September 27, 2016 by LAM Staff
Credit: ASLA 2016 Professional General Design Honor Award. Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl / Lim Shiang Han.
Resiliency is a word that has become fixed in the lexicon of landscape architecture, and for good reason. Resiliency means, among other things, protecting the 80 percent of the world’s population living near a coast from the onslaught of natural disasters and climate change—and there are rising hazards inland, too. It also brings increasing equity to the valuable roles of landscape architects. There’s a ton of information out there on how communities can become more resilient. To help navigate it, ASLA recently released Resilient Design, a web guide that documents the importance of focusing on resiliency (for the human and nonhuman worlds) and offers case studies organized into six general areas to show adaptations that try to anticipate the worst of circumstances. The guide, which was reviewed by several professionals deeply involved in resiliency issues, emphasizes layered defenses rather than “heavy-handed infrastructure projects.”
Posted in ASLA, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, LAM ONLINE, RESILIENCE, WATER | Tagged 2016 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO, ASLA, biodiversity, case studies, climate change, guide, New at HQ, New Orleans, resiliency, Resilient Design | Leave a Comment »
September 22, 2016 by LAM Staff
BY BETSY ANDERSON, ASSOCIATE ASLA
A stormwater retrofit makes space for a new park on Puget Sound.
A ferry ride away from Seattle, Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula is a deeply lobed fjordscape whose 216 miles of shoreline have provided the perfect laboratory for development of so-called end-of-pipe stormwater solutions: space-saving treatment occurring at the bottom of the watershed, near aging municipal outfalls. These stormwater retrofits were most recently tested in Manchester, a close-knit village piled up at the peninsula’s eastern edge. Here, a former gas station site was recruited to treat 100 million gallons of polluted stormwater each year, before it enters Puget Sound.
Tucked between homes and businesses and adjacent to a busy swimming beach, the half-acre parcel now known as Manchester Stormwater Park inspired the project team—a cadre of Kitsap County staff plus engineers and landscape architects from Parametrix, N. L. Olson & Associates, and GeoEngineers—to take a multifunctional approach. “People really wanted a green space here,” says Jens Swenson, ASLA, a landscape architect for Parametrix who led the hardscape, lighting, and plant design for the park.
The green space was hard-won. Funded by a million-dollar grant from Continue Reading »
Posted in BROWNFIELDS, DETAILS, ECOLOGY, LAM MAGAZINE, PARKS, REUSE, WATER | Tagged ASLA, bioretention, Filterra, fjordscape, GeoEngineers, Jens Swenson, Manchester, Manchester Stormwater Park, N. L. Olson & Associates, Parametrix, Peninsula, Puget Sound, Seattle, stormwater, Tim Beachy, Washington State Department of Ecology | Leave a Comment »
September 20, 2016 by LAM Staff
Horace Mitchell, whose title is lead visualizer of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, has mapped sets of U.S. Geological Survey data on stream flows of the entire Mississippi River Basin, which, of course, includes the Missouri River and Ohio River watersheds. Mitchell traces the streams’ flows from source to mouth (though not at actual stream flow speeds). It takes a while for water to run from the continental divides to the Gulf of Mexico, but it eventually does get there.
Posted in ECOLOGY, LAM ONLINE, REGION, WATER | Tagged LAMcast, Mississippi, Missouri, river, water supply, watershed | Leave a Comment »
September 15, 2016 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Credit: Rungkit Charoenwat.
From the ASLA 2016 Professional General Design Honor Award winner “The Metro-Forest Project” by Landscape Architects of Bangkok in the September 2016 issue, featuring an urban reforestation project in Bangkok, Thailand.
“Floating above the canopy.”
