Parkitecture: Autumn Edition at the North Chagrin Reservation

One of the pleasures of the Parkitecture programs this year has been discovering how much there is to learn when we visit a park with the people who shape it, care for it, and help others understand it.  Our collaboration with the Cleveland Metroparks has revealed that parks are so much more than preserved landscapes for us to hike through.  They are intentionally designed natural spaces that depend upon a great deal of interdisciplinary collaboration.

We began in the winter at the Brecksville Reservation, exploring the relationship between historic park architecture and a new generation of spaces for public learning. We also learned about how different bird species create mixed flocks in the winter and we fed them by hand.  Spring brought us to the historic Garfield Reservation, which was once a city park with a Gilded Age design.  It has since been incorporated into the Metropolitan park system, and is representative of the Cleveland Metropark’s innovative effort to open more reservations in the core of the city and give park space access to more people.  There, a restored pond and a new Program Center, built on the foundation of the old boat house, connected ecological restoration with the continuing story of this historic park landscape. Summer took us to the Huntington Reservation, where we explored how a historic estate became part of a park system. Each setting gave us another way to see the connections among architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and nature. 

As we close our 2026 collaboration with Cleveland Metroparks, we are incredibly grateful to the design, planning, and naturalist teams who have shared their work so generously, and to everyone who has joined us. Our final gathering brings those conversations to a particularly meaningful place: the North Chagrin Nature Center, on Sunday, October 25, from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.

Here, the nature center and its surrounding pond and marsh offer an opportunity to consider how deliberately designed and maintained places support habitat, invite exploration, and make environmental education possible. We will hear about the center, its current updates, and the planning and design of the landscape around it, alongside the perspective of the naturalists who bring these spaces to life for visitors.

We will also widen our view. Drawing on Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section, an important precursor to the modern urban transect, a drawing through North Chagrin will help us read the relationships between human settlement and the natural landscape. It will trace a section from the suburban edge along S.O.M. Center Road through forest, nature center, pond, and marsh, continuing into A.B. Williams Memorial Woods (a designated National Natural Landmark), past the original trailside museum foundation, and down through Digger’s Marsh toward the Chagrin River.

That landscape holds an extraordinary legacy. Its old-growth beech-maple forest preserves a living connection to Northeast Ohio’s ecological history.  It is one of the only patches of Northeast Ohio that has not been disturbed by development since Cleveland’s founding and settlement in 1796.  It also is important nationally because of the work of A.B. Williams.  He was Cleveland Metroparks’ first naturalist, and his ground breaking work there connected scientific inquiry with the enduring ambition to help people understand the world around them. Our naturalists for the day will continue that tradition with a closer look at bats and their place in this habitat. 

For me, this is what makes Parkitecture worth coming together for: the opportunity to see how our professions work together to contribute to places that support both ecological health and human well-being, and to experience those places together.

Whether you have followed the seasons with us or are joining for the first time, I hope you’ll come help us close the year among the historic, old growth woods and wetlands of the Cleveland Metroparks’s North Chagrin Reservation.

Best,

Gregory Soltis, AICP

AIA Programming Committee Co-Chair