BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
In Owens Lake, a land art installation draws on 100-year-old history while providing critical habitat.
FROM THE FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
When NUVIS Landscape Architecture was hired to assist the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) with its dust mitigation effort at Owens Lake (see ?Dust to Bust,? LAM, October 2012), Perry Cardoza, ASLA, was given a list of objectives. Foremost, any design needed to tamp down the dust that had become a public health hazard, but it also would have to meet very specific habitat goals and help the department meet its water-use reduction targets. (LADWP has used up to 95,000 acre-feet of water annually for dust mitigation.) What was not on the list was any mention of land art. ?In everyone?s mind, this was going to be a hiking trail with a parking lot,? says Cardoza, an executive vice president at NUVIS. ?We would have gravel and wetlands and some salt grass, and [we] would call it a day.? The project evolved, however, and the completed landscape, which opened to the public in April 2016 and won an Award of Excellence from the ASLA Southern California Chapter the same year, falls right into the land art tradition, even as it fulfills its mandate as an ecological booster.
Located on a tiny parcel?at 700 acres, the parcel is still just 1 percent of the lake?s total area?near the lake?s northeast boundary, the design includes a monument-like shade structure and a series of plazas ...