Surveys, Review Boards and Retaining Walls

This week has flown by with better progress than I had hoped. The group has begun to divide and concor and I think everyone has found interested in their responsibilities. The presentation could not have gone better on Tuesday night considering the state of disfunction we were just prior to walking into City Hall. I think we, as a group, now recognize the development that we need to have in order to move forward. Earlier, it was not always clear as to the next step in our process considering our inexperience with real worl design build applications.

Yesterday a faction of the Clemson crew surveyed the site in the dark. I don't even think Professor Sarasua thought we'd be idiots enough to try and survey our site on a cold Thursday...but we were, and we did. Our contour map will answer our questions about grading and fill needed for our landscape plan.

Today we talked about several differnt options for retaining walls since we can't use the recycled bottles or can bails. Initially I thought recycled aggregate would work, but a large concrete wall is not the aesthetic look we are designing for in this park. Jeff has found product data and researched gabion(loose rock walls contained in wire mesh) to use similar to the recycled bottle bails. From the structural diagrams and case studies on the interent, it looks like the cost and installation will be perfect for our application. I'm a little worried about the availability of some of these rocks in our area. As we researched, I remembered a vegitative wall in Madrid, Spain from my study abroad. Patrick Blanc, a french artist, designs vertical gardens on buildings all over europe and on a much simpler scale, I think the open cell design of these gabions will be perfect for some type of landscape intervention. My initial thought from some research was a berry of some sort to attract wildlife, but Jeff and I are both concerned with kids eating the berries...which would not be good. Either using some type of vine, planted in soil, built into the gabions, or fabricating pots that adhere to the mesh themselves, we could use the wall as a canvas to create shapes, messages or other designs...possibly with imput from students in the community.

http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/mainen.php
http://www.gabions.net/downloads/Documents/MGS_Color_020305.pdf

I found this website that discusses all kinds of gardeing possibilities in retaining walls and with more research, I think some of the plants mentioned might serve us some good. Ultimately, I believe we might need to talk someone at the Botanical Gardens with suggestions of local plants that will accomodate our needs. Most sites seem to suggest the most important factor in design is the local climate.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/nwest/msg071510479505.html