Arboretum of the Cascades
In collaboration with Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture

IMPERFECT LANDSCAPE

This native plants and wildlife arboretum was originally intended to preserve readily accessible nature within a short drive of downtown Seattle, along a rapidly growing residential and industrial corridor in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. As the design process has developed, it has become increasingly clear that this previously logged forest area is most valuable not as a model of perfect nature, but as a model for accepting and integrating the imperfections of previously impacted natural environments into a rehabilitated landscape that preserves nature and the record of logging and human intervention, and proposes maintaining networks of such native landscape islands preserved within growth corridors. For this purpose, recognition of the intrinsic geometric beauty of the patchwork logging process that worked across this land over the course of fifty years, leaving a grid of differentiated forest as well as the skids, roads and overdrawn landscape that is common to logged areas, becomes central to the site planning and architectural development of the arboretum.

The site planning as a whole involves a series of trails leading to important features of the existing topography and forest. A constructions are erected at strategic points on the landscape and trails, each serving as access and interpretive structures to enhance understanding of specific features of this forest’s various ecosystems. Forest biologists recognize three major eco-systems of the forest, the subterranean life below ground and among the tree roots, the unique under story life at the forest floor, and the most distant and mysterious world of the forest canopy. The primary structures of the arboretum each access specific moments in these environments, and bring them into a direct and visceral learning experience.
ROOTS BELOW is a series of open-topped trenches, a few tunnels and excavated rooms winding among the roots of giant dead cedar stumps, moss-covered nurse logs and living trees. Where the excavated paths and chambers are to encounter tree roots, steel rods are driven 4 feet into the ground next to each major root. As the excavation slowly works forward and each rod is encountered, a timber support strut is fitted to the base of each rod, and the root pressure washed free of dirt. The process continues until a giant stump or the thigh-thick root of a living tree stand free in the excavation, supported on slender timbers among which the visitors may wander as they examine the worms and critters and smell the redolent richness of the forest earth.
FOREST FLOOR is a low-slung, transparent roof functioning as both a protecting nursery for new ground plants and as a topographic measuring device forcing the visitors attention down upon the sloping forest floor. The majority of the roof hovers as an inclined plane just above the visitor’s head, with the ground rising up and down beneath it, and sometimes poking through into the sky. A smaller section of the roof switches strategy and begins to rise and fall, exactly following the undulations of the ground.
CANOPY WALK, a slender web of steel cables, much like those once used to pull the mother trees down from this mountain, is strung across the narrow canyon of a fast creek, allowing access from grade level of the trail into the canopy of the trees as one walks outward into space and the tree tops descend downward as their roots follow the drop of the canyon below. The catwalk trusses are fitted with research stations for the propagation of canopy epiphyte plants within environmentally controlled planting atmospheres.
GIANT’S PICNIC celebrates two remaining old-growth cedar trees, spared by a glut in 1940’s cedar production, standing alone on a rocky knoll within a steep canyon. The cloistered structure winds around the twin giants, culminating in a high canopy picnic shelter, with both an inside and an exterior moss carpet, growing on a well-plumbed nutrient bladder.