Hohmann, Heidi

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hhohmann@iastate.edu
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Title
Associate Professor
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Organizational Unit
Department of Landscape Architecture
Landscape Architecture is an environmental design discipline. Landscape architects actively shape the human environment: they map, interpret, imagine, draw, build, conceptualize, synthesize, and project ideas that transform landscapes. The design process involves creative expression that derives from an understanding of the context of site (or landscape) ecosystems, cultural frameworks, functional systems, and social dynamics. Students in our program learn to change the world around them by re-imagining and re-shaping the landscape to enhance its aesthetic and functional dimensions, ecological health, cultural significance, and social relevance. The Department of Landscape Architecture was established as a department in the Division of Agriculture in 1929. In 1975, the department's name was changed to the Department of Landscape Architecture and Community Planning. In 1978, community planning was spun off from the department, and the Department of Landscape Architecture became part of the newly established College of Design. Dates of Existence: 1929–present
About

Publications

Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
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Solving the "Recreation Problem:" The Development of the National Recreation Area

2016-06 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

As the National Park Service evolved, recreation became an increasingly important, if not fully stated part of the agency's mission. By the 1930s the NPS was seeking to solve the "recreation problem," or the need to provide recreation facilities to an industrializing nation whose workers enjoyed unprecedented leisure time. Expansion and experimentation resulted in the development of new park typologies, among them the recreation area, which was distinct from previous park types in its lesser "caliber" of scenic value and greater focus on active pursuits. Throughout the 1940s, the recreation area concept expanded as the NPS collaborated with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers in the creation of reservoir recreation areas. These developments, however, became increasing controversial in the wake of the Echo Park Dam controversy, leading to a four-year review of federal recreation activities by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission and the subsequent creation of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. As a result the National Recreation Area (NRA) was redefined as a general class of federal lands outside the sole purview of the NPS. Today there are forty NRAs of disparate size and character, located in wilderness, rural, and urban areas, and managed by the NPS, the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFS). Explicating the complicated history of the NRA, using such examples as Lake Mead, Glen Canyon, Chickasaw, and Gateway National Recreation Areas, expands our understanding of the NPS in the post-World War II era beyond the usual "Mission 66" story. An awareness of the historical context for this typology is also important as these resources, congressionally designated after 1963, become eligible for inclusion on the National Register.

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Landscape Architecture: A Terminal Case?

2005-04-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Langhorst, Joern , Department of Landscape Architecture

Late last year, two faculty members at Iowa State University circulated a manifesto to other departments of landscape architecture, charging that the field has outlived its historic purpose. Read excerpts from the manifest below, then read what Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA; Peter Jacobs, FASLA; Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA; Patrick A. Miller, FASLA; James Palmer, FASLA; Steven Velegrinis; and Peter Walker, FASLA, and Jane Gillette had to say in response.

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It's a Pale Shadow of a Real, Functioning River

2004-02-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

If the River Returns Project were a new design, its greatest weakness-the artificiality of the water system - would be clear. Some critics would decry the ersatz river as a pale shadow of a real, functioning riverine system, while others would complain that the mechanized nature of the park should be revealed, rather than hidden under a thin veneer of "ecological design." As new design, the project would, critically, be dead in the water.

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Critic at Large: Slouching Toward Minneaplois

2003-01-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

The Federal Courthouse Plaza (FCP) in Minneapolis is a typical Martha Schwartz project. Critically acclaimed, it uses a minimalist design vocabulary, innovates with new materials, and expands on theoretical ideas she has previously explored. Located between the late modernist federal courthouse by Kohn Pedersen Fox to the north and the Richardsonian Romanesque city hall to the south, the half-block plaza was designed and constructed fo the Government Services Administration.

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Considering Change and Context in the Preservation of Road Landscapes

2016-01-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , He Ming-yi, He , Liang, Wang , Department of Landscape Architecture

The literature of cultural landscapes contains abundant road studies by Jackson, Clay, and others. However, the actual preservation of transportation corridors poses numerous challenges, most of which stem from their long and narrow character: although preservation of a road's structures(roadbed, curbs and culverts) may be straightforward due to their relative simplicity and the road's jurisdiction under a single agency, preservation of the corridor context is usually more difficult, due to its vast expanse, myriad stakeholders, and rapid change. Situated in larger social and environmental networks of communication and transportation and affected by rapid technology change, roads are "fast change" landscapes, their use, experience and character evolving over time. Given such changes how can preservation be accomplished—or justified—over the long distances of transportation corridors? Four case studies from the United States explicate preservation challenges at local, regional and national scales. Discussion of parkways, scenic byways, and highways describes preservation approaches that permit ongoing transformation and evolution of these resources.

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Negoiated Stories in Public Space

2005-01-01 , Paxson, Lynn , Juhasz, Joseph , Kyber, Ashley , Hohmann, Heidi , Robinson, Clare , Department of Landscape Architecture , Department of Architecture

Design professionals and environmental social scientists understand the human modified environment as a material production of cultures. As a result, we also support the idea of spaces as communicative. The contextually defined relations between objects, places, and people communicate the values, decisions, and choices made throughout a broadly defined process of placemaking. Places have meanings, they tell stories. Thus "narrating" is one aspect or part of deCerteau's conception of spatial practices (de Certeau, 1984, xiv). Yet because values differ, the same place may tell different stories to different people.

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An Apocalyptic Manifesto

2004-01-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Langhorst, Joern , Department of Landscape Architecture

A Terminal Case? At the start of the 21st century, landscape architecture is a troubled profession, more distinguished by what it lacks than the qualities that it actually possesses. It has no historiography, no formal theory, no definition, direction, or focus. A vast schism currently exists between its academics and professional practitioners. In universities across the nation, researchers poach methodologies from other, more vibrant disciplines. Meanwhile, in professional offices, designers yoked to the bottom line crank out pedestrian design.

We believe these problems are pervasive and chronic. They indicate that landscape architecture is not just troubled, but sick. The condition of the patient is critical, requiring immediate attention.

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City United, Park Fragmented

2010-01-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

The Common Cry of Urban Development, "if you want to make an omelette, you've got to break some eggs," definitely applies to Boston's Big Dig, which has been an eggbeater in the heart of Boston for the past 20 years. Today the benefits of the demolition are clearly apparent in the open spaces of the Rose Kennedy Greenway that now stands in place of the elevated Central Artery.

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A Landscape Designed to be Viewed, Not Experienced

2005-01-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

Everyone is Impressed when This Old House transforms a tired bungalow into an elegant new residence, and that's the way oslund.and.assoc. has reinvented the competent Modernism of the General Mills Corporate Headquarters. With fine materials and design elan, the new addition updates and improves the sit's old vocabulary of rolling green lawns, minimalist buildings, scattered abstract sculptures, and amoeba-shaped ponds, making Modernism relevant again for a whole new era of corporate citizens.

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Perspective: Minneapolis Bloch Cancer Survivor Park

2003-02-01 , Hohmann, Heidi , Department of Landscape Architecture

Although I lack the financial resources to fund a hundred parks across America, I, like Richard Bloch, am a cancer survivor. I am a member (Lymphoma, Class of 1999) of a large and growing club that Bloch has undertaken to represent in his ambitious and laudable campaign to use parks to make the struggles of cancer patients both visible and less daunting to members of the public who may also be stricken by the disease. As a result, i approached the cancer survivors park in Minneapolis as both cancer survivor and landscape architect, with both a sense of ownership and a critical eye, with hope that the park would embody some aspect of my experiences-and apprehension that it wouldn't be.