Grant Jones / Jones & Jones: ILARIS: The Puget Sound Plan

128 Pages·2007·9.897 MB·English

by  Jane Amidon

G rant Jones /
Jones & Jones
Source Books in
ILARIS:
Landscape Architecture
4
The Puget Sound Plan
Jane Amidon, Series Editor
Source BookS in Architecture:
Morphosis/Diamond Ranch High School
The Light Construction Reader
Bernard Tschumi/Zénith de Rouen
UN Studio/Erasmus Bridge
Steven Holl/Simmons Hall
Mack Scogin Merrill Elam/Knowlton Hall
Zaha Hadid/BMW Central Building
Source BookS in LAndScApe Architecture:
Michael Van Valkenburgh/Allegheny Riverfront Park
Ken Smith Landscape Architect/Urban Projects
Peter Walker and Partners/Nasher Sculpture Center Garden
Grant Jones/Jones & Jones/ILARIS: The Puget Sound Plan
Published by Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy
Princeton Architectural Press Ball, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Penny (Yuen Pik)
37 East Seventh Street Chu, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Clare Jacobson,
New York, New York 10003 John King, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Katharine
Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Scott Tennent, Jennifer
For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657. Thompson, and Joseph Weston of Princeton Architectural
Visit our website at www.papress.com. Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
© 2007 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Printed and bound in China Grant Jones/Jones & Jones : ILARIS : the Puget Sound
10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 First edition plan. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Source books in landscape architecture ; 4)
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any Includes bibliographical references.
manner without written permission from the publisher, ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-604-3 (alk. paper)
except in the context of reviews. ISBN-10: 1-56898-604-1 (alk. paper)
1. Landscape—Computer simulation. 2. ILARIS.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify 3. Landscape protection—Washington (State)—Puget
owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected Sound Region. 4. Jones, Grant R.—Interviews. 5.
in subsequent editions. Landscape architects—United States—Interviews. 6. Jones
& Jones.
Editing: Nicola Bednarek QH75.G685 2007
Typesetting/Layout: Paul Wagner 712.09164’32—dc22
2006037146
Contents
Acknowledgments
4
Foreword, Bill Miller 7
Data and Chronology
10
Conversations with Grant Jones
13
3 Influences 13
3 A Context and a Catalyst 55
3 Building a Model 59
3 Puget Sound 69
3 Relevance and Critique 85
Gallery
95
Asking the Animals for Advice, Frederick Steiner 121
Credits
126
Bibliography
126
Biographies
128
Acknowledgments
With the publication of the fourth Source Book in Landscape Architecture, we enter new territory. While previous books
have examined very tangible designed landscapes, this time it is a digital mapping tool, an electronic architecture for the
evaluation and prioritization of signature landscapes, that we investigate. Perhaps because the digitization of geographic
information is often associated with alienation from the real experience of place, it is particularly important that Jones &
Jones—respected since the 1970s for its planning and design work as well as innovations in aesthetic resource analysis—
took on the challenge of translating analog categorization methods into current arcGIS technology.
As the fourth Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor, Grant Jones deserves many accolades for philosophical bravery:
not once in his discussions with students did he relinquish his belief that passion and science, poetry and ecology,
geographic information systems and the ancient arts of geomancy are not fully compatible. I am grateful to Grant and to
his partner Chong Hee for their willingness to eloquently explain the logic and emotion behind their work.
The value of this book is greatly increased by the informed foreword written by Bill Miller of ESRI and the participation
of Fritz Steiner, whose essay reveals a broad knowledge of the practice and theory of environmental design. Much
appreciation is due to the partners and staff of Jones & Jones. Interviews and discussions with founding partner Ilze Jones
and with the newest partner, ILARIS guru Chris Overdorf, provided essential perspectives. The help of Mark Ellis Walker,
Julie Briselden, and others at Jones & Jones was much appreciated.
Many thanks to the students who participated in the seminar: Seth Baker, Jake Boswell, Jason Brabbs, Charles
Cartwright, Lisa Cutshaw, Brett Davis, Nick Kuhn, Andrew Smith, Jennifer Vanni, and Anne Warjone. Special thanks to
Jason for videography, Charles for IT help, and Anne for her outreach efforts.
I’m thankful for the advice offered by colleagues and for the logistical help of Knowlton School of Architecture staff
members. In particular, the encouragement of Robert Livesey is essential to the Source Books program. Finally, the editorial
guidance of Nicola Bednarek and Kevin Lippert at Princeton Architectural Press is very much appreciated.
4
Source Books in
Landscape Architecture
Source Books in Landscape Architecture provide concise investigations into contemporary designed landscapes
by looking behind the curtain and beyond the script to trace intentionality and results. One goal is to offer
unvarnished stories of place-making. A second goal is to catch emerging and established designers as facets of
their process mature from tentative trial into definitive technique.
