Jim Patchett has a lot of titles: landscape architect, hydrologist, educator, environmentalist—visionary. But more significantly, he’s a man on a mission to sustain Earth’s ecological balance by treating water as the precious resource it is rather than a waste product filling storm sewers, streams, and rivers.
Patchett grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, where he had an up-close view of the mighty Mississippi. Yet his interests extended beyond the water, spending hours exploring nearby woods and their arrays of trees and plants, a childhood that helped lead him to his life’s vocation.
Thumbing through an Iowa State catalog in the early ’70s, Patchett discovered landscape architecture, a field he’d never heard of, yet one that aligned perfectly with his love of nature. He began his career with a landscape firm in Muscatine after graduating in 1975, but two years later found himself back at Iowa State studying environmental sciences as a landscape architecture graduate student.
Patchett took every water-related course he could, including studies in hydrology and water resources offered through the Department of Civil Engineering. “I was intrigued by the inseparable connection between land and water,” he explains. “I wanted to understand how what we do with the land influences water quality and water management.”
The value of multidisciplinary teams
His master’s completed, Patchett went to work for the Story County Conservation Board. And with wildlife biologists, foresters, and others with strong science backgrounds as co-workers, he soon learned the value of multidisciplinary teams.
“Landscape architects bring a special strength to the table,” he says. “It is the ability to synthesize a rather broad range of disciplines into a solution that no one profession has the technical training and depth of skills and life experiences to do by itself.”
By 1985, Patchett was completing his second Iowa State master’s—this time in civil engineering—and was already at work on his PhD in natural resources at the University of Michigan. His quest to combine landscape architecture, hydrology, and natural resources paid off when, in the late 1980s, urban planning and landscape design firm Johnson, Johnson and Roy asked him to join its newly established environmental services studio in Ann Arbor to work on regulatory compliance for wetlands.
When the firm expanded to the Chicago area in 1990, Patchett helped to get the office operational. He soon had what he calls his professional “epiphany” when he shared his frustration about designing wetland mitigation areas with Gerould Wilhelm, a research botanist and taxonomist with The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois. It seemed that no matter how adept Patchett and his colleagues were in using a diverse suite of native plants in designing these areas, invasive species such as cattails and reed canary grass quickly took over.
Countering water mismanagement
“Jerry explained the historical context of hydrology and the evolutionary relationship between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems,” Patchett says. “Historically, all of our streams, lakes, rivers, and wetlands were formed and sustained predominantly by groundwater discharge. No matter how hard it rained, very little water ended up as surface runoff.
“Today, it’s 180 degrees different,” he continues. “We have long-standing practices in structures and land-use design that have made water a polluted run-off item. As a result of this mismanagement, we have created all sorts of problems, not the least of which is flooding—1993 and 2008 are prime examples.”
Patchett responded to these insights by founding the Conservation Design Forum in 1994, assembling a multidisciplinary team of landscape architects, planners, environmental scientists, and water resource engineers to help carry out the mission, with Wilhelm as principal botanist and ecologist. Located in Elmhurst, Illinois, CDF is a “water-centric” firm based on the premise that all forms of land use should treat rainfall as a precious, life-sustaining resource and never allow it to become a waste product.
In its early years, Patchett notes, many of CDF’s ideas were actually illegal. City codes and ordinances often allowed only conventional curb and gutter systems that didn’t fit CDF’s plans. In addition, regulations often thwarted practices such as harvesting rainwater for reuse in buildings or incorporating plants taller than 12 inches.
Education, therefore, necessarily became a key part of any project. So Patchett and his team would meet with city councils, planning and zoning commissions, and engineering, planning, and public works directors in order to explain how their proposals would benefit the environment and the community. They designed and built demonstration projects to illustrate these benefits, spurring changes to codes and ordinances.
Breaking new ground—overhead
That educational imperative inspired Patchett and CDF to establish the Conservation Research Institute, a nonprofit affiliate dedicated to applied research and education, as well as the Conservation Land Stewardship, a landscape contracting and management firm that restores native landscapes and constructs infrastructure such as green roofs and bioretention systems.
Long practiced in Europe, CDF introduced green roofs to its projects in the late 1990s with guidance from Atelier Dreitseitl, a German design firm that sent an engineer to the United States to share his expertise with Patchett’s team. In short order, CDF served as lead designer when Chicago received a federal “Urban Heat Island Initiative” grant in 1999 to convert city hall’s rooftop into a green roof pilot project that captured the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Merit Award of Design.
“The Chicago City Hall is probably the most famous green roof in the world,” says Patchett, “It is a beautiful garden, but more importantly it was designed to increase our understanding of the functions and values of green roof systems. We’ve learned a lot regarding types of systems, heating and cooling benefits, success rates of native and nonnative vegetation, and reductions in rainwater runoff.”
Iowa State joined this revolution last spring with a CDF-designed roof on the College of Design addition. “It’s a perfect setting for the first roof garden on campus,” says Patchett. “Students in architecture, landscape architecture, and civil and construction engineering can learn from how we incorporated sustainable design practices. It is a natural fit.”
CDF has also contributed planning for two new buildings on Iowa State’s engineering campus—the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, currently under construction, and the proposed adjoining agricultural and biosystems engineering building. The plan includes storm-water management components such as a rain garden and plantings, a cistern collection system, green roofs, and possible native grass areas.
A special challenge for Iowa
Initiatives such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program have raised awareness and acceptability of sustainable practices. And Patchett himself makes a host of presentations each year to persuade people from all walks of life—developers, architects, engineers, builders, community leaders, farmers.
Still, Patchett knows much work remains in order to convince people to look at the issues holistically, to see how incorporating sustainable land-use practices will restore health and biodiversity to the land—especially in agriculture.
“I drive across Iowa,” he reflects, “and it brings tears to my eyes seeing what is happening to the land—the deeply gouged ditches and streams that didn’t use to exist.
“I want to influence change that revolves around biodiverse grassland restoration, that includes grazing, food and fiber production, and the restoration of our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.”