An award-winning new outdoor space in Ohio focuses on the autistic experience.
By Maci Nelson, Associate ASLA
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder enjoy the garden both independently and with support. Photo by Richard Mandelkorn.
In early 2020, Toronto-based Virginia Burt, FASLA, received a cold call and invitation to meet for pizza and discuss a garden project in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The garden would honor the memory of the family’s child, Morgan, whose favorite hobby was gardening, and who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The proposed garden would replace the existing courtyard at the Monarch Center for Autism and its Lifeworks Program, which cared for Morgan, and provides prevocational training and support for people with autism who experience severe emotional, physical, and social challenges.Continue reading Designed for Differences→
The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access
By David Gissen; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022; 216 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by Sara Hendren
Every rights movement carries a tacit “before” and “after” scenario in its theory of change, and global disability rights movements are no different: In the before, a nation’s normative legal policies, its structures of education and governance, its built environments have been inaccessible to people with atypical bodies and minds. In the after—the imagined desirable future—those same structures are newly loosed from these hindering barriers. The world goes from inaccessible to accessible. It is retrofitted, refashioned, its seams opened up for more flexibility, pliability, generosity, making smoother passage through the human-made world a form of civic enfranchisement.Continue reading Book Review: Access Measures→
Terrain-NYC turns a bedrock cliff in the Bronx into a garden for all seasons.
By Zach Mortice
The entry courtyard creates an elevated terrace that allows residents to look out over the surrounding neighborhood. Courtesy Terrain-NYC Landscape Architecture PC.
Faced with the need for a meditative and richly planted landscape for an affordable and supportive housing project in the Bronx on top of exposed bedrock, Brian Green, a landscape architect at Terrain-NYC, looked to the other geologic formations in Manhattan, particularly in Central Park, and in the Bronx. What he noticed most were the ferns that grew in these places. Typically considered too delicate to take root in rock, they were surprisingly persistent. “They’ll find their way, somehow, into these little crevices,” he says.Continue reading Top of the Rock→
Revamping the landscape history curriculum to uproot racist histories.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Participants toured sites such as Piscataway Park and the National Colonial Farm. Photo by Andrea Roberts.
On the evening of June 11, 2020, amid mass protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Marc Miller, ASLA, tweeted: “It’s time y’all. Revive American landscape history and reboot it to reflect the long history of systemic racism that helps to make it.”Continue reading Past Imperfect→
Snow Hill Plantation’s uncommon transformation into a Black-owned cooperative.
By Taneasha White-Gibson
An image from a recent workshop at Catawba Trail Farm, led by North Carolina State University’s Just Communities Lab. Image courtesy Kofi Boone, FASLA.
At the Catawba Trail Farm, founded by sisters Delphine Godley Sellars and Lucille Godley Patterson, land once occupied by the 30,000-acre Snow Hill Plantation outside Durham, North Carolina, is being reclaimed as a community garden. For $100 per year, residents can rent one of the 40-plus garden beds, learn to grow their own produce, and take it back home to feed their families. The sisters hold classes and share skills on canning and growing, host gleaning events, and collaborate with partners to give fresh produce and recipes away, with more activities to come.Continue reading On Their Own Terms→
A survey sheds light on why midcareer women leave design firms.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Maya Sharfi, the founder of Build Yourself. Photo by Jessie Wyman Photography.
Rachel Wilkins was 28 years old when she got her first job in landscape architecture. Since graduate school, she had dreamed of working for a woman, but at the large Houston firm where she’d been hired—which Wilkins declined to name—all her bosses were men. Though she had “two wonderful male mentors,” she says she also regularly felt demeaned as a woman, passed over for promotions that went to male colleagues or, when the firm was called out for its lack of women in leadership, to women with less experience but more social capital. Her bosses, Wilkins says, seemed to “consider themselves the dads of the office,” a dynamic she says is omnipresent in landscape architecture—and problematic. “I don’t need a dad,” Wilkins says. “I need a boss who’s invested in my growth.” Continue reading Roadblocks Remain→
A memorial garden for a 12-year-old victim of police violence becomes a springboard for serving generations of children.
By Anjulie Rao / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
Volunteers and staff from the Tamir Rice Foundation greet visitors at the garden’s unveiling.
I arrived at the Marion C. Seltzer Elementary School playground around 11:00 a.m., just before the day’s heat peaked. It was a Friday, and students were making the short commute between the elementary school and the Cudell Recreation Center, located just a stone’s throw northwest. A group of toddlers had gathered with their teachers—likely a preschool daycare—along a bench that bordered a butterfly garden.Continue reading The Butterfly Effect→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
