The Historic Preservation Professional Practice Network (PPN) - Part 2: Member Profiles 2008
This article is the ninth in a series profiling members of ASLA’s Professional Practice Networks (PPNs), based on responses to the 2008 Annual PPN Survey. The summary for this PPN is continued from the previous edition.

The Historic Preservation PPN serves two primary functions: disseminating information to landscape architects, allied professionals, government agencies, and others interested in historic landscape preservation issues and studies; and enhancing communication among allied professionals and others interested in historic preservation.

The PPN was instrumental in establishing the Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) that is administered by the National Park Service. The PPN spearheaded the development of HALS guidelines and works with HALS chapter liaisons who are creating a state-by-state inventory of potential HALS sites.

Below, members of the PPN share information about their practices, including recent achievements, activities, and challenges.

Edward C. Martin Jr., FASLA, is Landscape Architecture Professor Emeritus from Mississippi State University. He earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Georgia. Professional highlights include hosting garden tours to Europe since 1981, including 20 such tours for the Jeff Sainsbury Tours from 1996-2005. In 1985 in England he participated in the Attingham Summer Program in Historic Preservation of English Country Houses.

In 2001, Martin and his wife moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, and in the spring of 2003 he began part-time work as Garden Tour Guide at the Biltmore Estate, which he cites as the most enriching experience of his professional career.

Susan Crook, ASLA, is a principal at IO Design Collaborative in St. George, Utah. The firm specializes in landscape preservation with an emphasis on sustainable planning and design solutions. Among Crook’s recent activities are delivering a lecture in April 2008 with her associate, Robin Carbaugh, about the Salt Lake City Cemetery HALS at the Utah Heritage Foundation Preservation Conference and teaching a twice-yearly three-day landscape preservation workshop with her partner, Shalae Larsen, at the Traditional Building Skills Institute, Snow College in Ephraim, Utah.

The firm recently won a small victory for sustainable design when it gained approval for a nontraditional planting plan for Taylor's Bike Shop in Riverton, Utah. With a receptive municipality, architect, engineer, and owner, IO Design addressed parking lot storm runoff with a bioswale instead of directly piping it into the storm sewer. The team used native and adapted plants for the project rather than resource-intensive turfgrass and foundation plantings.

Michael A. Bender, ASLA, is senior landscape architect at Dream Design International Inc. in Rapid City, South Dakota. Bender is a member of the Rapid City Preservation Commission and has been an advocate of landscape preservation for many years. Some of his firm's projects focus on the preservation of cultural landscapes such as historic cemeteries, vernacular landscapes, and other historic properties. Bender recently authored the "Cemetery Design and Preservation" section of the latest publication of Landscape Architecture Graphic Standards.

Bender notes that his firm has been working on the preservation master plan for St. Ambrose Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. The Catholic cemetery (circa 1880) has many of the town's forefathers and important families buried there. During the assessment of the cemetery, team members used handheld GIS units to document grave markers, their condition, and preservation recommendations. This information will eventually be connected to the City's GIS data and be a valuable tool for genealogical research, as well as a means to monitor marker conditions in the future.

Kyle S. Zick, ASLA, is a senior associate at Carol R. Johnson Associates Inc. in Boston. He specializes in developing design solutions for historic sites for a variety of federal, state, municipal, and nonprofit clients.

Zick received the 2007 Boston Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for the Historic Rehabilitation of the North Bridge Cultural Landscape in Concord, Massachusetts, and a 2001 ASLA Honor Award for the Historic Rehabilitation of the Battle Road Trail in Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington, Massachusetts.

Other notable projects include improvements to a historic city park in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; rehabilitation of the Civil War-era bluestone paving within Fort Warren (part of the Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area); restoration of the Olmsted Brothers-designed gardens for the Dey Mansion in Wayne, New Jersey; and rehabilitation of the Civilian Conservation Corps-constructed Seawall and Blackwoods campgrounds in Acadia National Park.

Ned Crankshaw, ASLA, is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Kentucky Department of Landscape Architecture in Lexington. Crankshaw notes that, in addition to design studios, he teaches a course in historic landscape preservation. He is also a member of the Historic Preservation faculty and serves on thesis committees in Historic Preservation. He specializes in design and planning for rural cultural landscapes and the historic districts of towns and small cities.

Among recent accomplishments, Crankshaw received the 2007 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis along with Parsons Brinckerhoff for the Lower Howard's Creek Corridor Management Plan in Clark County, Kentucky. He also has a forthcoming book from Island Press titled Creating Vibrant Public Spaces: Streetscape Design in Historic and Commercial Districts.

Crankshaw finds that historic and cultural landscape values are an important motivating force for increases in public action. Outside of the design professions, many people have a difficult time distinguishing the characteristics that form high quality, livable environments. However, they intuitively understand the value of cultural landscapes in rural and urban places, according to Crankshaw. He has witnessed this phenomenon, as historic landscape preservation is aligned with the planning and management of quality urban and rural landscapes.

David J. Driapsa, ASLA, founded David J. Driapsa Landscape Architect, a cultural landscape research, planning, and design consulting practice based in Naples, Florida. Driapsa served as HP-PPN chair, cochair, and vice chair and is currently serving as district officer for the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) in Florida and as member-at-large of the Florida Chapter Executive Committee as HALS Subcommittee Chair. He will succeed Susan Crook as the HP-PPN national coordinator of HALS liaisons during the 2008 ASLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Driapsa participated at the 2007 ASLA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in the panel discussion and education session titled "Establishing the Historic American Landscapes Survey." For more information, go to www.davidjdriapsa.com.

Mary Krochmalny Everett, ASLA, is a junior associate in the landscape architecture division at Keith and Schnars PA in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While her work at an engineering firm that focuses on transportation and municipal work may seem unrelated to historic preservation, Everett feels that professionals can appreciate the presence and fragility of historic layers in any project. She believes that sensitivity to this in her division has led to thoughtful project designs, including a culturally unique cemetery in a vulnerable location by an interstate highway.

Everett‘s landscape architecture division was awarded a contract by the Florida Department of Transportation for an ambitious highway corridor visual landscape study. She finds it an honor to work on such a project at a critical turning point in how Americans perceive their visual resources and land use.

Everett says that HALS was the program that deepened her commitment to the history evident in the landscape. HALS also provided an opportunity for her to be part of the solution in Florida, where much of cultural ecology has either been erased or is in imminent peril. Everett joined a team of dedicated people who have begun listing and documenting the historic landscape sites within the state of Florida. She looks forward to the experience and to growing HALS in her state.

Jenn Thomas, Student ASLA, is currently a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Denver. She is working at the Visual Resource Center in the College of Architecture and Planning, scanning slides and cataloging images for the school's digital library. Following graduation, Thomas hopes to be a researcher/historian and documentarian for cultural landscapes.

The working title of her thesis is, “The Education of Jane Silverstein Ries at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Groton, Massachusetts, 1928-1932." The Lowthorpe School operated from 1901-1945. During her thesis work, Jenn helped an architectural preservation consultant, Sanford Johnson, with some of the historical narrative about the school and its grounds for his recently completed area survey for the Massachusetts Historical Commission. She has recently joined the board of directors of the Jane Silverstein Ries Foundation and is helping to plan a spring 2009 exhibit about Jane Silverstein Ries’s career. Thomas will also present a paper about her thesis at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture 2009 conference in January.

This summer, Thomas worked with University of Colorado professor Ann Komara’s studio class to document photographically the conditions of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp on private land in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. She will graduate this fall.