A Look Back: DELINEATOR's First Planning Design in 2012, Nashville Competition Finalist + Logo Pattern
I have spent most of 2021 projecting forward and focusing on our growth. As the year is close to end, I have become more susceptible to reflection not only on the incredible opportunities and relationships that we have formed during the past 4.5 years in Dallas with DELINEATOR, but on the genesis of the ambitious goal to start a firm that would raise the standard in landscape architecture in Texas. Looking back on the conception of the idea takes me all the way back to Houston, Texas in 2012 where I was working full time at SWA Group and began working “night-shifts” out of our home office on a competition project out of Nashville, Tennessee. It was our first project submitted under the name, DELINEATOR. We were shortlisted to finalists and attended the ceremony held by Designing Action on the waterfront. It was exciting to see that the ideas (we did our best to represent in the little amount of time we had in the “late-late night” hours for several weeks) were communicating an approach I knew I wanted to continue to pursue in my planning and landscape architecture. In particular that there can be beauty and harmony in a well-designed urban development that also heals the soils and accommodates for flooding. I will highlight a few of the main strategies below, but the beauty of these themes have been constantly reminded to me in our graphic logo that was generated from this process.
That spiraling grid; that I (and we) spent hours creating with a custom LISP and altered manually, mathematically, and repetitively offset. It was overlaid as a symbol and expression of soil reclamation planting patterning inspired by the center of a sunflower. I hope if you read this you too can remember that great planning and landscape is intentional, performative, temporal, evolving, and can also be beautiful in form.
-Lauren Fasic
The spiral pattern was inspired by a sunflower and created with a custom LISP in AutoCAD. That pattern was overlaid into the planning and design for Mirasol Park.
Mirasol Park is a proposal for an adaptive urbanized landscape that will serve the City of Nashville’s needs over time situated along a floodable land tract on the Cumberland River. The proposed infrastructure reintegrates the area with the East Nashville neighborhoods by turning the interstate into a signalized parkway. In addition the existing fragmented network of streets will be streamlined and a tram will take people through the entire riverfront area. The design is structured on center to a roundabout with an amphitheater created with recycled steel and concrete from the existing industrial site. The structure will serve as a striking reminder of the former site and its history by formally organizing the future development around this center.
A variety of plantings will be used to remediate the degraded land over an indefinite amount of time in the future. These plantings will cycle based on the different materials that each species is more likely to accumulate. The sunflower will be heavily used to remediate the soil and is the inspiration for the overall landscape planting spiral grid structure. An overlay of opposing spirals, as seen in the head of a sunflower, creates the adaptive reuse framework. The pattern creates zones that upon being fully remediated can then be reoccupied with recreational use program and development.
Development will be phased over decades, and the design intends to accommodate the unexpected needs of the future City by creating a framework that will allow multiple types of sport and recreation to be filled.
In the immediate future at the time (2012), the design proposed a sunken, multi-purpose field that captures and filters stormwater, large public indoor multi-sport facility with a connected garage that accommodates a rock-wall climbing facade. Other sport activities associated with the garage are volleyball, badminton and an adventure zip-line, giving visitors an ultimate experience of watching the planting patchwork of the soil remediation in progress.
As the land and soil quality begins to improve after the first 5 years, part of the site is focused on mixed-use smart redevelopment that maximizes and helps to economically stimulate the recreational surround.
In addition, the phased urban design proposed a network of pedestrian pathways, bike paths, promenades and a forest running trail. Mirasol is the Spanish word for “sun”, but literally means “look at the sun.” Mirasol Park encourages citizens and the community of Nashville to look toward a bright, active, multi-modal, connected and economically supported center along the Cumberland River. A healthier Nashville developed by a vibrant urban waterfront environment improves the land, reconnects the fabric of the neighborhoods and accommodates both flood and growth over time.
The two images on the left depict how the proposed design will accommodate and allow for flood on the site. The third image on the right depicts the current flood (at the time of the project).