The Value of Sustainable Landscaping in Architecture

Nick Boever:

Richard, Jessica, thank you for joining me today. I figured before we get started with our questions, I’ll let the two of you introduce yourselves. So we’ll start with Richard.

Rick Clarke:

Thank you, Nicholas. It’s great to be here. I’m Richard Clarke. I’m the design director at EYP. Very involved with designer projects and working on quality across the firm.

Jessica Petro:

Hi, and my name is Jessica Petro. I’m a landscape architect with EYP. Supporting. We have 11 offices nationwide supporting the growth of the landscape architecture discipline within the firm.

Nick Boever:

Wow, I didn’t realize you guys had that many offices. I guess I forgot to ask before we get into it, you guys are centrally based out of… Or you guys work within the American market, right? Or do you do any international work as well?

Rick Clarke:

Heavily American, but very international too, especially in our government work where we do embassies all around the world. I think we have worked on over a hundred embassies across the globe.

Nick Boever:

Wow. That’s very impressive. So I guess to get started with what we’re here to talk about today, what initially prompted EYP to branch off into their own landscaping practice?

Rick Clarke:

It’s a great story really because it touches at the heart of EYP. I think Jessica hinted at it with 11 offices. We’re very, very collaborative and we’re very integrated. We have a broad range of integrated design services and engineering. So our conversations are very focused on not only design quality but also sustainability. And within the culture of our firm, we’re kind of a learning organization. Every two years we sponsor something called Blue Oceans where we ask staff to come up with ideas that will make the firm better.

Rick Clarke:

We had a fantastic recommendation from a staff member who put together a program for sustainable landscape because it was a piece of our practice that was missing. It took about a year to put the plan together and to interview, and Jessica is the direct result of that process. We were so happy to have her join us because it adds a missing piece to the conversation to actually have a living, breathing, practicing landscape architect with us, with very strong set of ideas and amazing skill sets to join our conversation about integrated and sustainable design, whether it’s building landscape or building systems.

Nick Boever:

I’m really glad that you mentioned it being part of the missing piece of the conversation that you guys have because we’ve talked about it a little bit before in our preliminary call. But the idea that the landscaping is in and of itself an extension of whatever building it’s a part of is not something that I readily think about, but there is subconsciously in the back of my mind and I think that’s the way it is for a lot of people.

Nick Boever:

So I’m actually curious, how would you say that just given your experience so far, how would you say that the landscape ultimately can impact the building itself?

Rick Clarke:

Well, I think we probably both want to answer that, but as architects, one of the biggest impacts on the design is the site. And so for us, and for me in particular, the building and the landscape are really not separate things that they feed into each other and they’re tied together. And in fact, in many times the building is responding very strongly to the landscape and the extended landscape, the environment and the community that it sits in.

Rick Clarke:

So I think we like to think about it holistically as just as much as we think about the mission of our clients and the program that will also obviously help shape the building as well. Jessica and I have talked about this, but the landscape is actually one of the best ways for us to reach beyond the lines of the building and the site into the community. It’s a fantastic way to connect the building to a bigger environment.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah. I love that you say that because I always think about property lines are arbitrary for nature. They don’t know where [inaudible 00:06:17] So this idea of continuing that connection with every opportunity we can to the larger community and just the larger natural community and we’re trying to be a benefit to that system. So I get very excited about what we’re doing here with having these early conversations because I think about the landscape a lot about if there’s a physical, visual connection but then there’s this emotional connection. So it really can set the tone for space, gives context using local materials or need of plantings, and Rick had said it actually grounds the building.

Jessica Petro:

It’s one of the first things you experience when you come to a site is that that foreground of landscape that frames the building. So we’re very excited to have this in behalf of EYP.

Rick Clarke:

I have to quote you too. The first time we met Jessica was that at her interview and she said something I’ve never heard anybody say before is, “Before we get there to design a building, the landscape is doing fine on its own.”

Jessica Petro:

It’s happy. It’s thriving. It’s not expecting anything. So I really do feel like as best I can to be that voice for nature and be the spirit of the land.

Rick Clarke:

And then it’s a challenge for us, with a building, can we actually make it better? Can we make the landscape and the building be harmonious?

