A Chicago garden calls a Black community pushed to the margins back together again.
By Zach Mortice
MKSK’s design for the community garden extends a Mauricio Ramirez mural onto the ground plane. Image courtesy MKSK.
Since 2009, a vacant lot turned community garden on the 4600 block of Winthrop Avenue in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood has commemorated the Winthrop Avenue Family, the descendants of a group of Black families who for much of the 20th century were confined to this one block of the predominantly white neighborhood. “Everybody who lived on the block [was] not necessarily blood-related, but we were so close we felt like we were, and still do,” says Emilie Lockridge, whose mother was born there in 1925.
Albert Kahn Associates mines original drawings for the restoration of the historic Ford House.
By Jeff Link
The design team consulted Jens Jensen’s original drawings for the restoration, including this 1929 plan for the pool and lagoon. FOE31 Jens Jensen Drawings and Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
The restoration of the 87-acre grounds of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, may be among the most historically faithful re-creations of the work of Jens Jensen and Albert Kahn to date. Pieced together from Jensen’s original drawings, detailed construction logs, archival photographs, and digitized film reels, the restored landscape just outside Detroit features a 185,000-gallon clamshell-shaped pool, a lagoon, a meadow, and a wagon-wheel-shaped rose garden.
ONTHECOVER: Al Fay Park in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, by SLA. PhotobySLA/PhillipHandforth.
Featured Story: “Play It Cool,” by Jessica Bridger. A desert forest is a surprising sight in the booming heart of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. For the popular Al Fay Park, Copenhagen-based SLA used local materials and resilient native plants in unexpected ways, creating engaging settings for play and rest.
The 2022 Serpentine Pavilion, titled Black Chapel and designed by the multihyphenate artist Theaster Gates, was conceived as a space offering contemplation, community, and joy to the public.
Installed next to the Serpentine South Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, the austere pavilion felt at once imposing, as it reached just beyond the treetops, and humbly compact and perfectly embedded within its context.
A set of collages explored design possibilities for the backyard. Courtesy TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism.
The backyard as a distinct space has not always been with us. It is, according to the cultural landscape historian Paul Groth, a relatively recent invention that was made possible by technological innovations in the 1930s and 1940s.
ON THE COVER: Quarry Garden in Minneapolis by TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism. Photo by Gaffer Photography.
Featured Story:“Ten Times Better,” by Aaron King. TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism’s design for a modest backyard in Minneapolis fuses woody wildness and industrial remnants.
