Hot Mama's Cafe

It's my understanding that the Pedernales Lofts were one of the first upscale condo projects in East Austin where now you can't throw a stick without hitting one.  The upside is that this trend has really increased the density of the housing close to downtown which has a lot of sustainability positives in terms of amount of greenfield land disturbed for housing per capita, reduced car usage, etc.  Of course this gentrification has its downsides as well, especially with a lack of affordable units in the new developments.  The increased costs end up displacing the original residents of the neighborhoods, many of whom are minorities.  So you end up with less economic and cultural diversity.

Anyhow, the site I wanted to write about is a coffee shop (or espresso bar if you want to get fancy) right next to the Pedernales Lofts called Hot Mama's Cafe.  Both the landscape for the lofts and the coffee shop were created by D Crain back when they were still part of Big Red Sun.

View Into the Courtyard from the Street Sidewalk

The star of this outdoor courtyard landscape is weathered steel.  Sure there's some basalt and permeable concrete paving as well as some bamboo, but it's the steel where all the creative detailing went into.  Working from the outside in, the fence between the Pedernales Lofts and the courtyard take two forms.  This first are solid steel panels that are staggered on the horizontal plane so there are gaps where light can slip between them.  On the courtyard side there are cast concrete and steel benches with a couple of planters, and on the outside facing the lofts are planters with various succulents. The overlapping steel panels are cantilevered out from the middle core of planters/benches with a gap at the bottom that helps more light get through under the fence wall and make them feel a little less visually heavy.

Cast Concrete and Steel Benches at Steel Panel Fence

Another View of the Coffee Side of the Steel Panels

Outside Face of the Steel Panels

The second type of fence is corrugated, perforated steel.  This is taller at about 8 feet, and it occurs at one corner and then at a gate that connects into the courtyard for the lofts.  The waviness of the corrugated metal gives some interesting texture to the perforation.  It almost makes it seem more 3-D.  The gate door knob and lock area is framed out in weathered steel and then standard hardware has been used.

Corrugated, Perforated Steel Fence with Gate

Gate

Hardware

Other steel details on the site include edging around the permeable concrete paving pads and then flat steel fill panels between the street sidewalk and the interior concrete pads.  A large concave steel light fixture hangs down from the main tree in the courtyard.  Flip  this upside down and you have something very similar to the steel planters that Big Red Sun used as one of their signature landscape elements on other projects.

Steel Edging and Flat Panel Filler

Light Fixture

Pearl Brewery Plaza & Cellars

I was down in  San Antonio for a short anniversary getaway and was able to work in a quick stop by the new Pearl Brewery Plaza that I believe opened around April of this year.  At least, that's when the abutting restaurant Southerleigh opened up.  Behind them is also a new boutique hotel called Emma that is in the refurbished historic brewery building.  All this development is a continuation of the vision outlined in Lake|Flato's award winning Pearl Brewery Master Plan.  The first phase of that development included landscape by San Antonio based Rialto Studio, and I'll have to revisit that part at a later date.   This new plaza was designed by my former employer Ten Eyck Landscape Architects.

The plaza landscape appears to be divided into two main spaces.  At the center of one of these is a large three tier fountain fed by an elevated aqueduct.  From the distance, the fountain component seemed to be very conventional in its form, but when you get closer you notice that the steel tiers are recycled steel components presumably from the brewery.  You can also see the detail of the rain chain feeding water from the aqueduct that limits the splashing of the water.

Tiered Water Feature

Rain Chain from Aqueduct Feeding Water to Fountain

Upcycled Steel Fountain Tiers

Surrounding the fountain are a series of board formed concrete planters with concrete seat blocks.  The seat blocks introduce another recycled material component, this time what looks like reinforced concrete beams that have been laid horizontal.  You can see a circle of rebar points in the section cut of the seat blocks. The ground plane is composed of large cut stone paver rectangles with a jogged edge that bleeds into a crushed aggregate paving.  Large trees emerge directly from the aggregate, so there's a blurring of compacted pedestrian paving and permeable tree planting areas.  Modern bistro tables and chairs (they look like the Parc Centre series by Landscape Forms) provide a lot of seating in the plaza and freestanding umbrellas give additional shade.  Once the trees get bigger in the future these may not be as necessary as they will shade the plaza nicely.

Board Formed Concrete Planter

Reused Concrete Beam as Seat Block

Tables on Pavers and Crushed Aggregate

Another feature of this first plaza space is a large mesh steel wall that abuts what looks to be a former grain silo.  There's a sandwich of woven wire mesh panels with Bougainvillea starting to grow up them.  When the vine matures and fills in the trellis it will give a huge splash of color to the space.

Weathered Steel Trellis with Bougainvillea

The second space of the plaza landscape is defined by a large weathered steel pergola.  I didn't think to roughly measure the size of the posts or estimate the height, but it looks at least 15' tall to me in the photos.  It looks kind of like the big sister to the similar steel trellis I wrote about at Texas French Bread in Austin.  This trellis has two Big Ass Fans (it's the brand name) for summer cooling and then a series of hanging pendant lights for the evening.  At the end of the long axis is a 7' or 8' tall weathered steel sculpture wall that looks like it might also be composed of some components salvaged from the former brewery.  Steel rings at the base of each round post have soil with Crossvine (Bigonia capreolata) growing up vertical rebar.  Although, from my photo it looks like Bougainvillea might have been planted on one of the posts possibly by accident.

Weathered Steel Pergola

Big Ass Fan

Steel Ring with Vine

The paving under the pergola is the same crushed aggregate as in the other part of the plaza.  It is edged with reddish pavers that have an antique finish.  I think these tie in with the type of pavers you find in the earlier phase of the Pearl Brewery landscape.

Brick Sized Pavers Edge Crushed Aggregate

Those pavers also pop-back up near the entry of Southerleigh back in the first plaza space.  A pathway using them runs parallel to a sereies of rain gardens right at the main entry of the restaurant.  The entry also has some more recycled material, this time in the form of some planters willed with some type of palmetto and almost purple-black Oxalis.

Rain Gardens Flank Restaurant Entrance

Recycled Planters

Vic Mathias Shores Trailhead

 
Apparently Auditorium Shores had its named changed in 2014 by the Austin City Council to Vic Mathias Shores, although I never really noticed or adopted the change.  What I did notice was the landscape facelift the area has recently been given.  The improvements resulted from a partnership between C3 (organizer of the ACL Festival), the Austin Parks Foundation, and Austin's Parks & Recreation Department.  TBG Partners  was hired for the design.

The portion of Vic Mathias Shores I visited is the portion right on Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake since we're talking about name changes) at the First Street bridge.  The City of Austin project sign that's still up on the site declares this part the Auditorium Shores Trailhead (didn't we just change that name?).  You can access the site either driving or walking in off of Riverside Drive where the main entry sign is, or enter it from a ramp connected to the pedestrian walkway portion of the First Street bridge.  The later method gives you a good view of a good sized rain garden at the terminus of the parking lot as well as one off to the side of the lot.  The project increased the parking by 33 spaces, so assuming a 10'x20' parking space you've got 6,600 square feet of additional impervious cover.  With 1 inch of rain you'd get 4,112 gallons of water to potentially collect (using a multiplying factor of 0.623 per square foot).

Construction Sign

View of Rain Garden from Ramp

Entering the site from West Riverside Drive, it's evident that an effort has been made to keep the pedestrian pathway intersections with the vehicular routes flush.  In one area, the vehicular paving ramps up to a pedestrian crosswalk.  At the ADA parking the whole adjacent pedestrian route is flush, projected by wheel stops.  The end of the parking lot has a drop off loop that is flush with the plaza area and separation of vehicular and pedestrian spaces is provided by raised planters and bollards.  

Flush Pedestrian Crossing

Accessible Parking Spaces

Plaza Drop Off with Bollards

As a trailhead, there are the associated amenities that you would expect such as a new restroom and a drinking fountain station.  I read that the drinking fountains have chilled water which is unusual for a public drinking fountain.  The restroom has some benches out front that have a board-formed concrete base that matches the entry monument sign and then some composite wood product with skate stops as the seating surface.  The board-formed concrete has such a visible and somehow regular lookng grain, that I'm guessing they used some sort of textured form liner instead of actual wood.  Or maybe they used the composite wood material that also has an artifical wood grain.  There are custom galvanized steel tube and composite wood seats over on a composite wood deck that overlooks the lagoon at Brent Grulke Plaza.  The welds on the seats' mitered corner are inconsistent and many of them are really conspicuous.  I prefer to have welds where they are ground down flush.  I know that there's some more challenge with that and the galvanization zinc coating, but I've seen cleaner welds done with galvanized metal.  There also appears to be splattered concrete on the sides of some of the seats.

New Restroom

Board Formed Concrete with Composite Wood

Chilled Drinking Fountains

Galvanized Steel Tube & Composite Wood Seats

Brent Gulke Plaza Sign

Lagoon

The largest rain  garden is near the plaza drop off.  Its main inlet is in one corner where just inside there's a rock-filled gabion separator wall presumable to filter out trash.  A large stormdrain at this corner presumably serves as an overflow for the rain garden.  There are some interior limestone blocks with gaps, and I'm not sure if they're just aesthetic or if there's some elevation change that separates water chamber.  A secondary inlet is on the diagonal from the main inlet.  It's cut right at an expansion joint, and while that makes sense in some ways with the tilting planes of the paving, it does make me wonder what might happen if the exapnsion joint fails and water directed  towards it starts infiltrating beneath the paving.  There are also a series of pvc cleanouts along one edge of the rain garden, and I'm not sure what these are for.

