August 16, 2018 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Kevin Scott.
From “Made to Disappear” in the August 2018 issue by Timothy A. Schuler, about a fruit company compound by Berger Partnership that all but vanishes in a shroud of native plantings.
“On the berm and down below.”
–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR
As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.
Posted in FARMS, LAM ONLINE, OFFICE, PHOTOGRAPHY, SPECIES | Tagged Art Director's Cut, Berger Partnership, fruit, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, native plantings, Timothy Schuler | Leave a Comment »
August 14, 2018 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Morgan Vickers at Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. Photo by David Kafer.
Route 66, the nation’s first all-paved national highway connecting the Midwest to California, is best read as the first draft of contemporary America. Its establishment in 1926 definitively ended any notions of an untamed Western frontier, and it signaled the beginning of America’s total transition to a nation defined by settlement, landscape, and automobile obsession.
So much of Route 66’s cultural resources and history are dedicated and scaled to the car: motels, highways, bridges, gas stations, drive-in theaters, and oddball curios that read well from a speeding Ford. Its 2,400 miles cut through eight states and 300 towns, from Chicago to Los Angeles. It channeled migrants to the fertile coast during the Great Depression and soldiers and equipment to the Asian front during World War II.
But Route 66 eventually fell victim to the car’s success. In 1945, 65,000 cars were manufactured in America. Three years later that number had grown to 3.9 million. Cars became so omnipresent that this two-lane road was soon superseded by four-lane interstate highways. By the time it was decommissioned in 1985, Route 66 had been replaced by sections of I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10. Overshadowed by the interstate system, the communities that had sprung up around the route were cut off from the lifeblood of commerce that it supplied them.
Earlier this summer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a campaign Continue Reading »
Posted in HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, LAM ONLINE, PEOPLE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION | Tagged 11 Most Endangered, Adrian, Airstream, America, Americana, automobile, California, cars, Chicago, Civilian Conservation Corps, Freeway, gas station, Great Depression, Green Books, Highway, historic preservation, Instagram, Interstate, Jason Clement, kitsch, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, landscape preservation, Los Angeles, Midpoint Café, Midwest, Morgan Vickers, National Historic Trail, National Register of Historic Places, National Trust for Historic Preservation, neon, New Deal, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Pacific Ocean, paved, petition, PHOTOGRAPHY, polaroid, Road, Roadies, Route 66, Texas, Travel, Vietnamese, WWII, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2018 by LAM Staff
BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
In Miami Beach, elevating streets is not without growing pains.
Faced with rising sea levels, the City of Miami Beach is lifting itself out of the water’s way—one street at a time. Beginning with the neighborhoods lowest in elevation, the city has raised dozens of streets in the past few years, some by as much as two feet. The $500 million project, which also includes new stormwater pumps, is a coordinated effort to prevent flooding in the long term. In the short term, however, the rapid elevation of the public right-of-way is presenting the city with novel challenges.
Some of those challenges, such as pumps that can fail during power outages, are mechanical. Others are legal. When one restaurant flooded, its insurance company initially refused to cover damages after classifying the restaurant’s dining area as a “basement” since it was now lower than the surrounding grade. (The city installed generators to solve the first problem and advocated on behalf of the restaurant owner, whose claim was eventually approved, to solve the second.) Other challenges involve the design of the public realm. Continue Reading »
Posted in ACCESSIBILITY, CITIES, CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT, LAM MAGAZINE, NOW, OCEANS, RESILIENCE, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION | Tagged ACCESSIBILITY, Adriana Savino, Barry Miller, Eric Carpenter, flooding, Florida, green infrastructure, Greenspace Division, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Miami Beach, raised streets, RESILIENCE, Rodney Knowles, Savino & Miller Design Studio, sea-level rise, Sidewalk, sponge, stormwater, STREETS, streetscapes, Timothy A. Schuler | Leave a Comment »
August 7, 2018 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Geoffrey Giller.
From “Quick-Change Creatures” in the August 2018 issue by Timothy Schuler, on how the rapid evolution of Caribbean lizards is raising questions about urban ecology.
“Lizard lookers.”
–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR
As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.
Posted in ECOLOGY, LAM ONLINE, NOW, PHOTOGRAPHY, SPECIES, WILDLIFE | Tagged Art Director's Cut, Caribbean, Evolution, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lizard, Timothy Schuler, urban ecology | Leave a Comment »
August 2, 2018 by LAM Staff
BY LISA OWENS VIANI
In Great Lakes cities, derelict parcels sponge up stormwater.
Eight years ago, Sandra Albro, a research associate in applied urban ecology at the Cleveland Botanical Garden (now Holden Forests & Gardens) began to think about opportunities lurking in the city’s vacant lots—in particular how to help cities with their water quality problems. During heavy rains, raw sewage from old, leaky, combined sewer-stormwater systems is often flushed into the Great Lakes, resulting in beach closures not fun for tourists. At the same time, in Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Gary, Indiana—where populations have declined by as much as 40 to 50 percent since the 1950s—derelict houses and vacant lots have increased: 30,000 in Cleveland, 7,000 in Gary, and more than 6,000 in Buffalo.
