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As a landscape architect in South Florida, Nathan Vandeman (A’09) uses his creativity and analytical focus to rejuve-nate neglected parts of cities and breathe life into new developments.

A typical day may mean balancing projects ranging from a new corporate campus for American Express to a public city waterfront or a luxury resort in the Caribbean basin. Each requires the same artistic flair and laser sharp attention to both detail and overall scope that help ensure that the spaces nurture the mind and body but also serve a purpose and function in the grand scheme of the environment in which they are built.

Vandeman, an associate at the Fort Lauderdale office of TBG, an interna-tional landscape architecture firm, says the field encompasses a wide range of skills and types of work that help keep him challenged. At the same time, he’s able to build lasting monuments to a way of life that focuses on the human experience. “We’re working to show that a building isn’t just a bit of concrete that exists by itself,” says Vandeman. “We’re trying to improve the public realm so that when you’re walking down the street or going to a park, it isn’t just a lawn with trees. The paving looks consistent, with a nice pattern in it. The site furniture is on point. There’s a clear connection between point A and point B when you are going somewhere.”

This way of looking at cities, housing developments, and resorts as smaller pieces of a greater, cohesive whole isn’t new, he says, but it’s not been done in a widespread way in the United States before. In European cities, urban areas are plotted and built around humans and

offer ample opportunity for relaxing and walking in addition to being functional.

“The difference between European and American cities is the focus on the way it was built,” says Vandeman. “Most towns in the US were developed after the automobile, so they are focused around the car not the person. We’re realizing the sins we’ve committed by doing that. If you do it right, you can make these spaces that are destinations along the way — where you don’t have to get it your car to go somewhere. Landscape architecture is all about creating public space, even if it’s just a park so people can throw a Frisbee and take their dogs out.”

A responsibility to the worldIn Fort Lauderdale, Vandeman’s employer, TBG, created a plan for a tunnel top park near Los Olas Boule-vard that would unite the restaurant and financial districts while vastly improving an urban eyesore — a tunnel beneath a river that was used to build one of the city’s main roads. The Downtown Development Authority is working to raise funds to pay for the proposed park, which would help clean up an area of town that residents have been unhappy with for many years.

Landscape architecture may encom-pass everything from suburban housing developments to golf courses and mega-resort, but Vandeman says the appeal for him and many of his fellow land-scape architecture majors from Purdue University, has always been in bettering the world.

“Landscape architecture has always got these kind of civic undertones that appeal to your best self,” he says. “We

have a responsibility to improve the world we live in. The built world will stay a long time whether we do it well or not. The best possible outcome is when a city or the developer, and the people who use a space for the next 30 to 50 years are all happy with the outcome.”

Private developers are getting in on the act as well. Instead of putting as many homes as possible into an empty field, many developers are hiring landscape architects like Vandeman at TBG to try to infuse a sense of commu-nity and cohesiveness into projects that might otherwise feel like a series of vinyl Monopoly homes. Many developers

Alumni and students find purpose in social and environmentally friendly design

By Tanya G. Brown

B | E | T | W | E | E | NC R E A T I N G T H E S P A C E S

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kind of atmosphere and environment we want to create by proposing this kind of experience. Landscape architecture has the tightest relation-ship with our daily life because we use those spaces every day.”

Xu finds himself drawn to large-scale plan-ning that looks at how neighborhoods fit into the plans for cities, and how cities fan out into states and countries. “We don’t have to think about tedious construction details,” he says. “In larger scale landscape architecture and urban design, we look at the social impact of projects. I enjoy seeing the relationship between cities and the daily lives of human beings living there.”

Michael McCormick, another landscape architecture student who will graduate this spring, agrees.

“It’s the epitome of problem solving,” says McCormick. “Urban areas are so complex. You’re rarely working with a blank slate. You have to make it mesh with whatever’s there.”

McCormick, who originally came to Purdue to study civil engineering, says landscape archi-tecture satisfies the analytical side of his brain while helping him become more creative in his approach to problems.

“The reason I got into engineering at first was to solve problems but this is so diverse,” he says. “You can be redesigning a city street and looking at urban design issues of transporta-tion and then go design a park. There are so many different ways to solve problems. It’s more subjective than engineering where sometimes a thing either works or it doesn’t.”

A Pennsylvania native, McCormick did his co-op in Burlington, Vermont, with firm Wagner Hunt. He may return to that company for a job after school or he may at some point look into graduate school in urban planning like Xu.

“I like to design things that make cities more efficient and allow people to live healthier lives,” says McCormick. “You can have the biggest impact doing that in an urban area.”

Tanya G. Brown is the executive director of marketing and public relations at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business and a freelance writer.

Rob Sovinski, chair and professor of the department of horticul-ture and landscape architecture, says landscape architecture may be one of the most diverse, and the most misunderstood, of all the disciplines at Purdue.