Nick Boever:

I do really like that approach because for me personally, that’s one of the things that I always like to see in just design in general, this wedding of the natural and the artificial in a way. I do really like that quote that the landscape was doing just fine before we showed up. That actually leads into one of the other questions that I had, and I think Jessica you might be well suited to talk about this, but I was curious about some of the ways in which you guys utilize the landscaping to help restore biodiversity to an area in a different way. Because I think there’s one element of it can be maintaining but then the other element to it can also be restorative in a way.

Jessica Petro:

Oh, absolutely. It’s always a great opportunity for us if it’s an infill or a building in an area that we know will have to be demolished or something like that, that we have a new build that we can look for the opportunities to say what was there before and how can we restore it. So we’re always looking at ways of tying back to that larger context and biodiversity, but we’re also thinking about the landscape not just as an aesthetic element to a building, but a functioning element that needs to be aided or helped.

Jessica Petro:

So storm water management or thinking about the soil structure. All these kind of things are the layering that we pull into it. One of the things that used to be done a lot before was monocultures of plants. So a lot of the same plants over and over. And while that could be an amazing beautiful aspect of an ally of trees, we’re knowing that diversity is so important and not focusing on monoculture. So really just finding every opportunity to keep continually improving and working with not against it is really important to us.

Nick Boever:

I have to imagine that has to boil down to a conversation between your team and the facility managers or the facility owners or whoever is going to be in charge of maintaining the grounds after you guys leave the project. Is that true?

Jessica Petro:

Yeah, definitely. There’s always that conversation about how maintenance or management plans at the site is going to work best for the client. What kind of resources do they have and then it’s the level of care that we really need to be thinking about. That’s why native plants and thinking about your local context and working with that environment is so key. Using native plants once they’re established need minimal to no irrigation. That’s great from a resource management, right?

Nick Boever:

Yeah.

Jessica Petro:

Are there areas of a campus that can have less maintenance? Maybe it’s a grassland meadow or something like that that they only have to mow a couple times during a season. We really work with our clients to understand what’s going to work best for them as well as healing back nature as well.

Nick Boever:

I feel like especially considering just depending upon the regions that you’re working with too, you have so many beautiful plants that you can pick from and a lot of them wind up being, as you say, not just well suited to the region, so they require less work but just in general they can be tremendously more durable too in a lot of cases. I know just coming from New England, one of the things that the office park that I… Right outside the office park that I currently sit in, there are just these sumac trees all over the place. And those in and of themselves are basically bulletproof essentially.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah, absolutely. Knowing and understanding the local native plants and really leveraging it is so important. And it gives that local context of seeing what’s available in your landscape around you and celebrating that. So it’s great to hear you mention the… I assume you’re talking about staghorn sumac and just a native plant as a beautiful fall foliage. Anyway.

Nick Boever:

Exactly. I love them. And it’s just adding kind of a textural element too. I feel like plants and texture kind of go hand in hand, but there are different elements of texture that you can have especially just because we’re talking about staghorn where it has that very characteristic like velvety bark on it.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah. And then thinking about plants that also accentuate the architecture is really key and color palette because of the landscape’s dynamic and it really works with the building. Pulling out those key elements of the building or facades or play of light is so important too with setting the tone or the space as well.

Nick Boever:

Now you mentioned earlier that you guys do a lot of work with embassies and government buildings in a way, but I’m actually just curious as to what is the basic spread of the types of buildings that you work with? Do you do mostly commercial, government, educational, cultural?

Rick Clarke:

Thanks for asking that question. We probably should have addressed that in the introduction. But we do work all across the country and internationally. We mentioned government where we do a lot of embassy work, both new buildings and renovations of existing facilities, sometimes engineering studies. Our healthcare practice is also very large and we’ve done some projects overseas for that as well. Not as much as government sector, but definitely that’s a national practice doing very large scale hospitals, medical centers, cancer centers, clinics.

Rick Clarke:

So it’s a really broad range of buildings there. We have an S&T group which is mainly focused on research and development both in the academic setting but also for private clients developing really high technology facilities that are very much driven by speed to market and the importance of the quality levels of their product. And then our higher education group is also totally national working on… I think we’ve worked on over 300 campuses across the country. Buildings for teaching, learning, also student life.

