All posts by zachmortice

Get Ready to Respond

$1 billion in funding to reconnect divided communities is coming.

By Zach Mortice

Landscape architects are ingrained systems thinkers and experts on how to balance infrastructure and the ecological imperatives of climate change, all while improving transit networks that bind people together. Significant portions of the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that became law late last year will be filtering down to communities, and landscape architects bring experience and expertise to these types of projects, including the removal of highways, streetscape design, greenway planning, and especially those projects that seek to address incidences of transit infrastructure exacerbating existing economic and demographic inequalities. Continue reading Get Ready to Respond

Trees on Their Own Terms

New research into forests at the Arboreal Inquiries Symposium.

By Zach Mortice

Forests are many things to many people—repositories of carbon, factories for our atmosphere, near-sentient biological networks, and totems of climate change salvation, to name a few recent claims. But how can we understand forests separately from the way humans see them? Continue reading Trees on Their Own Terms

Northern Star

Stoss Landscape Urbanism’s design for the University of Michigan’s Gerstacker Grove melds ecological performance with technological proficiency.

By Zach Mortice

Gerstacker Grove is the only major piece of landscape connective tissue on the University of Michigan’s North Campus. Photo by Millicent Harvey.

The Eda U. Gerstacker Grove on the University of Michigan’s North Campus is the modern anti-quad. The North Campus is cloistered and suburban, separated from the main Central Campus by a mile-plus and the Huron River. Continue reading Northern Star

Thaw-Scape Scrutiny

Federally funded research will help set a baseline for how to build in the Arctic.

By Zach Mortice 

Utqiagvik, Alaska, where the researchers will be examining surface hot spots where melted ice pools. Photo by Andrew Shea/Arctic Design Group, 2017.

 

In Alaska, beyond the Arctic Circle in North Slope Borough, Indigenous communities practice subsistence whale hunting. To store the whale meat, tribal communities dig ice cellars in the permafrost, a major infrastructural feat, as a 50-ton whale can feed thousands. Continue reading Thaw-Scape Scrutiny