Mobile Mapping!

6/15/2021 My latest funded grant is $24,950 for Google Street View Tools (and more) for Remote and In-Person Instruction. This Cal Poly Pomona Special Projects to Improve Classroom Experience (SPICE) Grant funded by Student Success Fees.

Inspiration for the proposal was the virtual field trip I planned for LA3121L spring ’21 Salton Sea studio and getting to borrow MediaVision’s Insta360 Pro2 8k panoramic video camera to document the project site for Google Street View. Over two road-trips in January, I recording dozens of miles of Imperial County roads and hiking along shoreline with the camera jury-rigged to car and mounted on backpack.

The grant will enable getting a dedicated camera, proper mounts to allow students to use the camera, precision RTK GPS IMUs, a powerful Dell Precision 5280 workstation, and storage cabinets.

Grant Application File

gsv-spice-application-01-25-2021-tagged-wpDownload

‘(and More)’ in the grant title is establishing the ENV Advanced Design Computing Lab in collaboration with Prof. Weimin Li who also got a SPICE grant to purchase a multi-touch tabletop computer for interactive geodesign instruction. While the final location of the lab is TBD, we will be getting two storage cabinets to house our collection of drones, environmental sensors, the 360 panoramic camera and camera mounts, and other items crowding our faculty offices for students/colleagues to access.

Landscape Futurist 2018

Had the pleasure of being the final speaker in CPPLA’s spring 2018 lecture series with a talk titled “Landscape Futures” that covered my recent scholarship visualizing the interface between infrastructure, ecology, and culture.

You can watch my entire talk on Facebook:

www.facebook.com/calpolypomona.landscapearchitecture/videos/10214762114820499/

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The rest of my slides are below.

Hydrodynamic Modeling

Hydrodynamic Modeling of Coastal Flooding

LA402L utilized the USGS Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) 3rd generation hydrodynamic models for Southern California  to identify areas at risk for inundation and interpolated the timeline in consultation with Dr. Juliette Hart.

Earlier sea level models were static state, so didn’t factor in the significant contribution of waves to coastal flooding, above and beyond the levels observed by the tidal gauges. Interesting to note that the predicted sea levels are higher than the current tsunami risk zone delineation.

 

The full LA402L Sea Level Rise Strategies Report: LA402L_LB_SLR_Report-web 51mb.pdf

 

DCxMA Sea Level Rise Strategies

Over ten weeks in the winter of 2017, sixteen BSLA students my LA402L Advanced Landscape Architecture Studio at California State Polytechnic University, in collaboration with AHBE Landscape Architects (Los Angeles), developed site-specific strategies and tactics to assist the City of Long Beach’s efforts to plan for sea level rise (SLR).

Sea Level Rise strategies and tactics identified by the students of LA402L provide a range of short term mitigation tactics of the impacts and/or long-term adaptation opportunities for the community and waterfront. These strategies and tactics can be categorized as:

Centralized: defined by top-down policies or regulations, neighborhood or community-wide deployment, and reliance on public funding to implement.

Decentralized: implementable by individual property owners and occupants to protect a single building, parcel, or block. These strategies and tactics may require changes to the zoning or building code, and/or innovative construction approaches.

Together with the mitigation and adaptation strategies and tactics (below), the matrix of Decentralized/Centralized and Mitigation/Adaptation is abbreviated as “DCxMA”.

Land Art Generator Initiative Lecture 2-19

Elizabeth Monoian & Robert Ferry, Co-founders of LAGI. Photo by Joanna Totolici,  TOTOLICI.COM

Excited to share that artist Elizabeth Monoian & architect Robert Ferry, co-founders of Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) are giving a public lecture at 5pm in the atrium of Building 7 on Friday 2/19 at Cal Poly Pomona.

Prior to the lecture, they will be guests in my LA302L & LA402L studios that are designing entries for the 2016 LAGI competition (entry deadline is May 15th), set adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier.

Site visit with LA302L & LA402L

LAGI 2016 is an ideas competition to design a site-specific public artwork that, in addition to its conceptual beauty, has the ability to harness energy cleanly from nature and convert it into electricity and/or drinking water for the City [of Santa Monica].  http://www.landartgenerator.org/competition2016.html

The lecture is being co-sponsored by the Cal Poly Pomona Student Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

 

Plane Spotting

This gallery contains 58 photos.

