kong
works| schtick| crew| press| kudos| contact

featured projects

play
image 1 image 2 image 3 image 4 image 5 image 6 image 7 image 8 image 9 image 10 image 11 image 12

schtick

Dump It Right There

We are surrounded with detritus left by two centuries of industry. Mines and factories relentlessly churn out raw materials and products making our country rich and powerful. It’s taken an environmental crisis for us to finally face all the nasty by-products -- dumped in the river, or in a landfill, or just out back.

D.I.R.T. studio (Dump It Right There) was founded in 1992 by Julie Bargmann as a critical, design research-based practice driven by a love for the landscape, a concern for marginalized communities, research into eco-technologies, investigation of site histories, and an obsession with urban regeneration. We feel obligated, better yet, inspired to remake fallow Brownfields and derelict terrain into renewed landscapes of ecological and cultural production.

D.I.R.T. studio’s small but mighty design studio joins architects, planners, engineers, scientists, artists and historians to interface constructively with city, state and federal agencies to give simple form to spaces with many rich layers. Clients are not just customers; they are collaborators. Our investigative approach as designers informs our role as educators, creating a reciprocal feedback loop of adventurous investigation and evolving knowledge between practice and teaching.

D.I.R.T. studio strives to be catalytic and proactive, reframing crises as opportunities, detritus as resources. We dig into the deep strata of urban and post-industrial landscape systems – natural and social histories, production and engineering, technologies and sciences, policy and economics. We find ways to inventively multi-task the social and ecological performance of designs to maximize their impact. We unearth site histories and reuse existing materials with an artistic vengeance. We insist on deploying regenerative systems to rebuild natural resources, not simply exploit them. We make places and processes for communities to participate in rebuilding the vitality of their neighborhoods and cities. We give voice to the landscape. We aspire to the extra-ordinary to create grounded authentic places.

crew

Julie Bargmann founding principal

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovative designer in building regenerative landscapes and with interdisciplinary design education. She challenges restrictive policies and conventional remediation practices that plague Superfund sites and Brownfields, giving legible form to complex processes and offering renewed relationships for communities in tired and toxic surroundings.

Bargmann leads projects at the D.I.R.T. studio (Dump It Right There) that explore past and present industrial operations and urban processes in relationship to ecological systems, cultural constructs and emerging technologies. Interested in sites from closed quarries to abandoned coal mines, fallow factories and urban railyards, Bargmann joins teams of architects, artists, engineers, historians and scientists to imagine the next evolution of these landscapes.
Bargmann earned a Masters in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Along with receiving the American Academy in Rome Fellowship, Bargmann’s work was awarded a National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. TIME, CNN and Newsweek, along with national and international design publications have recognized Bargmann as leading the next generation in making a difference for design and the environment.

Marni Burns associate

Marni began her exploration of landscape architecture and the urban environment growing up in New York City, where the neighborhood parks were a second home. After an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies at UC Berkeley, she returned to New York City where she worked as an environmental consultant, searching out contaminated sites to restore and fragile places to protect. Determined to merge her interest in the environment with socially meaningful landscape design, she studied Urban Ecology at the Yale Graduate School of Forestry and completed her MLA at the University of Virginia. Marni cut her teeth at DIRT beginning in 2007, and has recently returned after three years as Landscape Architect at OLIN in Philadelphia. Marni’s professional experience includes landscape design and project management of urban public projects, public and private institutional campus projects, and winning competition designs. Marni is currently a Registered Landscape Architect and Associate at D.I.R.T. studio.

featured press

kudos

selected awards

Urban Land Institute Award
Urban Outfitters Headquarters at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, 2007

American Institute of Architects
National Design Award: Levy House, Spencertown NY. Collaboration with Thomas Phifer, Architects, 2006

American Society of Landscape Architects
National ASLA Design Award: Turtle Creek Water Works, Dallas, Texas; MESA Design, local landscape architects, 2007

Architect Magazine
Progressive Architecture Award, SOS Lower Manhattan, collaboration with Smith Miller Hawkinson and Ralph Lerner, architects, 2004

Smithsonian Institute Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
National Design Award for Environment, 2001

The Architectural League of New York
Emerging Voices Award, 2000

Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, American Academy in Rome
Comparative study of contemporary environmental art and ancient landscapes, 1989-1990

contact

D.I.R.T. studio
473 west broadway
new york, new york 10012


917 972 DIRT (3478)
dirt@dirtstudio.com

map