About Us
The Big Picture
HALCYON Planning & Design, LLC is a professional landscape architectural services firm based in Salem, Virginia since 2019, with a focus on these areas of practice that often weave together:
- Active Transportation Systems
- Landscape Design
- Master Planning & Design
- Parks & Recreation
- Grant writing
HALCYON Planning & Design remains strategically small and agile for flexibility to invest time and energy into innovative and arcane concepts and approaches.
Having had a variety of roles in ~500 very diverse projects over 32 years in both the public and private sectors, whatever challenges you face, I've probably seen something like them before.
Services
This is a broad, generalized outline list, but maybe it gives an idea of the ways I can help you achieve your goals and serve your people.
Active Transportation
- Visioning and planning for AT systems and networks
- Visioning and planning for specific corridors and individual projects
- Design of greenways, trails, sidewalks, and similar facilities
- Walkability and bikeability audits
- Accessibility audits
Site and Landscape Design
- Conceptual/Schematic Master Plans
- Detailed design of plantings and hardscapes
- Solutions to specific site problems, like erosion or wayfinding
- Site layouts, especially for commercial and institutional projects.
Recreation Planning
- Visioning and planning for parks and park systems
- Design of parks and individual elements within parks
PLEASE CALL If what you need is not on this list. Either I can help you directly, or I can find the firm or person who can help you. I'm happy to make that connection for you.
Ethos
HALCYON Planning & Design holds these truths to be self-evident:
- Collaborative planning and thoughtful design at any scale, from a back yard to a community, can deliver beauty, functionality, health, and other benefits for everybody.
- The modern transportation network is unbalanced in favor of motor vehicles, leaving all other modes wanting. We must rebalance the system and our urban fabric to make walking, biking, and other modes safe, viable, and attractive.
- Every landscape we create, every site we develop, every neighborhood we build, displaces a habitat on which the birds, bees, and bunnies rely. We humans rely similarly on the healthful and proper functioning of our habitats and the environment around them, so we must preserve and regenerate healthy ecosystem services and manage the cumulative impacts of the larger flow of projects.
- Green spaces and play are essential to human health and development, and they serve as valued escapes from the gray, mundane challenges and pressures of daily life.
- Basic human compassion compels us to serve both the strong and the needy.
About the name, "Halcyon"
hal·cy·on / ˈhal-sē-ən (adj.) serene, peaceful; balanced; prosperous.
According to Greek mythology, Alkyone, the daughter of the god of the winds, became so distraught when she learned that her husband had been killed in a shipwreck that she threw herself into the sea and was changed into a kingfisher bird. As a result, ancient Greeks called such birds alkyon or halkyon.
The legend also says that these kingfishers built floating nests on the sea, where they so charmed the wind god that he created a period of unusual calm that lasted until the birds' eggs hatched. This legend prompted people to use halcyon as an adjective meaning either "relating to the kingfisher or its nesting period" or "a period of calm". The latter meaning is what endures in common usage today, but biologists also adopted Halcyon as the scientific name for a genus of kingfisher. (Adapted from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halcyon)