Folger Shakespeare Library Renovation Update!

OLIN Partner, Hallie Boyce, and Project Architect, Stephen Kieran, of KieranTimberlake, sat down with Folger Library to discuss the new developments for the library's landscape as they enter the next phase of building renovation.

The landscape updates, which began in 2014, replaced the paved vehicular drop-off and hedged lawn with a series of at-grade and sunken outdoor spaces to create a modern take on an Elizabethan garden. Features are organized in a rectilinear geometry of paths through a ground plane of evergreen groundcovers, a renovated historic lawn plinth, and focal point entry gardens welcoming visitors from the east and west, each featuring a center panel of seasonally diverse shrub plantings.

Hallie worked closely with OLIN key team members, Sarah Miller and Judy Venonsky, to ensure that Shakespeare's love of nature shines through the landscape design, while using a contemporary approach to encourage visitor exploration and social interaction.

Learn more about the renovation update here.

OLIN Elevates Two New Partners: Spotlight on Marni Burns

Marni Burns at Water Works Park and Island, Philadelphia, PA | Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

OLIN is proud to announce the elevation of Marni Burns and Michael Miller to the role of Partner. We have had the good fortune of both Marni and Michael’s significant contributions to OLIN throughout their careers. Starting at OLIN as landscape designers, they each rose through the ranks to Associate where they have helped lead notable projects including Sojourner Truth State Park, ResilienCity Park, South Wetlands Park, and Origin Park. While each attends to their projects in a distinctive fashion, Marni and Michael share a passion for revitalizing ecologies and cultivating communities through the transformation of urban, post-industrial, and vulnerable landscapes. Their experience and growth at OLIN is due, in no small part, to the relationships they have built with you, our professional community, over their many years of practice at OLIN. They are in a new position to nurture and expand those relationships, so we would like to take this opportunity to let you get to know them even better. We are pleased to share their unique stories with you.

MARNI BURNS
Marni is driven to transform complex and neglected landscapes into ecologically thriving social spaces for everyday life. With a persistent interest in the human experience of ecological systems, and an education in environmental science, she approaches each site determined to maximize cultural engagement, ecological health, and hydrological functioning of the landscape. She began her career in environmental consulting, seeking out site histories and learning to read imprints on the land. Degraded and damaged sites remain her favorite places of action, where the layered histories can be reframed to contribute to environmental and social vibrancy rooted in the particulars of each community. Starting with the importance of place, her focus has evolved to include the interwoven aspects of climate resilience, environmental justice, and community connectivity. For over 14 years, Marni has brought this approach to many of OLIN’s most noteworthy projects, including The U.S. Embassy in London, Hunts Point Lifelines, Rebuild By Design Competition, Bronx, NY, Water Works Park and Island in Philadelphia, PA, and ResilienCity Park in Hoboken, NJ.

Marni’s work seeks to enhance and reveal environmental systems in immersive experiences that spark curiosity and connection. She spent her early childhood in rural New York, where the backyard deck designed by her father was larger than the house, and the fluctuations of water cycles were evident in the periodic flooding of the front yard from the adjacent lake. She then moved to an apartment in the Bronx where outside was mostly paved and water was hidden in pipes. She believes this ingrained an early drive to seek nature in the city and a deep appreciation for urban wilds. She often escaped to pockets of woods along the Hudson River near home, and to volunteer programs building trails and restoring wetlands further afield during the summers. Her fascination with the natural world was paired with a love of drawing and making art. This pairing eventually bound together, over a circuitous path, to the practice of landscape architecture.

Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

Marni obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Conservation and Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She worked for several years in environmental consulting, performing site assessments and helping clean up contaminants in New York and California before realizing she didn't just want to make places less bad, she wanted to transform them into places of health and community life. She began a masters program at Yale’s Forestry School with a focus on urban ecology prior to receiving her Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. At UVA, Marni was inspired by her mentor and founder of DIRT Studio, Julie Bargmann, whose artistic work on post-industrial sites has had an indelible impact on Marni’s approach to design.

Over her 14 years at OLIN, Marni has had the opportunity to work on projects that align closely with her deep set desire to reveal the history and environmental processes inherent in the landscape – inspiring those who experience it to witness, understand, and steward their environments. She has worked with Marie Selby Botanical Gardens for over six years helping to plan and implement the transformation of their Sarasota botanical campuses to meet the challenges of growth and climate change while delighting new and regular visitors in the wonders of epiphytes and native Florida plants. She brought this framework to her more recent projects, including planning for the transformation of a former cement production, brick making, and aggregate mining site into the new 520-acre Sojourner Truth State Park along the Hudson River in Kingston, NY for the non-profit land trust, Scenic Hudson. Many of her projects include large consultant teams and she revels in the collaboration and expansive learning that each project brings.

