December 5, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY KOFI BOONE, ASLA
A civic hydrology park emerges on Duke University’s campus.
Having lived in Durham, North Carolina, for more than a decade, I’ve come to realize that it’s almost impossible to discuss Durham without referencing Duke University, and vice versa. Duke is a private university, and its West Campus, although in the city, stands apart and within Duke Forest, a vast patch of woods created through a component of a century-old Olmsted Brothers master plan. The campus landscapes cultivated by Duke offer a stark experiential contrast to the eclectic environmental qualities of a rapidly suburbanizing region. Duke’s campus is a big draw for wedding receptions, picnics, walking and biking, and the occasional respite from nearby urban life. Durhamites regularly use the campus as an extended city park system. I’ve visited Duke’s landscapes many times with family and students in search of memorable settings in an educational environment.
Duke Pond, one of the newest campus landscapes, has been an increasingly popular attraction. On a recent visit to Duke Pond with my daughter, she waded into shallow water to scoop up a tadpole and said, “This place is kinda scruffy, but I like it!” When I relayed this story to Warren T. Byrd Jr., FASLA, the renowned landscape architect who concluded his career at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects with this project, he laughed. He was thrilled that younger generations felt comfortable engaging the landscape directly. Enabling the informal discovery of ecology was what he had in mind. On a campus populated with works by many leading landscape architects, most of them manicured and tightly controlled, the pond offers an example of a different aesthetic as well as the roles landscape can play in exciting the next generation about environmental stewardship. Continue Reading »
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Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HABITAT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, INVASIVE SPECIES, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, RECREATION, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, THE CLIENT, UNIVERSITY, WATER | Tagged architecture, bee balm, bridge, Central Park Conservancy, Chiller, civic hydrology park, Curtis Richardson, Cypress trees, drought, Duke Forest, Duke Hospital, Duke Pond, Duke stone, Duke University, Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Durham, East Campus, ECOLOGY, environmental stewardship, erosion, Evan Grimm, Gothic Revival architecture, gravel, Horace Trumbauer, Invasive shrubs, irrigation, James Duke, Julian Abele, Kofi Boone, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture Foundation, landscape design, maples, Mark Hough, Michael Easley, mill, native perennials, native planting beds, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, nitrogen, North Carolina, North Carolina State University, Olmsted Brothers, outdoor classroom, phosphorus, pine forest, placemaking, planning, reclaimed wood, Sarah P. Duke Gardens, slate, stormwater, stormwater harvest pond, Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park, Susan Nelson, terraces, the Dell, Trinity College, Tulip poplars, underground infrastructure, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, utility, Warren T. Byrd Jr., water conservation, water consumption, water quality, West Campus, wetlands | Leave a Comment »
December 3, 2019 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Image courtesy Jaime Lerner Associated Architects.
From “On the Edge” in the December 2019 issue by Jimena Martignoni, about a project to bring the waterfront of Porto Alegre back to the people.
“Porto Alegre waterfront.”
–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.
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Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, RECREATION, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE | Tagged Art Director's Cut, Brazil, Jaime Lerner Associated Architects, JIMENA MARTIGNONI, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Porto Alegre, river, waterfront | Leave a Comment »
December 2, 2019 by LAM Staff
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FOREGROUND
Bona Fide BIM (Tech)
Legal considerations regarding liability and ownership of intellectual property are emerging
for firms that use building information modeling.
Steel and Sand (Parks)
On Lake Michigan, the newly designated Indiana Dunes National Park thrives on a plan by JJR (now SmithGroup) that balances a rich shoreline ecology and the toxic footprint of industry.
FEATURES
The Water You Can’t See
On the Duke University campus, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects turned a
water conservation project into a mesmerizing mirror of a pond, surrounded by plantings
that show the clear stamp of Warren T. Byrd Jr., FASLA.
On the Edge
The city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, has made a new pact with its surrounding waters,
one that its people overwhelmingly love.
All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for December 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 December articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “The Water You Can’t See,” Mark Hough, FASLA; “On the Edge,” Leonardo Finotti; “Steel and Sand,” SmithGroup.
