species of sugar maples with their higher branching” allow less obstructed through views. Maple Allée, however, had served more as a line of demarcation across a huge open space; less transparency was desirable. “We dismissed a bunch of species because the branching would be too high. We talked about flowering, nonflowering, about litter. And then looking at the future: Are they necessarily good trees for what the climate and environment will be in 40 years’ time?” The plan that emerged is to replant the allée as the straight line it has always been. The species finally selected was black gum (Nyssa sylvatica).

Aerial views help reveal the gaps in Maple Allée. Image by Reed Hilderbrand.

In 2017, 20 standing Green Mountain maples and two stumps were removed and replaced with 34 black gums; 24 more maples will be taken out in 2019, with 42 black gums put in their place. “The spacing’s a bit different,” Seaman explains, because the black gums have a more compact habit. “The sugar maples were approximately 70 feet apart and these are about 40. To have the same effect it was necessary to increase the number of trees and narrow the allée itself.”

Hilderbrand says, “We would never recommend a single-species allée today, except in this circumstance—it’s a legacy condition. The Nyssa was chosen as the only hardwood that would be well adapted to the varied moisture and exposure conditions that the original maples couldn’t ultimately survive.”

The other major challenge was how to amend and continue to nourish the soil. “We did some serious soil forensics,” Hilderbrand says. For that, Eric T. Fleisher of F2 Environmental Design was brought onto the team. “We found the natural nutrient cycling capacity in the soils to be very low. We were getting less than 25 pounds of available nitrogen [per acre] from microbial activity,” Fleisher says. There were high bacterial counts and bacterial diversity, but low predatory protozoan populations. Ideally, the compost used to restore these soils would produce a minimum of 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre “coming from the living microorganisms,” that is, from the interaction among bacteria, fungi, and predatory activity, “tapping into the natural nitrogen supply that’s in the soil but that’s locked up in bacteria.” The means of applying these amendments would be through vertical composting and biological infusions.

Vertical composting sometimes describes the design of backyard composting devices. Here it’s something else. To renovate the soil around standing trees whose vigor could be restored—following years during which leaf litter had been removed, thus interrupting the natural process of nutrient replenishment—“you go in with an augur, down about 12 inches into the root zone in a specific pattern around each tree,” Fleisher explains, using straight compost with amendments such as biochar or pelletized humate where needed.

Biological infusions are more commonly called compost tea, a liquid amendment that home gardeners might simply drip around their plants. At Storm King it is engineered with different characteristics for application around specific trees, and injected by wand into the top 10 inches of the soil. Anyway, “compost tea is a generic name,” he says. “There’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf compost tea. Those are nothing more than the foods you would put into a compost tea—it might be humic acid, kelp, or fish hydrolysate—but these do not include the microorganisms that can only be found in a high-quality compost.”

Storm King obtained its own compost brewing equipment, plus a microscope and training so that staff can monitor and adjust the amendment. “When you work with these institutions, it has to be done in-house, extremely scientifically, which contractors really aren’t set up to do,” Fleisher explains. You are “looking at exactly where the imbalances are and then specifically engineering these biological infusions to correct that. We look at them under a scope every 24 hours. When you’re getting to the point where the protozoans have developed fully and are extremely active, and the bacteria is almost depleted or has gone down significantly, we feel ‘OK, the material’s ready.’ These are living organisms that absolutely don’t have a shelf life, and have to be applied within six hours of having been brewed.”

A schematic illustrates the sources of stress on the existing trees. Image by Reed Hilderbrand.

At that end of Maple Allée with problematic drainage, as trees are replanted, the soil is restored more aggressively, using a combination of compost and sand. “We create, in a sense, a lower horizon and upper horizon of soils. We mix more sand into the bottom, and if we find a real problem with drainage we go farther and do what are in effect dry wells with sand,” Fleisher explains. Beyond drainage management, the goal of the dual horizons is to promote “most of the microbial activity at 10 to 12 inches, where the feeder roots generally are.”

In the near term, visitors to Storm King will notice the difference between the smaller new trees and the mature ones in Maple Allée. An interpretive signboard nicely encapsulates the history and ongoing renovation. Eventually, the entire allée will be replanted. “We liked staging this for didactic reasons. People are attached to these maples, especially to the fall color,” Hilderbrand says. “There’s a good story about longevity by comparison to the new trees, about planting practices old and current, and about managing living collections in the face of dynamic climate and environmental conditions.”

