UC Berkeley students share zone zero landscape design ideas with Berkeley residents
Master of Landscape Architecture students presented fire-safe designs to residents of the Berkeley Hills, highlighting key strategies for adapting to new regulations without sacrificing aesthetic appeal.
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design Kristina Hill challenged students in her graduate landscape architecture studio to tackle a very real community issue, residential landscaping that complies with new fire safety regulations.
The EMBER plan adopted last year by the City of Berkeley requires residents living in the most fireprone areas of the Berkeley Hills to eliminate combustible structures, plants, and flammable mulch within five feet of their homes. This home hardening in “zone zero” is meant not only to protect their own properties, but also create a firebreak for the rest of the city downhill. Many homeowners have been seeking guidance about how to comply with the law, which went into effect on January 1, while maintaining attractive gardens around their houses.
Professor Hill was joined by three Master of Landscape Architecture students, Natalia Rovira, Caris Park, and Kevin Camacho, to present the studio’s design schemes in a webinar sponsored by Berkeley Council Member Brent Blackaby. Blackaby represents the Grizzly Peak area, one of the first Berkeley neighborhoods subject to EMBER’s zone zero regulations.
In a two-week sprint, students created designs for one of three actual home sites along Grizzly Peak Boulevard. They considered the topographical conditions for houses on the uphill side and the downhill side of the street, which offer different challenges and opportunities in terms of slope, shade, and water collection and runoff.
Each student explored a different design style or approach, from a Persian-inspired garden to a Mediterranean landscape to a yard embodying the Scandinavian “hygge” mood. Among these diverse designs, several principles of zone zero landscaping emerged.
Create outdoor rooms
One strategy that many of the students suggested is reconceiving outdoor space as a room or series of rooms focused around activities. For example, some students proposed transforming planted areas to outdoor play spaces, dining rooms, or raised vegetable beds. These “rooms,” hardscaped with gravel or paving, can transform a yard from something to be looked at into something to be inhabited, resulting in the yard being used more frequently as an extension of the home.
Explore alternatives to plants for visual interest
Another technique the students used in their designs is to replace plant material with non-combustable alternatives, such as boulders or water features. A design based on the traditional Persian garden featured a series of tiled pools that add color and sound to the garden. Other students proposed placing eye-catching sculptures, colored gravel, oyster shell aggregate, or river rocks in zone zero in lieu of grasses.
Redesign yards with landscaped islands
A key landscaping principle the students proposed was to replace foundation plantings, long a staple of residential garden design, with planted islands. Lushly planted islands, with vegetation layered at various heights, can be placed away from the structure but still provide visual interest from both the house and the sidewalk and help screen the house from the street. Selecting plantings that bloom at different seasons, in addition to evergreen perennials, ensures that the island can be a focal point of the yard year-round.
Choose non-combustable fencing materials
EMBER regulations require that the first five feet of a fence attached to a house be fabricated with non-combustable materials. Most fencing in the Berkeley Hills is wood and homeowners who want to maintain a sense of privacy and/or boundary are seeking alternatives. Student designs proposed aluminum slatted fencing, Corten steel, concrete, and fiber concrete for privacy fences. Other designs employ hogwire or clay brick to mimic the transparency of picket fences.
More than 100 residents attended the one-and-a-half-hour webinar, and another 100 registered to receive the recording, showing the eagerness of the community to look to UC Berkeley for creative solutions.
Blackaby thanked the students for inspiring his constituents to think creatively about how to harden their homes: “This has been a wonderful opportunity to explore zone zero designs that are fire-safe and beautiful,” he remarked. “There are many different paths for people to take.”