Season 3
COMMON GROUND: A LIVE RECORDING
In this live episode of Land Language, we sit down with landscape architect, Kate Forester, of Herrera and architect, Laura Squillace, of Green Hammer. Kate works with rivers, wetlands, and habitat corridors at municipal scale. Laura designs zero-energy and regenerative buildings, including a senior living community going for Living Building certification. Together, they explore One Water, climate-adaptive solutions, and what happens when our disciplines collaborate.
" Sustainability is a term that we've used for decades that has meant to indicate that it's better for the planet, but what it actually means is that it's a zero-sum game. You're doing less harm. And so the word regenerative helps us reframe the problem and say, 'How can we have a net positive impact on the planet and the people?"
—Laura Squillace
Both guests came to this work through a specific piece of land. Laura moved from the Bay Area to Big Sur in high school and lived on her great uncle's homestead, which is where she started asking how people could live inside wilderness gently.
Kate spent her early years in a one-room cabin on the edge of BLM land. When she went back, the property had been logged and a wild strawberry hill she treasured was covered in garbage. She decided going forward that her work would be about repair.
Topics include:
The net positive water building
Living Machines
Climate-adaptive solutions
Oak savanna on landscape time
Early collaboration on a budget
" There is no real wastewater. There is no stormwater. There's just One Water that is there for all of us."
—Kate Forester
This episode is a working conversation involving multiple disciplines that need each other, about designing buildings and landscapes as one system.
Kate Forester is a principal landscape architect at Herrera Environmental Consultants, an interdisciplinary science, planning, and design firm. She also serves as a current co-chair for the Oregon Association for Landscape Architects (ASLA) Climate Biodiversity and Action Committee (CBAC). Kate is passionate about bringing ecological tools and knowledge to the field of landscape architecture to help our profession adapt, collaborate and effectively step up to the environmental challenges we face.
Laura is an architect and Co-Director of Design at Green Hammer Design Build in Portland, Oregon. Specializing in sustainable architecture, she designs healthy, biophilic buildings that are inspired by and integrated with nature’s beauty and regenerative systems. She is a certified Sustainable Homes Professional and a leading member of the Portland Materials Transparency Collaborative (PMTC), through which she advocates for full disclosure of building material ingredients and impacts on human and ecological health.
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