All posts by LAM Staff

Planning, Practice

Behind LandDesign’s Transformation Into a Powerhouse Firm

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A humble attitude brought the Charlotte firm work for three decades. Pulling out of the recession called for bolder moves.

By Bradford McKee

In 2014, six years after the Great Recession showed up at LandDesign’s doorsteps, Rhett Crocker, ASLA, was looking to lead the firm out of survival mode. Crocker had just become the firm’s fifth president. He wanted to attract new kinds of clients—national ones with big names—but few seemed to recognize the firm or its work. Even a longtime client, who assumed the firm did work only in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the firm is based, expressed surprise at seeing a major project LandDesign had done “in China or the Caribbean or someplace,” Crocker recalls. “He had no idea of the depth of what we do.”

Before Crocker took the helm, the firm had endured a prolonged period of upsets. In 2007, LandDesign had one of its busiest years. It had grown to 300 people across seven offices, offering a specialized pairing of landscape architecture and civil engineering. Then came the shocks. Brad Davis, the firm’s president at the time, died of cancer. Two weeks later, Dave Taylor, a partner in the Tampa office, died unexpectedly. The firm was still grieving when the global financial crisis began in 2008. As the recession set in, work began to vaporize. In 2009, LandDesign had to slash everything possible for the sake of survival. The head count fell to 63 people. Continue reading Behind LandDesign’s Transformation Into a Powerhouse Firm →

Climate, Planning, Water

“The Profession Burst”: Designers on Katrina’s Impact 20 Years Later

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Eight Gulf Coast practitioners reflect on landscape architecture’s evolution and the success of community-based projects.

On August 29, 2005, the tropical cyclone battered coastal areas throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, claiming more than 1,300 lives and causing an estimated $125 billion in damage, including widespread catastrophic flooding. The storm also forced a national focus on climate change, coastal resilience, and racial and socioeconomic inequities. Landscape architects found themselves at the center of this conversation. In August, two weeks before the 20th anniversary of Katrina, eight designers based in the Gulf Coast region reflected on the storm and its impact on the profession. Continue reading “The Profession Burst”: Designers on Katrina’s Impact 20 Years Later →

Design, Equity, Practice

Elizabeth Kennedy’s Quiet Revolution

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A Black-owned design firm has 30 years of mission-driven work and a “portfolio that a lot of people don’t have.”

By Sala Elise Patterson

Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

Elizabeth Kennedy, FASLA, knows intimately how much landscape architecture has matured over the past few decades. She is the founder of Elizabeth Kennedy Landscape Architect, PLLC (EKLA), the longest-surviving landscape architecture firm headed by a Black woman in America. Based in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, the firm specializes in historic landscapes, cultural heritage sites, and green infrastructure considered through a social justice lens. Continue reading Elizabeth Kennedy’s Quiet Revolution →

Awards, Design, Equity, Parks, Preservation

Kongjian Yu: Found In Translation

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We were deeply saddened to hear that Kongjian Yu, FASLA, the  landscape architect, educator, climate advocate, and founder of Beijing-based firm Turenscape, died in a plane crash in Brazil on Tuesday, September 23, 2025.   Here, we look back to a profile published in conjunction with the announcement of his acceptance of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. A full account of Kongjian Yu’s career can be found on the Cultural Landscape Foundation website.

—September 24, 2025

Early concepts by Kongjian Yu, FASLA, explored the park’s role as a stage, an orchard, and a series of terraces.
Early concepts by Kongjian Yu, FASLA, explored the park’s role as a stage, an orchard, and a series of terraces. Image by Turenscape.

By Betsy Anderson, Associate ASLA

On a steely afternoon in late January, the soft notes of a dizi floated over the sound of construction in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The flutist played amid a line of safety fencing and the maneuvers of a carry deck crane. This was not an unusual scene in a city filled with building projects, in a neighborhood that proudly cradles cultural expression. But today, anyone crossing the intersection of 6th Avenue South and South King Street would not be greeted by the usual half-built shell of a mid-rise. Instead, a much less orderly silhouette emerged on the street corner. Asymmetrical, animalistic, and unapologetically red—a bending steel-clad structure reached up, piece by piece, to embrace the district’s most recently completed park. Continue reading Kongjian Yu: Found In Translation →

Awards, Climate, Design

Kongjian Yu: The Sponge Evangelist

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We were deeply saddened to hear that Kongjian Yu, FASLA, the  landscape architect, educator, climate advocate, and founder of Beijing-based firm Turenscape, died in a plane crash in Brazil on Tuesday, September 23, 2025.   Here, we look back to an profile published in conjunction with the announcement of his acceptance of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. A full account of Kongjian Yu’s career can be found on the Cultural Landscape Foundation website.

–September 24, 2025

By Stephen Zacks

The old industrial site in 2020, before the park’s construction.© Turenscape, courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation
An old industrial site in 2020, before the construction of Benjakitti Forest Park in Bangkok. Photo © Turenscape, courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

In awarding the second biennial Oberlander Prize to the Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, FASLA, the Cultural Landscape Foundation and its 2023 jury sent an unmistakable signal about the future of the field. For the prize, which seeks to function as a counterpart to architecture’s Pritzker Prize, Yu is a resonant international figure whose theory of sponge cities saw its influence and exposure steadily grow in the past decade. Gray infrastructure and channelized rivers of the past century are being increasingly daylit and replaced with naturalized environments that absorb water and restore wildlife habitats. Given the accelerating climate crisis and its impact on hydrological cycles, Yu now talks about the need for a “sponge planet,” updated to reflect the urgency of climate adaptation facing human settlements worldwide. Continue reading Kongjian Yu: The Sponge Evangelist →

Awards

A Prize-winning Essay Questions N.Y. Park Designs. Design Criticism Is Better for It.

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James Andrew Billingsley, a winner of the 2025 Bradford Williams Medal, pulls no punches with his take on some of New York’s swankiest new parks.

By Joe Adler

James Andrew Billingsley wants to make something abundantly clear: He likes Little Island, the 2.4-acre constructed park with walking paths and dramatic plantings that floats above the Hudson River on New York City’s West Side. “I think the planting is amazing,” says the writer and computational designer. Continue reading A Prize-winning Essay Questions N.Y. Park Designs. Design Criticism Is Better for It. →

Awards, Climate

Amid D.C.’s Dying Trees, Olmsted Woods Is a Success Story

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An article on Andropogon’s efforts to revive an urban forest is a winner of the 2025 Bradford Williams Medal.

By Joe Adler

While the core of Washington, D.C., is dominated by a unique mix of monumental architecture, imposing federal agencies, and rows and rows of office buildings, the rest of the city is arguably for the trees. Once you head north to explore more residential neighborhoods, the streetscapes darken beneath a winding canopy. Near the highest point in the city are 57 acres of forested landscapes at Washington National Cathedral known as the “Cathedral Close,” within which sits Olmsted Woods, a five-acre vestige of primarily oak and beech trees. Continue reading Amid D.C.’s Dying Trees, Olmsted Woods Is a Success Story →