Member Profiles 2012: Historic Preservation (Part 1)



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This article is the 11th in a series profiling members of ASLA’s Professional Practice Networks (PPNs), based on responses to the 2012 Annual PPN Member Survey. The members of this PPN work on a wide range of historical landscape projects around the United States and abroad.

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Edward C. Martin Jr., FASLA, who lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, is a landscape architecture professor emeritus at Mississippi State University and, as he describes himself, “retired and pushing 84.” He continues to review the draft of his illustrated book, The Biltmore Estate in All Seasons, A Photographic Guide, with 520 captioned photos taken in 2003–2012, when he worked as a part-time Biltmore Garden tour guide. Martin’s older son, E. Curtis Martin III, is coauthor of the book. In 2002, Curtis worked at Biltmore Estate as a house guide and in the office of the estate landscape and forest historian. Throughout the book, Martin refers to Frederick Law Olmsted's sustainable designs, as well as those of Architect Richard Morris Hunt, and to Chauncey Beadle, the estate horticulturist for 50 years who was recommended to George Washington Vanderbilt by Olmsted.

Lu Gay Lanier, FASLA, is a senior project manager and landscape architect at the Timmons Group in Richmond, Virginia. Her firm was recently chosen to prepare a new access plan and master plan for Henricus Historical Park in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

Chris Pattillo, ASLA, is president of PGAdesign in Oakland, California. Each year, the National Park Service sponsors a HALS (Historic American Landscapes Survey) challenge with a particular theme to encourage individuals or groups to document particular landscapes. In response to this year’s theme of “Documenting the American Latino Landscape,” Pattillo spearheaded the documentation of each of California's 21 missions by the members of the Northern California Chapter of HALS. This is the first project the chapter has undertaken in conjunction with members from Southern California. Each volunteer visits a site and conducts field investigations and historic research. The submissions will include a statement about the site’s significance and current and/or older photographs that depict how the property looked historically and how it appears today.

A. Graham Sones, ASLA, is the president of SGA Group Inc. in Waverly, Minnesota. He has celebrated the first year of his historic landscape architecture consulting office and has also continued to specialize in parks and education facilities. Recently, Sones applied to the Minnesota ASLA chapter’s board of directors to serve as state liaison to the HALS program. He has received essential training by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He also recently spoke out against demolition of the historic Peavey Park Plaza at a Minneapolis heritage preservation committee hearing.

Amy Hoffman, ASLA, is a professor of landscape architecture in the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego. She is working on several projects related to the early 20th-century work of local philanthropist George Marston. One project is with the “Save Our Heritage Organisation” in San Diego. She is doing preliminary research and design for a plan to restore the Marston House Gardens (http://sohosandiego.org/marston). Hoffman is also involved in collaborative research on Marston's work in shaping the landscape and campus at Pomona College.

David Driapsa, ASLA, is a historical landscape architect with the National Park Service in International Falls, Minnesota, the coordinator for the HALS program, and the Florida HALS liaison. Currently, he is preparing HALS documentation for Mallard Island, the historic island estate of Ernest Oberholtzer on Rainy Lake, Minnesota. Other projects include work on the Kettle Falls Historic District Cultural Landscape Report and construction oversight for the Rainy Lake Bike Trail at Voyageurs National Park in International Falls. He is also collaborating with community leaders in Tallahassee, Florida, on HALS documentation of Smokey Hollow as a memorial to the African American community destroyed during a 1950s urban renewal project.

Jill Cowley, ASLA, is a historical landscape architect for the National Park Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Recently, she co-instructed a two-day course, "Preservation Philosophy for People Who Maintain Historic Buildings (and Landscapes)," at Petrified Forest National Park. The course integrated building and landscape maintenance concerns for park, tribal facility, and maintenance staff.

Jan Hendrych, ASLA, is a landscape analyst, designer, writer, and project head researcher at the LandArt Studio and the Silva Tarouca Research Institute for Landscape and Ornamental Gardening in Pruhonice, Czech Republic. His main interests are historic parks and landscapes, landscape aesthetics, and ecological landscape design. His recent work focuses on the conservation, preservation, propagation, and documentation of the surviving heritage trees from the famous Bad Muskau Park Arboretum in Germany during the 19th century. Hendrych is also a member of the International Conservation Board for UNESCO parks including Bad Muskau and Branitz in Germany and Legnica in Poland.

Katherine Howard, ASLA, is a member of the steering committee of the Golden Gate Park Preservation Alliance and of SF Ocean Edge in San Francisco. She is working with these two groups to oppose the planned installation of seven acres of synthetic turf and more than 150,000 watts of sports lighting at the Beach Chalet soccer fields in Golden Gate Park. She recently won two local hero awards for her work: one from the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods and the other from San Francisco Tomorrow. The issues are not resolved, however, and she urges all landscape architects to weigh in on the destruction of the historic and living treasure that is Golden Gate Park. She encourages everyone to visit the SF Ocean Edge website to participate in the effort: www.sfoceanedge.org.

Julie McGilvray, Associate ASLA, is a landscape and architectural historian at SWCA Environmental Consultants in Austin, Texas. She is currently working on a cultural landscape report for Zilker Park and Barton Springs in Austin; a cultural landscape assessment of the Galisteo Basin in Santa Fe County, New Mexico; and a National Register nomination for the Butterfield Overland Mail Route Corridor in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas. McGilvray is also conducting an in-depth study of the 150-year evolution of road-building technology over the Butterfield Corridor within Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Her research will be presented at the upcoming Preserving the Historic Roads Conference in September and at the National Trust for Historic Preservation Conference in November 2012.

Steve Whitesell, ASLA, is a landscape architect with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in Flushing, New York. A highlight for him this past year was teaching a landscape history course at Farmingdale State College.

Katharine R. Masucci, ASLA, is a landscape architect at Gale Nurseries Inc. in Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania. Her primary interests are colonial American historic landscape preservation and the HALS program.

Shawn Sanes, Student ASLA, is an MLA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This summer she is a landscape architectural intern at the Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute in Beijing. She is working on design projects in China, as well as gaining valuable professional experience and a new cultural perspective on design and urban development. While Sanes has always had a strong interest in historic preservation and cultural landscapes, she recently began exploring landfills as cultural landscapes and looking in particular at their role in the history and development of the built environment.

Visit the Historic Preservation PPN web page for more information about this group. To learn more about ASLA's other PPNs, go to the PPN home page or contact Dena Kennett, ASLA's manager of Professional Practice, dkennett@asla.org.

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