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Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT, HEALING GARDENS, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, RECREATION, REGION, SHORELINE, SPECIES, UNIVERSITY, WATER | Tagged BIM, Brazil, Duke University, Indiana Dunes National Park, industry, JJR, Lake Michigan, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Legal, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, pond, Porto Alegre, shoreline ecology, SmithGroup, What's New | Leave a Comment »
November 21, 2019 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. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
BY DIANA FERNANDEZ, ASLA
Vicki Estrada, FASLA, opened Estrada Land Planning in 1985, and over the course of nearly 35 years, the firm has worked on planning and landscape architecture projects that have helped define the city of San Diego. Her work as a community planner and advocate over the past three decades was community engagement before there was “community engagement,” and her imprint can be seen everywhere in the city’s parks, streets, communities, and transit. We asked Diana Fernandez, ASLA, an associate at Sasaki, to interview Estrada about her career and her life, and what followed was a very candid and wide-ranging conversation about gender, representation, identity, and making landscapes that don’t pretend. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
Diana Fernandez: I’m so curious to find out what brought you to landscape architecture. I often feel like all of us landscape architects have stumbled into the field somehow.
Vicki Estrada: It’s a funny, interesting story actually. There were two processes. First of all, when I was in elementary school, I would draw. They were little downtowns. I was supposed to be listening to the teacher, but I would draw little downtowns in isometric view and with a ballpoint pen and my dad’s old office papers. You can still see his office logo on them.
The principal came by one day and said, “Hey, Steve,” my name at the time, “you’re going to be an architect.” I am? So from fourth grade on, it was kind of ingrained in me. You’re going to be an architect. You’re going to be an architect.
I got accepted at Cal Poly for architecture, and I went off. I had one year to go. I met some architecture friends, and I went down to Cal Poly Pomona on one Saturday to visit them. I remember walking down to the campus on a Saturday afternoon. It’s all deserted. It’s all quiet. We looked at this great big new lecture hall. So I walked in—have you seen the movie, The Blues Brothers?
Fernandez: No, I haven’t.
Estrada: Well, there’s a scene in The Blues Brothers where they walk into a church, and James Brown is the preacher, and the door opens up and you see the sunlight come down. I opened up the door, and there’s this room full of students, and onstage was this old guy with long, gray hair, with a cane. He pounds on the stage and he points—I swear it looked like he was pointing at me. “Imagine the Earth as a canvas,” he says. “Architects put dots on the canvas. Engineers connect the dots. You are the only ones who can paint the entire canvas.” Being an architect, I go, “What the fuck? What is he talking about?” Continue Reading »
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Posted in ART, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, PEOPLE, PLANNING, PRACTICE, RESILIENCE, THE CLIENT | Tagged American Planning Association, architecture, artist, ASLA conference, authenticity, Balboa Park, Caitlyn Jenner, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, client, climate change, color, community engagement, Community Forest Advisory Board, culture, Diana Fernandez, Estrada Land Planning, gender, gender identity, geologist, horticulture, hydrology, identity, Inequality, intersectionality, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Latinx, Mexican, Otay Ranch, planning, public private partnership, Q&A, representation, resiliency, Roberto Burle Marx, San Diego, San Diego Canyonlands, San Diego Environment and Design Council, Sasaki, The Blues Brothers, trans, transsexual, vernacular, Vicki Estrada | Leave a Comment »
November 19, 2019 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Stephen Dunn.
From “Look to the Sky” in the November 2019 issue by Haniya Rae, about a New Mexico residential landscape where a multilayered stormwater catchment strategy speaks to a different sort of beauty.
“Western water catcher.”
–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.
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Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ONLINE ONLY, PHOTOGRAPHY, REGION, RESIDENTIAL, SOIL, WATER | Tagged Art Director's Cut, catchment, HANIYA RAE, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, New Mexico, RESIDENTIAL, stormwater, Water | Leave a Comment »
November 14, 2019 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. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
BY LISA OWENS VIANI
Named for the walnut trees that used to line its banks, the Arroyo de los Nogales, a tributary of the Santa Cruz River, flows from south to north, descending from the high Sonoran desert in Mexico into Arizona. The main arroyo and its many smaller tributaries form a watershed, shaped roughly like a human heart, that is broken in two by the U.S.–Mexico border wall. Facing each other across the wall, in the river’s floodplain, are two cities, each named Nogales, that share social and environmental problems—including repeated flooding caused by rapid urbanization, ineffective flood control efforts, and the border wall itself.
Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, ASLA, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, and Francisco Lara-Valencia, an associate professor at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, have a greener vision for these border cities (together called Ambos Nogales), whose streets and arroyos often run brown with sediment and sewage in heavy storms. Díaz Montemayor and Lara-Valencia want to increase permeability throughout the watershed, slow peak flows in heavy storms, and develop more ecological connectivity between the two cities, despite the dividing presence of the wall.
They hope their ideas for an extensive network of green infrastructure can transform the way the cities develop, not only to improve water quality and flood management but also to provide more green space for residents. As the cities have grown, impervious surfaces have too, destroying natural areas. Both cities lack green space: There is just 1.1 square meter per person in Nogales, Mexico, and only 2.2 square meters per person on the U.S. side, Lara-Valencia says.
“We are not saying development shouldn’t happen,” Díaz Montemayor says. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s provide a structure for that development to happen [that] is based on natural systems.’” Continue Reading »
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Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, PARKS, PLANNING, PRACTICE, REGION, RESILIENCE, STREETS, TRANSLATED, UNIVERSITY, WATER | Tagged Ambos Nogales, Arizona, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Arizona State University, arroyo, Arroyo Cuesta Blanca Green Development, Arroyo de los Nogales, Ben Lomeli, bioswales, Border Wall, Channel, City of Green Creeks, Claudia Gil, created wetlands, creeks, development, ECOLOGY, El Nogal Regional Park, El Ranchito de los Aliso, Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, flooding, Francisco Lara-Valencia, Friends of the Santa Cruz River, Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, green corridors, green infrastructure, GREEN ROOFS, Instituto Municipal de Investigación y Planeación, international, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Laura Norman, Lisa Owens Viani, Mexico, Nogales, Parque Nuevo Nogales, Paseo de Los Nogales, permeable paver, permeable pavers, rain gardens, restored creeks, riparian habitat, Santa Cruz River, School of Transborder Studies, Seeds/Semillas, sewage, Sonoran desert, stormwater, STREETS, terraced gabion structures, trade, tributary, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Border 2020, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Arkansas, urbanization, Water, watershed | 1 Comment »
November 13, 2019 by Jennifer Reut
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
BY JENNIFER REUT
Like many cities in the Southwest (Palm Springs, California, most conspicuously), Tucson, Arizona, has a decent bank of midcentury modern buildings and landscapes. In the 1950s and 1960s, home buyers, drawn by the mirage of golf course-adjacent desert living (with air-conditioning, swimming pools, and lawns), flocked to the Southwest, and large swaths of the new development that went up during that era were built in the middle-class modern idiom. In the Southwest, modernism incorporated regional materials and climatic adaptations into lively vernacular architecture, and also generated some truly inspired landscapes.
Tucson Modernism Week was launched by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation in 2001 to highlight the region’s midcentury modern architecture and landscape heritage. The foundation is also among a handful of preservation groups trying to broaden notions of modern design to include the work of women and people of color, as well as expanding the boundaries of modernism to include textiles, dance, ceramics, and neon.
Among those whom the foundation has brought to the public’s attention is Taro Akutagawa (1917–2002), a Japanese American landscape designer whose work, primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been nearly erased. The foundation’s Taro Akutagawa Collection contains photographs, newspaper clippings, archival images, drawings, and plans.
The outlines of Akutagawa’s life and work are known, though there is not quite a full accounting of his projects. He was born in California in 1917 and educated in Japan before Continue Reading »
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Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MATERIALS, PEOPLE, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, REGION, RESIDENTIAL, SPECIES, WATER | Tagged agriculture, Albuquerque, Architectural Digest, Arizona, BAMBOO, Buddhist, California, Casa Juan Paisano, Catalina Foothills Estates, colonial, Colorado River Indian Reservation, cypress, Del Webb, Desert, Executive Order 9066, Gil Berry, hollygrape, Internment Camps, Japanese, Jennifer Reut, Josias Joesler, Juan Worner Baz, juniper, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Mexican, midcentury modern, Modern, nandina, New Mexico, piñon, Ponderosa Pine, Poston, regional, Rio Rancho, rock formations, Shinto, southwest, stone bridge, succulents, Sun City, Taro Akutagawa, Taro Akutagawa Collection, Taro’s Gardens, Tazue Yonemoto, Tucson, Tucson Modernism Week, university landscape architect, University of New Mexico, Water, wildflowers | Leave a Comment »
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