Innovation, education, environment and marketing

Talk about turning necessity into virtue. The necessity is common: a construction project which needs to mitigate environmental impacts in order to comply with environmental regulations. Sometimes developers run out of space for the mitigation. The usual options are either offsite mitigation in an area that is somehow related to the project area or payment of a fee in some pot that could disappear in the general fund. Sometimes the issue are wetlands, sometimes stormwater, sometimes Critical Areas, traffic or trees under Maryland's reforestation rules.

Community in action for a better school

How to turn the neccessity into a virtue? Some developers understand that their projects can't thrive in isolation, an insight which developers Toby Bozzutto and  Scott Plank have declared a principle for their projects. They also applied it to the $100 million, 292 apartment building called Anthem House, which they recently completed in in Locust Point in partnership with a local school for which Scott Plank's War Horse company donated over a million dollars to improve the  public elementary and middle school with a wellness center.

Anthem House: Lost perimeter trees needed to be replaced under Critical
Area rules

But it was Mahan Rykiel, landscape architects (MRA), with their own Social Impact Studio, who took Anthem House as an opportunity to turn the necessity of having to make up for perimeter tree loss into a virtue by pushing offsite mitigation to an entirely new level.

MRA went all the way, including a catchy name, planting of 1,300 trees, shrubs and plants, a community build day attended by the mayor, a middle school, STEM, a curriculum a partnership with Bluewater Baltimore, metal fabricators, an avian urban ecologist, a press release, a video and a website.   And since yesterday also a D Center design conversation devoted to "Birdland", the name of the special offsite mitigation project.

So much "out of the box creative thinking"  caught even progressive developers such as Bozzutto and Plank off-guard before they jumped on this second wellness aspect as well, even though the $16,500 tree mitigation effort had ballooned into a $400,000 project, counting all pro-bono efforts and donations.

MRA President Richard Jones on TV at Rancis Scott Key

With such a big reach and effort it isn't surprising that Mahan Rykiel sees the project as a model of collaboration between the private side and the eternally cash-stripped public sector schools. A model for exposing students to career opportunities they don't otherwise easily see, thus creating the base for more diversity in the design profession that badly needs it.

There is a quantitative side to it as well: MRA had figured out that all Baltimore school-yards together add up to three times the size of Patterson Park, certainly an area large enough to think about, not just de-paving school yards for green but including flora and fauna as a practice field for students, incorporated in the curriculum in support of physical activity, creativity, science and the outdoors, especially learning about three especially targeted bird species.

Mayor Pugh at the community action day

When the Locust Point students at the Francis Scott Key Middle school were asked to design a birdhouse with wooden ice cream sticks, they responded: "I am not a builder". It is amazing "how hard it is for the kids to accept that somebody asks them to create something " says MRA President Richard Jones. But once students got into the spirit of creative making, Ryan Carver and Emily Reid of Gutierrez Studios who served on the jury  found it "hard to pick a winner" out of the 60 entries. Only two birdhouse designs could be picked to be built in metal in Gutierrez' studio without causing habitat overcrowding.

Enthusiasm is contagious.
MRA had dreaded the prospect that the planned community planting day would not bring out enough volunteers to plant all the 1,300 items that were sitting in front of the school and that their office colleagues would

Students, teachers, architects and bird house designs

have to be commandeered out to do the digging. But with the help of Bluewater's experience in planning such action days 290 people turned out and the work was done ahead of the scheduled end time. The affair not only went down without a hitch, it was also recognized by the Mayor by showing up, by CBS News, the Baltimore SUN and various other print media.

Turning necessity into a virtue can have a good return on an investment, even in a case that had pretty much gobbled up MRA's entire marketing budget. The outcome that strengthened community, gave the school an attractive front yard with four distinct learning environments and giving many students a sense that creating and learning can go hand in hand, using hand and mind was already worth it even before the experience is scaled up and applied eslewhere.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Project Birdland
'Project Birdland' transforms Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School
Landscape Architecture Magazine