The Lay of the Landscape

An Interview with Leonard J. Hopper, FASLA

by G. Martin Moeller, Jr.

Blueprints Winter & Spring 2008/2009
Volume XXVII, No. 1-2

Len Hopper is a landscape architect and currently a senior associate with Mark K. Morrison Associates LTD in New York City. He also teaches at The City College of New York and at Columbia University. Hopper is an active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, having served as its national president for 2000–01 and as president of the Landscape Architecture Foundation for 2005–06. Illustrations accompanying this article relate to the Sustainable Sites Initiative of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Martin Moeller: How is the green movement changing the practice of landscape architecture?

Len Hopper: For landscape architects, sustainability arguably arose as an issue over 100 years ago, though of course they would not have used that term then. There are so many people now saying their practices are green—architects, engineers, everybody’s green now. But it’s not a competition—we all have to realize that we all have roles to play in being sustainable. As landscape architects, we look at ourselves as people who have been practicing this way for quite some time. It’s an ethic, something we believe in, and something that our training prepares us for.

What I find to be interesting is that now, rather than always having to convince a client, a public group, or another design professional that sustainability is something you need to think about, there’s more of an expectation that these are things you have to do. We are really over the hump of arguing that natural systems are things that need to play a part in any of these projects. So in some ways it has made the argument much easier and raised the expectations that we have to meet.

People are educated enough now that green design can’t be just a token gesture. They have a better understanding of what green means. The various standards or guidelines not only give the designer something to work toward, but also give clients some reasonable expectations as to what they’re getting.

Moeller: Speaking of guidelines, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has launched a Sustainable Sites Initiative in cooperation with other organizations. What is the purpose of this initiative?

Hopper: When you hear people speak about sustainability, usually you’re hearing about fairly general concepts and approaches. Many of the standards or concepts that are applied to sustainability are very quantitative—they say you should have X number of bicycle racks, or X amount of glazing—but they don’t talk about the qualitative nature of what you’re trying to create. Well, you can talk all you want about walkablecommunities, to cite one example, but unless you create a community where walking is pleasant and safe, nobody is going to walk.

The Sustainable Sites Initiative [SITES] was founded in 2005. One of the things that led to this was the success of the LEED effort of the U.S. Green Building Council and the positive response to it by municipalities, developers, builders, architects, and engineers. The problem was that only a very small component of the LEED certification process dealt with open space or sites. So there were really no guidelines or measures that you could apply to a site much like you could apply to a building.

SITES is trying to do two things: first, to complement and augment what the LEED guidelines had already established, and second, to encourage the development of sustainable sites even when there is no building involved. Those two things were really the driving forces behind getting a group together to develop the guidelines, and by the way, the Green Building Council was part of that group. [A preliminary version of the SITES guidelines is available online through the ASLA website.]

Moeller: Were you directly involved in the initiative?

Hopper: I had the great experience of serving on one of the technical subcommittees—it happened to be the Subcommittee on Human Health and Well-Being, which is interesting in itself because that’s an aspect of sustainability that is often overlooked. Green design offers not only an environmental improvement, but it also improves people’s health. Many mental and physical ailments can be eased by design strategies that are primarily geared toward the environment. It’s a win-win scenario.

Our two main goals on our subcommittee were to apply existing research to the standards, and then to establish standards that would stimulate new research so you’d have a real basis for the proposed guidelines. We shied away from setting aesthetic standards or design standards, because those can be so subjective. The qualitative part comes from what your objectives are—your expected outcomes—and you have to reach a certain positive level of design in order to achieve those objectives.

Moeller: Can you cite examples of specific projects that reflect the goals of the Sustainable Sites Initiative?

Hopper: It’s hard to find one project that deals with them all—some emphasize certain aspects more than others—but I think if we looked at perhaps two fundamental things that are common areas of focus, they would be storm water management and the thoughtful use of vegetation, soil, and materials.

