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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

CdA landscape architect Jon Mueller earns national award

Jon Mueller, Senior Landscape Architect with the Landmark division of Architects West, talks about the Centennial Trail project in Coeur d'Alene on Monday, Nov. 16, 2015. He was awarded the prestigious President's Medal at the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) annual meeting and expo in Chicago on Nov. 9. Mueller has been the principle designer for numerous projects in the area, including the Centennial Trail, and several parks, schools, commercial and residential projects in Spokane, Coeur d'Alene and throughout the Pacific Northwest. (Kathy Plonka / The Spokesman-Review)

As a boy growing up in Coeur d’Alene, Jon Mueller remembers walking to school under a canopy of grand, old street trees. Many of them are gone today, but Mueller has spent 30 years creating new landscapes with trees, boulders, paths, sloped grades and native plants enjoyed by people across the Inland Northwest.

The landscape architect has left his mark on scores of schools, parks and other projects in Coeur d’Alene, Spokane and neighboring communities. One of Mueller’s signature projects is the Centennial Trail in Kootenai County.

“Thirty years ago that was the introduction to multi-modal transportation,” said Mueller, 61, with Landmark Landscape Architects, a division of Architects West Inc. in Coeur d’Alene.

“At the time it was very controversial and people didn’t understand it or embrace the concept of connectivity. We barely had a functional road system around here,” he said.

Last week Mueller was honored with the President’s Medal of the American Society of Landscape Architects at the organization’s annual meeting in Chicago. A past president of the professional association of 16,000 members, he’s only the second Northwest landscape architect to receive the award.

“If you looked at some of the people I shared the stage with, that’s pretty tall cotton for someone who practices landscape architecture in the hinterlands of America,” he said.

After Mueller left the University of Idaho with a landscape architecture degree in 1978, he spent four years working for a firm in Billings which included park, school and palace projects in Saudi Arabia and a planned community for 15,000 at Colstrip in southeast Montana.

He returned to Coeur d’Alene in 1984 to take the job with Architects West. “I thought maybe it was a just a stop along the way, but I’ve been fortunate to be here and practice,” he said.

Mueller’s top projects include Landings, Bluegrass, Ramsey and Riverstone parks in Coeur d’Alene; Friendship, Westgate and Sky Prairie parks in Spokane; the extension of North Idaho College into a former sawmill site; the master plan for the Riverstone development; the site development for Lake City High School and Woodland Middle School in Coeur d’Alene; and Post Falls City Hall and the Ednetics company headquarters in that city. He’s now working on plans for new Spokane Valley City Hall.

In an interview Tuesday, Mueller reflected on his work and shared his thoughts on the future of landscape architecture:

Q: What’s your approach to landscape design?

A: You have to be context responsive, but you also have to take a look at basic needs and wants of the clients you’re working for. I’m just completing a large estate project for a client. It’s a ranch with development of a 5 ½-acre lake and an arena site for training of animals and then the house and grounds itself. You try to pull in most of what they want and blend that in to your artistic and design outlook.

Q: What do you like most about your projects?

A: Probably the thing I like to do most on a project is the earthwork and the shaping of the land. It allows you maximum creativity. For some, grading is a technical exercise. For the landscape architect, it’s both technical and creative. You have the opportunity to create so many different environments. For us that has special meaning. The other is the use of stone and stonework. I don’t get to do enough of it. It kind of injects naturalness into a project.

Q: What’s the reaction to the shift away from lawns and toward native plants in landscaping?

A: We still have a segment of America that likes it tidy and clipped. I’ve done some landscapes where we’ve come in with native grasses or long grasses, and they just freak out. They just have this mental block that we’ve got to mow the lawn once a week, we have to trim the edges.

Q: Why are projects like the Centennial Trail so important?

A: We need complete streets and multi-modal transportation as a way to connect neighborhoods, reduce dependence on foreign oil, emphasize better health for people – walking, bicycling. Some folks think it’s kind of a social engineering thing, and I laugh out loud at that because it’s really not. … When we finally built the interstate highway system, the automobile destroyed our cities. We’re sort of getting back to what was really good about the way our cities were 100 years ago. It’s a notion we can have both – motor vehicles and other modes of transportation.

Q: Urban renewal districts are under fire by some critics in Coeur d’Alene and other Idaho cities. What’s your take on this debate over how we pursue these projects?

“I think urban renewal has provided benefits. Is there always going to be controversy? Probably, because there’s a segment of society that says we want to vote on everything, and given the chance to do that we might not do any of this. Look at what the Riverstone site was before it was redeveloped. I worked in the sawmill there when I was going to college. There was a lot to clean up, a lot to remediate. It’s very expensive to come in and do that. You have to be able to create the means to move the economic process forward. I have the impression it doesn’t matter how much oversight we have, there’s going to be a small segment that’s never going to be satisfied. What you have to look to is when these renewal districts are closed, there’s an astonishing tax benefit that’s going to erupt. I don’t think people fully comprehend the extent of that benefit.

Q: You’ve taught classes at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. What’s the future hold for the next generation of landscape architects?

A: America by 2050 is expected to add 150 million people through growth and immigration. Fifty percent of the residential and commercial product needed to meet that demand exists today. That’s an astonishing amount of growth and development. We have the ability to change how we consume energy, the environments we provide for people, the cities we build. … We have a growth rate that’s still positive. To me it’s an exciting time that’s coming.

Q: What’s it like to see people using and enjoying these spaces you’ve created?

A: It’s phenomenal. I sneak out, sit down and watch. Beyond watching the activity, it’s the children’s voices that I find most enjoyable. If you just close your eyes and listen to the laughter, listen to the fun they’re having. It reminds me when I was a kid in this town. We didn’t have a lot of park resources, but we had a lot of fun as kids.