July 20, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY SARAH COWLES
In this installation by Terremoto, a carpet of pavers leads from the Rudolph M. Schindler Studio of the Schindler House into the courtyard, terminating in a circle of prickly pear cactus. Photo by Joshua White.
A group exhibition of landscape architecture at the Schindler House, co-curated by Mia Lehrer and Priscilla Fraser.
Every May in Los Angeles, men in orange whack back the dry, gold grass, making a mandated measure of defensible space in a landscape of fires, earthquakes, and landslides. This year, though, brought relieving rains. The Hollywood Hills came in green after years of severe drought, yet the message remained fixed: We must continue to cut back, tear out this and put in that, and mulch it over with colored gravel.
In flush times, it is irresponsible to deny water to our gardens; in dry times, we are guilty if we indulge them. This austerity imperative severs our intimate connections to the land. Edicts are always prefixed with “low”: low-water, low-maintenance, low-impact, which is said to require merely an aesthetic attitude adjustment. Yet all this lowing denies us the everyday tending practices and attentions; our attention to growth, flowering, decay; our ability to watch a sweet-pea tendril spiral or to inhale the scent of wet soils.
The temptation is to flip the script: Be a lush. Resist the conservatism of conservation. Practice a radical Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, GARDENS, LAM ONLINE, RESIDENTIAL, WATER | Tagged art, Bestor Architecture, Critique, drought, exhibition, Fitzpatrick-Leland House, Garden, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Los Angeles, Lush, MAK Center, Mia Lehrer, Michelle Frier, Naomi Sanders Landscape Design, Priscilla Fraser, Rudolph Schindler, SALT Landscape Architects, Sarah Cowles, Schindler House, Superjacent, Terremoto | Leave a Comment »
July 18, 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 “Martha Schwartz, Reconnecting” in the July 2017 issue, about Martha Schwartz’s return to the United States from London, her entrance into landscape architecture, and the landscape frontiers of China.
“At the light shop.”
–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 CITIES, CLIMATE, FEATURES, LAM MAGAZINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, THE CLIENT | Tagged China, climate change, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Martha Schwartz, Martha Schwartz Partners | Leave a Comment »
July 17, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY BRIAN BARTH
Cities are getting “smarter.” But are they getting wiser?
“Oh, no. My phone is dead. Better head to the park.”
Walk past the basketball court down at Anita Stroud Park, toward the little creek below, and you might find a gaggle of teens clustered around a very modern-looking bench that would seem more at home outside a coffee shop in Soho than in a tiny neighborhood park next to I-77 on the north end of Charlotte, North Carolina.
A pair of USB ports on a console on the front of the bench provides juice from the solar panel mounted at lap level between the seats. Who wouldn’t want to hang out at a bench like this? It certainly catches the eye of passersby. What these kids might not realize, however, is that this bench is watching them back. Underneath that solar panel is a small Wi-Fi enabled sensor that sends data back to an office building in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anyone who passes within 150 feet of the bench with a Wi-Fi enabled mobile device in their pocket is picked up by the sensor and Continue Reading »
Posted in CITIES, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, LAM MAGAZINE, NEW YORK CITY, PEOPLE, RESEARCH, SECURITY, TECH | Tagged Anita Stroud Park, Argonne National Laboratory, Array of Things, automation, Big Data, Center for Urban Science + Progress, Charlotte, Chicago, data collection, design informatics, Globalism, IDEO, Information Law Institute, innovation, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department, MIT Media Lab, New York City, No Barriers Project, Nodes, North Carolina, North End Community Coalition, North End Smart District, Park Bench, PARKS, Parsons School of Design, PeopleFLow, Privacy, sensors, smart cities, Soofa, Sounds of New York City, Spatial DNA, Startup Policy Lab, surveillance, technology, the internet of things, University of Chicago, University of Edinburgh in Scotland | Leave a Comment »
July 13, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
The world’s protected areas. Currently around 15 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is protected. The United Nations target is to reach 17 percent by 2020. © 2017 Richard J. Weller, Claire Hoch, and Chieh Huang, Atlas for the End of the World.
