Flooding at National Mall Tidal Basin/Sam Kittner

Five landscape architectural firms have been retained to envision a redesign of the National Mall Tidal Basin, which is a crumbling focal point of the mall.

“The National Mall Tidal Basin embodies freedom, perseverance, and democratic values, and it is a place where people come together from around the country and around the world to celebrate these ideals. That is why we must bring our best innovation and ingenuity to meet the challenges it is facing,” said Katherine Malone-France, chief preservation officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It is with great excitement that we can today announce the world-class talent coming together to protect and re-imagine this iconic landmark for future generations.”

The National Mall Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, presented by American Express, is a new forum that will foster collaboration, big thinking, and enable innovative ideas. The landscape architecture firms, DLANDstudio, GGN, Hood Design Studio, James Corner Field Operations, and Reed Hilderbrand, will join the Ideas Lab to envision creative and thought-provoking solutions to address the challenges and opportunities facing the National Mall Tidal Basin.

“Our goal, as a lead partner of the National Park Service, is to bring innovation and partnerships to expedite the fulfillment of the Master Plan for the National Mall,” said Catherine Townsend, president and CEO of the Trust for the National Mall. “These five visionary teams are a prime example of how collaboration between distinguished experts in fields aligned with our project needs, will create solutions to help overcome the complex preservation issues affecting the treasured Tidal Basin.”

The work that needs to be tackled includes fixing a crumbling sea wall and halting daily tidal flooding that swamps sidewalks and adversely impacts roots of some of the roughly 3,000 cherry trees that color the mall each spring with their dazzling flowers.

The National Mall Tidal Basin Ideas Lab is seeking solutions to a range of issues: security, circulation, civic stage, cultural landscape, connectivity, conservation, resilience, infrastructure, and visitor experience. 

The Ideas Lab exhibition will premiere next summer and continue through the fall of 2020, at which point the public will be given the opportunity to engage with the final design concepts. This work will inform the National Park Service’s mandated environmental review, master planning, and detailed design processes that will follow. 

The design firms are:

DLANDstudio - Dlandstudio is an interdisciplinary design practice founded in 2005 with offices in Brooklyn, New York and Denver, Colorado. The firm is a recognized thought leader in urban climate adaptation strategies and explores how ecosystems can coexist with human habitation patterns, through applied design research that benefits underserved urban communities. They confront the challenges of global climate change and obsolescent infrastructure with a methodology rooted in systems thinking and invention. Their designs are grounded by the intimacy of space, the scale of the everyday, the tactility of materials, and the subtlety of craft.

GGN - Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) is a landscape architecture firm founded in Seattle, Washington in 1999. For more than 15 years, GGN has also worked from a satellite studio in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, supporting the firm’s long-running series of significant projects in the DC region. GGN’s work is highly varied in scale and type, from furniture to campuses, and the firm’s 45 employees have backgrounds in landscape design, restoration ecology, architecture, engineering, and art.

Hood Design Studio - Hood Design Studio, Inc. (HDS), founded in 1992 in Oakland, CA, is a social art and design practice working in the areas of art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. Their breadth of work allows them to understand each place in its scale and context, and to respond, not with a standard design, but with an approach adaptive to the particulars and specifics of a space. HDS views urban spaces and their objects as public sculpture, creating new apertures through which to see the emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies around us. 

James Corner Field Operations - James Corner Field Operations is a leading-edge landscape architecture and urban design practice with offices in New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia. The practice is renowned for strong contemporary design across a variety of project types and scales with a deep commitment to the design of a vibrant and dynamic public realm that integrates ecology, program and people.

Reed Hilderbrand - Reed Hilderbrand is a landscape architecture practice whose works connect people to the invisible systems of nature and underlying patterns of culture. Over its twenty year career, their practice has been recognized for projects addressing questions of continuity and change, of adaptation and invention at diverse scales on behalf of communities and institutions. 

The problems at the Tidal Basin are just part of the staggering $11.9 billion maintenance backlog facing the National Park Service. There was an effort in the 115th Congress to pass legislation to raise $6.5 billion over five years to address the backlog, but the measure died when the Congress adjourned without taking final action on the measures. Similar bills have reappeared in the 116th Congress, yet no substantive action has been taken on them.

What remains to be seen, both in Congress with those pending measures and with the outcome of the Ideas Lab, is how the proposed work would be paid for.