—Chris McGee, LAM Art Director
You can read the full table of contents for September 2016 or pick up a free digital issue of the September LAM here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. 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 LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY | Tagged 2015 ASLA Professional Award, ADC, Art Director's Cut, Bangkok, Chris McGee, General Design, honor award, Landscape Architects of Bangkok, reforestation, Thailand, The Metro-Forest Project, urban | 1 Comment »
September 13, 2016 by LAM Staff
BY WENDY GILMARTIN
A Los Angeles firm turns to super-light interventions for a landscape bent on change.
It’s been nearly three years since Los Angeles County Waste Management’s fleet of rumbling trash trucks ceased their daily climb up and down the massive landfill in Puente Hills, for years one of the nation’s largest. Now, the 640-acre site is poised to become a public park, and despite its proximity to an area rich in outdoor amenities like the picturesque Powder Canyon and Arroyo Pescadero Trail, it lacks easy access and infrastructure that would allow surrounding working-class San Gabriel Valley communities a chance to experience its spectacular views and raw terrain.
“When the county came to us, they wanted us to think big, and they wanted the public to think big,” says Bryan Matsumoto, a landscape design associate at Withers & Sandgren Landscape Architecture and Planning in Montrose, California. On behalf of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, Withers & Sandgren worked with Auburn, Alabama-based Hillworks Landscape + Architecture and other consultants to develop a careful strategy of maximizing the site’s abrasively Continue Reading »
Posted in BROWNFIELDS, LAM MAGAZINE | Tagged Arroyo Pescadero Trail, California, elevation change, Hillworks, landfill, Los Angeles, Powder Canyon, public park, Puente Hills, remediation, San Gabriel Valley, settle, Withers & Sandren | Leave a Comment »
September 8, 2016 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Credit: MIR for Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.
A rendering from the ASLA 2016 Analysis & Planning Professional Honor Award winner “Memorial Park Master Plan 2015” by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in the September 2016 issue, featuring the reworking and restoration of Memorial Park in Houston.
“Morning fog, photorealistic edition.”
—Chris McGee, LAM Art Director
You can read the full table of contents for September 2016 or pick up a free digital issue of the September LAM here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. 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 ART, ASLA, AWARDS, LAM ONLINE, PLANNING | Tagged 2016 ASLA, Analysis and Planning, Art Director's Cut, Chris McGee, Houston, master plan, Memorial Park, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Professional Awards, rendering | Leave a Comment »
September 6, 2016 by LAM Staff
BY CAROL BECKER
Hoerr Schaudt’s Michigan Avenue plantings in Chicago return the investment near and far.
You might be in Xanadu, having lunch in an outdoor café on Michigan Avenue. You are steps from noisy traffic, but flower baskets surround every café, parkways are lush with flower beds, and every available space along the sidewalk, both public and private, is given over to gardens, urns full of flowers, statuary, and well-kept trees. A garden grows in the middle of the six-lane avenue. Twenty-five years ago, Chicago’s main downtown thoroughfare was little different from many others—you shopped or ate or saw sites or worked and lived along city streets with young trees under tree grates, with not much else that was living to separate people from constant high-speed traffic and the railroad yards.
Today it’s all different, owing to the Michigan Avenue Streetscape project, recipient of the 2016 ASLA Landmark Award, given to works of landscape architecture between 15 and 50 years old that have kept their design integrity and contribute to the public realm. The project has proved its worth for tourism, real estate, retail shopping, dining, and quality of life for the millions of people who find themselves on the avenue every year. Michigan Avenue has become a destination in itself. The Streetscape (which includes only the median plantings and not the many other streetside plantings that have followed) guides Continue Reading »
Posted in ASLA, AWARDS, CITIES, LAM MAGAZINE, STREETS | Tagged 2016 ASLA Awards, A Safe Haven, ASLA, Associate ASLA, Carol Becker, Chicago, Clarence Davids & Company, Department of Transportation, Doug Hoerr, FASLA, Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, Kris Sorich, Landmark Award, Mag Mile, Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, Michigan Avenue Streetscape, Millennium Park, Pamela Self, Peter Schaudt, Phyllis Bramson, public private partnership | Leave a Comment »
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