Within the hundreds of maps Richard Weller, ASLA, assembled for his Atlas for the End of the World, there’s an implicit argument for something like a new mandate for landscape architecture: Instead of mostly planning the development of public outdoor spaces in developed and affluent cities, it’s time for landscape designers to mediate the battles between rapidly expanding developing-world cities and the irreplaceable biodiversity they’re consuming. It’s a task that increases landscape architects’ zones of influence from the scale of city blocks to hundreds of square miles.
The online atlas, which launched on Earth Day 2017 and just passed its 50,000th click, has a bracingly apocalyptic name. But within the discipline of landscape architecture, it points to a new beginning.
“There’s a whole question for us about how we approach urban design and planning so that cities Continue Reading »
Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, PLANNING, PRESERVATION, REGION, SPECIES, WILDLIFE | Tagged Abraham Octelius, Atlas, Atlas for the End of the World, audit, biodiversity, Chieh Huang, Claire Hoch, climate change, colonialism, conservation, Developing World, Earth Day, Ecoregions, Globalization, Hotspots, Inequality, landscape architect, landscape architecutre, landscape designer, Landscape Intelligence, Mapping, Richard Weller, Sprawl, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, University of Pennsylvania, urban planning | 1 Comment »
July 11, 2017 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Terrence Zhang.
From “Martha Schwartz, Reconnecting” in the July 2017 issue, about Martha Schwartz Partners’ mammoth landscape for Beiqijia, a mixed-use development located an hour north of central Beijing.
“Circles.”
–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 FEATURES, LAM MAGAZINE, PARKS, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLAYGROUNDS | Tagged Beijing, Beiqijia, China, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Martha Schwartz, Martha Schwartz Partners, Mixed-Use, Park | Leave a Comment »
July 10, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
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The linear art installation SWA designed for Houston’s Highway 59/Interstate 69 bridges came with two important traffic safety stipulations: no words, and no faces (so as not to distract the drivers zipping by).
Natalia Beard, the lead designer, came up with a pixelated vision of bright colors splashing across several 300-foot sections of chain-link fence along the sidewalk of the elevated freeway. The linear imagery (called “Houston Bridges”) tracks the velocity and movement of the freeway. It gives you enough depth to ponder when stuck in traffic. The images came from photos by Houston schoolchildren, digitally turned into jubilant checkerboards of neon color.
This smoke-stained stretch of highway, which connects Houston’s downtown to its primary airport, is Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION | Tagged art, bridges, Freeway, Highway 59, Houston, Houston First, Infrastructure, Interstate 69, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Natalia Beard, PHOTOGRAPHY, Plastic, Sidewalk, streetscape, SWA, traffic, transit, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
July 6, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY JAMES TRULOVE
Back from a dozen years in London, the designer is focusing on climate and the world she has made her home.
Martha Schwartz, FASLA, and her business partner and husband, Markus Jatsch, last year relocated from London to Brooklyn, though the London office remains the headquarters of their firm, Martha Schwartz Partners. Schwartz continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—though her projects have taken her firm just about everywhere but the United States. James Trulove, a former editor of LAM, who has known Schwartz for years, joined her and Jatsch, who is trained as an architect, for a conversation to find out what prompted the move and where Schwartz is directing her design and teaching now.
James Trulove: You now have offices in New York, London, and Shanghai. I guess there are many opportunities for a landscape architect in China given the enormous amount of construction that is taking place. What is it like to work there?
Schwartz: Unfortunately the quality of much of the built work is poor, Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, LAM MAGAZINE, NEW YORK CITY, PEOPLE, RESILIENCE, SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY | Tagged Brooklyn, carbon sequestration, China, classicism, climate change, Climate refugee, David Keith, education, Frank Gehry, Graham Foundation, Harvard Forest Project, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Hideo Sasaki, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, London, Martha Schwartz, Martha Schwartz Partners, Massachusetts, modernims, New England, Peter Walker, SWA Group, trees | Leave a Comment »
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