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“For rent — one house. Pre-furnished. Must be willing to get the heck out again in six months.”
Well, that’s what the sign on Lisa Geyelin’s front door could read next semester. After submitting her application to take part in Temple University Ambler’s study abroad program for landscape architecture students at Heriot-Watt University/Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, she has received final word that she will indeed be heading overseas for her last semester in the Landscape Architecture program.
“It’s very exciting. I still need to determine my classes and go through the process of registering,” Lisa said. “I also need to find someone to rent my house without having to move all of my stuff out.”
Planning for a trip overseas, however, is anything but easy.
“It’s not so much the fact that I’m going to be away for six months; it’s more all of the things that I have to do before I leave,” Lisa said. “When I was younger, I’m not sure I would have been quite so prepared. Today, I’m very ready for the change and the opportunity.”
Preparation tends to be par for the course when you’re helping run your mother’s landscape business at least three mornings a week, working on four or five landscape designs of your own on the side, and taking a full load of classes on top of it. Not bad for someone who did a fine job of portraying a dead person at the Landscape Architecture and Horticulture Association’s recent — and highly successful — Haunted House, which transformed Cottage Hall into a chamber of horrors and netted the association several thousand dollars to support their efforts throughout the year.
“I was working in and around the coffin scene,” she said. “We took turns on who was actually in the coffin. That was a prime job!”
Meanwhile, back in the classroom, it’s been all about rocks, restoration, and redevelopment.
“In Geology, we began with rocks and minerals and have since moved on to the Earth’s interior — geothermal forces. As far as understanding the inner workings of land formations, that’s helpful for a landscape architect,” she said. “It’s an enjoyable and informative class and is relevant to my career. We’ve been getting in to reading maps and I already have an ‘in’ there. I’ve been drawing and mapping plants for years.”
In Landscape Restoration, Lisa has been studying forest restoration, a surprisingly touchy subject with some.
“We’ve been examining Fairmount Park and other examples that are close to home, which is helpful. If you want to actually see the examples up close, you can take that opportunity,” Lisa said. “Forest restoration is a controversial topic with some people, at least with regard to the public’s view of restoration. In Chicago, which has the longest history of grassroots restoration programs, they wanted to get rid of invasive trees.”
For the prolonged health of the forest, Lisa said, a series of prescribed burns — intentionally set, and controlled, fires — had been proposed to destroy the plant life that shouldn’t have been growing in the forest to begin with.
“That, of course drew some criticism for individuals who didn’t quite understand the intention of the project. At its face it looked like they were destroying trees, not working to preserve the forest,” she said. “We’ve since moved on to stream restoration, which I’ve already done a lot of research on for last year’s (Philadelphia) Flower Show. We’ve broken up into teams in class to develop a proposed restoration plan for an area stream.”
In American Landscape Traditions Lisa has been studying the “City Beautiful” movement, which began in America in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. For Lisa, that’s meant becoming intimately knowledgeable about Logan Circle and Logan Square in Philadelphia for a term paper on the subject.
“It was one of William Penn’s original five squares, with City Hall as the center square. Logan Square, named for James R. Logan, was the northwest square,” she said. “Logan Circle was part of the whole parkway movement, which was originally conceived in about 1890. It took about 30 years to develop.”
The study of historic Philadelphia ties directly into Lisa’s Senior Studio. Her major project this year is to develop a design for the Schuylkill riverfront between the Art Museum and South Street.
“Philadelphia is starting to put money into public spaces the way they did 100 years ago. They’re finally starting to see the economic potential after the effects of the 50’s and 60’s, when everything was designed for cars,” she said. “For the Schuylkill River corridor and 30th Street, pedestrians weren’t even thought about at all. The idea now is to integrate areas like the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, and 30th Street with Center City, the Museum District, the Parkway, and Rittenhouse Square.”
The students in Lisa’s design studio have spent the semester exploring how the city must spend money in order to make money on the Schuylkill riverfront.
“You have to really put money into the area before businesses are going to want to invest. You need to increase density in order to support increased commercial space,” she said. “It’s a fun project with a lot of challenges. You are working with different grades, differences of 30 to 40 feet in some places. There are some areas that are hard to get down to.”
Lisa hasn’t kept the project to just theoretical data either.
“We’ve made more than a half a dozen trips, a couple hours each time. I don’t think you can do a project — in class or out of class — without truly knowing what you’re working with,” she said. “In reality, you are going to work with existing conditions — there really is a different feel to different parts of the river. I think it’s fun to work with a place, to respond to and respect the feeling of the space.”
This is the second part of an "A Year in the Life” series featuring Lisa Geyelin. Lisa, who lives in Wayne, received a B.S. degree in Landscape Architecture in 2005.
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