Julie Bargmann and her Core City Park in Detroit. Left photo courtesy Barrett Doherty, The Cultural Landscape Foundation; right photo courtesy Prince Concepts and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Known for the many students who cite her as an influence as much as for her work as the founder of D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio, Bargmann is revered for remediating polluted and neglected postindustrial sites with designs that celebrate infrastructural refinement and industrial power. A master at regenerating degraded land without erasing its history, Bargmann reveals layers of strata and ruin, but also layers of narrative, granting her projects strength, performance, and a kind of raw beauty.
According to the Oberlander Prize jury, Bargmann “has been a provocateur, a critical practitioner, and a public intellectual. She embodies the kind of activism required of landscape architects in an era of severe environmental challenges and persistent social inequities.” Continue Reading »
The 2021 ASLA Awards issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine showcases 75 winning projects selected out of the 926 submissions to this year’s awards program. The highly anticipated October issue is free this month and includes all of the 2021 Awards and Honors, including this year’s recipients of the Bradford Williams Medal, which honors excellence in journalism about landscape.
Complete details and images for the full slate of the Student and Professional award-winning projects can be seen at ASLA’s website. For more insight into the awards, check back here next month for exclusive behind-the-boards content from Student and Professional award winners. And join us to celebrate the winners at the ASLA Awards ceremony at the Conference on Landscape Architecture, November 19–22 in Nashville, Tennessee.
On June 17, 1988, life changed for Laurie Potier-Brown, ASLA. She was living in Tampa, Florida, and working in marketing while also pursuing an MBA. Her company’s offices were located downtown, near the new NationsBank tower, Harry Wolf’s now-iconic concrete silo of an office building. That Friday, during her lunch break, Potier-Brown ventured down to the park that had just opened in conjunction with the building. She walked under the plexiglass-bottomed canal and up into the cool, leafy garden, and as she wandered through the grove of flowering crape myrtles and listened to the “gurgling of water running in the rills,” Potier-Brown says she decided to abandon everything—her job in marketing, her MBA—and become a landscape architect.
Thirty years later, Potier-Brown is part of a group working to help restore the park that so profoundly altered her career. Today it is known as Kiley Garden after its lead designer, the renowned modernist Dan Kiley—though for those who remember it, the garden is barely recognizable. Its 800 crape myrtles are gone, as are its allées of sabal palms. The clear-bottomed canal has been removed, and the reflecting pools one once crossed have been paved over. “They’re literally parking cars where the reflecting pools were,” says Christian Leon, the director of a local nonprofit and a supporter of the garden’s restoration. “There’s an entire parking garage underneath!” Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Iwan Baan.
From “Worlds Away” by Glenn Dixon in the September 2021 issue, about PWP’s Glenstone museum outside Washington, D.C., which makes a monument out of its art and its landscape.
View of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, and the Chukchi Sea in February 2020. Photo by Chengxin Sha/Arctic Design Group, 2020.
Federally funded research will help set a baseline for how to build in the Arctic.
In Alaska, beyond the Arctic Circle in North Slope Borough, Indigenous communities practice subsistence whale hunting. To store the whale meat, tribal communities dig ice cellars in the permafrost, a major infrastructural feat, as a 50-ton whale can feed thousands. But as climate change melts permafrost, the cellars are failing, leading to spoiled food. Studies have indicated that climate change may be a factor, but soil conditions and development on top of cellars are also causing warming and potential failure. “We keep it there in trust for the community,” says Gordon Brower, the director of North Slope Borough Planning and Community Services and a member of the Iñupiaq Indigenous community. “To keep that type of meat secure and healthy, we need to evaluate our earthen storage shelters.”
How might designers augment ice cellars’ cooling capacity in ways that support Indigenous traditions, while contending with the Arctic’s position on the front lines of climate change? This question is just one part of the National Science Foundation-funded research by the University of Virginia’s Arctic Research Center, aimed at gathering data to determine the design parameters for Arctic infrastructure in an era of expanding development and climate change, says Leena Cho, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at UVA. Cho, her partner Matthew Jull, an associate professor of architecture, and a team of UVA researchers will install aquatic, meteorological, and geotechnical sensors in the North Slope Borough town of Utqiagvik. This data will help Cho and Jull formulate guidelines for building height, form, materials, and foundations, as well as wider urban planning concerns in the Arctic. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Image by Anjelica S. Gallegos.
From “Reappearing Act” by Jonathan Lerner in the September 2021 issue, about Anjelica Gallegos’s plan to revive a memorial for Indigenous people on the shores of Staten Island.
Designers from SCAPE’s New Orleans and New York offices talk about the lessons from Hurricane Ida, in and out of the office.
Damage from Hurricane Ida in Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana, where volunteers from SCAPE are pitching in with the recycling organization Glass Half Full to help with the cleanup. Photo by Liz Camuti.
In early September, a few days after Hurricane Ida raked through Louisiana on its way up the East Coast, three designers from SCAPE Studio met up on Zoom to talk with Landscape Architecture Magazine’s Acting Editor, Jennifer Reut, about Ida’s aftermath. SCAPE’s practice has long focused on coastal resilience and sea-level rise, but Ida’s dual impact on New Orleans (August 29) and New York (September 1) was the first time that designers from both offices had experienced catastrophic flooding from the same storm. Hurricane Ida’s aftermath offered a chance to reflect on what is changing and what isn’t in the profession and the public’s understanding of climate-fueled catastrophes.
Gathered were John Donnelly, ASLA, the technical principal at SCAPE, who had recently moved to New Orleans to work at SCAPE’s office there. Studio Director Chris Barnes, ASLA, had founded the New Orleans office when he moved back home to Louisiana, and Design Principal Gena Wirth, ASLA, called in from SCAPE’s New York office. This is an excerpt from the conversation that took place on September 10. The full interview will appear in Landscape Architecture Magazine in November 2021. Continue Reading »
The 2021 ASLA Awards issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine showcases 75 winning projects selected out of the 926 submissions to this year’s awards program. The highly anticipated 
