Landscape architects are ingrained systems thinkers and experts on how to balance infrastructure and the ecological imperatives of climate change, all while improving transit networks that bind people together. Significant portions of the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that became law late last year will be filtering down to communities, and landscape architects bring experience and expertise to these types of projects, including the removal of highways,streetscapedesign,greenwayplanning, and especially those projects that seek to address incidences of transit infrastructure exacerbating existing economic and demographic inequalities.Continue reading Get Ready to Respond→
Years of politically motivated attacks have put professional licensure at risk. Now, the design professions and their allies are banding together to protect it.
The state of Virginia has regulated landscape architecture as a profession since 1980, certifying practitioners through its professional occupational agency. In 2010, landscape architecture became a licensed profession in the state.
Stormwater runoff from the property collects in a steel basin before seeping into the lawn through a series of weeps. Photo by Marion Brenner, Affiliate ASLA.
Nothing excites Anna Thurmayr and Dietmar Straub, ASLA, more than bringing high-concept landscape architecture to places where it is traditionally absent—remote communities, inner-city schoolyards, peri-urban land awaiting tract homes. Continue reading Have Van, Will Garden→
Installing plants at a Test Plot site with USC student Yiyi Peng, studio instructor and USC Test Plot lead Jen Toy, and local resident Maria Arroyo, a member of the Abuelas de Parque. Image courtesy USC Architecture.
In 2018, after discovering that city arborists planned to plant Australian and South African plant species in response to a future of sustained droughts, the Los Angeles landscape architecture studio Terremoto launched Test Plot, a small-scale scheme designed to engage community groups in growing native plants in city parks and ultimately show that residents can play a role in maintaining the city’s landscape. “There’s a fear of maintenance,” Jenny Jones, ASLA, a partner at Terremoto, says. “We want to celebrate the maintenance.” Continue reading The Lab in the Backyard→
LAM is highlighting studentand professional winners from the 2021 ASLA Awards by asking designers to share an outtake that tells an important part of their project’s narrative.
The standard model of practice in landscape architecture—killer hours, ho-hum salaries, and often little say among staff—has long assumed the profession is competing with itself for talent. That’s no longer the case.
There’s quite a lot of stirring these days in landscape architecture offices, and it’s enough to make firm owners and leaders nervous in unfamiliar ways. Continue reading Work in Progress→
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
“Team building amongst the trees.”
—Chris McGee, Art Director
Image courtesy Stimson.
From “In Their Elements” by Jonathan Lerner in the April 2022 issue, about the culture of craft and care embedded in the eponymous landscape architecture firm Stephen Stimson founded in 1992.
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