Rick Clarke:

So we do some dormitories and student centers. Again, new construction as well as renovations of existing buildings. So it’s a really thriving diverse practice. On occasion we also do civic buildings that are sometimes related to the government work and sometimes related to relationships and a very strong sense of place. So landscape becomes a big part of that dialogue. And occasionally commercial buildings, which we do usually through relationships that we have with clients who want to extend our relationship.

Nick Boever:

Now, this is probably going to be a very difficult question to answer, but what is an example of a project that you guys have done that you think really captures this idea of a holistic sustainable landscape?

Rick Clarke:

Well, there’s many projects do that, but there’s one I like particularly. Actually two examples, I’ll give you one internationally and one in the United States. I mentioned before that our clients are very mission driven and that has a lot to do with it because it affects, not only the building but the landscape as well. So we just have under construction, we’ve totally completed documents and drawings for the new consulate in Erbil for the US government to extend their diplomatic relationships in the region.

Rick Clarke:

It’s a hot dry climate, but it also has seasons. It can snow. We designed a building that needs to serve the life of people there who go to literally work and live on the same compound for two or three years at a time. So in a way, we have to create a very diverse environment. One of the ways we did that on the compound, which is over its 19 buildings is using landscape.

Rick Clarke:

So we drew from the region. On a 50-acre site, we created a wadi that is basically a dry riverbed and it culminates in a wetlands, in a pond. Sometimes in the year, it’s verdant and lush and filled with water, and the pond fills up. In other time of year when it’s dry, which is quite frequent, it maintains a kind of dry, rocky, wadi quality. And we have bridges that go across it. So we use the landscape as a circulation device and then that feeds into the architecture, which includes a series of indoor and outdoor workspaces.

Rick Clarke:

You can actually take your laptop in and go work. Others are outdoor dining or working spaces adjacent to the indoor dining facilities. And others are like a community lawn or small gardens attached to the residences because it’s literally a small town.

Rick Clarke:

So what I like about that landscape is it ranges from the very formal and representational at the main entry to the consulate and then you flow through into a courtyard that’s personally covered for sun protection because it gets very hot and dry and then it flows out into this landscape with natural plantings that can take both the dry weather and the wet weather.

Rick Clarke:

So what I like about that is it’s really serving the people. Ultimately we’re designing for people and we’re designing places to provide diversity so they can have a successful life. That’s a whole city in the United States. In Missouri, we designed a mental health facility which is the largest in the states, a 300-bed mental health facility which is growing need all across the country. And that also is a 50 acre site. Interesting that they have the same size.

Rick Clarke:

And that one was about connecting to the community, making a facility that usually has a difficult connotation and destigmatizing it, creating a landscape that welcomes the community in. In fact, we put in pathways and walkways and gardens so people could walk their dogs and take strolls or go running around the perimeter. Whereas inside, we extended the landscape in and created a series of four courtyards that serve the benefit of the patients.

Rick Clarke:

So we have healing landscapes that are a big part of that restoration process. And then we have welcoming landscapes for the community. So it really makes that connection to the community. Our central oval is a drop off area to receive people, but it also serves as a park for the community. Twice a year they bring food trucks in and welcome the community in and have a festival of ethnic foods and that’s all complimented by the landscape, which again uses local plantings that need low maintenance and it’s also highly performative because it filters water and takes it into the bio soil systems and throws it on site.

Rick Clarke:

So landscape is a very interesting combination of performance function, beauty and a little bit of… I like that conversation you had about time because it also changes over time with the season. So it’s a wonderful aspect to work hand in hand with the architecture.

Nick Boever:

Even with the mental health aspect, it’s like developing its own city in a way. Although it’s not quite the traditional setup of a city that you might imagine. I would probably be better calling it like its own sort of microcosm where you have-

Rick Clarke:

Yeah, that’s right.

Nick Boever:

… little areas.

Rick Clarke:

Yeah. Fulton State Hospital, it’s spread out. It’s all in one level so it creates a very strong sense of community for the people inside.

Nick Boever:

Jessica, do you have any opinions on the favorite project that you’ve worked on so far?

