The Need for Landscape Professionals - Part 1

This trip has been a great experience, it has been interesting as I spend more time at various plazas. I see landscape elements I would do differently, as well as, I have seen many great ideas.

The one thing that stands out about all of the designed landscapes I have seen so far, is the lack of professionally educated landscape designers and designs. Chile is just now starting to offer degrees in landscape architecture and horticulture at very few and select colleges and universities.

This lack of understanding of basic design principles and/or basic horticulture practices is sad to see because in this area of Chile the land is very fertile and green and can grow just about anything with little or no skill. There is an abundance of beautiful trees and plants. I see many attempts to create a beautiful concept, but overall the final effect was not completely achieved due to a lack of basic landscape knowledge and skill. For example:

Four different kinds of plants were installed in a very small area with little thought about how they will appear when they are fully grown. Is the space large enough to accommodate each plant and its needs for space, water, and sun?

In addition, these same four plant species were never used again in the rest of the plaza. Repetition of plant material is a basic design principle that was ignored.

Here is another example:

Notice the Palm tree in the foreground. It does not work here, in fact, it distracts from the beauty and design of the other trees. Because there is only one tree of its kind here it does not belong. It appears that it was an extra tree that someone just decided to plant in that spot.

Yet another problem with this Palm tree:

It was obviously planted after the other trees had matured and is directly under the canopy of a larger tree. No planning regarding the future growth of the palm was considered. The palm tree has room to grow right now, but in five years it will become a problem. It will collide with the canopy of the other tree.

I see this same pattern of design problems over and over again. I see a house with a small yard space and a big old oak tree growing that completely hides the house and ten different kinds of plants all competing for the same area.

Note: I want to clarify that if you take a short drive through any neighborhood in Utah, you will see the same problems. In the US, professional landscapers will try to address these issues. I am in no way trying to put down Chile. As I have stated earlier, there are no landscape professionals here. I have seen many beautiful buildings and other structures that obviously had a professional Architect involved in the design and planning, but Building Architects and Landscape Architects are not the same thing.

The need of Landscape Professionals Part 2

The thing that has always had me so interested in design is the problems solving aspect of it. You are given certain criteria for a space for example this area needs to accessible for the public , it needs to have places for events, it needs to be able be maintained with this amount of money and have these amenities. You then take all this information and have to come up with a design that can satisfy as much of these different criteria as possible. The ability to do this and come up with new way of satisfying these need all in a ascetically pleasing way gets me excited and remind me that I picked the right career.

I watch the gardeners taking care of the plazas and i see all of the issues that they have to deal with and think no wonder they can't keep up with it and thats why there always are maintenance problems. So many of these issues could be solved with some simple redesign. now don't get me wrong if they threw more money at these spaces they could fix it, but isn't that always the issue with public spaces are that they are under funded since it falls upon the government to pay for it.

Can you imagine trying to water a whole park with a hose. luckily here he get help with some rain but still as you can see there are still a lot of dry spots. the bigger problem is that if he has to spend all of the time watering the grass when will he have time to do all of the other stuff like weed, maintain the play equipment. This problem could be fixed by adding a sprinkler system. The issue here is not money because there is the money, the problem is that no one knows how to design one. water pressure, evaporation rates, soil types, hydro physics and grass requirements which you need to know to do a efficient irrigation system at this scale are not know. Thats the point, if you have people knowledge you can overcome most money constraints. As Chile develops careers in the Landscape Industry these problems will start to be solved.

The Hill

There is a hill that rises above equator park. I think it used to be some kind of defense for the spanish and then the Chileans fighting the spanish. It has since become a natural park where you can hike, picnic, and get a pretty good view of the city. It fits good with the equator Park below because the hill has more of the natural side where as the equator park is more of a structured park with play equipment, tennis courts, grass areas and such. I liked the original design of the hill even though it seemed fairly run down. I find that this is a common problem with much of the parks here in chile where they have built something great but never thought of the upkeep of it. The other big problem I saw with the park was the plant selection. most of it is natural plantings but you can see near the trail they have added plants and they don't work on a couple of levels. They don't fit the style, they need more maintenance then they are getting, and even placement many times is not right for that plant. I did really love though the ramparts and the cobblestone street. It kind of took you to a different time in history and made you want to go and explore the whole hill looking for other old relics of the past. There were some great views of the city and for being a five min. walk from my apartment in downtown Concepcion I was able to feel like i was out in the country and not in a urban setting

This is the view from close to the top of the hill. You can see most of Concepcion, with San Pedro in the back ground.

This is how most of the hill is with just a natural pine forest that all this area was before Concepcion was developed.

There are ramparts all along the hill that you can take trails to. They are pretty cool and most of them have a pretty good view over the park below. The only problem is there really has not been much upkeep. nothing ruins a pretty space like graffiti.

You can kind of see the cobblestone street. I love the texture that come with a cobble stone street. I would suggest paving all street in it because it make quite a bumpy ride but it definitely fit this space.

The tennis court is actually a private club so thats why its so nicely up kept. I love the color of the clay court.

These two pictures are examples of what I was talking about before where they went wrong in integrating the natural with their design and a lack of upkeep. There is so much potential here just needs a better choice of plant material and also some maintenance and fix up.

Plaza de Tome

I have been to Tome a couple of times so it's about time that I write post about it. Tome is a smaller town on the coast north of Concepcion. It is a interesting town, in that it used to be built around a Textile mill that was built there, but it is shut down. A good part of the town died with it. But in the last 5 to 10 years it has come back to life as somewhat of tourist town due to the fact that its right on the coast and that it has some beaches that people like to come and visit. The plaza embodies this change in the town. The plaza was built when the city was formed and it's history is tied very much to the history of the town, but It was expanded a while ago. The older part very much has the colonial typical look that many of the other plazas that I have looked at have. There is a classical looking fountain with some old Araucana trees.

On the new expanded side there is another fountain that is has very modern design to it. There are many younger trees. The problem I see with both the town and the plaza is that there is not any connective elements or even any kind of transition from one design to the other. It's more like a fight between of the older part to maintain the history and the new part to be come hip and relevant for the tourist. You see this fight for dominance in the plaza. The two fountains are on either side of the plazas and instead of leading you from one to the other, it is more like a competition for attention.

It was interesting, I was talking to this man that is working with the city trying to restore some of the historic parts of the town that he thinks is being destroyed in the new developments I could see many of his points but he told me that the city was going to redo the plaza and he showed me the preposed plan. He then told me that they had successfully talked the city into keeping the plaza as it is. I didn't tell him at the time, because he felt pretty passionately about it, but I liked the new design a lot better then what is there right now. I felt like it retained a lot of the older elements but did a lot better job at combining the new style and the connectivity of the whole plaza.

This is the proposed plaza:

The idea was to move the older fountain to the middle of the plaza to make it the focal point with all the paths crossing so that they all lead to the fountain. The idea was to also add a stage with a bathroom underneath. They also wanted to open up the one side and take out much of the grass and trees so that they could use the space for exhibits and activities. I don't agree with all of the ideas but I like it better then how it is right now.

This is kind of how the plaza is right now: