THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME – Landscape Architecture Magazine

Carley Rickles came to a realization thats unfamiliar to most landscape architects when she was beginning the landscape plan for an accessory dwelling unit (ADU). There was, strictly speaking, no site. As part of Los Angeless ambitious program to alleviate its housing crisis by dropping ADUs across the citys legendary single-family-home horizon, each structure would sit in a backyard that could contain different dimensions, constraints, and contexts.

Rickless landscape design would be paired with a crisp and angular garden shed-like unit designed by Jennifer Bonners MALL, a creative practice that stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops, Miniature Angles & Little Lines, or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability. It felt like all we had to draw from was the architecture, Rickles says.

So, the Atlanta-based Martin Rickles Studio (composed of Rickles and the artist and architect Jennifer Martin) extrapolated the abstract geometry of Bonners design and put together a planter-based graphic kit of parts, Rickles says, that could weave around and through whatever might be behind the back doorbirdbath, pool, or actual garden shed. Every house is going to be different with different conditions, and we need to be able to respond to that, she says.

Lean-to ADU, the name of the 515-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath collaboration between Bonner and Martin Rickles Studio, is part of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safetys catalogue of preapproved ADU designs, with entries from local and national firms, both new and established. With over two-dozen templates, city officials are looking to elevate ADU design while also offering an expedited over-the-counter approval process, as the former Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne and current Los Angeles chief design officer told Carolina A. Miranda,his successor at the Los Angeles Times.

Bonners ADU riffs on Los Angeless regional vernacular housing types, as well as the omnipresent backyard shed. And Rickless landscape uses this same geometric palette of circles, rectangles, parallelograms, and very acute triangles, she says, an echo of the front facade roof line. These shapes are defined by wavy metal edger planting bedsand arrayed in any pattern thats pleasing. Sketched and rendered with an Instagram collage aesthetic, with hearty helpings of millennial pink and teal, it looks like a ready-made boutique Airbnb offering.

Absent site-specific context and guidance, Rickles was able to draw on the history of Los Angeles landscape design from the late Ruth Shellhorn. Born in 1909, Shellhorn was a native Angeleno and pioneer in the design of Southern California landscapes at a time when there were few women practicing. She was best known for her work at Disneyland, where, in just a handful of months, she designed the parks pedestrian circulation system, planned landscapes, and selected plantings. Rickles took inspiration from Shellhorns horizontal beds of geometric plantings that depict Mickey Mouse. I thought that this idea of literally having pop culture embedded in the landscape would be something interesting to bring forward, especially in California, by this heroine of landscape architecture, she says.

Shellhorn was important for the way she used landscape to frame retail experiences, designing courtyard-like landscapes that presented shopping as a lifestyle, with intense sun-dappled plant textures and colors to evoke a subtropical aesthetican approach that became synonymous with Southern California landscape design. She was also attracted to narrative and theatrical applications of plants, like the brambled melaleuca trees planted at the Sleeping Beauty Castle, which are sinister and twisted in the way of a fairy tales second act.

For Lean-to ADU, Martin Rickles Studio includes native plants such as desert marigold, blue fescue, red buckwheat, and desert globemallow. Surrounding the geometric planters, Rickles says the remaining yard will be green gravel, a satirical take on the still-aspirational environmental dead-end of standard single-family-home turf lawns. Rickles sees this as a corrective thats meeting a social and ecological need, she says.

By flexibly nesting a new design typology within the suburban residential pattern, Martin Rickles Studios landscape promises to assert just enough of its own identity to be a good neighbor.

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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME - Landscape Architecture Magazine