May 2025 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine
The facilities at Green Hill School Recreation and Wellness Center in Chehalis, Washington, were designed with the principles of bioilic and trauma-informed design, which included a recreation center with a pool, gymnasiums, a yoga studio, a teaching kitchen, and a multi-purpose event space. Seattle-based HBB Landscape Architecture designed the 9.5-acre landscape, which includes sports fields, a jogging track, an amphitheater, and a bioretention garden at its center that filters water before recharging the Chehalis River nearby. “There’s no reason that this space shouldn’t be done just as well and designed as thoughtfully as you would a public park,” says Juliet Vong, ASLA, a principal at HBB Landscape Architecture who worked on the landscape design. Shannon Payton, a senior associate at DLR Group, the facility’s architect, says it could be a community college campus.
But at Green Hill, every element of landscape design—plantings, topography, materials, circulation, and sightlines—are oriented toward safety, security, and surveillance. The facility houses teen and adult men up to age 25 who require medium-to-maximum supervision while they are involved in the justice system. This is a result of Washington State’s “JR to 25” law, which stipulates that young men sentenced in adult court for crimes committed when they were under age 18 can remain in juvenile detention until they turn 25. The opportunities and programming created by the health and recreation center presented a progressive face for the incarceration of minors centered on less punitive practices of rehabilitation and education. The original intention of the facility is broadcast on their website: at Green Hill, youth can work toward a high school diploma, take college classes, and undergo training for computer technology, light machine fabrication, and other vocational programs, and there is also psychological support. For Payton, this facility for youth, which is run by the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Family (DCYF), not the department of corrections, is a “showcase of restorative justice design.” Trent Phillips, the Capital Facilities Manager for Washington State DCYF, praises the potential for healing in landscape at Green Hill, but says “it is what it is” he says. “It’s still a prison.”
In any youth-focused landscape design, durability and secure visibility are critical, but at Green Hill School, these factors directed the design. HBB selected plantings that “preclude the ability to hide various contraband in the landscape,” Vong says. That means nothing with a “strong, woody system” or “shrubs that grow straight from the ground and have a lot of vegetation.” Instead, HBB selected ornamental grasses such as lilyturf and Mexican feathergrass. The honey locust trees are the thornless variety. Staff at Green Hill also have voiced concerned about the type of gravel used. Could someone pick up stones, or crush them, to make a weapon? In response, Vong’s design specifies finer-grain aggregate. Designers have had to consider “how those materials can change—intentionally or otherwise—over time,” she says. “Can something fall off? Can they chip away at something over time? Can they create something that can be used for harm? When you’re in these scenarios with juvenile detention, self-harm is actually a significant concern,” says Vong.
Before the new facilities were built, the landscape was not a priority. It was “kind of dismal,” says Vong, of the poorly irrigated brown lawn spare of trees, but the landscape scope expanded dramatically after the client stated their intent to offer wider programming. The scope widened from just a field to a to include fitness areas, a jogging path, and a ball field. They wanted “to not treat [Green Hill residents] essentially as inmates,” says Vong.
Buildings encircle the new landscape, which includes the recreation and wellness center as well as residential and educational facilities. At the center of the landscape is the bioretention rain garden planted with sedges and rushes as well as ginko and honey locust trees. Vong had originally planned for a denser canopy, but she says she scaled it back after security staff voiced concerns about visibility. Sports fields and an amphitheater pinwheel around the central rain garden; each conceived as a series of discrete outdoor rooms. With its muddy soil and dense plantings, the rain garden is a barrier that strictly delineates and blocks circulation routes between the zones defined by different landsape programs.
“We use a combination of topography, urban features, and landscape to define those different zones,” says Vong. These zone divisions are vital to the security parameters of the facility as well. Security concerns prohibit residents from freely comingling. The goal is “occupying the same space without colliding,” says Payton. A jogging track that loops around the softball field “was kind of hard for [staff] to begin with, just because it means individuals are going beyond their zones,” says Vong.
The topography also enables resident surveillance, and the central rain garden “literally is the bowl; it’s the low-point of the landscape,” says Vong. The perimeter is approximately 5 feet higher than the lowest point in the center, allowing security staff on the edges to see across and into the entire landscape from a handful of vantage points. The entire site likewise has been organized so the majority of the campus can be seen from the south, west, and north.