Each Source Book presents one project or group of related works that are significant to the practice and study
of landscape architecture today. It is our hope that readers gain a sense of the project from start to finish,
including crucial early concepts that persist into built form as well as the ideas and methods that are shed along
the way. Design process, site dynamics, materials research, and team roles are explored in dialogue format and
documented in photographs, drawings, diagrams, and models. Each Source Book is introduced with a project data
and chronology section and concludes with an essay by an invited critic.
This series was conceived by Robert Livesey at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture and parallels the
Source Books in Architecture. Each monograph is a synthesis of a single Glimcher Distinguished Visiting
Professorship. Structured as a series of discussion-based seminars to promote critical inquiry into contemporary
designed landscapes, the Glimcher professorships give students direct, sustained access to leading voices in
practice. Students who participate in the seminars play an instrumental role in contributing to discussions,
transcribing recorded material, and editing content for the Source Books. The seminars and Source Books are
made possible by a fund established by DeeDee and Herb Glimcher.
5

Foreword
Bill Miller
It is hard to think of Grant Jones, known to most of us as the poet laureate of landscape architecture, as a systems
architect—someone interested in environmental models and the use of expert systems to assess the aesthetic
qualities of landscape. But such is the case.
In 1965, the year of my graduation, Grant was studying at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard
University. As an inquisitive young landscape architect he decided to enroll in an off-beat class on structural
linguistics, which inspired him to examine the hypothesis that the landscape could be broken down into a
minimum set of distinct forms. He later developed a Fortran routine to determine and assess the various aspects of
these components as they form or constitute the visual nature of landscape. Grant’s continued exploration of this
hypothesis, coupled with his talents as both poet and systems thinker, would lead him through his career as a
noted master in the art and science of landscape architecture.
In 1972, after forming the firm of Jones & Jones with his partner Ilze Jones, he began his pioneering work on
the Nooksack River Plan, where he used the visual landscape as the framework to guide open space planning
decisions along the entire Nooksack River corridor in northwest Washington. Following projects included a
systematic inventory and evaluation of landscape forms in the Upper Susitna River system and a Scenic Highway
Plan for Washington State. Jones & Jones later developed, together with Roy Mann & Associates, a comprehensive
catalog of aesthetic landscape resources for the entire United States coastal zone. This work, which was considered
at the time to be a benchmark study in landscape aesthetics, assisted states in meeting the requirements involving
the consideration of aesthetic resources as specified in the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972.
Jones described his approach to understanding the nature of landscape in two seminal articles he authored for
Landscape Architecture magazine, “Landscape Assessment...Where Logic and Feelings Meet” and “Cycles of
Seeing.” In 1979 he detailed his methodology for assessing the intrinsic character of landscape in “Design as
7
Ecogram.” Together, these articles served to position Grant as one of the world’s leading experts in landscape
aesthetics.
Between 1980 and 2000 he and his associates at Jones & Jones worked on a series of landmark projects,
including the development of the “National Field Guide: Aesthetics and Visual Resource Assessment for
Highways”; a detailed study of the aesthetic visual resources of the Columbia River Gorge (between Washington
and Oregon), which lead to the establishment of the gorge as a National Scenic Area; and a study for the United
Nations to document and assess the landscape features in the Northern Kyunggi Province along the demilitarized
zone in Korea.
Due to the firm’s wide experience in the field, Jones & Jones was approached by the Trust for Public Land (TPL)
in September 2002 to develop a series of landscape assessment strategies, based on the visual character of the
landscape, to help protect the Puget Sound. Chris Overdorf, one of Grant’s associates (now a partner with Jones &
Jones), reviewed Grant’s early Fortran program in order to determine if the firm’s geographic information system
(GIS) could perform a similar type of analysis. He identified ModelBuilder, a component of the Environmental
Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) ArcGIS system, as a likely candidate. As I had been one of the original
developers of ModelBuilder, Overdorf asked me to lead a workshop at Jones & Jones on geographic modeling and
how to use a mapping and decision (MAD) diagram as a prelude to constructing a ModelBuilder model. Attending
this workshop, Grant was immensely pleased to discover a tool he could readily use to construct virtually any type
of environmental (landscape) model.