Toured LAX’s airfield with my LA301L studio on Monday 10/26 to see what we could see. Highlights include the Argo Ditch, sculptures by Ball+Nogales, and several A380 taking off! Argo Ditch (north side of the airfield)

LAX Interstitial

LA301L Fall 2015 Topic Studio

Source: Wikipedia

As the gateway to the metropolis, LAX is a 3,425-acre void in the urban fabric. This studio will explore opportunities to address contemporary urban and ecological issues in the vast interstitial zones between the aviation and logistics hardscapes.

Projects in this 301L.02 will explore mapping landscape systems, visual variables and pattern generation, and use/event theory to support the final project.

Course Goals

Upon successful completion of this studio, students will gain the following design frameworks and methods:

• Graphically evaluate ecological & technical systems in the landscape, documenting their processes, flows, nodes, topologies and spatial arrangement, boundaries and limits, and interactions with other system.
• Express landscape systems as integral design features.
• Use visual variables in the quantitative mapping of landscape systems and in the design graphics.
• Generate pattern-based design framework that respond to the context and supports specific design goals or parameters (such as noise reduction).
• Develop site-specific programming supported by the designed features, materials & plants, spaces, surfaces, and systems.
• Refined ability to construct a clear
• Integrate design fundamentals into the development & presentation of landscape design project.

AF video introduction

Aqueduct Futures intro Video on Vimeo

Cal Poly Pomona Landscape Architecture students with Prof. Barry Lehrman and Jonathan Linkus (exhibit co-designer) share how the Aqueduct Futures Project has changed their attitudes towards water and came to understand the impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct to all of California.

In order of appearance:

• Barry Lehrman – project director
• Jonathan Linkus – exhibit co-designer
• Ernest Little
• Ernesto Perez
• Anais Placido
• Alejandro Castellon
• Anthony Vazquez Perez
• Gabrielle Fladd
• Christian Vasquez

Produced and Directed by:

• Barry Lehrman

Videographer and editor:

• Preston Perry

Crew

• Students in LA499 Spring 2013

This video is under a Creative Commons license: attribute & share alike. All other rights reserved.

AF Exhibit

Days from the printer’s deadline for completing the exhibit and everything is coming together with the help of Jonathan Linkus and our great closing team of research assistants (Jane, Ernesto, & Kevin).

One change worth noting is is the public reception has been shifted to Tuesday, December 3rd, 9am-11am!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

ARID Journal & Aqueduct Futures

For this November’s centennial of the LA Aqueduct, two journals (ARID and BOOM) have special issues that are really cool read for infrastructure and landscape folks. Included in ARID are two articles using data collected as part of the Aqueduct Futures project!

Barry J. Lehrman, Douglas Delgado and Mary E. Alm, Ph.D.  Aqueduct as Muse: Educating Designers for Multifunctional Landscapes

Lee-Anne Milburn, Ph.D. and Barry Lehrman, with Tiernan Doyle, Eric Haley, James Powell and Devon Santy.  Contested Waters, Unholy Alliances, and Globalized Colonies: Exploring the Perception of Water by Residents of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Watershed

On a personal note, ARID Journal also includes my dedication to my late wife, Mary Alm who died after a 15 month fight with cancer in September. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to write ‘Aqueduct as Muse’ with her.

Mary Alm (1969-2013) was my muse, dear wife of nine years and mother of our son. She died peacefully after a grueling 15-month fight with breast cancer, just days after we submitted the final manuscript to Arid. The week before she was stricken by an undetected metastasis, I was finally able to bring her up to the Owens Valley to see the place that is now the foundation of my academic career.

As the cool and calmly collected presence reigning in my boundless ideas, Mary Alm brought focus to my life and provided the inspiration that encouraged me to aim for the moon.

As a health psychologist, Mary gave me a perspective into human behavior that enriched my scholarship into urban landscape systems and sustainability. This article was our first published collaboration to connect the gulf between our disciplines. Writing together—often at her weekly infusions during the darkness brought by the cancer—gave us strength to persevere against the relentless toll chemotherapy inflicted and to continue to pursue our dreams of future endeavors together.

