An Arts Portfolio, 2013

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Jonathan Andrews
00 Introduction
01 Physical
02 Visual
03 Verbal
04 Additional Notes
2
Index
00
Introduction
The work in this portfolio spans three broadly defined categories
the physical, visual, and verbal. They are largely chronological, and
flow largely from the practical to the more theoretical.
Documenting everything from my four years as an organic farmer,
to Harvards Career Discovery Program, to my own writing, it
presents a span of my energies across numerous fields. The
selection is unified by its focus on spatial awareness, aesthetics,
and intellectual interest (along with a few other odds and ends).
Jonathan
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01 Physical
FOR FOUR YEARS, I worked on a variety of organic farms and gardens in the
Hudson Valley in New York state the following pictures and captions document
only some of my work over the years. While I developed skills and a lot of practical
experience, what I ultimately gained was an understanding of the farm as a site of
overlapping social, economic, and ecological systems. This comprehension,
developed over time through hands-on experience, is what ultimately drew me away
from farming and towards design.
View of Four Winds Farm, 2012
The Stone Barns Center
From January 2009 till December 2012, I worked on and off at the Stone
Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY, as both an
intern and later employee. The Center represents the bulk of my agricultural
career, incredibly formative in my understanding of the farm not only as a
productive space, but as a public and educational one as well.
The Stone
Barns
Center,
2011.
Founded in 2004 as a farm education
center by David Rockefeller, the Stone
Barns Center is dedicated to the
preservation of American farmland. Its
mission includes raising public awareness
about sustainable food production,
training young farmers, and educating
children to encourage land stewardship in
the future.
I was taken on as a full-time Apprentice in
late spring of 2011, working on the farms
! acre Terrace space. There I grew a
variety of crops, from culinary herbs and
sungold tomatoes to hothouse ginger. The
space was primarily dedicated to cut
flowers and herbal teas, which were sold
at the on-farm market.
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Stone Barns on-site farm market, where I would sell
my flowers and dried teas; foraging pigs in the
woods surrounding the Center.
I was also responsible as a farm educator, leading tour groups, teaching classes and
helping host groups of campers. Stone Barns is as much a place of learning as it is a
place of agriculture, and arguably my work as a teacher was just as important as
my work as a grower.
Additionally, as a public farm Stone Barns had a responsibility to maintain both its
accessibility and appearance. The agricultural work took on a horticulture spin and
served multiple functionsproductive growing space performed the secondary
function of looking beautiful, helping to attract visitors. Functional aesthetic was an
important part of the farming culture at Stone Barns.
The Terraces
greenhouse-
grown ginger,
along with a
satisfied
customer.
My experience at Stone Barns brought two
perspectives first, learning to balance the needs
of production with issues of public access and
aesthetic, teaching me the various ways in which
a landscape (even a productive one,) can perform.
Second, understanding the relationship between
a farm and its surrounding communities and
systems (be they social, economic, and ecological).
I learned and how each can support (or hinder)
the other, and ultimately the interconnectivity
between a designated site and its surroundings.
These lessons brought depth to my experience at
Stone Barns, yet I appreciated this place above
all else for its dual intellectual and hands-on
nature I could pose theoretical questions
concerning ecology and conservation while still
getting my hands dirty. Whats more, the
Centers aesthetic look gave me an opportunity
for creative expression thats often missing on
other farms.
Video of Jonathan at Stone Barns
http://vimeo.com/37267813
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Bouquets I had
made;
Jonathan
Andrews as
professional
chicken
wrangler, circa
2011.
Purchase College/Four Winds Farm
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While working at Stone Barns, I was
simultaneously managing a small student garden at
Purchase College. My time there (from 2010 to
2011,) became an extension of my work at Stone
Barns much more than running a school growing
space, I worked with interns and local growers,
taught classes on gardening, and found myself
functioning more as an educator than farmer.
The next year I moved north to work at
Four Winds Farm, an organic vegetable
grower outside of New Paltz, NY.
Specializing in heirloom tomatoes and
utilizing no-till growing practices, Four
Winds followed a much more straight
forward model, selling its produce at
market. While I no longer had the
opportunity to work as an educator, I
gained perspective on the economic
challenges and opportunities facing
young farmers in upstate New York,
and spent time engaging with that
community. In addition to my job, I was
also interning with garden writer Dr.
Lee Reich, studying soil science,
horticulture and fruit tree cultivation
in my spare time.
Ultimately, my desire for greater
creative and intellectual freedom took
me away from farming and towards
design. Yet while I may have left
agriculture, my training in plants, food
production and ecology (not to mention
basic commonsense and know-how,)
was invaluable. I wouldnt trade it for
anything in the world.
Four
Winds
Farm,
2011.
02
Visual:
Sketches
VISUAL ART IS A NEW FIELD FOR ME. I started sketching for the first time in
May of 2012, while still farming in upstate New York. I approached it with the
understanding that learning to draw would be essential to prepare myself for
graduate study. Yet while this was the catalyst for learning, it happened that I
really enjoyed doing so once I started.
