The Alumnae Valley Landscape represents our firm's reworking of 13.5 acres of this campus over a seven-year period. The restoration confronts a history of contamination on this site and results in a new, ecologically functioning landscape structured by a remedial purification system.
When Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. surveyed Wellesley College in 1902, he saw a topography of glacial landforms, valley meadows, and native plant communities--campus characteristics he emphatically suggested be preserved. During the initial years of the college's development, the area now known as Alumnae Valley was a neglected remnant of that original landscape. Neglect soon became indifference, and in the ensuing decades the valley became the site for the college's physical plant, industrialized natural gas pumping, and ultimately, a parking lot over a toxic brownfield.
In 1997 we were hired to prepare a Master Plan for the college. In that report, the valley--at that time a parking lot for 175 cars--was indicated as a potential locus for new campus development. The siting of a campus center building to the north and a newfound focus on the pedestrian experience heightened the importance of the valley as both a visual and physical link between the hilltop nodes of campus life. We conceived of the plan to relocate those cars in a new garage as part of a future campus center.
The construction of a parking garage in association with the new campus center relieved the site of its burden as a car corral. However, the site's toxic history lay embedded, manifest in its soil. Removal of the asphalt parking lot promised to exhume the contaminants, as did excavation for the new structures. Hazardous soil was dealt with in two ways in our design: removal and in situ treatment. Heavily toxic soil was located, excavated, and removed offsite for treatment. Dense non-aqueous phase liquid, a byproduct of natural gas processing, found the ancient watershed beneath the parking lot and collected there. Pumping infrastructure was incorporated into the design, and toxic residue is periodically removed for treatment. Capped with clean fill, mildly contaminated soils could be kept on site and used as fill for a trio of meadow-planted, drumlin-like mounds. As a result, the entire site was raised 6 feet above the previous grade and a new wetland, the engine of our design, was artificially perched. Toxicity caused many problems, and each inspired a creative solution.
Parallel to the passive neglect of the twentieth century ran the destruction of the site's original hydrology that Olmsted so admired. The valley's role as a link between its 80-acre watershed and the adjacent Lake Waban was broken by an access road. The valley, after our project, is once again an intermittent wetland and more; a series of sedimentation forebays and basins hold and treat the site runoff water, which mingles with forbs, sedges, and cattails before trickling back into Lake Waban. A geosynthetic clay liner simultaneously seals contaminated soils and prevents water from prematurely returning to the original water table.
The restored Alumnae Valley again becomes part of the natural valley hydrological system that structures the form of the Wellesley campus. Not merely a restoration, the reconceptualization of the site included an understanding of its historical function: from glacial valley to industrial dumping ground to parking lot to a valley restored yet informed by its previous incarnations. Its use of topography as both a means of design solution and experiential enhancement underscores a landscape that is at once willfully artificial and unabashedly picturesque.
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Project Resources |
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Architect:
Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects
Civil Engineer:
Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. (VHB)
Geotechnical Engineer:
Haley & Aldrich, Inc.
Soil Scientist:
Pine & Swallow Associates, Inc.
General Contractor:
Richard White Sons, Inc.
Site Contractor:
Maxymillian Technologies |
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Electrical Engineer:
ARUP
Irrigation:
Irrigation Management & Services
Meadow Consultant:
Prairie Restorations, Inc.
Bamboo Consultant:
Susanne Lucas
Landscape Contractor:
ValleyCrest Landscape Development
Graphics and Signage Consultant:
H Plus Inc. |
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