View of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, and the Chukchi Sea in February 2020. Photo by Chengxin Sha/Arctic Design Group, 2020.
Federally funded research will help set a baseline for how to build in the Arctic.
In Alaska, beyond the Arctic Circle in North Slope Borough, Indigenous communities practice subsistence whale hunting. To store the whale meat, tribal communities dig ice cellars in the permafrost, a major infrastructural feat, as a 50-ton whale can feed thousands. But as climate change melts permafrost, the cellars are failing, leading to spoiled food. Studies have indicated that climate change may be a factor, but soil conditions and development on top of cellars are also causing warming and potential failure. “We keep it there in trust for the community,” says Gordon Brower, the director of North Slope Borough Planning and Community Services and a member of the Iñupiaq Indigenous community. “To keep that type of meat secure and healthy, we need to evaluate our earthen storage shelters.”
How might designers augment ice cellars’ cooling capacity in ways that support Indigenous traditions, while contending with the Arctic’s position on the front lines of climate change? This question is just one part of the National Science Foundation-funded research by the University of Virginia’s Arctic Research Center, aimed at gathering data to determine the design parameters for Arctic infrastructure in an era of expanding development and climate change, says Leena Cho, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at UVA. Cho, her partner Matthew Jull, an associate professor of architecture, and a team of UVA researchers will install aquatic, meteorological, and geotechnical sensors in the North Slope Borough town of Utqiagvik. This data will help Cho and Jull formulate guidelines for building height, form, materials, and foundations, as well as wider urban planning concerns in the Arctic. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Image by Anjelica S. Gallegos.
From “Reappearing Act” by Jonathan Lerner in the September 2021 issue, about Anjelica Gallegos’s plan to revive a memorial for Indigenous people on the shores of Staten Island.
Designers from SCAPE’s New Orleans and New York offices talk about the lessons from Hurricane Ida, in and out of the office.
Damage from Hurricane Ida in Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana, where volunteers from SCAPE are pitching in with the recycling organization Glass Half Full to help with the cleanup. Photo by Liz Camuti.
In early September, a few days after Hurricane Ida raked through Louisiana on its way up the East Coast, three designers from SCAPE Studio met up on Zoom to talk with Landscape Architecture Magazine’s Acting Editor, Jennifer Reut, about Ida’s aftermath. SCAPE’s practice has long focused on coastal resilience and sea-level rise, but Ida’s dual impact on New Orleans (August 29) and New York (September 1) was the first time that designers from both offices had experienced catastrophic flooding from the same storm. Hurricane Ida’s aftermath offered a chance to reflect on what is changing and what isn’t in the profession and the public’s understanding of climate-fueled catastrophes.
Gathered were John Donnelly, ASLA, the technical principal at SCAPE, who had recently moved to New Orleans to work at SCAPE’s office there. Studio Director Chris Barnes, ASLA, had founded the New Orleans office when he moved back home to Louisiana, and Design Principal Gena Wirth, ASLA, called in from SCAPE’s New York office. This is an excerpt from the conversation that took place on September 10. The full interview will appear in Landscape Architecture Magazine in November 2021. Continue Reading »
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.
A few bills attempted to deregulate or lower the level of regulation back to certification, but none of them made it out of legislative committee. Around 2011, Republican then-Governor Robert McDonnell set up a commission to eliminate regulations in general, including of professions such as landscape architecture and interior design. Members of the Virginia chapter of ASLA persuaded the governor to remove landscape architects from the list.
Robert McGinnis, FASLA, an associate principal at Kennon Williams Landscape Studio and a member of the Virginia ASLA chapter’s government affairs committee, says that interior designers and landscape architects get targeted because people don’t know what they do. “They see the word landscape and think we put trees in the ground.” Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Courtesy Glenstone Museum.
From “Worlds Away” by Glenn Dixon in the September 2021 issue, about PWP Landscape Architecture’s Glenstone museum outside Washington, D.C., where landscapes that shift through the seasons complement monumental sculpture.
In two influential books, the entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy has spread a message of people-powered biodiversity, to say that if humans have crowded out nature across the world, they can also invite it back in at close range. Tallamy, who is 70 and lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he joined the faculty in 1981 and has led or coauthored 104 published research studies on the behavior and chemistry of insects. In 2007, his book Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants hatched a mission to persuade home gardeners to think big about the buffets they can create for animals just outside any door as bulwarks against ecological decline. He expanded that project in 2020 with Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard,which became a New York Times best seller.
Tallamy’s latest book, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees (published, like the others, by Timber Press), puts his message through a different prism, that of the genus Quercus, which includes 435 species of oaks around the world, 91 of them in North America, where they are superlative among trees as sources of food and shelter in their environments. He details the oak’s life cycle through the 12 months of the year. “Unfortunately, the diverse web of life that is associated with oaks goes unnoticed and thus unappreciated by most homeowners,” Tallamy writes. Many homeowners, indeed, are ready to cut down oaks to avoid raking leaves, though he explains that raking is not only unnecessary but to be strongly discouraged, given the high value of oak leaf litter as microhabitat. Once again his gift to readers, in plainspoken prose, is to help them see the familiar in nature and find the unseen.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Bradford McKee: In The Nature of Oaks, as in your earlier books, you’re bringing science and natural history to the household conversation—
Doug Tallamy: That’s the goal!
BM: —though scientists who do academic research and also do public advocacy so regularly are exceptions in most fields. What’s driving your mission?Continue Reading »
The Philadelphia sculptor Miguel Horn’s latest work may not look particularly technological, but it is the product of a sophisticated design and fabrication process that many landscape architects may recognize. ContraFuerte is a new permanent outdoor installation set to be unveiled this fall. “It’s a monument to collective action,” Horn says.
The installation contains a strong element of discovery. Located in an alley in Center City, directly across 12th Street from Reading Terminal Market, the sculpture depicts two sets of male and female figures, entwined and buttressed against a small bridge as if, with superhuman force, they are keeping the bridge suspended above the roadway. To execute and install the work—which weighs 11,000 pounds and comprises more than 5,000 intricately connected aluminum pieces—Horn turned to the capabilities of design software and invited his longtime friend Chris Landau, Affiliate ASLA, a design technologist with a newly established eponymous firm, to collaborate. Continue Reading »