Collaborating with OLIN Partners, Lucinda Sanders and Richard Roark, on Rebuild by Design’s Hunts Point Lifelines, a federally facilitated design competition following Hurricane Sandy, was a crash course in both resiliency planning and deep community engagement. The project resulted in an innovative plan to safeguard the hub of New York’s Food Supply while improving the quality of life for the South Bronx community, through environmental health, as well as economic, recreational, and hydrologic measures. This began a trajectory of work around resiliency planning and design projects requiring responsiveness to community needs and technical demands at a range of scales. She helped lead the design of ResilienCity Park in Hoboken, NJ that manages almost two-million gallons of stormwater as part of the City’s flood protection strategy while offering a place for culture, play, and respite –co-designed with the community. At a larger scale, the Comprehensive Infrastructure Master Plan for the eight communities of the square-mile, Caño Martín Peña District, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, defined measures to mitigate the risks of chronic exposure to flooding as well as lack of sanitation infrastructure, safe housing, and accessibility –driven by community advocacy.

In her new role as Partner, Marni continues to believe landscapes have a story to tell and hard work to do. She is looking forward to continuing to evolve her practice to meet future challenges while staying grounded in the cultural history and natural processes of the places we depend on.

OLIN Elevates Two New Partners: Spotlight on Michael Miller

Michael Miller at the future South Wetlands Park site | Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy.

MICHAEL MILLER
Michael’s work is focused on the transformation of urban and post-industrial landscapes. He seeks to create a deep connection between people and an authentic urban nature: one that is functional, healing, and experientially powerful, but that is also honest about its impure origins and our complex future on this planet. “As landscape architects, we have the ability to provide that slice of magic no matter where you are.” Since joining OLIN in 2010, Michael has helped envision and create critical park spaces for cities and communities including Origin Park on the Ohio River in Clarksville, IN, First Buffalo River Marina in Buffalo, NY’s Outer Harbor, and South Wetlands Park on Philadelphia’s Delaware River.

Michael credits the landscape he was raised in, and the experiences he had there, for leading him to landscape architecture. He grew up on a 75-acre farm in the North Carolina Mountains and from a young age maintained the land alongside his parents. Michael recalled, “Having grown up in a place that was so beautiful and powerful is what made me fall in love with the landscape, and for me, that is something I want to provide… to everyone.” Although he is now a confirmed Philadelphian he has worked to keep the land in the family and protect it from development pressure in what has become a vacation destination for the South’s growing cities.

Michael first became interested in urbanism as a way to sustainably manage growth and avoid overdevelopment of places like where he grew up. This led to an interest in making cities more healthy and livable – and the crucial role that natural systems play in this goal. Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies with a concentration in Planning from Stanford University. After graduating and working as planner in both the public and private sectors, Michael decided to further pursue this integration of nature into urban contexts through dual master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design.

During his time at Penn, Michael made his initial connection with OLIN Partner –and now mentor– Lucinda Sanders. She invited Michael to OLIN as an intern where he assisted on a wide range of projects working with many designers in the studio. He recalls, “I knew, when taking on this internship, it would complement the conceptual, large-scale thinking emphasized at Penn with OLIN's legacy of attention to detail, craft, and the human scale.”

Photo credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

After graduation, Michael joined OLIN full time as a landscape designer, working on a range of projects from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia to a campus master plan for the Peddie School and developing an interest in community engagement practices. Over years of experience, his interests and expertise broadened to projects of vastly greater scale and impact such as the 30th Street Station District Plan in Philadelphia, the Green Over Gray infrastructure plan in Cleveland, and Hunts Point Lifelines, OLIN’s winning entry in the New York region Rebuild by Design resilience competition.

Michael is a founding member of OLIN Labs, an emerging community of designers within OLIN committed to elevating the practice of landscape architecture through research, development, and education. As the leader of People Lab, one of five interdependent groups, Michael spearheads initiatives and supports other designers to rigorously and empathetically inform the relationship between the places they design and the people that live with them. Through social science research and education, he and other team members serve as a resource for project teams, advocate for evidence-based design and social justice, and provide a bridge between academia and practice. Michael applies both his ever-deepening experience in project design and his Labs work to serve as a lecturer and studio critic at his alma mater, the Weitzman School.

In his new role as an OLIN Partner, Michael is leading large-scale park and planning projects with a renewed energy to integrate nature and cities and to create that 'slice of magic' for the people who live there. Michael says these projects “...bridge the systems thinking and complexities of urban design and planning with the powerful sense of place that can be achieved through site-specific design that integrates wildness and craft.” This excitement for the large scale and the power of a wild urban place motivates his work on the expansive Origin Park – a project that realizes his desire to deliver an experience of nature's beauty while revealing the rich ecological and cultural legacy of the site. At the same time, he is leading a resilience planning effort for the tidal reaches of the Philadelphia region focused on the compounding effects of climate and industrial risk in environmental justice communities. He believes that cities need nature, and nature needs cities. He believes that we as humans need the best of both, and that there is no end of good work to do.