August 22, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY JANE MARGOLIES
Randall’s Island, situated at the center of New York City, has become the park and recreational mecca long dreamed about.
It’s a sunny afternoon in May, and lacrosse games are in full swing on Randall’s Island, a 516-acre landmass surrounded by water and, beyond, the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Cyclists pedal on a path under the heroic arches of a 1917 railroad trestle. A middle school track team is warming up outside the stadium where Usain Bolt broke the world record in the men’s 100-meter dash in 2008.
The landscape architect Rick Parisi, FASLA, and I are not playing lacrosse or cycling or running. But we are roving around the island—which is bordered by the Harlem and East Rivers, the Bronx Kill, and a treacherous strait known as the Hell Gate. Parisi, the managing principal of MPFP, has helped with the transformation of the island over the past couple of decades, and I’ve asked for a tour of some of his firm’s accomplishments. Besides, I have a special request: Continue Reading »
Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, CONSTRUCTION, FEATURES, HISTORY, LAM MAGAZINE, NEW YORK CITY, PARKS, PEOPLE, RECREATION | Tagged Adrian Benepe, Aimee Boden, Andrew Tisch, Anne Wilson, Arches, asylum, bridges, Bronx Kill, Carl Icahn, Central Park Conservancy, East River, Environmental Champion award, Eric Peterson, excavation, fill, Frank Rossi, Frieze art fair, Geoarcheology Research Associates, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, Harlem River, Hospital, Islands, Jane Margolies, Karen Cohen, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, living shoreline, Manhattan, Mathews Nielsen, Michael Barnicle, Michael Bloomberg, MPFP, New York City, PARKS, potters field, Queens, Quennell Rothschild & Partners, Randall’s Island, Randall’s Island Access Plan, Randall’s Island Park Alliance, RGR Landscape, Ricardo Zurita, Rick Parisi, Robert Moses, salt marsh, Sports fields, Starr Whitehouse, Stephen Whitehouse, the boneyard, the Bronx, The French Connection, Triborough Bridge Authority, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, wetlands | 1 Comment »
August 21, 2017 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.
From “Game On” by Jane Margolies in the August 2017 issue, about Randall’s Island’s long and winding road to becoming the sports field megavenue it is today.
“Shade break.”
–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR
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 BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, NEW YORK CITY, PHOTOGRAPHY, REUSE, Uncategorized | Tagged Jane Margolies, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, New York City, PHOTOGRAPHY, Randall’s Island, RGR Landscape, Sahar Coston-Hardy, Sports fields | Leave a Comment »
August 17, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
A basin and spillway near Las Vegas. Image courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation Photo Archive.
On the outskirts of the parched city of Las Vegas are dozens of basins dug into the earth, connected to hundreds of miles of arterial concrete channels that weave through the city to Lake Mead, some 30 miles to the east. Begun in the mid-1980s, this $2 billion land works infrastructure project is now 80 percent complete. The full plan calls for 121 basins and 800 miles of channel.
What’s the purpose of all this megascaled trench work? Las Vegas, plopped arbitrarily in the Mojave Desert with no permanent source of surface water and annual average rainfall of four inches, is prone to flash floods. These basins, spillways, and channels collect rainwater and whisk it away just every so often.
This paradox is the subject of Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles. Up through mid-September, its eerily steady gaze Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, ECOLOGY, LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, REGION, WATER | Tagged basin, Canal, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Channel, Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood, development, drone, exhibition, flood, Irony, irrigation, Lake Mead, Land Art, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Matthew Coolidge, Nevada, Photo, Rainfall, Ramparts, Valley, video, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
August 15, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY BRIAN BARTH
One practitioner defies the handicaps of building Information modeling for landscape, determined not to remain an exception.
Meghen Quinn, ASLA, has a secret. BIM—an acronym that puts moonbeams in the eyes of architects, but makes some landscape architects cringe—is her software of choice. BIM, shorthand for building information modeling, is the 3-D, data-rich software platform embodied by Revit, a product launched in 2000 by Charles River Software and acquired by Autodesk two years later. By 2012, 70 percent of architecture firms in North America reported using BIM, and in 2016 the American Institute of Architects reported that BIM was used for nearly 100 percent of projects at large firms.