Young Nyssa and mature maples with Mark di Suvero’s sculpture Pyramidian. Courtesy Storm King Art Center/Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

Especially for Storm King’s staff and community of donors and members, says Davidowitz, repairing the allées has been “another element of understanding the broader ecological dynamics of this place. You see a row of trees, you don’t think, ‘Oh, that tree over there that’s taller is having a completely different life experience than one planted a few yards away.’ It helps people to think holistically. It helps to see photos of Mike standing by the truck with that big brewer on the back. It’s made things as complex as soil health accessible. It’s been a great educational experience.”

Jonathan Lerner is a writer based in New York State.

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A lei by PBR HAWAII references the island’s dark colonial past. Courtesy PBR HAWAII.

As the receptionist for the Honolulu office of Belt Collins, Dawn Higa is not typically involved in design discussions. Her tasks, while vital to the day-to-day operations of the global design firm, tend toward the administrative: answering phones, directing calls, taking messages. It’s a job Higa’s held since 1987, when as a single mother she was placed at the company, which today has offices in multiple countries, including China, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, by a temp agency. “I don’t think I even knew what an engineer did for the first year,” Higa says.

But once every two years, Higa becomes an integral part of the team competing in Honolulu’s biennial RE-LEI competition, in which individuals and teams craft traditional Hawaiian lei—a garland typically made out of flowers, ferns, leaves, or nuts—out of 100 percent postconsumer waste. Registration for this year’s competition, which is open to anyone, not just those living in Hawaii, closes Saturday, March 23, 2019. The cost is $75 for individuals and $250 for teams, with discounted rates for students. RE-LEI was first organized by a group of landscape architects and planners in 2015; its proceeds support landscape architecture education and the recently created MLA program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM).

RE-LEI’s aim is to educate the public about environmental issues and how landscape architecture can help solve them while also celebrating a unique aspect of Hawaii’s material culture. Long a part of Native Hawaiian culture, lei remain a part of daily life in Hawaii, given out on birthdays and graduations and worn in hula performances. Rather than May Day, since 1928 on May 1 Hawaii has celebrated Lei Day, a celebration of Hawaiian song and dance and lei making. Most often, lei are a symbol of hospitality and friendship, though they can also hold much deeper significance for those versed in traditional Hawaiian practices.

A lei made from bits of a T-shirt. Courtesy Mayumi Dao/Thai & Lu.

The idea to make lei out of discarded materials emerged from conversations between Brad Tanimura, ASLA, a landscape architect at Belt Collins, and Dawn Easterday, ASLA, then with Belt Collins and now the principal of Easterday Design. They knew that the student chapter of the American Institute of Architects at UHM held an annual sandcastle competition to raise money for chapter activities. Tanimura and Easterday thought a similar event could benefit the nascent landscape architecture program.

The rules of RE-LEI are simple: All materials must be postconsumer waste, with the exception of string or wire and paints and dyes used to alter the discarded material. There are no restrictions on the type of lei an individual can submit—some lei are worn around the neck, others on the head or around the wrists or ankles—but preference is given to entries that can be worn.

Beach plastic, recycled into a lei. Courtesy Jonathan Stanich, Student ASLA/Thai & Lu.

Entries are submitted in one of seven material categories (for example, “plastics” or “electronic or composite”) and are then evaluated by a jury of design and conservation professionals on the basis of artistry, innovation, execution, fulfillment of the theme, and creative reuse of materials. Prizes are given out in each category, and winning lei are displayed at the Honolulu Museum of Art the last weekend in April and at Honolulu Hale (city hall) for the city’s Lei Day celebration. Prizes are generally donated by local businesses so that the majority of the competition’s entrance fees can be put toward RE-LEI’s mission of landscape architecture education.

RE-LEI is perhaps most notable for the way it draws attention to both indigenous practices and the pernicious problem of waste. For Easterday, the value of the competition lies in its ability to shift a person’s perspective, to illuminate the hidden value of what they thought was rubbish, or to at least make visible just how much rubbish they produce. “I was always taught, from way back in school, that we are stewards of the land,” she says. “And that’s always been part of landscape architecture for me.”

This lei is made from packaging plastic. Courtesy Ashley Kawabara/Thai & Lu.

