Senior associate: Barbara Oakrock
Specialties: Urbanist landscapes for multi-family housing and communities

GGLO Architects has added a landscape group to its design staff, hiring landscape architect Barbara Oakrock as lead. As regulations have matured and landscape and site design guidelines have firmed up, the design professions do well work closely together, she said.

As an architecture and landscape architecture team, the firm is at work on four new high density multi-family housing projects in Denver, a business park and conference center in Yelm called Prairie Park Center, High Point redevelopment grant application for Seattle Housing Authority and Lake City Village, also for SHA.

"The past 20 years of urbanization in American cities has reduced the expectation of the kind of places people have to come home to," said Oakrock, "And the perception is that density is the culprit."

Collaboration between architects and landscape architects can help to reverse that perception, she said. The most important elements are: "a strong central focus for sites and neighborhoods, scaled for everyday use; a clear and strollable street network; a pattern of lots and buildings sizes which supports density without crowding; a diversity of dwellings within blocks and uses within buildings; great streets and street facades, a principled and buildable approach to urban ecology, and a rich patina of living materials."

While these fundamentals are widely accepted they are rarely accomplished, she said. Economics, regulations, market perceptions, site program, and even site geometry get in the way-and too often landscape architects are very late to the table. But when architecture and surrounding spaces-streets, squares, open-space-are formed together, they become the positive and negative aspects of the same successful design.