Toronto’s cold-savvy planners adapt the city to hotter summers.
By Sam Bloch Illustration by Meg Studer
When cities plan to mitigate extreme heat, many draw from a now-familiar playbook—more trees, more reflective surfaces, and more air-conditioning. In Toronto, city officials are exploring a different strategy: changing the orientation, massing, and materials of new buildings to improve the habitability of public space. The project, currently billed as a “thermal comfort study,” represents a new frontier in urban adaptation. “We can’t change the climate,” says Dorsa Jalalian, an urban designer at Dialog, a design firm retained for the study. “We are just trying to extend the number of hours that we can be comfortable.”Continue reading Keeping Their Cool→
Computer modeling puts a new species on the menu of edible fire breaks.
By Madeline Bodin
A team of scientists says it has found a plant that could help protect communities against wildfire while providing income and filling bellies at the same time: the banana.Continue reading A Buffer Buffet→
To meet the ambitious climate targets ahead, designers, developers, and construction firms need common standards. And soon.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Climate Positive Design, whose Pathfinder platform is another emissions calculator, is among the ECHO Project’s participants. Image courtesy Climate Positive Design.
As municipal governments, developers, universities, and corporations begin to collect emissions data, either voluntarily or to comply with local regulations, experts say that the building sector will need better standards for reporting embodied carbon data. “We need to be aligned at the highest levels of guidance and leadership, or else it’s going to lose its impact,” says Pamela Conrad, ASLA, the founder of Climate Positive Design and the creative force behind Pathfinder, a free carbon calculator designed for landscape architects (see “The Plus Side,” LAM, October 2020).Continue reading Fast Tracked→
By Piet Oudolf, with an introduction by Cassian Schmidt; London and New York City: Phaidon, 2023; 276 pages, $79.95.
Reviewed by Rosetta S. Elkin, ASLA
“For me garden design is not just about plants, it is about emotion, atmosphere, a sense of contemplation.” So begins Piet Oudolf in his latest monograph, At Work, adopting a tone of wisdom and mischief. The wisdom in this book is offered freely across a selection of hand-drawn planting plans that are reproduced with meticulous care. Each drawing offers a lesson to the reader in “How to Oudolf.” A kind of manual for designing nature without ecology is found in the series of artful drawings that reveal a strategy for working with plants through quantity, species, spacing, and cultivar. Here, he seems to say, is my secret recipe. The mischief is found in its provocation—go ahead, copy it. I dare you to try.Continue reading Nature Without Ecology→
Lone Oaks Farm had a master plan as ambitious as they come. Implementation has been rocky.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The cabins opened in summer 2023, but the site was cleared prior to construction. Image by Penny Russell.
From the beginning, the idea behind Lone Oaks Farm in Middleton, Tennessee, was ambitious. Acquired by the University of Tennessee (UT) in 2015, the 1,200-acre property was to be a new home for 4-H summer camps; offer hunter education programs and a world-class sporting clays course; host corporate retreats and private events; and serve as a model for ecological restoration and environmental conservation, all while continuing to operate as a working cattle farm. The goal was to connect people of all ages, especially youth, to the Tennessee landscape, which the farm would do through education, sport, hospitality, food, and agricultural science.Continue reading Form Follows Funding→
A floating resort designed by EDSA helps preserve fragile coastal terrain in the Yucatán.
By Scott Sowers
The odd layout of the resort is a response to a decision to preserve as many mangroves as possible. Courtesy Ian Lizaranzu (photographer), GIM Desarrollos (client).
At the Etéreo beach resort on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the typical vacation experience is transformed into a floating holiday amid a carpet of pygmy mangroves. Pathways to the resort’s pools, restaurants, and beaches are rendered as boardwalks constructed of treated hardwood and mounted on timber pilings. The walkways serve as a staging ground for nature walks and photographic safaris. “The boardwalks feel like they’re floating in the mangroves,” says Devon King, a landscape architect and vice president at EDSA, which led the site’s design. “We wanted to create an ethereal journey and make the walk from the hotel to the beach with moments of discovery, seating areas, and educational moments that made people slow down.”Continue reading Over And Above→
Berger Partnership designs a green infrastructure facility that’s part of the neighborhood.
By Katharine Logan
The station models green infrastructure strategies to manage rainwater on a densely developed site. Courtesy Berger Partnership.
As climate change and urban growth stress the ability of combined storm and sewer systems to handle the volume of water besieging cities, infrastructure that would once have been relegated to industrial outskirts increasingly needs to fit within mixed-use neighborhoods. In south Seattle, the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station is meant to model replicable solutions while becoming “an integrated part of the community: accepted, acknowledged, actually liked,” says Michael Popiwny, the architectural design and mitigation manager for the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, who served as the senior project manager during the design phase of the facility.Continue reading Resilience Theater→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
