MEADOW MAN

James van Sweden, FASLA, visited Wolfgang Oehmes Vollmer Garden for the first time in 1964. "Id never seen such a beautiful private garden," van Sweden says. "Id seen ornamental grasses in the Netherlands, but never on this scale."

Together, Oehme, who died of cancer in late December, and van Sweden created a new style of landscape in the 1970s and 1980s. Their work combined tall meadow plants, then uncommon in American gardens, in painterly massings, often around highly structured pools and paved areas.

They were not the first or only landscape architects to encourage smaller lawns or more meadow plantings. Landscape architects such as Isabella Pendleton were seeking low - maintenance alternatives to lawn in the 1940s. A. E. Bye Jr. called for wider use of low - maintenance meadow grasses in Landscape Architecture in 1961, noting they are "striking" against the snow. Darrel Morrison, FASLA, wrote about his work with native prairie plants in 1975, and an older school of landscape architects including Jens Jensen had promoted large naturalistic clearings.

VECTORWORKS GETS IT

IT MAY NOT BE THE DOMINANT DESIGN SOFTWARE PACKAGE IN THE UNITED STATES, BUT VECTORWORKS LANDMARK IS IN MANY WAYS UNIQUELY HELPFULTO LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS.

Autodesk has dominated the market for drafting and design software in the United States since landscape architects first started trading in their T squares for computers in the early 1980s. In ASLAs most recent survey of firm leaders software preferences, 69 percent said they used the companys AutoCAD software.

I have personally been an AutoCAD user since 1981, when I started working with a prerelease version of AutoCAD 1.0. But after experimenting with the latest version of Vector - works Landmark this past fall, Ive decided the time may be right for a little change.

Vectorworks Landmark is the only major stand - alone program designed specifically for landscape architects.

It is produced by Nemetschek Vectorworks, a Maryland - based subsidiary of the Nemetschek Group, which is the leading vendor of software for architects, engineers, and the construction industry outside North America.

The people who created this software clearly understand the sort of work we landscape architects do and the tools we need to do it That is probably because Vectorworks keeps two registered landscape architects on staff, Eric Gilbey, AS LA, and Stewart Rom.

ARE DONE YET?

MEASURING FOR A PROJECTS SUCCESS IS KEEPING CLIENTS AND DESIGNERS ENGAGED WELL AFTER INSTALLATION.

Landscape architects, like most people working on contracts, are used to fairly clear finish dates. Usually, their contracts with clients end with the installation of the landscape, and then there may be a year or two of care involved afterward.

But contract time periods may be getting longer, as clients increasingly begin to require ongoing monitoring and testing to ensure that their complex installations succeed. Designs these days involve more and more overlapping and intricate stormwater management, pavement, and irrigation systems. Plus, tighter client budgets may mean the planting of more young specimens rather than mature ones, so determining success may take multiple seasons, particularly with nonnative plants. Performance metrics that are written into contracts spell out what a client can expect after installation and increasingly prolong the contract period during which a landscape architect is involved.

"I like to compare the substantial completion issue to the commissioning of HVAC systems in the museums we do work for," says Eric Kramer, ASLA, a senior associate at Reed Hilderbrand in Watertown, Massachusetts. In this testing model, independent commissioning agents are brought in to work with the architects and mechanical engineers to ensure each building system works properly through cycles of seasons with periodic adjustments.

A PUZZLING TRANSFER

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE NO LONGER OVERSEES A SECTION OF THE NATIONAL MALL.

Washington, the truism goes, is a federal government town. But from a public land perspective, a lot depends on what part of the federal government youre talking about.

Take the National Mall. Over the past couple of years, the National Park Service has started to take maintenance seriously at its most - visited site, with a new nonprofit, the Trust for the National Mall, that has committed to raise a good chunk of the $350 million needed to repair the Malls crumbling landscape and infrastructure.

The trust is also leading the park service in some interesting directions, designwise. Before overhauling several important parts of the Mall, its decided to rethink them as well, through a design competition thats drawn landscape architectures buzziest names: Ken Smith, Hood Design, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, and OLIN, to name a few. In mid - December, four finalists were announced for each of three sites: Union Square near the Capitol, Constitution Gardens by the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument grounds at the Sylvan Theater.

STREAMLINING OF INTERIOR DEPARTMENT AGENCIES ISNT GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN.

Almost everybody wants to streamline the federal bureaucracy, but virtually nobody thinks that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazars latest idea is a good one. In October, Salazar announced that the agencys Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement would be merged into its Bureau of Land Management. OSM oversees and enforces regulations affecting coal mines, most of which are privately owned and in the eastern United States. BLM oversees multiple activities on land, mostly in the western United States, owned by the federal government

According to Salazars order, the move is a simple streamlining of the Department of the Interior bureaucracy, intended to "integrate the management, oversight, and accountability of activities associated with mining regulation and abandoned mine reclamation; ensure efficiencies in revenue collection and enforcement responsibilities; and provide independent safety and environmental oversight of these activities."

GOOD AS OLD