Cleveland, Buffalo, and Gary are among 158 communities with permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to discharge treated wastewater into the Great Lakes. The agency has also charged them with implementing Long Term Control Plans under the Clean Water Act to eliminate discharges of untreated sewage from their combined system overflows. “It’s a funny thing,” says David Rankin, the executive director of the Great Lakes Protection Fund, a private nonprofit corporation that funds projects to build the health of the lakes. “Most of the time these systems do a great job of managing stormwater—they actually treat it. It was state-of-the-art Victorian engineering that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. But in heavy rains, some waste gets flushed out, too—and when you’re looking at more than 100 dischargers, it starts to add up.” According to the EPA, in 2014 the toll was an estimated 22 billion gallons of untreated wastewater discharged into the lakes.
Rankin says Great Lakes cities need to think differently about the problem—many are trying to find funding to build massive pipes. But with their populations declining, he suggests these cities should think about solutions that don’t involve tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So when Albro came to him with her idea for using vacant lots to capture stormwater, the fund awarded her a small grant to develop a plan. She contacted 11 Great Lakes cities, Continue Reading »
Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, GREEN ROOFS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, LAM MAGAZINE, PLANNING, PLANTS, REGION, RESIDENTIAL, RESILIENCE, WATER | Tagged Buffalo, Buffalo Sewer Authority, Buffalo/State University of New York, census data, Clean Water Act, Cleveland, Cleveland Botanical Garden, combined sewer-stormwater systems, David Rankin, Demolition, EPA, Gary, gentrification, Great Lakes, Great Lakes Cities, Great Lakes Protection Fund, GREEN ROOFS, Holden Forests & Gardens, hydrology, impervious surfaces, Implement, Indiana, Jason Kentner, Jenifer Kaminsky, landscape adaptive reuse, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lisa Owens Viani, Long Term Control Plans, native plant nursery, New York, Ohio, pilot projects, pollution, PUSH Blue, PUSH Buffalo, rain barrels, rain gardens, Sandra Albro, Sean Burkholder, sewage, soil, stormwater, University of Pennsylvania, Urban Vacancy, vacant lots, Vacant to Vibrant., Water, wealth inequality | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2018 by LAM Staff
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
It’s the first of August, which means the latest issue of LAM is here! You’ll find these stories inside:
FOREGROUND
Lots of Opportunity (Water)
PUSH Blue helps Great Lakes communities manage their stormwater with rain gardens,
playgrounds, and greenhouses created on vacant parcels.
The Finer Fabric (Preservation)
A historic Tucson neighborhood is making an inventory of the street details,
big and small, that make it singular.
Tooling Up (Tech)
Digital work flows for CNC fabrication are coming out of the studio and into practice.
FEATURES
Democratic Void
Zurich’s vast public square, Sechseläutenplatz, opened in 2014. Now the city’s residents must decide how (and how often) they want to use it.
Almost Wilderness, Maybe Forever
The 24,000-acre Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve on the California coast was bought—and protected—with the largest donation ever made to the Nature Conservancy.
Made to Disappear
Berger Partnership’s landscape for the Washington Fruit & Produce Company headquarters takes inspiration from Yakima Valley’s agricultural heritage.
All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for August can be found here.
As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.
Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting August articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “Tooling Up,” Marion Brenner, Affiliate ASLA; “Lots of Opportunity,” Sandra Albro, Holden Forests & Gardens; “The Finer Fabric,” Steve Grede; “Made to Disappear,” Kevin Scott; “Almost Wilderness, Maybe Forever,” The Nature Conservancy/Peter Montgomery; “Democratic Void,” © Manuel Bauer Agentur Focus.
Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANTS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SPECIES, STREETS, WATER | Tagged Berger Partnership, California, CNC, conservation, Fabrication, Great Lakes, Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, native plantings, Nature Conservancy, Preservation, public square, PUSH Blue, rain garden, Sechseläutenplatz, stormwater, STREETS, TECH, Tucson, Vacancy, Washington Fruit & Produce Company, Washington State, Water, Yakima Valley, Zurich | Leave a Comment »
July 31, 2018 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Vitrified brick in Cincinnati. Image courtesy Robin Williams.
Uncovering historic pavements reveals each city’s “urban fingerprint.”
In the past 200 years, cities have become larger, safer, and healthier places to live, but there’s one arena of urban infrastructure that has become incalculably more monotonous and denuded: the range and diversity of pavement types on city streets and sidewalks.
Before the dominance of concrete and asphalt, city streets were paved in a wild diversity of minerals and materials: glassy vitrified brick, wooden block, crushed oyster shells, rough-hewn granite blocks, and more.
Robin Williams, the chair of architectural history at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has traveled to 40 cities across North America to study their historic pavements and found a rich spectrum of street coverings that somehow persist with no preservation protections. Continue Reading »
Posted in CITIES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, LAM ONLINE, PRESERVATION, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION | Tagged 19th century, architectural history, asphalt, authenticity, belgian block, brick, Bridget Lidy, CITIES, cobblestone, concrete, granite, historic pavement, historic preservation, Infrastructure, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, ordinance, paver, permeable surfaces, regulation, Robin Williams, Savannah, Savannah College of Art and Design, shared streets, street, streetscape, traffic calming, transit, urbanization, Victorian, vitrified brick, walkable, wood block, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
Older Posts »