This gets back to the qualitative aspect. Landscape architects often take a very practical element and make it into something that’s sculptural and aesthetically pleasing—something that looks like it is doing something other than what it actually is. Sometimes we say that the work of landscape architects is often at its best when it is unnoticed, and certainly there are times when that’s appropriate—you know, people look at, say, Central Park, and they don’t realize that someone designed it, since it looks so natural. Then there are other times when design interventions are quite bold and it’s very obvious what the man-made elements are. But what’s a little more subtle is that projects often function on different levels. In some landscapes, for example, you see these sculptural pieces and you think, wow, what a great design, but they’re actually there to harvest rainwater. There are very functional things that a landscape architect is able to take and turn into an aesthetic amenity for a community, and that’s the part I don’t think many people initially see.

Moeller: Many people associate the profession of landscape architecture with projects of modest scale—yards for private houses or common areas in corporate developments, for instance. Landscape architects also, however, often contribute to large-scale, communitywide design and planning projects. Is that becoming more common?

Hopper: I do see landscape architects increasingly working in larger planning roles. In fact, the line between a planner and a landscape architect is sometimes blurred. Although the disciplines are different, I think you’re seeing landscape architects being brought in much earlier in planning processes, if not right at the beginning. There are also some large firms that exemplify a multi-disciplinary approach within their own firm, including both planners and landscape architects, as well as other disciplines working together from the earliest stages of the project’s inception.

Moeller: You were previously the chief landscape architect for the New York City Housing Authority, which was recognized by the Landscape Architecture Foundation for outstanding leadership in urban design and planning. What did you and the agency do to earn that recognition

Hopper: In New York, there are 350 or so different housing developments. The big challenge is how to give each development a unique sense of identity and place. There are a lot of fairly tall buildings—10, 12, 14 stories—but I always maintained that you can foster a sense of community through careful design of the ground plane. A high-rise is supposedly anti-street life, but you can bring people out and encourage them to think of the site as an extension of their homes.

One of the things we were able to do was reduce crime significantly. When I started in the late 1970s at the Housing Authority, it was right after a time of economic decline, and there was no money for public housing, infrastructure, or maintenance. Since they were unable to maintain the planting areas, much of the open space was paved with asphalt for ease of maintenance. The open areas in housing developments were desolate, gray, and bleak, allowing people from the street to come in and take over. Residents felt trapped in their houses. We had allowed these areas to become urban battlefields where outsiders had the advantage. So very early on I said, “Let’s change the battlefield, and
let’s give ourselves the advantage and put the intruders on the defensive.”

The idea of “defensible space” was really popular at that time, but that really just consisted of building very tall fences, which put up a barrier and isolated the housing development from the community at large. If you went through the fences, there was really nobody “defending” the space on the other side. What we tried to do was keep our housing developments extremely open, creating spaces for residents’ activities and amenities that they requested, and in doing that, we created areas that they felt not only very comfortable using, but also taking care of them and assuming proprietary ownership over them. As part of that effort, we were able to create large green areas that replaced the “sea of asphalt” with carpets of green turf and flowering shrubs and increase the tree canopy. That positive presence created such an inherent sense of security that it reduced crime significantly on the housing development sites and, in fact, in the areas immediately surrounding them.

Moeller: What kinds of projects are you working on now?

Hopper: The firm where I am now practices across a broad spectrum of the landscape architecture profession including a good deal of municipal work. We are working with a couple of different housing authorities, as well as with New York City Parks and Recreation in designing some of their play environments and recreation facilities. These projects involve some of the same safety, environmental, and social issues as in public housing. More specifically, in terms of sustainability, we are working with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC program [a long-term plan for “a greener, greater New York”]. We are helping to identify tree-planting locations on housing authority sites, through the sponsorship of the New York Restoration Project, which is Bette Midler’s group. We are also part of the mayor’s Schoolyards to Playgrounds program, taking barren spaces that are covered in asphalt and surrounded by chain link fence and redesigning them so they really become community assets. We are actually working with kids to redesign their own schoolyards with the goal of having a community playground within a tenminute walk of all residents.

In all our projects, we are talking more and more about the connections between design and human wellbeing, so whether we are looking at creating walkable communities or providing pleasant outdoor spaces, we are also looking at how we can leverage the design for the maximum possible benefit—socially, economically, and environmentally. •

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