For some, the competition is an opportunity not only to challenge themselves as designers, but also to educate the public about Hawaii’s complex history. The 2017 winner in the paper/plastic category, for instance, was a combination of maile and crown flower lei all made out of recycled Hawaiian language newsprint. It was created by PBR HAWAII, a Honolulu-based planning and landscape architecture firm, in honor of the centennial of the death of Queen Liliuokalani, who during the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in the late 19th century had news smuggled into her chambers via flower bouquets wrapped in newsprint. To make the crown flower lei, the team cut, folded, and colored the newsprint to resemble Calotropis gigantea blossoms—the queen’s favorite flower.

Grace Zheng, ASLA, a landscape architect with PBR HAWAII, says her team’s entry was “a celebration and an appreciation” of Queen Liliuokalani, while also “recognizing what had happened to her, and in a symbolic way, calling attention to that, choosing not to glaze over Hawaii’s history.” Zheng adds that the concept came from the firm’s administrative department: It was Paula Okamoto, an administrative assistant who is part Native Hawaiian, who suggested that the team use Queen Liliuokalani as their inspiration. “Our admins are very involved in this because it allows them to be creative beyond their administrative work,” Zheng says. “So it’s a way to bond with our administrative staff as well.”

Tire rubber, recycled into a decorative lei. Courtesy Thai & Lu.

In past years, entries have come from outside the islands, and Easterday stresses that participants don’t need to be trained in traditional lei making to enter. A YouTube video or two can be a good start. But even those who don’t enter can participate in the competition. For the week of April 22–28, the public is encouraged to vote for a People’s Choice award via Instagram (@relei808) as a part of Earth Day celebrations and Landscape Architecture Month. May the best lei win.

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the natural environment. He lives in Honolulu.

BY ZACH MORTICE

Inuksuit is meant to be staged outdoors, in any kind of landscape. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen.

For her landscape art installation in Houston, the landscape architect and artist Falon Mihalic, ASLA, drew inspiration from a musical score as much as she did the live oak trees on her Rice University campus site.

Her installation was the setting for a performance of the composer John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit. The Inuit title is loosely translated as “evidence of human presence” and commonly refers to Arctic wayfinding markers such as cairns of stacked stones. Mihalic’s installation is also concerned with wayfinding amid wildness.

Her work contains three main elements. The origin point is a circle of white crushed limestone gravel 30 feet in diameter that surrounds a live oak tree. At its perimeter are CNC-milled pieces of plywood painted black with triangular acrylic patterns applied on top, pointing outward, shimmering and reflective as water. A thin line of crushed gravel dotted by boulders forms an ellipse around the origin point, which the musicians use as waypoints to track their movements. Up above, a dark aluminum “ribbon of smoke,” as Mihalic calls it, is hung from a tree’s branches. “It looks like a kind of ghosted branch,” she says. “I wanted it to be almost invisible.” This ethereal gray calls to mind the home and hearth that come with human settlement (or inuksuit), but Mihalic sees it as conjuring wildfire and cyclical landscape processes.

A shroud of dark aluminum follows the contour of the central tree’s branch. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen.

The origin point circle is rimmed by black plywood and triangular acrylic patterns. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen.

Through these elemental references (water, smoke, and stone), musicians radiate outward from the origin point. Inuksuit—an amorphous and mercurial landscape of sound—is meant to be performed by nine to 99 musicians on drums, cymbals, gongs, conch shells, piccolos, sirens, glockenspiels, and more. Each musician has a loose score. An event map (which Mihalic drew on to make her installation) guides movement across every landscape in phases that are roughly coordinated. Audience members are also encouraged to wander about the site as they listen, determining their own experience of the music and landscape.

A drone’s-eye view of the performance. Photo by Brandon Martin.

Forty-five musicians from Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and elsewhere spread across a live oak grove at Rice for Inuksuit’s February 16 performance (Mihalic’s installation remains in place through March 16). The musicians moved in three groups, guided by the installation. Shaped by a basic soft/loud/soft dynamic structure, the music starts with the breathy tones of conch shells. “It’s so slight and quiet that it takes you a minute to even understand that the piece has started,” Mihalic says. Rising action is dramatized by gongs and other metal percussion. “It feels like a festival or a rock concert,” she says. “It’s kind of overwhelming.” The composition, produced at Rice by Brandon Bell, finishes with piccolos tweeting like birds. Offering a clue to Adams’s commitment to what’s called the music of the place, the event map advises, “[Musical] figures chosen should be those of birds that occur at the performance site.”

 During the performance’s intense middle section, Mihalic noticed that audience members tried to find the best aural vantage point. They began flocking to the spot where the musicians had decamped from, as if the landscape itself abhorred a vacuum. “That was a very happy surprise for me,” Mihalic says.

