TCLF’s latest conference, Leading with Landscape IV: Transforming North Carolina’s Research Triangle, was held on April 13, 2018, at the James B. Hunt, Jr., Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Topics explored include the regionally unique coupling of human and natural systems, how the area’s campus landscapes are serving as “incubators” for innovative planning and design solutions, new projects that are re-evaluating the region’s monuments and memorials, two revered public landscapes—Moore Square and Dix Park—and much more. To learn more about the conference: https://tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/raleigh2018/index.html
Moderator – Panel I: The Research Triangle’s Emerging Urban Public Realm: Campus Landscapes Lead by Example as Incubators and Laboratories for Fresh Ideas and Approaches
Mark H. Hough, FASLA, University Landscape Architect, Duke University
Introductory Remarks
The geographic region known today as the Research Triangle was borne out of a progressive business venture from the 1950s that sought to maximize the intellectual and economic capital generated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), North Carolina State University (NCSU), and Duke University. The three schools, which had evolved in very distinct communities, with unique cultural contexts, histories, and aesthetics, became drivers of a transformative economy. Over time, the Piedmont landscape they shared, with its rolling hills, successional woodlands, and expansive farmland, evolved into an increasingly crowded and suburbanized maze of highways and planned communities. As industries modernized, demographics changed, and the vernacular landscape of the past disappeared, higher education remained the constant.
Campuses—including those found other colleges and universities, along with corporate, institutional, and urban examples—make up the most significant designed landscapes in the region. UNC, the oldest state university in the country, grew incrementally and steadily since its founding in 1789. In Raleigh, Shaw University was founded in 1865 as the first HBCU in the Southeast, NCSU opened as a land-grant college in 1887, and Meredith, the largest all-female college in the state, opened in 1891. Duke, with historic landscapes designed by Olmsted Brothers and Ellen Shipman, was founded in 1924 in nearby Durham. The rich design legacy of the campuses includes modernist landscapes designed by Dick Bell, and contemporary spaces designed by significant landscape architects such as Laurie Olin, Gary Hilderbrand, Warren Byrd, Michael Vergason, and the late Peter Schaudt and Glenn Allen.
source
