Oakmont in Retrospect
By David Driapsa
David Driapsa was employed as a community planner in the Community Development Group of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and delegated to master plan the streets, building lots and parks of the Oakmont neighborhood. He also coordinated the implementation of what became an award-winning neighborhood of 130 single-family homes of a common architecture and landscape architecture theme in the prestigious community of Pelican Bay.
Oakmont crowns a dry sand ridge mantled in coastal scrub forest. This ridge is a relic of an ancient beach dune. It consists of fine white sand, with scant surface moisture. The ridge is crowded with dwarf live oak trees, saw palmettos, stands of fire-scorched pines, brittle shrubs, tawny grasses, showy forbes, lichens and even cacti. More than forty species of plants and many more species of animals are restricted to this environment. Here grows the southern-most strand of Turkey Oaks (Quercus leavis) in the United States. The Florida scrub jay, listed as threatened, is a resident.
David’s expertise in Florida-appropriate plantings and design became widely recognized as he preserved a matrix of the forest landscape in a management intensive approach to real estate development. Instead of a wholesale clearing of the vegetation to make way for homesites, he used tree surveys and orchestrated the selective removal of plants on a site-by-site basis allowed each home to be nestled in the forest. David wrote the landscape architectural guidelines that required new plantings to be similar in character to the forest vegetation, meaning in drought resistance, form, color and texture.
Oakmont was an experiment in real estate development, natural resource conservation and landscape aesthetics. At first it seemed most people wanted to clear away the vegetation, but as the results of this sustainable development progressed, home builders learned to retain the natural forest beauty that had attracted their buyers to the neighborhood in the first place.
Oakmont won many local, state and national landscape awards. South Florida Water Management District designated Oakmont a Xeriscape Neighborhood Demonstration Site and the Florida Chapter of the American Society of landscape Architects bestowed its awards on this crowning achievement of landscape sustainability.
David J Driapsa Landscape Architect
(239) 591-2321
Please visit www.davidjdriapsa.com for more information
Registered Professional Landscape Architect, Florida LA0001185
(C) Copyright 1993-2016 David J Driapsa