Listeners gather in the central origin point. Photo by Brandon Martin.

As the piece wound down, the piccolo and glockenspiel echoed each other as Adams’s music decelerated. “Everyone took a deep breath together and stopped where they were,” says Mihalic. “It was such a beautiful way to end the piece.” In this stillness, all that was left were the birds singing in the trees. “That’s my favorite moment,” she says, “because the whole audience was suddenly attuned to the music of the place by experiencing the place.”

A percussionist performing Inuksuit. Photo by Brandon Martin.

Each performance of Inuksuit is intended to be wholly shaped by the landscape in which it takes place. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Why take photographs of basketball courts but leave out the players? For photographer Bill Bamberger, basketball courts tell a compelling story by themselves. They are signs of play — and community life. The environment surrounding a court tells a lot about the community that created it.

In Hoops, a new exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., Bamberger and curator Chrysanthe Broikos edited the 22,000 images of basketball courts Bamberger shot around the world over the past 15 years to just 75.

At the preview, Bamberger said he was intrigued by conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher’s famous photographs of water towers and other industrial buildings. The duo shot objects in black and white, in the “same neutral light,” from the same angle, forcing the viewer to notice the small differences between the industrial remnants. The result was “there was no context.”

Bamberger is clearly inspired by aspects of their approach. The focus of this exhibition is entirely on one built object — the basketball court. But he also diverged from their path by highlighting the context — the environments surrounding the basketball courts.

In one photograph of a court at a charter school playground in Harlem, New York City, one can see the “color and the diversity of the place” (see image at top).

In contrast, in Phoenix, Arizona, the basketball court at a wealthy school almost blends into the landscape, its edges fading into the desert.

In a church playground in Kinihara, Rwanda, where Bamberger visited with his partner, who is an HIV/AIDS researcher, the “inventiveness” of the community is apparent — the handmade basketball posts are made of tree trunks, the backboard is made up of old wood planks, and the rim is fashioned from found metal. The space from which players shoot is demarcated by bricks embedded in the ground instead of the usual painted lines.

Basketball hoops pop up everywhere there is life — on the sides of buildings and homes and along streets. One of Bamberger’s favorite photographs is of a hoop on a grain silo in Portland, Oregon.

And one call tell from the pictures which hoops are well-used and loved and which have been abandoned. A hoop at an abandoned campsite in Tennessee, where a homeless family was living in an old bus, is a remnant left by people moving through.

Bamberger said some of the greatest hoops were found in communities facing incredible challenges. One charming court in struggling North Fork, West Virginia, shows the hope and vitality still there.

The Hoops exhibition shows you that if you see a basketball court somewhere, some unique group of people came together to built it. “Play is a necessity in community life.” Basketball courts are really community portraits.

Hoops opened just in time for the 2019 NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments. The exhibition is on view through January 5, 2020.

REVIEWED BY SARAH COWLES

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Street trees occupy a shifting and contested dimension of cities. Whereas trees in parks and private gardens in cities are afforded a measure of stability and protection, street trees are literally on the front lines of urbanism, absorbing the impacts of changes in policy on errant cars. Street trees are surrounded: hemmed in by architecture, tree grates, cages, with leaking gas conduits at their roots and power lines teasing their crowns, soaked by deicing salt on one side and dog urine on the other.

Although there are field guides to street trees and technical manuals for planting and soil specifications, there is no comprehensive look at the culture and politics of the urban forest. Seeing Trees by Sonja Dümpelmann fills this void and unearths a detailed and complex vein of urban history that “offers insights into how our relationships with both nature and the city have changed over time.” The collection of illustrated essays, divided into sections on New York and Berlin, is “about street trees’ literal and figurative entanglement not only in the built urban structure but also in the urban social, cultural, and political life as a whole.”

Dümpelmann takes on an elusive spatial subject in landscape architecture history. Unlike a particular landscape “unit” such as a park, garden, or river corridor, street trees are individual constituents of larger urban and regional masses of tree cover. The book covers the history of the single tree in the urban right-of-way, and the emergence of research on the distributed “hyperobject” of the urban forest. Like an individual seeking a voice in a community, representation is key to advocacy. An individual street tree can be seen and counted, but for the urban forest as a whole to be valued, it must be represented in the abstract. Dümpelmann documents many ways that arborists and citizen advocates in both communist and capitalist regimes have attempted to plant, maintain, represent, and catalog the urban forest, but unfortunately shies from offering critique and analysis, drawn from her exceptional research, that might lead to more productive and equitable models to support and maintain the urban forest. As a whole, the weakness of the volume is structural; it leaves much low-hanging fruit out for subsequent analysis, and at times this reader longed for a chapter or at least for a handful of position paragraphs—beyond the brackets of the introduction and conclusion—that distill this deep dive into the archives into guidance for the future.

