Human/Nature: Redesigning 19th-century Picturesque Landscapes

Led by Heidi Hohmann, Landscape Architecture

This studio will examine how we can transform picturesque landscapes, originally designed using romantic ideas about the human-nature relationship, to meet the needs of 21st-century people and cities. We will redesign two well-loved 19th-century historic park landscapes, working at two scales in two different Iowa communities. Our first, warm-up project will be 7-acre Lake LaVerne on the Iowa State campus. Designed by Prairie School landscape architect O.C. Simonds in the 1910s, this water body is a beloved campus icon. However, it was naively designed and now suffers from siltation, nutrient loading, and excessive, odiferous algal growth. As plans to dredge it unfold, our studio will ask, how might this site be differently envisioned for the students and campus of the future?

Our second, larger project will examine 100-acre Bever Park in Cedar Rapids for the Bever Park Neighborhood Association (BPNA). This 19th-century park was once located on the edge of town; served by an interurban rail line, it featured a zoo, gazebos, early tennis courts, and a rock garden and in 1924 became the site of the city’s 8-million-gallon, underground water reservoir. Today, surrounded by residential neighborhoods and badly impacted by the 2020 derecho, the park’s steep topography and oak savanna ecology is plagued with eroding trails and invasive vegetation; its quaint historic features have been replaced by utilitarian structures, a swimming pool, and parking lots. Though well-used, the park has the potential to play a much larger and dynamic role in its community. The BPNA hopes our studio can develop alternative futures for the park that not only address its significant ecological issues but also meet the city’s changing needs.

These projects will both critically examine park design history and question the role of history in design process. In the 21st century, are the romantic notions of nature inherent in the picturesque landscape still valid? Although no site is ever a blank slate, how much should the history of a past design or work of past designer play in a landscape’s future? If a landscape design no longer functions as originally intended, are cultural, ecological, material, and social rationales required to support its retention or erasure? Or is redesign simply a part of the ongoing evolution of built landscapes as posited in theories of emergence in landscape design?

Studio work will include field trips (to project sites and other places), readings, and discussion in historic landscape preservation, management, and theory. Students will also conduct case studies of large parks and urban analysis. Design products will potentially include educational graphics/boards, overall park planning strategies, and detail designs for individual spaces within the larger proposed designs.

Course objectives:

• To design landscapes based on thorough site analysis that address social, political, economic, and especially historical and ecological contexts.
• To understand the ecological, programmatic, social, and physical imperatives of large-scale park design using both historic and contemporary precedents as models.
• To understand how professional standards of historic landscape preservation can be applied in large park redesign.
• To interrelate scales of planning and development.