Books, tech, and lots of pens to set the newly minted designer up right.
By the LAM Editorial Advisory Committee
Well, it’s finally happened. Your family member/friend/mentee/colleague has graduated from a BLA or MLA program, and they’re ready to start their journey as a landscape architecture professional. Now that they’ve finished school, you want to buy them a gift that shows them you get what they do and why they’re passionate about it.
A University of Kentucky graduate exhorts her fellow students to “Be the change.” Credit: @uky_landscapearchitecture/University of Kentucky (UK) Landscape Architecture.
As lockdowns eased in 2021, Hôtel du Nord led a walk in L’Estaque, in North Marseille, to the Miramar site, with the encouragement of music along the way. Photo by Dominique Poulain, Archives Hôtel Du Nord.
Matthew Beaumont’s beautiful book about London, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, begins with a quotation from Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905): “…little by little, the Londoner comes to forget that his London is built upon real earth: he forgets that under the pavements there are hills, forgotten water courses, springs, and marshlands.” Beaumont shows wayfaring as an immersive and connective practice and proposes that cities can only truly be known through the practice of walking. Continue reading Sharing the City One Step at a Time→
North of the student union, a new, permeable plaza provides space for events as well as informal gatherings. Photo by Denmarsh Studios/LBA.
In the mid-1950s, the fast-growing University of Pittsburgh acquired two historic properties: the Hotel Schenley, built in 1898, and the Schenley Apartments, built between 1922 and 1924. The buildings were renovated for use as dormitories—and later, in the case of the hotel, a student union—but the spaces around them were left largely untouched, updated over the years to meet local codes but otherwise given little thought. Continue reading (Re)making the Grade→
Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA, sketching outdoors. He calls urban sketching a public act, one of vulnerability and frustration balanced with unique opportunities for dialogue, discovery, and fulfillment. In these conditions, the scene, weather, and stamina are always shifting. Focus, adaptation, fortitude, and luck become some of the best assets.
In The Thinking Hand, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how sketching is a multilayered process of interpretation, one that requires rapid decisions and adjustments. For example, the darkening of one form affects our understanding of those around it, or when we notice the foreground object is a certain size, we understand that a distant object must be half the size, and so on. Through this continuing dialogue a memory is imprinted.
East Dareen Beach Neighborhood Park in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy Michael Blier, FASLA.
The East Dareen Beach Neighborhood Park site in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, is a serious place: Bounded by a missile silo to the north, its double shore of coast and island form results from a dredge-ravaged coastline—and it is a major part of the city’s treated sewage effluent (TSE) program. Continue reading Line by Line→
A vision for 20 miles of Honolulu’s waterfront is based on a network of amphibious green spaces that buffers the city from sea-level rise. Image courtesy of the University of Hawai’i Community Design Center.
United States-controlled islands such as Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa are rarely mentioned in U.S. climate coverage, but the projected impacts of sea-level rise to island communities are severe and far-reaching. Continue reading Hawaii Coastline Report Links Resilience with Access→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
