Abstract
During the 1920s, the Olmsted Brothers had a vision for Los Angeles; to construct a series of interconnected parkways that would serve as multimodal transportation routes providing green space for recreation, wildlife habitat, and stormwater management. Following a watershed approach as a framework, the parkway was strategically positioned to protect water resources, establish public parks, and install flood management infrastructure. The comprehensive plan focused on the physical and social connections within the Los Angeles watersheds to revitalize neighborhoods and rehabilitated the Los Angeles River and its tributaries. For a number of reasons, their proposed park corridor, known as the Hollywood-Palos Verdes Parkway, was never constructed. However, the forethought of the Olmsted Brothers’ design approach and the subsequent floods that devastated Los Angeles in 1938 offers a rich opportunity to backtest how their original parkway design could have performed during large storm events. Digital applications, such as HGIS, AutoCad, and SketchUp provide methods to simulate, test, and interpret how natural systems might have interacted with the built environment in a historical context. These digital models offer ways to analyze ecological, functional, and experiential landscape systems to uncover potential outcomes. This innovative research approach offers new applications for testing and visualizing proposed (and existing) designs as well as technical insights and methodologies to inform contemporary sustainable development strategies.
Presenters
Aaron LiggettLecturer, Landscape Architecture, California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design
KEYWORDS
Landscape performance, Sustainability, Design, Digital modeling, Visualization, Stormwater management, Watershed