It seems that so few landscape architects use BIM, however, that no one has ever bothered to collect the data. Its reputation in the field is as a clunky, building-centric, overly complex tool that has put up yet another barrier between landscape designers and architects.
Yet Quinn, who merged her San Francisco practice with the Office of Cheryl Barton in January, is all moonbeams. Well, mostly. “I never want to use CAD again,” she says. “Moving to BIM is like Continue Reading »
Posted in CONSTRUCTION, LAM MAGAZINE, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, TECH | Tagged 3-D, architect, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, Brian Barth, Charles River Software, Cloud-based, coordination, data, Illustration, interdisciplinary, Jeffrey Galbraith, landarchBIM, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Meghen Quinn, modeling, PRACTICE, Revit, Rhino, Site Designer Extension, SketchUp, software, Solomon Cordwell Buenz, tool | Leave a Comment »
August 14, 2017 by LAM Staff
When the landscape architects at Mahan Rykiel Associates found themselves with uprooted trees they couldn’t fit back onto a newly designed and built mixed-use building site, they offered them to a local Baltimore middle school in the Locust Point neighborhood. But after talking with the principal of Francis Scott Key Middle School, they quickly realized that there was an opportunity for a much deeper collaboration than simply donating some foliage. So the landscape architects began designing a school yard with four different types of learning environments, to aid what they call “STEM-based environmental education.” Project Birdland will be the first phase of a partnership between Mahan Rykiel Associates and Francis Scott Key Middle School. Students will work with a biologist and the fabricators at Gutierrez Studios to design and build birdhouses for endangered and threatened bird species. From the outset, the project gives students an introduction to the humancentric world of design and craft and also to the creation of habitats for their neighboring fauna.
Posted in EDUCATION, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, PEOPLE, PLANTS, SCHOOLS, SPECIES, STUDENTS, WILDLIFE | Tagged Baltimore, Birdhouses, birds, Environmental Education, Francis Scott Key Middle School, habitat, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Locust Point, Mahan Rykiel Associates, Mixed-Use, Project Birdland, STEM, students, tree | Leave a Comment »
August 10, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Image courtesy of Land8: Landscape Architects Network.
The landscape architecture websites Land8 and Landscape Architects Network (LAN) have merged. The resulting media platform aims to add focus to original content creation while serving an international audience. “We want to be the most visited website in landscape architecture,” says Matt Alcide, Land8’s majority owner.
LAN will largely dissolve into Land8 with the merger, as the Arlington, Virginia-based Land8 will Continue Reading »
Posted in LAM ONLINE, PEOPLE, PRACTICE | Tagged Aggregation, ArchDaily, Architizer, Audience, Content, Forum, Internet, Land8, Landscape architects, Landscape Architects Network, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Matt Alcide, Media, Merger, Original Content, Product Manufacturers, scott renwick, social media, sponsorship | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY LAUREN MANDEL, ASLA
Artist Zaria Forman’s large-scale pastels describe a vanishing Antarctic.
The Brooklyn-based artist Zaria Forman draws in fine detail to capture expansive corners of the Earth. Her large-scale, hyperrealistic pastel works feature, most recently, Antarctic landscapes affected by climate change. “I’m trying to offer people a time and a place to connect with these very far-flung places,” Forman says. “If they can fall in love with [these places] in a similar way that I have, then that will lead them to want to protect and preserve them.” Forman has been completing a drawing series and video installation for an upcoming solo exhibition, Antarctica, inspired by her first trip to the polar continent as an artist in residence aboard the National Geographic Explorer in winter 2015.
Whale Bay, Antarctica no. 4 captures the fragility of a remote harbor off the Antarctic Peninsula that is filled with melting icebergs that calved, drifted, and ran aground on the shallow seafloor. Forman says that as the icebergs melt, “it’s like the wind and the water are just hands, just making these most incredible shapes that you can’t even conceive of until you’re there.” Bays that enclose icebergs like these are called iceberg graveyards, a term that “captures the eerie solemnity of the site,” Forman says, “but Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT, LAM MAGAZINE, OCEANS, PHOTOGRAPHY, THE BACK | Tagged Andropogon, Antarctic, Antartica, art, climate change, drawing, exhibition, Global Ice Viewer, icebergs, Lauren Mandel, melting, NASA, National Geographic Explorer, Seattle, sketch, video, Winston Wächter Fine Art, Zaria Forman | Leave a Comment »
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