A 1963 greening plan for the center of East Berlin. Image courtesy Landesarchiv Berlin, C REP. 110-04 [KARTEN], NR. 112 T 1 and 2.

Dümpelmann, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, leads with “Tree Doctor vs. Tree Butcher,” a chapter introducing the congested streets of late 19th century New York, strung with new overhead telegraph wires and lined with gas conduits below. This period ushers in the birth and development of arboriculture, a term that “by the early twentieth century had come to be used in English to describe the planting and maintenance of street trees, encapsulates this fusion of nature and culture by means of science and technology.” It is an era of innovations in street tree artifice and technology, such as protective tree guards and grates. Tree guards, derived from structures to protect pasture trees from hungry livestock, give “expression on a micro scale to the larger rural–urban transformations that were occurring at the time.”

The chapter also details the emergence of specialized research on urban forests, including the first studies on how street trees moderate urban temperatures and have a positive effect on public health. Dümpelmann documents the rise of a new professional discipline of urban forestry, whose practitioners were in “forestry, landscape architecture, horticulture, or plant science.” These experts were charged with selecting and evaluating species with the best aesthetic and adaptation traits for harsh urban conditions. A highlight of the chapter is the detailed research on the polarizing tree of heaven.

In “Street Tree Aesthetics,” Dümpelmann discusses the debates, proposals, and technologies involved in creating an orderly yet diverse urban forest in New York City. Before terms like biodiversity and resilience, urban forestry specialists sought species that were pest resistant and varied visually, though similar in form and habit. By 1940, the city was lined with a municipal palette familiar to most New Yorkers: linden, ginkgo, Norway maple, and Oriental plane trees.

Urban trees were vulnerable to insect infestations resulting in defoliation and other nuisances. Early methods of pesticide application were coarse, and Dümpelmann’s research exposes the lax protections afforded citizens and workers who worked with pesticides.

Suggested crown shapes and crown-trunk ratios based on age, from a 19th century treatise. Image courtesy A. Des Cars, A Treatise on Pruning Forest and Ornamental Trees, Trans. from the 7th French Ed., 3rd Ed. [Boston: Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, 1894].

As the nation became industrialized, practitioners developed methods to standardize the planting and ongoing care of street trees. Dümpelmann beautifully illustrates these early efforts with archival images of dendroscopes, a French invention introduced at the 1867 World’s Fair. A dendroscope is a template of an ideal tree shape that one worker peers through to guide the worker pruning the tree. Initially used for optimal lumber production, the dendroscope was adapted to guide pruning of trees in their stages of growth. The dendroscope prefigures the modern impetus toward crown symmetry, reinforced through selection and hybridization of today’s popular species, such as Green Vase zelkova and pin oak. The chapter includes descriptions of early time and motion studies of proper limb pruning techniques, contrasted with images of optimal bricklaying, reinforcing the drive toward the Taylorization of human labor. She rounds out the chapter on the aesthetic realm of urban forestry with descriptions of the new uniforms for tree workers, created to promote a professional image on the street and in worker parades, and designed for mobility and durability. Innovations in technology continue to condition the relationships of citizens to their trees and the public officials administering their care, resulting in programs such as TreesCount!, the 2015–2016 street tree census that fed citizen-gathered data to an open-source map of New York’s trees.

In the third chapter on New York, Dümpelmann posits that in the late 19th century, women trained their attention on street trees because the realm in front of their homes was one of the few public spaces for women to inhabit. She provides a rundown of their organizations and campaigns for a greener city and advocacy for restoring faltering bird populations. Birds still provided the best, least costly defense against insect infestations of the urban forests, but were affected by predation loss of habitat. Dümpelmann outlines how birds became a focal point of organization for elite women, delving into the intricacies of urban birdhouse design, the demands of the international millinery trade’s appetite for birds and their decorative feathers, and the design of an early bird sanctuary in New Hampshire. Though they may appear to be digressions from the book’s subject, these examples reflect the diverse ways women lobbied from the periphery for healthy urban forests.