Jessica Petro:

I probably can’t pick a favorite.

Nick Boever:

I know it’s always hard.

Jessica Petro:

And to be honest with you, with each team working on different sectors, it’s just been a really great process. I think what’s great about our diversity of our portfolio is we do have these four main sectors that each has their individual needs or maybe some more things that we focus on with certain aspects of landscape. But at the same time there’s a lot of principles that we keep leveraging and using.

Jessica Petro:

I won’t pick a favorite project but I’m excited to talk about the process and the way we explore things. It makes me very excited about the culture here. And just the early conversations and integration of landscape as well as we have a whole component of a firm called Green Lab where they just look at the sustainability and efficiencies of building and now how does Green Lab interface with landscape and thinking about the time value of landscape over time.

Jessica Petro:

You plant trees and in 15 years those trees might shape parts of the building, will help with the buildings… Aging a building or maybe their systems of the building. So I’ll say my favorite is just culture. I won’t pick a project.

Nick Boever:

No, I totally understand that. I would consider myself a complete nerd when it comes to just the different processes that go into making these buildings. Just you talking about the greenery kind of shaping the building reminded me of this news story that I saw recently. I think it was a residential tower that just opened out in China that has this entire… The entire front facade of it is just filled with all of these green walls that they planted all of this stuff into.

Nick Boever:

It’s relatively bare now just because these are all saplings and new plants that are being put into it, but they’re being selected based on the fact that they’re going to grow to these massive sizes over time so that it’s eventually going to fill up all of the cavities that are in the building right now with all of this lush greenery.

Jessica Petro:

That’s great.

Rick Clarke:

That sounds fantastic. Jessica brings some fresh way of thinking for us too and not only in terms of how we look at a site, but how we might even position our building. If we were just planning it, an architect might look at it one way, but she looks at it from the landscape forward or topography forward. And that’s really interesting because sometimes it’s very different than the way we might look at it thinking about other points of view. So it’s been this interesting meshing of those different points of view that makes these solutions stronger.

Nick Boever:

I guess one of the other questions I had going back to that idea of approach is have you guys had much of an opportunity to experiment with certain techniques or approaches since starting this landscaping practice where you’re using these novel techniques in order to inform your own practice?

Jessica Petro:

Well, I guess I could talk to it from my perspective of where I’ve been in my career and the change in what we’re doing with EYP. EYP has always worked with amazing consultants and will continue to do so. The benefit of having an in-house landscape architect discipline growing is just early conversations to help develop that. We’ve had jobs where there’s another landscape architect of record, but I’m in collaborative conversations and we’re just sharing ideas and just trying to open up this idea we really believe in what’s possible and always thinking about that from new angles.

Jessica Petro:

Sorry. With that thought there, it’s exciting to see a new way of looking at projects and new way of delivering services to our clients. It’s also started to create these new conversations between disciplines that are excited to think about collaboration. A perfect example for me right now is we have an amazing workplace strategist in our firm and she and I have been talking about opportunities of creating a new way of thinking about outdoor workplace.

Jessica Petro:

With everything that we’ve gone through recently and thinking about people, leveraging the outside in different ways, this has given us a great opportunity to collaborate. So I think it’s just a lot of the interesting synergies that we’re starting to explore as well as continuing and strengthening our services to our clients and our projects.

Rick Clarke:

And I’d say that it’s affected our practice. We’re a charette based practice because we’re so collaborative. Jessica’s voice is a new voice and we charette at the very, very early stages of a project and that’s the best time to get those ideas on the table because there might be a landscape idea that shapes the entire building. I mean actually I look forward to that sometime. We could have a project that really comes out of that dialogue that happens early. So I would say it hasn’t changed our process but it’s enriched our process. It’s the same way it’s enriched our dialogue. I think the results are already starting to show.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, I’m very curious about… Well, just to ask, how have some of your clients reacted to this new approach to things just in general? I know sustainability has become a very big topic for a lot of people, so obviously that is kind of at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. But I am curious to see when you walk away from a project, what are your client’s opinions after the fact?

Jessica Petro:

I guess I’ll jump in.

Rick Clarke:

You go.