Large Rain Garden

Limestone Blocks in Rain Garden

Secondary Inlet

Cleanouts

When the redesign of Auditorium Shores was underway and public feedback was being collected, I recall there being a lot of debate about offleash dog areas.  The park is a popular dog spot, especially a limestone block edge at the water where I've seen dogs swimming off of for years.  Technically this area is now not an off leash area according to the temporary map up at the site.  There is a "Creekside Forest" restoration area adjacent to these limestone blocks.  A wood fence separates this area the people and canines.

Leash Sign

Off-Leash Boundary Map

Limestone Blocks into Water

Creekside Forest

The bulk of the square footage of the Vic Mathias Shores area at the trailhead is a large open lawn.  There's a concrete band that cuts through it, and at first I thought that might be a designation of dog off-leash area, but that doesn't match what the off leash map shows.  Both long edges of this lawn have great allees of Live Oak trees that were existing before the improvements.  Shaded pedestrian pathways run through the trees, and one of them ends at a statue of Austin icon Stevie Ray Vaughan.  And while Stevie was a great music star, a landscape in Texas isn't complete without a large Texas star.  In this case it's part of the Bicentennial Fountain that was existing before the renovation.  This is yet another empty water feature, either a vicitm of the current drought water restrictions or insufficient maintenance budgets.

Open Lawn

Live Oak Allee

Stevie Ray Vaughan Statue

Bicentennial Fountain

Discovery Hill Outdoor Learning Center

The Native Plant Society of Texas held their 2015 symposium this year in Austin, and as part of that they offered various tours, including one of an outdoor learning garden that was commissioned by the Austin Independent School District (AISD).    It is located in south Austin behind their Science and Health Resource Center and serves as a resource for the entire school district.  Busloads of elementary, middle and high school students show up weekly to work on curriculum focused around the garden. 

Environmental Survey Consulting (ESC) was hired by AISD to design and install the garden which was opened in 2013.  This  construction included a vegetated swale, an information kiosk, planting terraces, planting beds, etc.  Most of the labor was done by volunteers led by a project manager from ESC.  With this in mind, the construction details were kept intentionally simple and rustic to allow for future replacement by volunteers with readily available materials and minimum carpentry skills.  This mainly included cedar logs, limestone blocks, and treaded wood posts.  The irrigation was the one element that was professionally installed because of the more specific knowledge needed for that work.

Cedar Log Fence

Limestone Seat Block & Cedar Log Planting Bed Edge

The Science and Health Resource Center sits at the top of a slope and forms the north boundary for the garden.  Water pours off the roof directly into the landscape, so a gravel strip of river rock was added as a splash dissipator and a perforated pipe under the rock conveys the water to the vegetated swale on the east side of the garden.  The slope is terraced with cedar log retaining walls, and cedar and decomposed granite steps provide three routes through the terraced beds.  At the bottom of the slope is a DG path running east to west which is separated from a second such path by a string of garden beds.

Drainage River Rock at Top of Slope

Cedar Log Terraces with Decomposed Granite Steps

Garden Decomposed Granite Pathway

Path & Pond

One of the most popular features of the garden is a small pond in a galvanized water tank.  Teachers have seen this and replicated it at several different schools.  The aquatic plants in the tank were planted in plastic containers that where embedded in a slump of concrete.   Refill of the pond is manually done, so there's no auto-fill or any other mechanical components like that.  Vandalism of the pond was a big problem, but the school installed a motion sensor light and a security still capture camera, and these deterrents have really helped.

Stock  Tank Pond

Aquatic Plant Pot with Concrete Slump

A main educational feature of the garden is its showcase of native habitat areas.  The original planting plan featured palettes for Short Grass Meadow, Woodland Edge, Riparian Edge, etc.  The garden   is a "Certified Schoolyard Habitats Site" as designated by the National Wildlife Federation.   Many plants were in full bloom when I was there, such as Engelmann's Daisy (Engelmannia peristenia) and Fall Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium).  The Inland Sea Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) plants were also heavily laden with seed heads.  While we toured there garden you could hear mockingbirds singing, and we saw a lot of birds flying in and out in general.  It's great that AISD has this garden as a resource for children to learn about the local habitat and also get some general exposure to nature.

Certified Schoolyards Habitat

Engelmann's Daisy and Wooden Bench

Narrowleaf Snakeherb and Fall Aster

Inland Sea Oats