The Landscape Performance Series: Making the Case Barbara Deutsch, FASLA, Executive Director of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, will be presenting the innovative Landscape Performance Series, an interactive set of resources that provides tools and information to quantify benefits, show value, and make the case for sustainable landscape solutions. This will be a unique opportunity to learn about these essential resources to improve practice, showcase work, and help achieve sustainability.

Lessons from Chicago: Midwestern Ethic, Building with a Swamp, and Millennium Park Terry Guen, FASLA, of Terry Guen Design Associates will provide an overview of how Chicago’s Millennium Park came to be, how it takes its cues from its built and ecological history, how it was planned, planted, and constructed. Over the past eight years this park has produced extraordinary economic, social, and environmental benefits for the City of Chicago. Millennium Park has come to represent a new prototype for urban parks, provoking a discussion about the value of public landscapes to City redevelopment. With this one-time public/private investment and excellence in design on a major scale, Chicago has created an internationally recognized cultural public space, which as positively influenced local and national perceptions of place, City identity.

Constitution Square: Introducing Rain Gardens to the Urban Streetscape Alit Balk, ASLA, Senior Designer at ParkerRodriguez, Inc. will present on Constitution Square, a project which is a full city block at 1st, M and N streets, NE in the heart of NOMA, one of Washington, DC’s new and fastest growing downtown neighborhoods. ParkerRodriguez was hired by the owner/developer StonebridgeCarras as the master planner for the block to incorporate the recently established NOMA Design Guidelines into the design of the public realm – the urban streetscape. ParkerRodriguez worked with the many relevant agencies and through clever interpretation of the guidelines, designed the streetscape in artful ways to incorporate environmentally friendly features such as structural cell technologies for healthier tree soil volumes. The boldest sustainable gesture is a series of long, gently curving rain gardens inserted into the sidewalk that extend the entire block along the length of 1st Street.