Title: Assessing baseline conditions – A collaborative effort to advance landscape performance research

Abstract

The Landscape Performance Series (LPS), initiated by the Landscape Architecture Foundation in 2010, measures a built landscape design project’s environmental, economic, and social performance and uses it to determine whether design solutions, individually and collectively, achieve the project’s goals (Canfield et al., 2018). However, when evaluating landscape performance, many research teams encounter a challenge: the lack of baseline data, against which the post-occupancy performance can be compared. Baseline is defined as “a standard measurement or fact against which other measurements or facts are compared” (Pearson Longman, n.d.). The lack of baseline implies additional assumptions and undermines the rigor of landscape performance research (De Almeida & Lopresto, 2019). In this study, we discuss the value of baseline and share the experience and lessons learned from an academic-practice research partnership formed before construction to document baseline condition of a site. We had participated in LPS multiple times and discovered that baseline data collection is often missing from the conventional design process. Many design firms have no experience with landscape performance methodology and have no measurement tools. In addition, most clients do not support in-depth research of site conditions as part of a typical project’s scope, schedule, and fee. Therefore, a funded academic-practice partnership at a project’s early stage is an alternative to documenting existing conditions. Regarding when to collect baseline, we found that baseline and site inventory cannot always be combined despite similarities. What to assess mainly depends on the project goals, while programming is not always completed before site inventory. Thus, the baseline is to be collected after design and before construction.

Biography

Dr. Yi Luo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Florida. She is a licensed landscape architect in Utah and has a mixed background, including architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Her research interests include landscape performance, sustainability assessment, and evaluation metrics and methods.