Teaching the Next Generation about Recycling Construction Material

The morning class assignment for the students in Buck Abbey's class at Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University was to help design a Crazy Horse - Sitting Bull Memorial. ''I sketched a design on the blackboard at 9:30 and asked my students for their ideas,'' Buck explains.

Buck Abbey, ASLA, of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University, is of course LASN's longtime landscape ordinance columnist and source for all things ordinance.

Buck relates he recently assigned a project to his class to design a project out of the southern yellow pine, cypress and Douglas fir scrap lumber from his building addition.

He sketched a Crazy Horse - Sitting Bull Memorial on the blackboard and then asked for student input.

The carpenter constructed the memorial in three hours. The real purpose of the class exercise was the importance of repurposing recycled construction materials.

In the afternoon, a carpenter that Buck frequently hires came out to his house and in three hours constructed the memorial from the design. At sunset, the memorial was dedicated to the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors and to Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the 268 U.S. soldiers of the 7th U.S. Calvary who died at the infamous battle near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana on June 26, 1876.

''The real purpose (of the class exercise) was not so much to remember the clash between American natives and the western rush of the U.S. Army, but to make the point with my students that it is important to repurpose recycled construction materials. This is one of the main sustainability canons landscape architects are using to design around. The memorial was of secondary importance to the sculptural character of the finished project, especially the way materials were selected, their finish qualities and how they were fastened together. The tarnished steel and weathered wood used in the project somehow capture the clash of cultures on the Little Bighorn. The nighttime beam of light reaches out to the present and keeps the importance of that historic clash in mind.''