As a lasting tribute to our love, this article is dedicated to Mary’s genius, goodness, and grace.

–Barry Lehrman, September 5, 2013

2030 Palette

Architecture 2030’s new 2030 Palette might just be the design tool I’ve been dreaming of – a built environment performance simulation tool that works across site, district, neighborhood, city, and regional scales. What isn’t shared yet, is the underlying methodology and data used the calculations.

If Palette is just another fancy case study browsing interface (there are plenty of those already), which is all that the screen shots and interactive tour feature, then I’ll be sorely disappointed as we desperately need a performance tool that transcends scale and integrates buildings into the larger landscape.

Once I have a chance to test it, I’ll post more. Really hoping Ed Mazria and crew have delivered. If they have, I’ll probably use Palette as the core in one or more of my studios next year.

Tree Torture Labs

Two visually striking experiments are attempting to find out how trees will respond to climate change:  Sevilleta LTER, and Aspen FACE at Michigan Technological University. These science experiments invoke several recent landscape architecture projects, but are purely functional.

Sevilleta LTER

“But we have to kill the trees to understand how they die. Not a lot of them, just a few.”  “We need to understand the mechanistic side if we’re going to model the effects of climate on a large scale, we need to understand why and where trees die. When we can do that accurately, we’ll have a shot at knowing the broader effects.“– Nate McDowell

The experiments at Sevilleta focus on Pinon-Juniper woodlands of New Mexico and are subject to several experiments by researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory (U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science’s Program for Ecosystem Research).

To observe the impact of higher temperatures, 18 trees are wrapped in 15′ tall plastic cylinders with heaters that keeps the temperature about 7 degrees warmer than ambient conditions to simulate the predicted climate of 2100.

more images at NPR.org

Fall mid-review

The public is invited to attend the fall mid-review presentations for LA301L and LA401L at Cal Poly Pomona on Monday, October 29th.

301L teams are identifying culturally relevant sites along the LA Aqueduct and discussing the landscape character. 401L students have mapped the water-energy nexus for Los Angeles and are selecting sites to enhance the resilience of the Aqueduct (plus there is a team who are hoping to win the EPA’s Campus RainWorks Competition).

Guest Jurors

• 301L: Andrew Kanzler, Perry Cardoza
• 401L: Robert Lamb, Jonathan Linkus

Cal Poly central campus map [pdf]

Please send a note if you are interested in being a guest juror for either mid-review session or final presentations (November 28th)

Aqueduct Futures Workshop – October 15th

The Owens Valley community is invited to a free public design workshop, 6-9pm on October 15th at the Methodist Center, 205 North Fowler Street, Bishop, California 93514.

This workshop will explore designing resilience and adaptation into the landscape of Owens Valley with California State Polytechic University Pomona Landscape Architecture students. The Landscape Architecture students will be visiting Owens Valley on a field trip as they learn about designing large-scale sustainable infrastructure systems as part of the Cal Poly Pomona’s Aqueduct Futures Project.

Please RSVP to help us plan the event: http://owensvalleyfutures.eventbrite.com/

If you wish to participate in the resource fair, please email: blehrman@cpp.edu

Press Release

Moral Judgement on Climate Change

I missed this important sustainability article back in march, which is
comparable to Global Warmings Six Americas Report [pdf], but Grist got 
my eyeballs on it.

Climate change and moral judgement by Ezra M. Markowitz & Azim F. Shariff
Nature Climate Change,  2, pp. 243–247 (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1378
Published online 28 March 2012

[sorry there is a paywall unless your library subscribes to this journal]

Converging evidence from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that the human moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify climate change — a complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused phenomenon — as an important moral imperative. As climate change fails to generate strong moral intuitions, it does not motivate an urgent need for action in the way that other moral imperatives do. We review six reasons why climate change poses significant challenges to our moral judgement system and describe six strategies that communicators might use to confront these challenges. Enhancing moral intuitions about climate change may motivate greater support for ameliorative actions and policies.

‘

And the solution to overcoming these biases are:

via Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could | Grist.