CityScape: Schmidt Design Group’s ‘sustainable and artful’ landscapes

Civita Park in Mission Valley Photo courtesy Schmidt Design Group In Glen Schmidt launched a landscape architecture practice with the motto sustainable and artful Currently Schmidt Design Group with forty-one employees and a mission of Positive Change By Design has helped create whole new urban habitats in our region They are talented players on teams that include city planners architects engineers artists and developers There is a perception we often hear of landscape architects being gardeners says JT Barr president and managing partner who joined the company in Quite the contrary we re trained and licensed practitioners who shape spaces at multiple levels Company founder Schmidt who still works a couple days a week earned an environmental planning and management degree at the University of California Davis which gave him a broad perspective at a time when fresh ideas about landscape design began to emerge I came out of school in the late seventies with a real commitment to sustainability Schmidt says Back then green planning and design were rare Thirsty plant species from around the world were commonly specified in drought-prone California Landscapes of natives and drought-tolerant plants seemed offensively stark to chosen people One inventive take on landscape architecture is Schmidt Design s Civita Park a fourteen-acre constituents space at the heart of the -unit Civita mixed-use advance in Mission Valley on the site of a former sand and gravel quarry More than a decade in the making the society is almost complete The buildings are a mixed bag of architecture but the landscape is consistently cool A cloud amphitheatre with a cloudlike steel shell is a vital community space at the bottom of the park where streets buildings and landscape converge It s a venue for concerts movie nights and a farmers realm From there paths and footbridges lead up through the park past a landscape of nearly one hundred species from Coast Live Oaks and California Sycamores to manzanita bottlebrush Indian Hawthorn and yuccas Along the way are children s play areas shady places to picnic or read habitat for birds butterflies and insects plus scent and succulent gardens Rusty quarry equipment is strewn through the site re-purposed as community art At the top of the park approaches switchback over rocky outcroppings synthetic but realistic where a seasonal waterfall flows From there the runoff meanders down through a new streambed along the edge of the park landscaped with native and drought-tolerant plants Instead of eroding the slope the water eventually runs into the San Diego River Also at the top of the park is the seventy-two-foot-long Magic Tunnel an alluring concrete passage designed by Schmidt with a mural by artist Kevin Anderson of San Diego scenes such as farms sailboats surfers aircraft carriers the Coronado Bridge and all sorts of San Diegans including Tony Gwynn Another place where Schmidt Design s work is essential is Fox Point Farms along Leucadia Boulevard in Encinitas It s a conscientiously branded Agrihood of cottages carriages condos and townhomes plus forty affordable apartments White residential buildings resemble clapboard farmhouses other buildings take barn-like forms There s a five-acre field where pigs chickens and cows roam near rows of carrots arugula cauliflower and lettuce to be sold and consumed at Fox Point s sector and restaurant The landscape ties it all together When you turn into the neighborhood your tires crunch on the gravel road Children play on a central green surrounded by Schmidt s landscape At the back of the advancement where residential buildings perimeter the farm decomposed granite paths run along beds of agaves native grasses flowering sages and droopy-leaved podocarpus It feels like a rural retreat here not suburbia Down the coast are very different examples of Schmidt Design s expertise at solving unique problems presented by San Diego s natural landscape moves and trails that lead from bluffs to beaches such as Grandview Beacons and especially Swami s where policies are anchored by rock bolts sunk thirty-five feet into the bluff These are all stormy locales what with changing weather crumbling cliffs heated local opinions and unpredictable California Coastal Commission guidelines Needless to say landscape architects must double as goodwill ambassadors who help move projects forward while keeping good design as a priority Liberty Station the redevelopment of the former Naval Training Center in Point Loma where the landscape plan needed to conserve the site s historical status presented other type of challenge What was a barren marching ground at this former military compound has been transformed into a park-like masses space anchored by Stone Brewing World Bistro Gardens where the garden is as essential as the brew Schmidt has also done a landscape plan for Liberty Station s Arts District The company also created the Coastal Rail Trail in Solana Beach the Children s Park in downtown San Diego and the landscape plan for a section of North Harbor Drive Click through pages and pages of projects on Schmidt Design s website and you ll see why they ve won dozens of awards for adding beautiful experiences to our urban and suburban locales Glen Schmidt is particularly proud of Sharp Memorial Hospital s Green Roof a garden where landscape elements are configured as music staffs with agaves and yuccas placed as notes from the first bars of Beethoven s Symphony No Ode to Satisfaction Research shows that garden views help the healing process Schmidt says especially when they evoke beautiful music Presently Schmidt Design is part of the association planning Riverwalk San Diego a huge mixed-use project that replaces the twenty-seven-hole Riverwalk Golf Club in Mission Valley Schmidt envisions a diverse riverfront landscape that will conserve existing terrain bring back native plant species and incorporate structures such as a clubhouse and a beautiful bridge over the San Diego River Specific of my friends kind of walk away from the business cold turkey but I just get a charge out of making places for people that improve their quality of life Schmidt says explaining why he s still at work Both he and Barr like the idea of leaving a San Diego legacy In fact they already have Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego and he also writes about houses for San Diego Magazine