Engineering With Nature + Landscape Architecture

The Engineering With Nature-Landscape Architecture initiative emerged in response to a workshop held at the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi in Summer 2017. In that workshop, personnel from the USACE, members of the Dredge Research Collaborative, and a diverse group of landscape architects identified opportunities to integrate EWN and LA approaches into new and existing water infrastructure projects and operations. 

Engineering With Nature is a program of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It is the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes to efficiently and sustainably deliver economic, environmental, and social benefits through collaborative processes.

As a field, landscape architecture is presently concerned with many of the same issues of infrastructural performance and potential that EWN is currently pursuing, including in particular the re-imagination of existing infrastructure to meet more diverse criteria encompassing engineering functions, ecological value, recreational opportunities, and aesthetic benefits. This overlap in concerns suggests that the design principles and precedent knowledge summarized as EWN approaches may be beneficially combined with the design principles and precedent knowledge that has been accumulating in landscape architectural approaches to infrastructure, such as the work of landscape architects on recent international design competitions that deal with issues of coastal storm protection, public space, and ecological performance, like Rebuild by Design NYC and the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge. Moreover, landscape architects bring additional methods and expertise, including design, representation, and communication skills, that can aid in achieving the shared goals of EWN and landscape architecture. 

The members of the Dredge Research Collaborative work in precisely this area of contemporary landscape architecture, with a particular focus on coastal and riverine infrastructures that interact with sediment systems, and are correspondingly able to bring familiarity with both the challenges and the opportunities inherent in deploying EWN approaches to water infrastructure.

For more information on the EWN+LA initiative, see Jared Brey’s article “The Long Game” in Landscape Architecture Magazine and various project reports at EWN’s website.