Ironically, my wife, Naicong Li, a linguist and specialist in the development of expert systems, had just
developed an interest in GIS and had been working with ArcGIS on a village master plan for the City of Bainbridge
Island. Grant asked her to assist in the development of a comprehensive model for assessing the intrinsic aesthetic
8
characteristics of the landscape in the near-shore areas in the Puget Sound. Grant, Overdorf, Li, and Simmonds
(also with Jones & Jones) worked together for four months on the development of this model, which in time came
to be called ILARIS, for Intrinsic Landscape Aesthetic Resource Information System. Grant’s early training in
linguistics and Li’s interest in landscape architecture provided the perfect overlap for this assignment. Li had the
expertise to translate Grant’s knowledge in landscape aesthetics into a clearly definable system, and she, Overdorf,
and Simmonds worked together to develop the actual ILARIS model, which at the time was one of the largest
ModelBuilder models of its type.
Throughout the course of its development ILARIS has undergone a number of revisions as well as extensive
testing and debugging. It has also been exposed to four peer reviews, including reviews by the University of Texas
at Austin, Ohio State University, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and the University of
Minnesota, and it was featured in 2004 at the ASLA National Convention in Salt Lake City and more recently as a
centerpiece article in the Winter 2005/2006 issue of ArcNews, ESRI’s quarterly news magazine.
ILARIS recently won the Research and Communications Merit Award from the Washington Chapter of
Landscape Architects (WASLA) and the prestigious National ASLA Professional Award of Honor for Research,
conferred by the American Society of Landscape Architects. The software represents the perfect integration of art
and science and serves to demonstrate what can be done when we simultaneously invoke our powers as both poet
and systems thinker.
Bill Miller
Director, GeoDesign Group
Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)
9
Data & Chronology
iLAriS: the puget
Sound pLAn Puget Sound Intrinsic
Landscape Formations:
Client: Puget Sound accretion islands, barrier
beaches, bay barriers, creek
dAtA: delta barriers, double bay MAy 2001 MArch 2003
The estuary of Puget Sound is barriers, pocket barriers, point Grant Jones presents ideas for Jones and Overdorf begin
second in size only to the barriers, marsh barriers, drift saving Puget Sound to a group of developing methodology
Chesapeake Bay Estuary and barriers, rollback barriers, Seattle business leaders and framework for ModelBuilder.
is larger than all other national delta berms, rollback berms, activists that includes Trust for
estuaries such as San Francisco hooks, closed points, creek Public Land (TPL) board FeBruAry 2004
Bay, Boston Harbor, Albemarle delta points, dual points, flat members. Chris Overdorf and Dr. Naicong
Sound, Delaware Bay, or points, open points, open Li establish a methodology and
Tampa Bay. points with spits, breached SepteMBer 2002 diagramming (MAD) process to
points, rounded points, point- TPL engages Jones & Jones to develop the logic processes and
Mountain ranges within spits, creek delta rollbacks, develop strategies to protect Puget functions for a ModelBuilder-
watershed: 4 pocket rollbacks, hooked spits, Sound that are based on the visual based intrinsic landscape
U.S. rivers within dual spits, bay barrier spits, character of the region. analysis system.
watershed: 30 opposed spits, converging
Total tributary waters: 900 spits, delta spits, dual hooked FeBruAry 2003 ApriL 2004
million gallons/day (3.4 trillion spits, points with spits, Chris Overdorf reviews existing Overdorf and Li begin
liters/day); 80% from the tombolos, tombolo spits, dual Fortran subroutine and development and programming
Fraser River beach pocket tombolos, determines ESRI’s ModelBuilder of the ModelBuilder model now
Shoreline within the U.S.: pocket tombolos, point is the ideal platform to develop called ILARIS (Intrinsic
2,500 miles (3,700 kilometers) tombolos, sea bluffs, lagoons, an updated visual landscape Landscape Aesthetic Resource
Maximum depth: 900 feet caves, rock cliffs, emergent classification routine called Information System), which is
Human population: 4,093,500 rocks, islands, rock platforms, “GLISten”—the Greenprint reviewed by Bill Miller from
Fish species: 220 tidal flats, mud flats, fjords, Landscape Information System. ESRI.
Marine mammal species: 26 sand dunes, glaciers, cascades,
Sea bird species: 100 waterfalls, marshes, swamps,
U.S. counties in watershed: 12 viewsheds, Cascade ridgelines,
U.S. cities in watershed: 25 Olympic Ridgelines, bends,
U.S. tribal governments: 21 harbors, passages, sounds,
Watershed regions: 7 coves, bays, bays of islands,
Subregions: 33 bights, sloughs and
Basins: 100 backwaters, eelgrass beds, kelp
Sub-basins: 175 beds, pastures, prairies,
Reach watersheds: 641 madrona stands, oak
Tessellations: 17,387 savannas, viewing points, seal
Habitats: 8 haulouts, audobon sites, orca
Habitat loss: intertidal 58% grounds, historic sites, ancient
10 Salish tribal village sites