Category Archives: Education

The Lab in the Backyard

USC’s Landscape Justice Initiative aims to give students grassroots perspective on their field.

By Patrick Sisson

Installing plants at a Test Plot site with USC student Yiyi Peng, studio instructor and USC Test Plot lead Jen Toy, and local resident Maria Arroyo, a member of the Abuelas de Parque. Image courtesy USC Architecture.

In 2018, after discovering that city arborists planned to plant Australian and South African plant species in response to a future of sustained droughts, the Los Angeles landscape architecture studio Terremoto launched Test Plot, a small-scale scheme designed to engage community groups in growing native plants in city parks and ultimately show that residents can play a role in maintaining the city’s landscape. “There’s a fear of maintenance,” Jenny Jones, ASLA, a partner at Terremoto, says. “We want to celebrate the maintenance.” Continue reading The Lab in the Backyard

Awards Focus: The Death and Life of Great American Barges

LAM is highlighting student and professional winners from the 2021 ASLA Awards by asking designers to share an outtake that tells an important part of their project’s narrative.

Student Analysis and Planning Honor Award

Weicong Huang

“The rendering shows local wetland restoration, in process and after. In the gray frame, the ship is ejecting stored sediment into the wetland and people are planting native weeds. Continue reading Awards Focus: The Death and Life of Great American Barges

Awards Focus: After Plastics

LAM is highlighting student and professional winners from the 2021 ASLA Awards by asking designers to share an outtake that tells an important part of their project’s narrative.

After Plastics: The Gardens of the Glacial Foreland

Student Research Honor Award

Image courtesy Andreea Vasile-Hoxha, Associate ASLA.

“Plastic particle x is currently sunbathing between the sharp peaks of the Swiss Alps. It is reflecting on the journey that had brought it here, while discovering the essence of its new identity—it is now called a microplastic particle. What that truly means, particle x has yet to understand, but for now, it begins to feel trapped under the snow, slowly freezing… Continue reading Awards Focus: After Plastics

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