A soapstone quarry with Indigenous roots is set to become an archaeological park.
By Kim O’Connell
Examples of previously excavated soapstone. Montgomery Parks says future archaeological excavations are likely. Courtesy Montgomery Parks.
Four thousand years ago, if you were working with a stone mallet, it would be steady but relatively quick work to carve a soapstone boulder into a medium-sized bowl. With stone chipping off with every strike, you could start the project in the morning, work into the afternoon, and be boiling water in the bowl by nightfall. Soapstone was ideal that way—easy enough to carve but dense enough to hold heat.Continue reading Dig Deep→
Cleveland’s DERU Landscape Architecture sees big stories in small spaces.
By Zach Mortice
Photography by Amber N. Ford
A plaza with interpretive signage attracts visitors from the sidewalk.
Inside the Cozad-Bates House, a handsome, red brick Italianate building on the east side of Cleveland that’s the last pre-Civil War house in the University Circle neighborhood, is a small exhibit that tells the history of Ohio and Cleveland’s role in the Underground Railroad. A map of Ohio created in the late 19th century by the Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert traces the clandestine network, with thin arteries arrayed south to north, reaching across almost all its counties. Seven of these trails converge in Cleveland before crossing Lake Erie into Canada. It gives every impression of the loose town-to-town network of sympathetic families that would open their homes to people escaping enslavement that the railroad was—long on hope, short on actual infrastructure.Continue reading Star Tracks→
The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade
By Jared D. Margulies; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023; 392 pages, $24.95.
Reviewed by Anjulie Rao
Some years ago, a friend handed me a potted cactus. I wasn’t aware of the genus or species, only that it looked like a quintessential cactus: seven inches tall and deep forest green, its ribs dotted with malicious, symmetrical spikes. Though he had cared for it over the years, he no longer wanted this particular cactus. Looking around his home, I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that it was filled with succulents of many varieties, shapes, and conditions of health. It seemed that his minor obsession was similar to one that had overtaken my thirtysomething peers’ homes. There were succulents everywhere: Senecio rowleyanus, or string of pearls, hanging from macramé-covered pots in the bay windows of Chicago two-flats; aeoniums in vibrant pinks and greens; pincushions tucked into windowsills, looking soft and dangerous. Continue reading Prickly Desires →
Louisville’s Speed Outdoors sets contemporary art amid a new Reed Hilderbrand landscape.
By Mark R. Long
The planned outdoor space sits near the intersection of three major greenways. Image courtesy Reed Hilderbrand.
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is employing landscape architecture and urban planning to broaden its audience and help fill a gap in green space for its urban neighbors, transforming its grounds into an always-open art park that will display more than a dozen sculptures by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Sol LeWitt, and Deborah Butterfield. Scheduled to open in late 2025, the Reed Hilderbrand–designed green space will feature furniture and spaces for people to walk, relax, dine, study, and enjoy cultural programs amid expanses of new plantings, shaded by 150 new native trees.Continue reading Always Open→
A new housing development in Arkansas is designed for neurodiversity and community.
By Maci Nelson, Associate ASLA
The master plan for South Cato Springs weaves nature and active transportation throughout the community. Image courtesy Office of Strategy + Design.
The ability to decide how to get from one place to another is a choice that many people take for granted. But for many neurodivergent individuals, these small yet meaningful travels from school or to work are a resource for a sense of self-actualization, dignity, and independence, experts say. At South Cato Springs, a 230-acre Ozarkian mixed-use, mixed-income development designed to serve neurodivergent individuals in Fayetteville, Arkansas, an emphasis on nature-immersed mobility that promotes nonvehicular travel as the norm could help the development become a model of inclusivity for the region.Continue reading A Place For Every Person→
The allegorical assemblages of the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument.
By Kofi Boone, FASLA Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
I’ve been to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., many times: day and night, individually and in groups. I’ve sat and watched groups as they moved through the Mountain of Despair sculpture, touched the walls of quotes, and took selfies in front of the Stone of Hope. I have many friends and family who love the memorial. The site works as a linear narrative experience, and it does, in scale, material, and level of detail, mirror other memorials that share the National Mall. Based upon how you remember King, or how you want to remember King, the memorial can inspire or frustrate you. The King Memorial symbolizes the challenges that come from the decision to either be a part of a whole symbolic landscape fabric or to be apart from it. Should a memorial to a civil rights leader blend in with memorials to people that in some cases represent the opposite of their interests and values?Continue reading An Elegy In Granite→
The recent announcement of Kongjian Yu, FASLA, as the winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize sent us back to the archives for this piece on his work at Hing Hay Park in Seattle.
—October 26, 2023
Early concepts by Kongjian Yu, FASLA, explored the park’s role as a stage, an orchard, and a series of terraces. Image by Turenscape.
By Betsy Anderson, Associate ASLA
On a steely afternoon in late January, the soft notes of a dizi floated over the sound of construction in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The flutist played amid a line of safety fencing and the maneuvers of a carry deck crane. This was not an unusual scene in a city filled with building projects, in a neighborhood that proudly cradles cultural expression. But today, anyone crossing the intersection of 6th Avenue South and South King Street would not be greeted by the usual half-built shell of a mid-rise. Instead, a much less orderly silhouette emerged on the street corner. Asymmetrical, animalistic, and unapologetically red—a bending steel-clad structure reached up, piece by piece, to embrace the district’s most recently completed park.Continue reading Kongjian Yu: Found In Translation→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