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Teaching myself through a combination of
instructional books, advice from friends, and the
odd art class, I found learning to draw both
challenging and engaging. It taught me a lot about
perceiving and viewing, informing my other
creative endeavors such as poetry and fiction, and
providing me with a better sense of space,
composition, and visual comprehension.
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I SPENT THE SUMMER OF 2013 AT
HARVARDS CAREER DISCOVERY PROGRAM,
a six-week long design introduction course with a
focus in landscape architecture. The work
presented here represents two of the three
projects assigned to us over the course of the
program.
The first assignment is a hypothetical design
project, based upon the research and analysis of
an ecological process. After selecting a process,
students would develop a theoretical site to show
the process at work, then propose a design
intervention to alter it. In my case, I chose water
runoff and pollution from coal slurry dams in
Appalachian mining communities.
The second assignment was developing a plan for
the revitalization of the Brickbottom
neighborhood in Somerville, MA. Choosing to
focus on the districts industrial past and
reimagining its local transportation and waste
infrastructure, my final design for the project
was called Trash Park.
02 Visual:
Career
Discovery
My interest in researching water contamination from coal mining plants initially
stemmed from my fascination with Appalachian history, particularly its folk songs and
labor movements. It is a region with a long political and environmental history, with a
past intimately tied to coal mining. Thus, when the time came to choose an ecological
process, I was naturally drawn to the ecological effects of coal.
Using my basic understanding of the regions history as a jump-off point, run-off and
groundwater infiltration from coal slurry dams quickly emerged as a major
environmental issue, and became the focal point of my research.
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Project 01
Coal Dam
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A coal slurry dam, or slurry impoundment, is a conventional method of storing
waste water left over from coal treatment plants. The highly-toxic slurry (which
contains a mix of dirt, coal particulate and various chemicals,) is stored in
massive outdoor ponds, often placed in natural valleys through the damming up
of adjacent mountains. Despite required safety precautions, groundwater
infiltration, contaminated runoff, and the occasional dam break are not
uncommon occurrences at these sites.
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The design not only alters an ecological process, it also creates public space and the opportunity for
educational and recreational programming.
My hypothetical intervention would
transform the one massive pond into a series
of smaller treatment stages, using rhizo- and
phytoremediation strategies to absorb toxins
and curtail groundwater seepage.
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The design not only alters an ecological
process, it also creates public space and the
opportunity for educational and recreational
programming. Following the flow of
contaminated water downhill through the
remediating wetlands, a series of descending
footpaths allows visitors to trace the flowing
water as it makes its way back into rivers,
streams, and the local aquifer.
Besides cleaning contaminated water and
offering outdoor access to the public, the
design also creates wetland habitat for birds
and other wildlife, compensating for the
ecological destruction caused by mountaintop
removal, a common strip-mining practice used
widely in Appalachia.
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Project 02
Trash Park
Whereas the first project worked in the
hypothetical, the second takes on an
actual site in the Brickbottom
neighborhood of Somerville, MA. A post-
industrial site long stripped of the brick
factories and slaughterhouses that once
defined it, the final design took
inspiration from both Brickbottoms
history and the last industry to leave the
neighborhood, waste disposal.
Design strategies were developed around
a dual focus on waste management and
transportation infrastructure in the
neighborhood and surrounding city. It
was playing with concept of garbage that
gave the project its final name Trash
Park.
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With the closure of the Somerville Waste
Management facility, Bostons trash now travels
much farther to a processing site in Revere, well
beyond the citys center.
Left: Detail of McGrath Highway traffic
flows, note how map is divided virtually in
two by the highways presence.
As it stands, the Brickbottom district
occupies an urban edge it is physically
isolated by the elevated McGrath Highway
and the railways that surround it,
suffering from limited public
transportation and pedestrian access. With
the closure of the Somerville Waste
Management facility in July, the
neighborhood consists largely of half-empty
lots, auto-repair shops, a handful of artists
studios and the odd municipal building.
Yet the district sits barely a mile outside of
downtown Boston, and with the incoming
Somerville Community Path and the
MBTA Green Line Extension, visibility and
access to the neighborhood will soon
increase dramatically.
R
a
il L
in
e

Cambridge
Somerville
Revere
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Factoring in the sites industrial past,
its physical isolation, the pressures of
urban waste removal and the
neighborhoods need for public space,
Trash Park addresses these concerns
through two distinct strategies.
The first strategy reverses the
traditional model of taking waste out of
our communities instead, it places it
in our midst. Brickbottoms former
Waste Management facility is
transformed into a municipal
composting/community center. It
simultaneously addresses issues of
food waste in the Greater Boston Area,
while also functioning as a site of local
events, community meetings, classes,
recreation, workshops and more.
