Raise Some Green (Water) With a $30 million investment, the City of Buffalo is joining a small group of cities that have
turned to environmental impact bonds to fund soft infrastructure.
Count Them In (Planning) Long neglected by planners, the people in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley harness a history of community advocacy and a plan by Groundworks Office to connect residents to city life.
FEATURES
The Twin Pandemics Seven Black landscape architects and designers discuss the spatial factors around a deadly virus and
deadly policing for besieged Black people in the United States.
A Subtropical Second Take To reflect a change in mission, New York’s Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice reopens its renowned interior landscape, originally designed by Dan Kiley, with the lower-latitude palette of
Raymond Jungles, FASLA.
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 250 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: “The Twin Pandemics,” Laura Haddad, artist and landscape architect; “A Subtropical Second Take,” Barrett Doherty, ASLA; “Count Them In,” Ninon Scotto di Uccio.
Mount Auburn’s roads and paths were laid out to highlight the landscape’s natural contours. Photo courtesy Mount Auburn Cemetery.
A crowdsourced archive transcription project at one of the nation’s most historic cemeteries offers insight into 19th century landscape design.
Among the surprises Meg Winslow has found amid 100,000 pages of digitized 19th century records from Mount Auburn Cemetery’s long history are documents detailing “perpetual care of the soil,” she says. As part of lot purchase contracts, people were paying up front for the maintenance of healthy soil alongside care of the grass and plantings and upkeep of headstones. Winslow, Mount Auburn’s Curator of Historical Collections and Archives, found documents from the 1830s that detail soil type and quality, making clear that the experience of Mount Auburn was always focused on horticultural expression.
Established in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the nation’s first rural cemetery, the synthesis of pastoral and carefully planted landscapes dotted with memorials, gravestones, and sculpture. It was a persuasive vision of how the living should honor the dead, as opposed to the crowded warrens of graves in churchyards that had predominated. This landscape type spread across the nation within a few decades, influencing the conception of the public park as another sort of pastoral reprieve from the dirty, brutish city.
The long and complex history of this continually evolving landscape is becoming clearer. A $42,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is funding the transcription of these documents, which include letters, trustee minutes, and records from superintendents, sculptors, gardeners, and others. It’s a record that delves into historical funerary practices, landscape and memorial design, and environmental conservation at what is perhaps the most historic cemetery landscape in the nation. Continue Reading »
Since the creation of the Antiquities Act in 1906, American presidents have had the authority, the honor, and the privilege of designating as national monuments the country’s most culturally and scientifically significant public lands—including, by corollary, some of the most spectacular, biodiverse, heritage-rich, and downright magnificent landscapes in America.
It’s doubtful whether presidents also have the inverse authority—to deconsecrate a national monument once protected—but doubtful is good enough for the current incumbent. In December of 2017, the Trump administration announced the reduction of two national monuments in southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, to shards of their former expanses, exposing culturally and ecologically important places to oil and mineral development.
The deconsecration of Grand Staircase and Bears Ears exemplifies a larger trend in this administration’s management of public lands. Since 2017, federally owned lands and waters totaling more than four times the area of California have been put up for lease to the energy sector. Utah, with its oil, gas, and mineral resources underlying the vistas of the Colorado Plateau, is on the front line. About 65 percent of the state is federally owned, and the U.S. Department of the Interior has received some 230 lease nominations covering more than 150,000 acres. Development of these leases threatens iconic Red Rock Canyon lands, forested plateaus, indigenous cultural sites, archaeological troves, and geological marvels. Some of the leases would allow drilling within half a mile of renowned protected sites, such as Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, and within 10 miles of Bears Ears’s radically shrunken limits. Continue Reading »
“The Schoolyard Is Sick” by Jane Margolies, from the June 2019 issue of LAM, won a gold Association Media and Publishing EXCEL Award in the feature article category.
Curbing Sediment collects sediment washed along curbs and street aprons in shallow troughs. Image courtesy Halina Steiner and Ryan Winston.
Research at the Ohio State University aims to keep stormwater sediment stranded on the road.
When Halina Steiner tested new sediment-collecting infrastructure in her lab at the Ohio State University (OSU), she noticed a mysterious magnetism pulling people toward the bits of beveled foamboard she had crafted into sediment collectors. As water mixes with dirt and sand starts flowing across the planks of foam, and sediment settles into intricately carved CNC-milled grooves, “it’s very mesmerizing,” Steiner says. It’s like sending a paper boat down a stream or, more accurately, “down the gutter,” she says, because that’s the exact place Steiner is looking to intercept sediment that pollutes and clogs waterways. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photos by Jeff Hou, ASLA, left; and Elizabeth Golden, right.
From “Wash at Will” in the July 2020 issue by Haniya Rae, about handwashing stations serving Seattle’s homeless population that recycle graywater into planters.