“Isles of safety” and trees in movable boxes in a 1911 plan for New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Image courtesy Tree Planting Association of New York City, Reports of Officers, Charter, By-Laws, Committees, 1912 [New York: Tree Planting Association, 1912]. General Research Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In the chapter “Planting Civil Rights” (previously published in LAM in December 2015), Dümpelmann covers urban greening efforts in the civil rights era, focusing on the work of Hattie Carthan, a community leader in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Carthan organized planting campaigns to improve environmental conditions and increase community coherence and stewardship in lower-income neighborhoods.

Dümpelmann writes that “tree planting was a creative and constructive activity that could—its supporters certainly hoped—replace the neighborhood’s more common hostility and alienation.” What is troubling is that Dümpelmann’s chapter does not address reasons for this alleged “common hostility and alienation.” She omits speculation on the root causes of social fragmentation in the targeted neighborhoods—for example, the specific economic precarity, structural racism, and poverty of the time. Her examples outline how tree planting programs were considered vehicles for urban social reform, but she avoids examining the other side, where poorer urban citizens were expected to provide under- or uncompensated labor and materials to reconcile the structural inequities in their immediate environment.

The section on the history of New York’s street trees demonstrates that street trees’ dual nature as a singular, local element and as a constituent of the urban forest has long been a source of trouble for advocates and urban leaders. The chapters demonstrate that effective advocacy is often localized, down to the neighborhood or block, where class and race are stratified, while investments in the body of the urban forest as a whole can benefit all citizens. Yet Dümpelmann shrinks from dispatching her research to draw out the class conflicts and assumptions evident in the approaches to greening in wealthy versus poor neighborhoods.

Today, publicly accessible urban forest maps like the New York City Street Tree Map are a means to visualize and ameliorate these inequalities in forest cover. The map provides a picture of spatial distribution of the urban forest that can be correlated with demographic data.

“Burning Trees,” the first chapter in the section on Berlin, stands out for its poignant picture of a city ruined by aerial bombardment and postwar precarity. In this chapter, Dümpelmann outlines trees’ ability to support the survival of devastated communities and mitigate whatever chaos humankind generates. The chapter includes a discussion of “weaponized” street trees, packed with explosives and partially cut, to be detonated and fall in the path of tanks, and efforts by scientists to inventory the number of fruit-bearing species, such as mountain ash and sea buckthorn, that could provide vitamin A to meet the nutrition needs of malnourished survivors. During the blockade of West Berlin between 1948 and 1949, the city was cut off from energy supply lines, causing more culling of the urban forest for heating and cooking.

Hajo Schüler’s posters advocated for street trees in the 1980s. Image courtesy Studienarchiv Umweltgeschichte, Neubrandenburg.

Dümpelmann’s investigation retrieved detailed information on early research and design of Trümmerbegrünung (rubble greening on sites destroyed by bombs) and the building of topsoil through communal composting efforts, which dovetails neatly with Jens Lachmund’s Greening Berlin (The MIT Press, 2013), a history of citizen ecologists and park advocacy movements in Berlin from the postwar period to the present day.

“Greening Trees” details the advances in technology and research in the postwar period to the 1970s and contrasts the approaches between the governments of East and West Berlin. In the east, designers such as Walter Meissner and Walter Funcke envisioned new planting schemes for the mass production of worker housing, although many schemes were never planted owing to a lack of nursery supply. West Berlin reforestation efforts focused on planting trees on the front lawns of private properties.

New avenues of research during this era included measuring how trees attenuate noise from cars and aircraft in the urban sound sphere, new tree nursery transplantation methods and stump removal devices, and the emergence of environmental psychology, another branch of science focused on the value of the positive impacts of urban greenery. The divided city, with its contrasting aims and justifications for urban greening, engendered a diversity of research and site-based experimentation that would enrich the city post-reunification.

A 1948 plan for the Insulaner, a park to be created on postwar rubble. Image courtesy Landesarchiv Berlin, Insulaner, F REP. 270 A, 4748.

Dümpelmann knits together the emerging ecological art movement and activism of the postwar period in “Shades of Red.” Starting in the mid-1970s, the Berlin-based artist Ben Wargin planted hundreds of ginkgo trees and site-based agitprop installations on car roofs and barges, installed the Parliament of Trees, a garden memorial to those who died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, and likely influenced Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks—City Forestation Instead of City Administration, a work first presented at Documenta 7 in 1982 in Kassel, Germany.