At Green Hill, “trauma-informed design,” (TID)—the practice of designing spaces that mitigate triggering responses in individuals—“guided the entire process,” says Payton. The building uses residential materials and finishes, and its sawtooth roof and clerestory windows are intended to deliver lots of natural light. There’s relatively little heavy concrete and institutional-looking cinder blocks. In the landscape, Vong points to the lack of hard barriers and fences, and the site’s commitment to circulation control through topography and plantings as elements of TID. “It’s using rolling hills and mounds and different types of plants in the different zones to define the spaces that these students are supposed to stay in,” she says. Vong’s approach to TID also includes offering areas for solitude or socialization and plantings that provide sensory interest (“a softening visual effect, waving in the wind.”) This project, she says, wasn’t a doctrinnaire summation of where landscape architecture and TID are at during this moment in the discipline’s history, but instead, “a very collaborative series of conversations” with Green Hill staff, administrators, and the architects at DLR.
Spurred in part by the active discourse in architecture, landscape architects’ research into the typology of carceral institutions (prisons, but also detention centers) has increased in the last 10 years, but there isn’t consensus about whether landscape architects should take on this kind of work.
Claire Latane, a landscape architecture professor at Cal Poly Pomona, believes those conversations need to continue. Latane, whose work focuses on the intersection of landscape design for educational facilities with mental health, safety, and academic success, says the basic concept of incarceration seems to inherently cut against the biophilic understanding of what humans, and especially children, need to be happy and healthy—the very heart of the landscape architecture discipline.
“I think it’s pretty clear at this point what we need,” she says. “We need community. We need access to a humane environment, which often includes nature or at least prospect in refuge, and being able to see [outside.] The very notion of confinement goes against those principles.” Latane’s own child was impacted by the justice system as a minor, and her pedagogical and professional mission is to interrupt what’s called the school-to-prison pipeline.
“I believe we should abolish prisons,” Latane says. “I don’t believe that prison is the answer, especially for children. It’s upsetting to me that designers are still designing these spaces at all.” The position of the designer choosing to work on carceral landscapes might mean working within the system to improve existing conditions while simultaneously advocating for the dismantling of those same systems; “harm reduction and healing,” she says, on the way to abolition. The humanity and care shown with the Green Hill landscape is admirable, says Latane, but “even better would be to do everything we can in our power to keep children with their families so that these spaces don’t have to exist.”
Vong allows for some ambivalence about her role as a designer. “Is it better to leave [youth] in the environment they’re in and give them services rather than incarceration? I don’t know,” she says. “For some of them, it might have been. If I’m given the opportunity to make these facilities a better place regardless of the politics around it, I absolutely want to do that, and I think it’s something we should do. I’m glad that there’s a discussion on corrections facilities, but my practice is the practice and my personal beliefs are separate. It isn’t an area I choose to go down.” Payton, the project’s architect feels otherwise. “A lot of people say, ‘it’s not perfect, so don’t change it.’” she says. “Our approach is ‘it’s not perfect—we need to help change it,’” she says. Her goal is to “move the needle one project at a time.”
In the two years since Green Hill opened, the initial intentions and successes have been overshadowed by overcrowding and other issues that have failed to keep the residents safe, much less provided a comprehensive rehabilitative experience. Last July, after the Recreation and Wellness Center opened, the state suspended intake into the facility because of overcrowding, and transferred 43 residents to Department of Corrections facilities. This was reversed by a court order to return the residents back to Green Hill, which said that the move, conducted without emergency hearings, was a violation of due process. A DCYF attorney argued that a series of hearings would have “presented a great danger to an already untenable situation at the prison that was on the verge of a riot.” To help manage the situation, the governor ordered additional staff from the Department of Corrections to Green Hill, which was 30 percent over capacity as of that June, though it’s population has since declined.
Amid mounting lawsuits, residents and their family members say the rehabilitative and educational programming at Green Hill is being eliminated or made inaccessible because of lengthy lockdowns, a statement that was refuted by Nancy Guitierrez, DCYF’s Director of External Communications, who said that that all residental units at Green Hill have daily access to the the recreation center landscape, and only one of seven residential units does not have daily access to the recreation and wellness center building.
Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA, is a landscape architecture professor at the University of Washington, who has studied carceral landscapes as a LAF fellow. He says the hardline abolitionist position taken by many designers leaves the masses of currently incarcerated people in a grim spot. Though he supports “dismantling and re-thinking” the prison system, the system will exist for a long time to come. “So the question is, should people lie in deplorable situations that is increasing their trauma until we get there, if we ever get there?” he says. Absent the public support and political will needed to make that transformational change, “it’s hard for me to say we should take that all away.”