This was a student project by Alyssa Ingrassia and Gwen Winer for Parker Sutton and Tameka Sims' course LARCH 2390 in Spring 2019.
We were asked to design a landscape in which offers a vital ecosystem to at-risk Flora and Fauna of the Ohio region. As by the guidelines of the project, we would locate this new habitat on the site of The Ohio State University golf course in Upper Arlington. This transformation included terraforming, landscape transitions, and maintenance. This studio project focused on the idea of Generating Ohio’s Landscape Futures. Golf courses are parts of many communities, therefore when no longer in use they are still forced to remain “open”. This opens the large areas of acreage to become parks or nature preserves. That's where our design task comes in.
Our main concept for this project was to create an environment that used to be prevalent in Ohio but has since been wiped out; wetlands. Ohio used to be speckled with various open wetlands, however urbanization and human interactions has limited this reach. Therefore, we chose all of the wetland/water loving Flora and Fauna to create a wetland reservation. This ecological system will be designed around wetland birds and the ways they flourish. Our site will be a wetland bird sanctuary, housing three endangered birds (King Rail, Cerulean Warbler), and introducing two other wetland birds, Cattle Egret and Great Egret, for greater diversity. We thought it would be important to incorporate the Great Egret into the environment as it is the symbol of the Audubon Society. Our plan focuses on flattening the land and expanding the river to allow ample flood plains for the various wetland birds we are reintroducing.
In the site, we focused on Turkey Run, a damned, tunneled stream, that cuts the site on its East-West axis. We chose to focus on Turkey Run and its man made lake in the center of the site. This is imperative to our design as the fauna being introduced are wetland loving, therefore, the usage of water is key. Once on the site, we decided to focus on creating a more expansive river reach by spreading the main lake into a long and thin curvy system. This allows for our birds to have plenty of edge conditions for nesting and hunting, while also allowing our Flora species like the Tamarack to flourish in the floodplains between each curve. The main focus is taking out the infrastructural components of the site, such as the damn, and making it as “natural” as possible for the endangered species. On top of this we are flattening most of the site to make the river system with various sedges more viable in the area.