Jessica Petro:

Then you add on. One thing that I think is really great is just the response of having these early conversations of landscape even if we’re at a programming component for new building. Already thinking about how does this connect to the landscape? Our clients are really wonderful because they not only think of maybe if it was healthcare patient and visitor, but they’re really thinking about the wellness of their staff and what opportunities are we giving them to connect to nature respite, having their breaks.

Jessica Petro:

Actually, it’s just been wonderful because our clients really want that and they’re thinking in those ways as well. When I think also about sustainability, it’s such a great time because we do have a great platform and a great way to add value now talking about sustainability and landscapes and our clients are really interested in that as well.

Jessica Petro:

I’m a SITES AP, so I’m really excited to say that. It’s like the lead equivalent, but in the sites. In the landscape, it’s like the landscape respond to lead, so we have a rating system. They go hand in hand. But I’m excited to start leveraging that with our clients as well because it’s a great program and it starts very early on with programming and integration of teams and talking about what are the best ways that we can be sustainable through this whole process into construction as well as management. So overall, it’s been a great response and just excited about it.

Rick Clarke:

Yeah. I’ve noticed that that clients come to us when we have our kickoff meetings. They’re thinking about their program and how to satisfy their staff needs and their budget and the schedule. And then they hear Jessica talk and it’s like, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about the landscape.” So for them, it’s been like, “Oh, this is a whole added dimension that they aren’t thinking about initially, but because we like to do that in the early stages, they end up walking away with some new thoughts in their head about how the whole environment can help shape the building as well including landscape.” And they can’t get enough of Jessica so that they want more of her.

Nick Boever:

That’s really great to hear. So I guess it’s safe to say that this… Or actually, I guess I’ll still ask the question any ways. Has this surge in interest in sustainability really affected the types of projects that you work on or the amount of people coming to you with projects or have things stayed about the same?

Rick Clarke:

I think we’re still growing the practice and actually we’re poised to expand it now which is great. I think our clients that we’re working with just realized that we have that much more to offer, again, in a more integrated way which was actually our goal in starting that whole process. I can say we’ve never been busier, this is a really busy time. So perhaps that’s been part of the impact of the practice. But I think the message we’re putting together about integrated design and integrated practice, including landscape, is resonating with our clients on campuses across the country, we graft into something that’s existing and make it stronger.

Rick Clarke:

Landscape is a big part of that. Like at Grinnell College, also in Iowa you’re right in the middle of the prairie and they started to think about as a negative thing as, “Oh, we’re stuck out in the prairie.” But we started saying, “Oh that’s an amazing ecosystem here.” And we actually pulled that into the project. It was very successful because it helped us shape campus spaces that didn’t exist before. Actually, you should look it up on the website. It’s a beautiful project and very nicely crafted landscape spaces that provide places for students to gather and relax and both indoors and outdoors. So big part of the landscape, welcoming the prairie again.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah. I love that you say that because I get really excited about the perception of space and celebrating local context. So to hear you talk about the prairie and to change that mindset or let’s enhance that is really exciting because I love our projects that are our government sector with the National Park Service that those are amazing spaces that are doing just that.

Jessica Petro:

We’re preserving, conserving as well as drawing that mindset of what beauty is in a natural environment. So I always look to do that with our projects as much as I can, a power place.

Nick Boever:

I think that’s probably one of my favorite aspects when it comes to just looking at buildings, the buildings that really take that context of the environment that they’re in. I mean all aspects of the environment. Obviously, the natural environment plays a big role in it a lot of the times, but taking in the nature, the culture, the history, all of that. Oftentimes, the culture and the history play out through the landscape of the region itself. So that can also heavily factor into it.

Nick Boever:

I’m trying to think. I had the word, the retranslation of these spaces is always really good where you’re taking something that already exists like you said and you are just converting it into this built manmade environment as opposed to a natural environment.

Rick Clarke:

I have a really good example for that one. I think you’ll like this. It happens to be another government project. We’re working on the new embassy in Hanoi, which is establishing diplomatic relationships between United States and Vietnam for the first time since the war, which is fantastic. But one of our principles was to unite an urban site with the region. So we went to the site. We explored and we realized that an interesting ironic thing that our site 10 years ago was a rice paddy. But when you explore the landscape around it, it’s a big part of the mental makeup of the people that a lot of people from the urban centers leave the town to go work in harvesting rice in harvest season.