“People see that word, ‘landscape’, and they interpret it to mean landscaping,” Sovinski says. “But plant materials are just one thing on our palette that go into a total design. Landscape architecture is about planning complete spaces that work with the environment around them. We use the word landscape as a noun not a verb.”

While the profession was affected by the recession, and devel-opers’ skittishness to begin new projects, landscape architecture is rapidly improving with the economy — so much so that by 2020, when working baby boomers are retired, there won’t be enough new graduates in the field to meet the demand.

Purdue’s program focuses on four years of instruction and includes a fifth year of co-op experience between the junior and senior years on campus. Students are generally sent to larger US cities with leading design firms such as San Francisco, Boston, Austin, and Atlanta.

A good landscape architect can come in with a variety of skill sets and interests but generally the program looks for students who:

• have a good mix of so-called “right” and “left” brain skills. “Purdue has excellent programs in art and engineering, and landscape architecture is really a beautiful mix of those two,” says Sovinski. “Technically-competent, problem-solving students with a strong artistic flair flourish here.”

• have a strong desire to leave the world better than how they found it. “The world needs land development with a strong sustain-able ethic,” he says. “Landscape architecture has always embodied sustainability.”

• enjoy both plants and building. “We get a lot of architecture students who wanted to also do exteriors, and a lot of landscapers who want to go beyond just plantings. We work in the connection points, the spaces between.”

The trend for both residential

folks and corporations is more outdoor

entertainment and working space.

are asking for help putting the focus back into shared spaces like community centers, mixed use outdoor areas for picnics or entertainment, and even restaurant and business districts so that homeowners have a place to interact with their neighbors that feels like a neighborhood rather than sprawl.

For corporations, landscape architecture allows for building from plans made by people who understand sustainability and how to make the outdoors and the indoors work well together. For the new American Express corporate headquarters in Sunrise, Florida, Vandeman and his co-workers are moving beyond the typical parking lot, building, and outdoor eating area to bring part of the natural ecosystem back throughout the campus.

“We’re making an effort to look at the ecolo-gies that exist in this region. In south Florida, they have been removed. You may know what was once here but you’ve never seen it,” he says. “We’re replacing some of these on the site. On a walk between the parking lot and arrival area for staff, for example, you will get to understand what the wetland ecosystem was like, because we’re putting it back.”

Building to LEED standards, a sort of report card for builders who are trying to reduce their carbon footprint, also means reducing and reusing in other ways. The new campus may harvest rainwater to run toilets and irrigate the wetlands and greenery. Structured parking, rather than vast parking lots, will control sprawl and preserve land for future expansions.

Want outdoor living? Look up.The focus on green buildings and community development isn’t just in urban areas with tens of millions of people either. Randy Royer (A’94) says green living is coming to towns like Columbus, Indiana, and downtown Indianap-olis. Royer, principal and partner at Blue Marble Design LLC, a landscape architecture firm in Indiana, has seen the development business evolve into planning that incorporates the state’s rich agricultural history into its urban spaces.

While working on the campus master plan for the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis,

Royer’s firm created rich exterior spaces that allowed not only for outdoor dining but also meetings and small group activity.

“Whether it is access to DIY channels or resources online, the trend for both residential folks and corporations is more outdoor enter-tainment and working space. For homeowners, they want fire pits and outdoor bars. Businesses need seating for large groups and shade so they can see their laptops. More and more, people are trying to spend more time outside in the Midwest.”

The urban trend of rooftop gardens and planting spaces has also made the jump to the Midwest. In multi-family apartment living, roof-tops are being planned as spaces where residents can reconnect to the land.

“They’ve been doing urban agriculture in Chicago and Atlanta and New York for a long time, but not so much here” says Royer. “Now lots of folks that move downtown want space to garden and grow their own vegetables and flowers. A few of the projects we’re working on in Indianapolis are lower income housing and as part of the financing the developers are required to include outdoor community garden space.”

For his part, Royer, who has worked in southern Florida for many years, is excited to see the commitment to design and Indiana’s growing interest in building people-centric community spaces. “Indianapolis is much more walkable than it once was. Columbus, which is known for its architecture, is focusing on connecting the city to the people who live there. It’s an exciting time. Hopefully we leave things a lot better than when we got involved.”

Designing for the futureDaniel Xu, a landscape architecture student set to graduate from Purdue in May 2015, says it’s that tie to humanity and the world people inhabit that drew him to the major in the first place. After having finished his co-op in Monterey, Mexico, he hopes to complete his degree and pursue graduate school in urban planning.

“It’s very natural,” says Xu. “The first thing we think about is the human experience — the

Landscape Architecture: (noun) the practice of proposing meaningful and thoughtful change to the built environment

To learn more about landscape architecture at Purdue, please visit ag.purdue.edu/hla/LA.