By focusing community development
around this composting center, we turn
garbage into a participatory
experience, challenges visitors
preconceptions of trash and rendering
the normally invisible process of waste
removal into something tangible and
everyday.
Using an aerated static-pile
windrow system, the
proposed composting
center could manage
around 250,000 tons per
year. Thats more than a
third of the Greater Boston
areas compostable
waste including all food
waste generated by the
citys twenty-plus colleges
and universities that are
shown here.
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The project's second concern is reinterpreting local transit
infrastructure. By altering existing traffic and pedestrian flows
around the elevated highways pylons, the design both creates new
public space and stitches together what had been two distinct
areas on either side of the highway.
This alteration, in addition to transforming Poplar Street into a
pedestrian walkway and wetland grass planting, addresses the
communitys desire for more green space. It encourages
accessibility and foot traffic, and anticipates incoming development
with the Green Line Extension and Somerville Community Path.
Composting
Windrows
Community
Center
Wetland Grass Planting
McGrath Highway
Corridor
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Bike lanes, expanded sidewalks, on-
street parking, but especially
reimagining the intersection and
unused space beneath the highway
itself, are all used to radically alter
the McGrath Corridor and its
relationship to the neighborhood.
The pylons and elevated roadway
are exploited for their shade and
microclimate potential, transforming
a formerly inhospitable spot into an
pedestrian walking area. An
intrinsic part of the design, it unifies
the composting facility and
community center into a single,
cross-highway space.
Community Center
Composting Site
McGrath Highway
Underplanting
The elevated highway is
represented by pylons for
sake of visibility.
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Working with pre-existing traffic patterns, the highway
underplanting creates a living archipelago of traffic
isles, as a means of enabling greater pedestrian access.
Utilizing a hardy mix of grasses and shrubs, the new
plan breaks up the concrete hardscape, captures runoff
and encourages the sense of spatial continuity, travelling
from the neighborhoods western border into the main
park along the former Poplar Street (now a pedestrian
walking area).
Composting Site
(Below)
Medford St.
Somerville
Ave.
Locust Grove
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The park features the usage of existing topography,
channeling water-flows downhill into a series of
plantings consisting of both selected wetland grasses,
along with a more mixed woodland environment. The
planting would use species already existing on site,
both native and non-native, in the final design.
Mixed Planting
Black Locust Grove
Vine Trellis/Small
Garden
W
a
t
e
r

F
e
a
t
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r
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Ultimately, the park looks towards
the future Trash Park is intended
to be flexible, leaving room in its
design for staggered development
and expansion options. Shown are
two of these plans: one for tree
management practices in the Black
Locust Grove, the second
hypothetical model for
infrastructural, green-space and
other development opportunities
over a thirty year period.
Future development
possibilities.
03
Verbal
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Though it may seem strange to include samples of written work in
a design portfolio, the relationship between writing and landscape
architecture is actually quite strong (though not readily apparent).
Both disciplines focus heavily on narrative, and at their heart
strive for the successful conveyance of concepts and ideas from
creator to viewer. At its most simplistic level, each field offers a
specific mode of story telling one visual, tactile, and experiential,
the other aural, rhythmic, and lyrical.
Yet there is still more crossover between the two. The use of
spatiality in writing (be it typography, format, font, etc,.) is just as
essential as the words the author uses, especially in poetry. It
affects flow, timing and rhythm, can layer in nuance and meaning,
and ultimately shapes (if not defines,) the readers interpretation
of a work. Even the dimensions of the page or book itself can effect
the poems physicality and thus its reading.
From Concrete Poetry to Futurism and Dadaism, to contemporary
writers such as Anne Carson, Gregory Corso, and Kamau
Brathwaite, we realize that the manipulation of typography to
alter a poems emotional or intellectual content is hardly a new
idea. While my own writing is not as radical in layout or format as
some of these authors, my poems remain concerned with issues of
spatiality, and draw heavily from these influences.
Samples of film criticism are
included as a supplement.
In 2010 I began exploring the effects of different page
sizes on my writing, noting that subtle shifts in the format
of a page could direct the visual flow of the poem in new
ways. Leaving Crete was a simple 90-degree rotation of
the conventional up-down rectangular page, leading me to
a try a broader, zigzag arch from the pages top to bottom.
This is the first page of an extended narrative-poem from 2012 entitled Astyanax. In exploring the
loss of a child, the concept was to use a small, condensed language against a landscape of white,
focusing the poems emotional energy onto a single, hardened point, one page after another. The
effect is diminished by reformatting, but the idea can still be grasped.
Astyanax









My grandmother never talked much about the stillbirth.
Indeed, the fact of it was only brought to my attention by a
careless relative. While it is easy to give into the temptation of
placing the occurrence in the context of a historical episode (a
given specific time, place, and list of involved parties), rarely
are these things so simple for those affected by it.
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04 Additional Notes
Jonathan Andrews lives in Brooklyn.
631.879.7098
jandrews627@gmail.com
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