In the old-but-still-good department, check out Nature, Landscape, and Building Sustainability, a collection of articles first published in the Harvard Design Magazine between 1998 and 2004. The roster here includes big names like Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben, but I liked Kristina Hill’s 2003 take on a Seattle project to redesign streets to work better ecologically, specifically in processing stormwater rather than just funneling it and its pollution out into the streams as fast as possible.

Seattle Public Utilities picked up on an idea from a University of Washington landscape architecture studio and incorporated it into a Hope VI design where the street right-of-way included an eleven-foot-wide planting strip. They designed a way (pretty much invisible to casual observers) to maximize block-by-block detention and filtering capacity.

Good, yes? But there’s better. “The High Point project team took the unusual approach of . . . then modeling detention performance in a hypothetical predevelopment landscape” to see how their creation was doing by comparison.

“This simulation work represents an important step in ecological design – use use of ‘best available engineering’ to turn the hypotheses of good designers into good experiments as site construction is completed and monitoring results start to come in. To improve our ability to address ecological functions and not just make cities look greener, we need to figure out how to simulate the performance of these designs and then test those simulations using monitoring data. Without clear performance expectations, explicitly modeled conditions, and actual performance data, it is going to be hard to work within the narrow range of risk most clients can accept and still learn to do this kind of design work better.” {154, emphasis added}

Hill directs the Program in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, coedited Ecology and Design: A Framework for Learning and is supposed to have a new book out this year entitled Water, Ecology and the Design of Cities: Landscape Urbanism in the Pacific Northwest.