Exploring Concepts of Landscape Architecture: OKLAHOMA: Ruby Grant Park

wanderings

I was born in Oakland California. I grew up in North Central Washington, in the eastern foothills of the Cascades and on the Columbia River. I graduated from a school of 250 students K-12. I didn't attend college until after I was 30, so I brought to school my experience: garden designer, carpenter, concrete worker, florist, greenhouse manager, perennial expert, shrub and tree salesman, bus driver, truck driver, apartment manager and maintenance man. Frequently I worked 3+ jobs a day during my go-get-'em-like-your-killin' -snakes years. So I was well prepared for the vigor's of the University and the initiation rituals of the Architecture department. I graduated from the College of Architecture with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design and a minor in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environment. College has allowed me to bundle my many paths into a single and wide corridor. I started my Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 2006.

bearings

Knowing where I've been is the easy part. Knowing where I come from and where I am going is the challenge. I moved into a little rent house out in the country about 15 miles south of Norman Oklahoma. During my first winter in Oklahoma, I dabbled in some genealogy. I found two great-grandfathers and their families buried within a few miles of my new home. It was not just serendipity that my internal way-finder connected and centered me in the place of my forefathers. I have a deep connection with this place.

compass

The spirit of place. Present and past human connections influence our lives. Community, family and place are part of our soul. Regional identity is both cultural and physical. The spirit of place is what nourishes our beginings and tethers our world view. It is also that soul and bond that embraces our community. Technology has allowed us to disregard the environmental aspects of place. The media wants us to believe we are a global society and that our world is getting smaller. Our world gets smaller when we exchange our spirit of place for anothers. The spirit of place must be unearthed again to regain the comfort of belonging.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Ruby Grant Park

Tonight was a great night. I won a Merit Award from the Oklahoma Chapter of ASLA for my Ruby Grant project. Here was my presentation:

Cross Park is a nature park for the soul and an activities park for the body.

The project encourages active play and regional awareness through a matrix of integrated syste

Cross Park provides the activity space for the community while embracing the vital environmental corridors of the site. It layers the needs of the community, the arts and the environment by celebrating the history and identity unique to its place.

Cross Park/ Ruby Grant Park is located on the Northern edge of Norman.

Cross Park is a nature park for the soul and an activities park for the body.

The project encourages active play and regional awareness through a matrix of integrated systems.

In designing Cross Park I used the dynamics of the environment to engage, direct and mold the geometries of the two major systems

These two major systems are the guiding matrix of the project.

The natural dynamics identified here as

Hydrology

Bottomland forest

Upland prairie

Riparian corridor

Old farm fields

dictate the geometries and layout of the design. They are the guiding framework and structure.

The activity circuits guide the flows of the design

James Corner wrote, “…the meaning of landscaft comprises a deep and intimate mode of relationship not only among buildings and fields but also among patterns of occupation, activity, and space, each often bound into calendrical time.” Activity and human occupation ebb and flow with the time, the day and the season, and the natural dynamics of the site are the foundation of the human experience. Cross Park is not covered in a seductive veil of contrived beauty. It is an expression of spiritual beauty of the raw and regional dynamics of the native cross timber, prairie/forest edge systems. Cross Park is not an idealized picture of the past. It is an engagement in the present. The occupation and activity of Cross Park is the life of the park. The natural dynamics of the park are the spirit.

Environmental impacts and education are at the core of the design. The design establishes a sustainable and healthy framework for present and future water flows. The design preserves healthy plant communities, and uses these communities as the structure of the habitat and educational zones. By protecting and improving the environmental corridors the negative impacts of intense use are reduced.

The design encourages the reintroduction of managed fire to enhance the quality of prairie habitat adapted to fire. The habitat communities including the “farm forest” of the agriculture zones provide specific habitat to local wildlife and environmental education. The environmental solutions proposed in Cross Park teach and raise awareness through demonstration. This awareness is improved by identifying historical agriculture land, and maximizing human use with active play zones of park lawn and trees.