Rick Clarke:

So it becomes a big part of the culture as well. So we actually use the rice paddy motif to tear us up our landscaping to make a highly performative resilient environment. We couldn’t afford the building to ever be caught in a flood, and Hanoi floods all the time. So we actually use the regional impact of the rice paddies as a way to form our landscape in an urban center.

Rick Clarke:

So it was a really interesting transposition of something natural to the environment combined with other cultural aspects as well, such as the Karst limestone formation formations and how that becomes the base of the building and then rising up above a tree canopy. So very much tying into what’s there and also expanding the reach from a local region to a larger scale environment.

Nick Boever:

That’s really great that you brought up resiliency too because that was something that I personally had neglected to think of when coming up with all these different questions to ask you today. But it’s something that’s still very important within the talk about sustainability because I think now a lot of people are coming around to the idea that amidst all of the efforts for sustainability, there’s still a level of resiliency that we have to prepare for in our buildings, especially given the regions. Different regions have their own different things, but I think everybody is also coming to this conclusion that some of the more negative effects of climate change are unavoidable at this point.

Nick Boever:

So adding in that brand of resiliency is really impactful in a lot of ways. Since you bring it up in the context of the landscape, I think that also has a big role to play in the resiliency of a lot of these buildings.

Rick Clarke:

Yeah. It may start with the landscape. The landscape can provide a lot of solutions.

Nick Boever:

Now, before we wrap things up, I had a personal question for you guys that I’m very interested in and I’d like to hear from both of you on it, but when it comes to the landscape, we’ve all been talking about projects you’ve worked on and just the idea of this idyllic landscape surrounding the building where you get to walk in and experience everything on your way in. Can you think of a building where your enjoyment of being on site for that building was impacted by the landscaping surrounding it?

Jessica Petro:

Definitely. It’s funny, it took me a little bit of time to think about this and I actually really appreciate the question. I’m really thinking and thinking what would I say, what would I say. Now in general, being a landscape architect, it’s always the landscapes for me. So I have a million photos of every park I went to and just anything. So I’m really drawn into that. The nature to me is just so amazing. It doesn’t have a forced view. All aspects are unique so you can really draw into your own beauty of what you find beautiful in nature.

Jessica Petro:

So I was trying to think back and my answer that I really liked, it’s not one of our projects that I have to say it because it’s ones I love, it’s called the Clark Institute. It’s in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Nick Boever:

Oh, I’ve been meaning to actually go out there at some point because I’m out in the borough. I used to actually live out in that region. Oh God, now you just make me want to go all the more now.

Jessica Petro:

Now you have to go. And what I love about it is you enter in and you enter obviously to the front of the parking lot. Well, as I’m walking through the front parking lot, I’m like, “Wow, this is a really cool parking lot. Look at the sustainability measures that they do and that’s amazing.” So you already are starting to set the tone and then you’re received into the building. As you move through the building it’s just is so beautifully done and tied back to the land around it.

Jessica Petro:

So you experience that part of being in the building as well as obviously seeing the pieces that the museum has. But then also there’s an area where you can go out to the surrounding grounds and you walk through this path that still has grazing cattle. It was a cool immersive experience for me and I liked how there was different aspects of nature that they pulled in. It was just cited really well. So I think that’s one of my favorites, if I have to say a building that I’ve experienced on personal level.

Rick Clarke:

Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. You mentioned the word experience, which is really what it’s about. And in my early career I was a sculptor and the two examples I think of they’re actually not buildings, but the Cruller Muller museum in the Netherlands. And if you want to keep driving west, if you go to Storm King in New York, just a little bit past Williamstown there are outdoor sculpture parks and yet they’re shaped by the landscape. So your experience of the place, I will say not less so than the building is all about landscape. And your connection to landscape and how that allows you to see these sculpture installations, which sometimes are just landscape. It’s a beautiful feeling.

Rick Clarke:

On a smaller scale, I’ve always loved, it’s a quiet little experience, but Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth has an entry courtyard that takes your breath away because it’s framed by the architecture, it’s very quiet and you take a step into it and you step onto gravel. So you hear the sound of your feet on the gravel and then you’re in a very small grove of trees which alerts your senses that you’re coming into a new place.