In East Berlin, “oppositional street tree activism provided cover to evade state control and surveillance and created space for other adversarial activities. Given their relative ‘neutrality,’ street tree-planting campaigns were tolerated more easily by the state, although it followed these campaigns closely.” Groups such as the Association for the Protection of Berlin Trees organized protests against road widening projects that removed street trees, the destruction of cobble paving, and poor or underfunded arboriculture.

East Berlin struggled with the same financial woes as the West, but without a private sector to make up the difference. To maintain and improve the public realm, citizens were expected to contribute weekend hours in a program called “Participate!” where labor was not entirely altruistic—“participation could earn them certain favors such as a promotion, the ability to travel abroad, or a bigger apartment,” and by 1982, East Berlin’s tree ordinance “finally codified street tree care as citizen labor.”

Notable post-reunification efforts to green the city included citizen-led tree planting efforts where the wall once stood. “Tree planting was a displacement activity, an activity that sought to heal the fissures of the German psyche as well as the physical fissures in the urban fabric, an activity that expressed the desire to make Berlin whole again and to overcome the different cultural traditions, frameworks, and collective memories in East and West Germany.” The discussion also includes the metamorphosis of Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden boulevard as an urban datum reflecting political changes, from imperial times, the poisoning and loss of trees owing to the introduction of illuminating gas, and its widening as a Nazi parade ground and subsequent rehabilitation under reunification.

Seeing Trees offers a new perspective on the history of two cities’ growth. It’s a historical resource for practitioners and planners working in temperate, continental cities who are looking for ways to represent the urban forest and its benefits. It is illustrated with exceptional images and examples of early information design in landscape representation techniques. It is also a book about the messy work and negotiations of landscape urbanism, though it is thankfully devoid of stilted academic language or jargon. It reads as a delightful work of nonfiction, though at times the narrative loses momentum in the minutiae of the characters and quantities. But as a scholarly foundation, it creates a new dimension of study for others to take on this rich topic.

Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin, by Sonja Dümpelmann; New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2019; 332 pages, $50.

Sarah Cowles is a cofounder of Isthmus Group, a landscape design and planning studio based in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

Climate change is causing seas to rise, flooding to worsen, and hurricanes and wildfires to become more destructive, all of which puts our infrastructure at greater risk. On top of that, America’s current infrastructure received a D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in their latest scorecard. Increased risk from climate events and the massive backlog of maintenance projects means that our infrastructure has never been more vulnerable.

But for some forward-thinking communities, vulnerability means opportunity. For these communities facing climate impacts, the best way to protect themselves has been to move beyond the grey infrastructure of the past and transition to green infrastructure.

In the Neoclassical Rayburn building on Capitol Hill, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and Environment and Energy Study Institute (EESI) hosted a briefing for over a hundred Hill staffers to explain how communities and landscape architects are using green infrastructure to help communities become more climate-resilient.

Nancy Somerville, Hon. ASLA, CEO of ASLA, said infrastructure should be created or remodeled to work “in tandem with natural systems.”

As outlined in the report Smart Policies for a Changing Climate, which was the result of ASLA’s blue ribbon panel on climate change and resilience, green infrastructure — such as “green roofs, streets, and corridors; tree canopies; parks and open spaces; and wetlands and wild lands” — leverages the benefits of nature to soak up excess stormwater and protect against flooding. These innovative projects also provide many other benefits, such as improved water and air quality, cooler air temperatures, and psychological and cognitive benefits for people.

“The risks of coastal, riverine, an urban flooding are increasing,” said Mark Dawson, FASLA, managing principal at Sasaki, one of the leading landscape and urban design firms in the U.S., which incorporates green infrastructure into all its community resilience projects.

His firm is now working with flood-inundated Shelby County in Tennessee, which won a national disaster resilience grant of some $60 million, to protect itself from persistent, destructive riverine flooding. Sasaki mapped the extent of current and expected future flooding and developed comprehensive plans with the impacted communities. In one especially hard-hit low-income community, there was serious conversation about selling and relocating but planning turned towards how to use parks and reconfigured residential lots with floodable zones to better protect homes. A new green infrastructural park now in development will accommodate an expanding and contracting flood plain (see image at top).

Montgomery county, Maryland, has also gone all-in on using green infrastructure to improve community resilience to climate change. Adam Ortiz, director of environmental protection for the county, said the county government is focused on bringing green infrastructure to previously under-served communities in order to spread the benefits to everyone.

