Category Archives: Design
The Long Game
Landscape architects are working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and building new networks through the Engineering With Nature program. The implications could be transformative for both.
By Jared Brey
A needle that falls in the southern reaches of the New Jersey Pinelands might find itself washed into the Maurice River and carried by its current to Delaware Bay. The Maurice flows south in tight coils, and before it reaches the estuary, it’s forced into one final wide bend around a long dike at Matts Landing, near the old bayside oyster towns of Bivalve and Shell Pile. Continue reading The Long Game
Explorers at Home
Plant-hunting is always in season at the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon, the storybook base of the botanist Lilla Leach, where Land Morphology has begun a next-century upgrade to the grounds.
By Bradford McKee / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
Leach Botanical Garden
“We wanted that project so badly,” a friend told me when I mentioned my upcoming visit in May to the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon. The Leach Garden is a former private property, about 90 years old as a garden and about 40 years old as a Portland public park.
Pocket Ecologies
Offshoots, Inc., designs a place for people, bikes, and plants in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood.
By Karolina Hac
Traveling into Boston on the elevated section of Interstate 93, a small pop of green is visible among the swath of industry in Charlestown’s Hood Park. Designed by Offshoots, Inc., in conjunction with Elkus Manfredi Architects, that green dot is known as Hood Bike Park. Continue reading Pocket Ecologies
For Crows, By Humans
Walter Hood reflects on what corvids can teach us.
By Anjulie Rao
Crows—although they share a predilection for scavenging human food waste alongside other urban avian “pests” such as pigeons—carry a more mischievous reputation. The National Audubon Society cites their incredible intelligence and documented cases of the birds using tools, holding grudges, and performing funerals. Continue reading For Crows, By Humans
Seeding a Wilder Future
A new gorilla conservation campus by MASS Design Group and TEN x TEN is a laboratory for reforestation.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The plan was ambitious, even by MASS Design Group standards. For the headquarters of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the world’s foremost mountain gorilla conservation organization, the designers envisioned a series of lily pad-like buildings nestled into a landscape made up of plant communities drawn almost exclusively from the gorillas’ native habitat in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.
Windbloom Maps the Breeze
Falon Mihalic’s sculpture charts the atmospheric forces that bind us.
By Zach Mortice
Windbloom, a 12-foot-high sculpture and pavilion under construction near Houston by the artist and landscape architect Falon Mihalic, will give physical form to ephemeral weather processes—specifically, which way the wind blows. The site-specific piece will map the direction of local wind, and its biomorphic qualities will reflect the vitality and energy of the Gulf Coast skies it surveys. Continue reading Windbloom Maps the Breeze