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SOLDIER STORIES

June 15, 2021 by LAM Staff

BY KIM O’CONNELL / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

Three new landscapes in Washington, D.C., honor the common soldier and fill gaps in the capital city’s memorial narrative.

FROM THE JUNE 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

On the National Mall, it’s unusual to feel as if you’ve stumbled upon a secret, sacred space. The nation’s history is an open book on this great expanse, a story told in granite and marble, if somewhat unevenly, through dozens of memorials to significant events and people. War is the dominant theme, with monuments that speak of large-scale sacrifice in places like the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Korean War Veterans Memorial. Other Washington, D.C., memorials revere larger-than-life figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the latter being the subject of a massive new Frank Gehry-designed memorial just south of the Mall, one of the most recent to undergo the multiyear, many-layered process of creating public space in the nation’s capital.

So it is somewhat surprising to come across one of D.C.’s newest memorials in a tree-lined grove set in a wetland—and that it is focused on a simple steel circle rising above the earth. Situated just beyond the famous cantilevered roof of the National Museum of the American Indian, this is the National Native American Veterans Memorial, which opened last fall to honor the long and underappreciated tradition of Indigenous military service. Although the memorial shares some traits with others in the capital city, where it’s not uncommon to see elemental shapes and enduring materials used as symbols, it’s part of a new wave of veterans’ memorials that seek to speak as much to the present and future as they do to the past.

Significantly, three recent memorials—the Native American memorial, the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial, and the just-opened national World War I Memorial—also have things to say about the role of landscape architecture in elevating the voices of often-forgotten groups of people. They each focus on the common soldier’s experiences while making important civic connections to their surroundings. Continue Reading »

Posted in ASLA, CITIES, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MEMORIAL, PRESERVATION | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

ART DIRECTOR’S CUT, JUNE 10

June 10, 2021 by LAM Staff

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

From “Soldier Stories” by Kim O’Connell in the June 2021 issue, about three veterans memorials in Washington, D.C., that find new ways to connect to the city.

“Long shadows along the National Native American Veterans Memorial in D.C.”

 

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

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.

Posted in HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MEMORIAL, ONLINE ONLY, PLANNING | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

POWER PLAYER

June 8, 2021 by LAM Staff

As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish.

BY NICHOLAS PEVZNER, YEKANG KO, AND KIRK DIMOND, ASLA

FROM THE JUNE 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Renewable energy is a central element in the Biden administration’s climate plans, a response to President Joe Biden’s campaign goal of a 100 percent clean grid by 2035 and the promise of 10 million well-paying green infrastructure jobs. Renewable energy and the power sector must play a central part in this plan if the United States is to meet Biden’s ambitious new national climate target. The goal, released on Earth Day as part of a virtual international climate gathering ahead of the COP26 Climate Change Conference, is to achieve a 50 percent reduction in climate emissions by 2030 measured against 2005 levels. And clean energy transmission, generation, and storage have a major presence in the American Jobs Plan, the Biden administration’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal now making its way through Congress. All of this renewable energy would represent a major transformation of the landscape. What would it mean for landscape design, and what would the designer’s role be in such a major overhaul of the energy sector? Continue Reading »

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, PLANNING, PRACTICE, RESILIENCE, THE BACK, UNIVERSITY | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

THEY WERE ALWAYS THERE

June 7, 2021 by Jennifer Reut

BY JENNIFER REUT

 

FROM THE JUNE 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

This spring, the Atlantic published an essay by David Treuer, the Ojibwe author of the highly lauded cultural history The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. In “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” Treuer puts his argument out front, and for the next 8,000 words, he doesn’t mince.

Treuer takes readers through an excoriating and sure-footed record of the national parks as sites of violence and dispossession, stopping only briefly to let readers take in Katy Grannan’s exquisite portraits of contemporary Native American people and their landscapes. The essay frontloads the murderous history of how tribes had been removed from their ancestral homelands in places that became Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and then starved out when they could no longer return to hunt or fish.

The narrative serves as a bracing jolt to set up the case that the national parks should be returned to Native Americans, who are owed these lands, and best suited to manage them in a responsible way. In the hands of tribes, the parks would be protected from the political badminton that sites like Bears Ears National Monument, and their people, have endured. With the maintenance backlog and reduction in park staff even as attendance has increased multifold, the National Park Service appears increasingly ill-equipped to steward the parks through climate change and into the next century. Continue Reading »

Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, LAND MATTERS, PARKS, PLANNING, PRACTICE, RECREATION | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

ONE STITCH IN TIME

June 3, 2021 by LAM Staff

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A new pedestrian path is a small act of repair for Tulsa’s Black Wall Street.