Rick Clarke:

And then you pass through the threshold and through the glazing and you’re in a totally new environment. But the landscape is what sets you up for that change of experience. So I’ve always thought that was a wonderful example. Not flamboyant, but perfectly geared to the kind of experience you want to have in a museum.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. Those sound both really incredible. I was going to say one of my personal favorites has always been… I feel like it’s cheating a little bit because it’s a botanical garden. So landscaping kind of sits at the core of it. But there’s this botanical garden called Tower Hill out in Boylston, Massachusetts. But the thing that really strikes me about it is… It’s funny that you mentioned the gravel part of it because they do that same element where it’s kind of spread across all of these different areas.

Nick Boever:

So you have areas where there are dirt paths, gravel paths, even paths with stonework laid across it and it all correlates to different environments that you’re stepping into. And just from the moment you walk in, you have the very well sculpted approach where you have all of these different plants and trees being organized out front.

Nick Boever:

You have these gazebos made from a lot of the local materials. And then even just playing with the local landscape. It’s set upon this really interesting confluence of different biomes almost where you have wetlands area. It touches upon these rolling planes along a hill and then it even branches off into this coniferous forest at one point. And all throughout these different environments, the pathways are constantly changing. The type of plants that they have on display are constantly changing.

Nick Boever:

It is kind of this very interesting experience that even though it’s a very carefully curated experience, it still feels like it’s part of the natural environment in the way that it’s presented.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah. It sounds beautiful. It’s like understated, but using this common element that threads through, which is really nice.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. I personally like it a lot. I don’t get a chance to go out to many botanical gardens, but it is one that has stuck with me as being my most pleasant experience.

Rick Clarke:

I have to make a trip to Boylston.

Jessica Petro:

I was thinking the same. I haven’t been there and I want to go.

Nick Boever:

It’s a very nice area. I mean, I personally love the metro west area of Massachusetts just because it’s got that nice connect. It’s got that nice interplay between urban and natural environments that I’m always looking for.

Rick Clarke:

Great.

Nick Boever:

Part of the reason why I love the Berkshire so much, but that’s a story for another day. Before we go, one last question, and this is only if you guys are willing to share with this information, but I was also curious are there any new and exciting projects that you guys are currently working on that you’re willing to talk about?

Rick Clarke:

Well, we’re always working on something new. Probably the one I was most excited about was that Hanoi example I just gave you because I think it’s pretty compelling what we’re doing with the landscape. We’re also taking it into the interior, making an interior courtyard that inverts that and creates a quiet setting. Jessica, how about you?

Jessica Petro:

Sorry, I’m trying to think a little bit. I’m thinking one that we both worked on was Central State.

Rick Clarke:

Oh yeah.

Jessica Petro:

That’s a good one to talk about. And that was another collaboration with an established team and a landscape architect of record. But there is an opportunity for looking at an interior space of drawing the landscape in. So I was really excited about that opportunity, that collaboration and what that did for furthering the idea of blurring the interior and the exterior experience.

Rick Clarke:

Yeah. That’s a nice project. Central State, which is another behavioral health project. I think, Nicholas, we have a really special project in Houston called the Alief Community Center, which is… Actually, it very much is like the story you were just telling. It’s a building set in a park. So we are designing not only the building but the park itself as an integrated whole. And it’s all about serving that community. A place of resilience so that if Houston floods again, it becomes a place where the community can go. So the building is raised up through the landscape. The landscape actually lifts it.

Rick Clarke:

And it is designed actually to flood. So the flooding would happen in the play fields, in the soccer fields, but not in the building. But it’s a marvelous integration of recreation, nature and building. And it has the largest front porch in Texas. It has a frame canopy that looks out over the landscape and the community spaces. So that’s a really good one to take a look at.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. I’ll definitely have to… once we wrap things up here. But once again, I’d love to thank both of you for making the time and joining me on this call.

Rick Clarke:

Great to be here. Thank you, Nicholas. Appreciate it.

Jessica Petro:

Yeah, really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again, so thank you.