Volume CXXXIII, Number 16 February 15, 2002 f

Landscape architect
SAMUAL DOWNING
STAFF WRITER

The historic vistas and quiet places of Bowdoin's campus were graced last Monday by a waning blanket of snow and ice, but a fortunate few who call it home saw the campus graced by the lady who literally wrote the book on preserving it. Carol Johnson, author of Bowdoin's current Master Plan and founder of the prestigious landscape architecture firm Carol R. Johnson Associates, spoke about the challenges of environmental preservation and the importance of good planning in an academic setting, suggesting many ways for Bowdoin to enhance its campus..

The talk was sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, in conjunction with the Bowdoin Architecture and Design Club and the Career Planning Center. Carol Johnson holds the ASLA Medal, the highest honor of the American Society of Landscape Architects, of which she is a fellow.

Carol Johnson spoke of many different ways Bowdoin's campus could be improved. (Henry Coppola, Bowdoin Orient)

Introduced by Environmental Studies Professor Jill Pearlman, Johnson began by explaining the process of restoring a polluted area. "First," she said, "you have to examine the cultural and environmental history of the place" and the various ways that land has been used over the years. She focused on her 102-person firm's work to restore the Mystic River Reservation in Medford, Massachusetts.

In the wake of interstate highway expansion in the 1960s, construction firms left behind a nasty gift. Pollution had swallowed up the salt marsh and the soil could no longer grow trees.

Johnson's Boston firm was selected for the job. Somehow, the architects had to transform the wasteland into a place where families could spend the afternoon in nature.

By "mixing soils to grow a park system," Johnson developed a plan to make the ground fertile for trees and for recreation alike.

The architect lamented the high cost of rebuilding the salt marsh, but she recognized that a restored marsh wouldn't cut it for a high-density public park anyway. Building a drainage blanket and planting a mix of fast and slow growing trees, she created a space that mitigated environmental damage and served the public as a beautiful urban park. Today the area is a thriving recreation center shaded by healthy new trees.

Johnson, a graduate and former professor at Harvard's School of Design, also presented slides of her firm's projects at colleges around the world.
The constraints that limited funding and bureaucratic oversight place on a landscape architect's work was a recurrent theme in Johnson's lecture.

At Grinnell College, the architect said, two factors kept her from realizing an important aesthetic and safety goal. A plan for a tree-lined boulevard, designed to visually connect the two sides of campus across a major roadway, was rejected by the Iowa Transportation Department.

"Apparently," Johnson said, "farm machines have these great arms" that would paw at the trees as they passed by, sending branches flying. The college bureaucracy initially rejected a plan for raising the elevation of the boulevard's crosswalks because of the cost.

Johnson stressed that Bowdoin still has problems with pedestrian safety at the Maine Street crosswalks. She urged raising the crosswalks above the level of the street and brightening their markings.

The architect said in any project, it's important to create courtyards for public gathering.

At the new American University in Cairo, Egypt, the architect studied the social interactions of students at the school. As one of the only Middle Eastern universities with more women than men, Johnson learned, cultural standards limited women's freedom to associate, so she designed a series of pleasant shaded courtyards to bring an acceptable forum for women to meet people and relax.

The biggest unfinished business at Bowdoin, said Johnson, is her plan to create a number of sunny garden-like meeting places to encourage students to interact and relax outdoors. The concrete of Hyde Plaza, the architect said, should be replaced with a green space leading up to Sargent Gymnasium. A garden would take advantage of the sunlight that hits that spot and encourage students to congregate there. She proposed moving the Polar Bear to Smith Union's main entrance near the Dudley Coe Quad. The entrance, another sunny spot, would be turned into a landscaped anchor for that corner of campus.

One of Johnson's favorite elements of the 1996 plan called for simplifying the edges of campus so that the major vistas seen in early photographs could be restored. Johnson was pleased to renew a certain "sense of openness in the way the college addressed the greater community." At Johnson's urging, the college removed several hedges and plantings. Views from Maine Street, Bath Road and College Street were restored to their former grandeur and simplicity.

At Bowdoin, and at the many college projects Johnson presented, recent construction and growth is causing parking nightmares. The architect said Bowdoin needs to develop either new parking alternatives at the fringes of campus, connected by a remote parking shuttle system, or a higher density parking garage. "It's disappointing," she said, "to see so much parking in the middle of campus, and cars parked right under the Bowdoin Pines."

For the 1996 Master Plan, she studied traffic flow around campus and listed several recommendations. Monday she again urged the College to improve bicycle routes across campus and install strategically located bike racks to discourage the use of cars.

At the end of the presentation, a Bowdoin senior asked Johnson how students who live a few minutes from campus could resist the temptation to drive to school. She replied: "No student on this campus should make a one minute drive across campus. The world is too wonderful to walk in. They ought to learn that."