For example, the Dennis Avenue green street, found in an “under-invested” neighborhood, is not only a “beautiful upgrade” but cleans and infiltrates stormwater runoff and protects against flooding. These projects aren’t just good for the environment and property values, they also create economic benefits. According to Ortiz, “green infrastructure projects have contributed $130 million to the local economy,” spurring the creation of county businesses that offer well-paying green jobs.

It’s worth reiterating that some communities need green infrastructure more than others, because some communities have borne “environmental insults” far longer. Dr. Jalonne White-Newsome with the Kresge Foundation argued that environmental justice considerations should guide who gets much-needed resilient green infrastructure. She said low-income “black and brown” communities are often more vulnerable to climate impacts because they are already dealing with so many contemporary issues and the legacy of past injustices. “First, you take institutional racism, then throw climate change on top of that, and it makes things only worse.”

White-Newsome said anyone working on these projects should seek to use good local science; conduct a comprehensive environmental justice analysis before starting a project; remove barriers to “education, access, and financial decision-making;” and empower local communities as part of the process. Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange and Earth Economics are helpful organizations for communities seeking to finance their own plans and projects.

In the past few years, there has been progress on Capitol Hill in incentivizing more resilient infrastructure, but not nearly enough. Ellen Vaughn, director of public policy for EESI pointed to the Disaster Recovery Reform Act; the Water Infrastructure Improvement Act; Defense appropriations around climate resilience; and the recently-passed Natural Resources Management Act, which provides permanent financing for the Land & Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). And Somerville noted that ASLA has been promoting the Living Shorelines Act and hopes it will be re-introduced this Congress.

But more must be done at the federal level to spread the protective benefits of next-generation resilient infrastructure to more communities. Somerville said: “what is needed is dedicated federal funding for green infrastructure.”

Eight years ago Danish architect Bjarke Ingels came up with a fantastical idea — build a ski slope on top of a power plant. Well, now, it has actually happened — the $660 million Amager Bakke is preparing to welcome adventurous ski bunnies in Copenhagen. Known to locals as Copenhill, this cutting-edge renewable energy system converts waste into energy while giving sports lovers access to a 2,000-feet-long ski slope, a 295-feet-high climbing wall, and hiking and running paths. The project is the most visible demonstration yet of Copenhagen’s determination to become the world’s first carbon neutral city by 2025.

According to Babcock & Wilcox Vølund, the engineers of the power plant, Copenhill will convert 400,000 tons of waste each year into heat for 250,000 homes and energy for another 62,500 while producing zero toxic air pollution. Some 100,000 pounds of ash collected from the waste incineration process will be reused to build roads; and some 90 percent of the metals in the waste stream will be salvaged.

Two ski lifts take visitors up to the slope, which allows for all types of skiing — alpine and racing — along with snowblading and snowboarding. On the Copenhill website, one can already reserve a time to snow plow or slalom down the slopes for about $20 an hour. Visitors can also rent equipment, take a ski class, or join SKI365, the building’s ski club. The big plus: because the slope is built using specialized artificial turf, people will be able to ski up there year round.

Translating their website from Danish, it’s clear they’ve tried to design the space for everyone: “If you a beginner, a shark on skis, free-styler, fun skier, man, woman, boy, girl, thick, thin, tall or short, then you are part of the community. We have something for everyone. There are both red / black, blue, and green courses. In addition, there is also a slalom course, free-style park, and, of course, an area for the smallest.”

For those who avoid skiing, there are freely-accessible paths sloping up a 5-35 percent grade where one can walk up or take a heart-pounding run. Bjarke Ingels’ firm BIG and landscape architects with SLA planted more than 30 trees in landscaped areas. There, Copenhill invites you to “take a picnic in the shrubbery or just enjoy the view on one of the reclining benches.” There’s also a club for these path enthusiasts — RUN365, with crossfit training options for members.

The facility replaces an older power plant, and the cost of building Copenhill is shared among the five municipalities who will sell Copenhill’s heat and power. But according to Bloomberg, the city government thinks it’s perhaps the tourism money — rather than the heat or power — that will end up offsetting a larger share of the cost of the new plant. Situated just 13 minutes from the airport, it will be hard for first-time visitors — particularly those with kids — to avoid making a stop.

In an interview, BIG told Inhabitat that the building is expected to blow steam rings at some point. The technology apparently works — they are now fine-tuning.

See more images at DesignBoom and check out an interview we did with Ingels in 2011, where he discussed his bold ideas about merging buildings and landscapes.