FROM THE JUNE 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Tucked inside President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan is $20 billion earmarked for communities torn apart by freeway construction and urban renewal. According to the Biden administration, the federal funds will be used to help reconnect these typically minority, often Black, communities and address decades of disinvestment and environmental racism.

Cities around the country might soon be looking to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood neighborhood for ways to do so. Located just north of downtown Tulsa, Greenwood is home to what was known as Black Wall Street and is the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which 35 city blocks of Greenwood were burned and hundreds of Black men, women, and children were killed. (The event was narrativized in the HBO adaptation of Watchmen.) Greenwood was rebuilt by the families and business owners who survived, only for sections of it to be razed again to make way for what is now Interstate 244. Continue Reading »

Posted in ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MEMORIAL, NOW, STREETS | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

JUNE LAM: NEW WAYS TO REMEMBER

June 1, 2021 by LAM Staff

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

FOREGROUND

Talking Points (Planning)
The WELL Community Standard is touted as the new sustainability checklist, but is it just landscape architecture in new clothes? Reed Hilderbrand tries it out at a Florida megaproject, Water Street Tampa.

Let the Graveyard Grow (Maintenance)
In Brooklyn, New York, Green-Wood Cemetery’s parklike setting and open lawns have become a pandemic destination. Behind the placid view, the horticultural staff races to stay ahead of climate change.

FEATURES

Soldier Stories
Three new veterans memorials break from the visual language of war to make a place for those who served and lived. Butzer Architects and Urbanism, Michael Vergason Landscape Architects, and DAVID RUBIN Land Collective each found an approach that ties the past to the present.

Back to Basics
When Waterfront Toronto announced that the Google offshoot Sidewalk Labs would be designing an urban techtopia on a prime 12-acre site, brows were raised. Now the project is canceled—a casualty of public resistance and pandemic funding—and the city looks to what’s next.

The full table of contents for June 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 June articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Soldier Stories,” Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA; “Back to Basics,” Picture Plane for Heatherwick Studio for Sidewalk Labs; “Talking Points,” Reed Hilderbrand; “Let the Graveyard Grow,” Green-Wood/Art Presson.

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, HEALING GARDENS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MAINTENANCE, ONLINE ONLY, PLANNING, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SPECIES, WATER | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

CORNELIA HAHN OBERLANDER, 1921–2021

May 26, 2021 by LAM Staff

 

 

Cornelia  Hahn Oberlander, on site in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, in 2013. Photo by Anne Raver.

 

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a recipient of the ASLA Medal, died this weekend at the age of 99, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy of designed projects and a lifelong commitment to advocacy for the profession. Born in 1921, she fled Nazi Germany in 1939 for the United States, eventually attending Smith College and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, from which she graduated in 1947. Five years later, she moved to Vancouver, British  Columbia, with her husband, the late architect Peter Oberlander, where they both had high-profile careers for several decades. Oberlander designed many projects internationally, but her life and work are closely linked with the Canadian cultural landscape.

As word of Oberlander’s death spread, praise for her influence and activism appeared on social media, where she was called a “visionary,” “icon,” and “legend.”  Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, who served on the Oberlander Prize Advisory Committee, tweeted, “We stand on Cornelia’s shoulders. Great talent, creative risk taker, generous mentor.” Chris Reed, FASLA, of STOSS Landscape Urbanism, agreed, saying, “Cornelia leaves a stunning legacy of work and leadership, and humanity.”

Oberlander’s landscape architecture work has been extensively published in Landscape Architecture Magazine, as well as the general and design press. A selection of articles published in LAM and available online include “Permafrost Frontier,” a profile of Oberlander’s work in the Northwest Territories; “Canadian Modern,” profiling her work in Vancouver; and “Northern Terrain,” about Canada’s National Gallery.

Among the many opportunities to learn about Oberlander’s contributions are Susan Herrington’s Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape and the recent documentary City Dreamers, which focused on four influential women designers and critics: Denise Scott Brown, Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, and Oberlander. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which conducted an oral history with Oberlander in 2008, announced in 2019 that a recently established international landscape architecture prize would be named in honor of Oberlander. The biennial prize will carry a $100,000 award as well as two years of public engagement. The Cultural Landscape Foundation has extensive information about Oberlander’s career and the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize on its website, as well as a recording of the livestreamed memorial service held on May 24, 2021.

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