Seferian Design Group undoes years of additions and urban encroachment at a historic green space.
By Zach Mortice
Seferian Design Group’s plan called for naturalized bioswales lining the edge of Silver Lake. Image by Seferian Design Group.
Waterloo Park was established in 1893 in Waterloo, Ontario, to serve as a pastoral retreat from city life, but in the intervening century, much of the city infiltrated the park. Located near the central business district and adjacent to two universities, the park was increasingly being taken over by extraneous service buildings and parking lots, especially surrounding one of its signature attractions: the nine-acre Silver Lake, a stormwater retention pond that once hosted swimmers leaping off diving platforms and anglers casting for speckled trout.Continue reading Decluttering The Park→
Toronto’s cold-savvy planners adapt the city to hotter summers.
By Sam Bloch Illustration by Meg Studer
When cities plan to mitigate extreme heat, many draw from a now-familiar playbook—more trees, more reflective surfaces, and more air-conditioning. In Toronto, city officials are exploring a different strategy: changing the orientation, massing, and materials of new buildings to improve the habitability of public space. The project, currently billed as a “thermal comfort study,” represents a new frontier in urban adaptation. “We can’t change the climate,” says Dorsa Jalalian, an urban designer at Dialog, a design firm retained for the study. “We are just trying to extend the number of hours that we can be comfortable.”Continue reading Keeping Their Cool→
A new strategy for public spaceplanning takes the stops offsmall-wheeled sports.
By Katharine Logan
Image by van der Zalm + associates.
There’s no question that skateboarding gets a bad rap. The National Safety Council ranks it safer than baseball—not to mention hockey and football—but it’s perceived as risky. Noise from skate wheels is negligible at 50 feet, but it’s perceived as noisy. And although skaters comprise a wide demographic, they’re stereotyped as teenage boys with a predilection for delinquency.Continue reading Skate The City→
A hotel in the shadow of a national park blends in.
“Usually, you’re curtailed to a pretty small postage stamp site for an outdoor space at a hotel like this. We’re saying, no, let’s push this program out and around and depart from the typical ‘you are in the pool [or] you are not in the pool.’ Here, we want to say, you’re always in that space, in that pool; whether you’re going to the campfire or you’re going on a hike, that space is contiguous.”
On a leftover site in Punta Pite, landscape architect Teresa Moller’s house is a study in give and take.
By Jimena Martignoni/Photography by Cristóbal Palma
The terraced gardens behind the house showcase many different species that can now be appreciated as one composition.
Nestled into steep cliffs that face the Pacific Coast of Chile, the landscape architect Teresa Moller’s house combines a small-scale rewilding and a site for the study of seacoast plants. The experimental gardens at Moller’s house, in the residential development Punta Pite, are part of a 27-acre property that follows the contours of a bay between Zapallar and Papudo, two sea towns located about 100 miles north of Santiago. Started more than 15 years ago, the gardens seem to have realized their full potential, though they are also, fundamentally, an evolving work in progress.Continue reading A Certain Sacrifice→
No longer just for coastal areas, WEDG 3.0 adds inland waterfronts to its certification.
By Clare Jacobson
Funded through the Rebuild Illinois capital plan, each breakwater features new below- and above-water habitats. Image courtesy Living Habitats.
In October 2023, the New York–based nonprofit Waterfront Alliance launched version 3.0 of its Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG) and revised its WEDG Professionals Course, which the group describes as “tools for sites building resilience, ecology, and access at the water’s edge.” WEDG was updated in part to maintain best practices and to surpass regulatory codes, says Joseph Sutkowi, the chief waterfront design officer at the Waterfront Alliance. He notes changes to benchmarks for community engagement, long-term maintenance planning, and protection for flooding beyond a site’s property line.Continue reading Coming To A Shoreline Near You→
Transforming a defunct monorail into an elevated trail was an exercise in creative friction.
By Timothy A. Schuler
TEN x TEN’s vision for the trail treats the former monorail as part of the cultural landscape. Photo by Corey Gaffer Photography LLC.
For some designers, a zoo may not have the same appeal or design potential as, say, a postindustrial site. But for the Minneapolis-based designers at TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, a project to repurpose a former monorail at the Minnesota Zoo as a 1.25-mile-long elevated walking path was as rich as any historic site.Continue reading A View To The Zoo→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
