April is, of course, World Landscape Architecture Month. This year, to mark the occasion, LAM is issuing a special supplement for young readers, called YOUR LAND. It offers a basic introduction to landscape and landscape architecture, a look at the methods and goals of the profession, a breakout of several intriguing types of projects, a career primer, and, not least, a glossary of landscape architecture terms! Our goal is plain: to encourage the making of more future landscape architects. For many people, landscape architecture is a second career choice after they have made their first, and one they like better—it’s mainly a matter of exposure to the wide range of things landscape architects do in their work. We figure sooner is better, so this supplement is free and available digitally for downloading. For limited quantities of bulk print copies for classrooms or other groups, e-mail discover@asla.org (shipping charges apply).
Our regular April issue is every bit as exciting, covering a range of bold work that is reshaping landscape architecture today. In the cover feature, Michael Dumiak reports on an audacious plan by H+N+S Landscape Architects in the Netherlands, led by Dirk Sijmons, to power the countries around the North Sea with wind energy by the year 2050. It’s a multinational endeavor that transcends bureaucracies as well as boundaries in hopes of making these countries fulfill the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which took effect last year, of holding the average global temperature to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels by reducing emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases.
Back in North America, Jack Dangermond and his company, Esri, have done as much or more than anyone since the onset of the digital age to help decode the Earth’s landscape with the computational tools known as geographic information systems, or GIS. At this stage of his career, as Jonathan Lerner profiles, Dangermond is putting that might behind his Green Infrastructure Initiative, the goal of which is “to identify and secure the critical remaining large cores of relatively unspoiled landscape” on a national scale. It is a galactic attempt to counter the routine fragmentation of ecosystems and habitats, in hopes of putting them back together in part, if not in whole.
Our other features cover a marvelous renovation of piers in San Francisco by GLS Landscape | Architecture to create a new Exploratorium, the museum that welds art to science like no other, which, as Lydia Lee reports, has relocated from its longtime home to one that could scarcely be more fitting; and the (some would say improbable) collaboration between the landscape architects Stephen Stimson, FASLA, and Julie Bargmann, ASLA, to design the new Phil Hardberger Park in San Antonio. Jennifer Reut considers the dimensions of their “cultivated wild” approach on what little is left of the Texas prairie.
In the Back section, Timothy Schuler follows the quest by Lisa Orr, ASLA, to restore lost place names to the digitized National Map of the United States Geological Survey. And in Books, Elissa Rosenberg reviews Toward an Urban Ecology, by the landscape architect Kate Orff, ASLA, and her New York-based firm, SCAPE, a “manufestograph” that describes the firm’s work but also details its innovative approach to working at the manifold ecological levels of cities.
There’s much more to take in during this World Landscape Architecture Month. You can read the full table of contents for April 2017, or pick up a free digital issue of the April LAM here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. 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.
Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating April articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “Your Land,” Scott Shigley; “Power Play 2050,” Michael Dumiak; “The Toolmaker,” Spencer Lowell/Trunk Archive; “San Antonio Takes the Shot,” Charles Mayer Photography; “Wet Bars,” Patrik Argast; “From Phyto to Myco,” Nathan Kensinger; “Hard Choices,” © Albert Vecerka/Esto; “New Urbanism, New HUD,” Paul Goyette [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], via Flickr.
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