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Archive for the ‘MATERIALS’ Category

APRIL LAM: CROSSING BORDERS

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, LAM ONLINE, MAINTENANCE, MATERIALS, OFFICE, PARKS, PLANNING, PRACTICE, SOIL, SPECIES, STREETS, STUDENTS, THE CLIENT, UNIVERSITY, VIEWS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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It’s the beginning of April, which mean’s LAM’s World Landscape Architecture Month issue is here! You’ll find these stories inside:

FOREGROUND

Maintenance Matters (Office)
Maintenance is all about relationships. And money.


Slope Style (Materials)
Pointers and pitfalls for planting trees on steep grades.

Royal Treatment (Gardens)
The art of bonsai is easier to see in Rhodeside & Harwell’s new pavilion at the
National Bonsai & Penjing Museum.

FEATURES

Ethic and Aesthetic
The acequia—a centuries-old irrigation technology—is ideal for stormwater management
at a New Mexico house.

Scale Factor
SWA combines beauty and security at Mexico’s University of Monterrey.

Parisian Accents
Three new parks anchor regeneration projects near the city’s periphery.

Out of Time
The past and the present merge in a new language for commemorating slavery at
Valongo Wharf, the largest slave port in the Americas.

THE BACK

Soft Power in Moscow
Public spaces devoid of politics are a new idea in Moscow. You could even call them revolutionary.

All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for April can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting April articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Parisian Accents,” Atelier Jacqueline Osty & Associés; “Out of Time,” Sara Zewde; “Ethic and Aesthetic,” Kate Russell; “Scale Factor,” SWA Group/Jonnu Singleton; “Maintenance Matters,” Josef Gutierrez, ASLA; “Slope Style,” SiteWorks; “Royal Treatment,” Allen Russ Photographer; “Soft Power in Moscow,” Iwan Baan, courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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MIND, SOUL, DESIGN

Posted in ECOLOGY, FORWARD, GARDENS, HABITAT, HEALING GARDENS, LAM MAGAZINE, MATERIALS, PALETTE, PLANTS, PRACTICE, REUSE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

Practicality resides at the core of every Virginia Burt design.

FROM THE MARCH 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

“I want to create gardens that really are truly meaningful and touch people,” says Virginia Burt, FASLA, the founder and principal of Virginia Burt Designs in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and Cleveland, Ohio. She’d been practicing nine years by the time she was invited to start on a partner track at JSW+ Associates in Richmond Hill, Ontario, but said she was looking for more in her own work. “My personal life was deeper and more meaningful than the kind of work that I was doing, and I said, ‘You know what? I wanted to be more.’”

Burt could have easily gone down a number of paths. She is an avid skier and author, and thought at one point she would go into veterinary medicine. But since high school she had known exactly what she wanted to do. “My brother brought home a woman for Thanksgiving who was in landscape architecture, and I was like, ‘I love drawing. I like being outside. I love nature. Oh, my God, you get paid to do stuff like that?’” She was so sure of her path that during an entrance interview for the landscape architecture program at the University of Guelph, she remembers fielding the question, “What’s your plan if you’re not accepted?” with an immediate: “There is no plan; I’m getting in.” (more…)

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SOLID AS A ROCK

Posted in ENERGY, LAM MAGAZINE, MATERIALS, REGULATIONS, REUSE, SOIL, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2018| Leave a Comment »

BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA

The stone industry adopts a new sustainability standard.

FROM THE FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

In 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design, Bill Browning, an environmental designer and founder of Terrapin Bright Green, cites “material connection with nature” as a significant principle. In other words, materials from nature, with minimal processing, can be used to construct the built environment—reflecting the local geology and connecting people to a place and natural setting. More than any other material, stone fulfills this “pattern”—often seamlessly settling a built landscape into the larger natural context. Yet in some cases, heavy stone can travel thousands of miles between harvest and use—offering absolutely no connection to the local natural landscape and creating a substantial environmental footprint.

Stone holds great potential to be a highly sustainable construction material for use in paving, stairs, and walls. It can be extremely durable, with relatively low embodied energy (energy used to produce a material), and nontoxic. However, a study from the University of Tennessee estimates that more than half of all dimension stone—defined as any stone that has been cut or shaped for use in construction—is imported, primarily from China, India, and Brazil, owing to far lower labor costs and fewer worker safety regulations, which combine for a lower product cost. Some of this stone might have been harvested in the United States, sent overseas for processing, then returned as “imported stone.” Minimal records of stone harvest, sales, and processing make it challenging to track stone’s path to market. Additionally, environmental impacts from waste and water use in stone quarrying and manufacture are not insignificant. Fortunately, a new standard from the Natural Stone Council (NSC) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) offers criteria for reducing the environmental impacts of stone harvest and processing and requires a chain of custody for stone so consumers can know for sure the path their “local” stone has traveled.

The stone quarrying process is often lumped together with metal mining’s heavy blasting and toxic runoff, but Kathy Spanier, the marketing director at Coldspring in Minnesota and a participant in the development of the new stone standard, emphasizes (more…)

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FEBRUARY LAM: Earth, Trees, and Stone

Posted in DETAILS, ECOLOGY, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, GARDENS, HEALING GARDENS, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, IDEAS, LAM ONLINE, MATERIALS, PARKS, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANTS, PLAYGROUNDS, RECREATION, REGULATIONS, SOIL, SPECIES, TECH, VIEWS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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It’s the first, which means February’s issue of LAM is here! You’ll find these stories inside:

FOREGROUND

Secrets to Share (Gardens)
Sadafumi Uchiyama, ASLA, can teach you how to
make a Japanese garden in Portland, Oregon.

Woven in Place (Details)
At Kopupaka Reserve, New Zealand, the Isthmus Group is weaving
Maori culture into stormwater infrastructure.

Solid as a Rock (Materials)
Is stone always a sustainable building material?

FEATURES

A Forest in the City in the Forest
Sylvatica Studio’s landscape for the Fernbank Museum of Natural History
immerses visitors in Atlanta’s old-growth Piedmont forest.

Ripple Effect
A topographically exuberant campus by Snøhetta embraces
the MAX IV synchrotron particle accelerator.

A View of the World
Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects has restored
the landscape of the painter Frederic Church’s estate.

All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for February can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting February articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Ripple Effect,” Felix Gerlach; “A View of the World,” Detail of Clouds over Olana, 1872, by Frederic Edwin Church, Oil on paper 8 11⁄16 x 12 1⁄8 inches, OL.1976.1. Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York, Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation; “A Forest in the City in the Forest,” Timothy Hursley; “Solid as a Rock,” GGN; “Secrets to Share,” Jonathan Ley; “Woven in Place,” David St. George.

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TROUBLE ON THE EDGE

Posted in CONSTRUCTION, DETAILS, FORWARD, LAM MAGAZINE, MATERIALS, PRACTICE, SOIL, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 16, 2018| 1 Comment »

BY ANDREW LAVALLEE, FASLA

Pavement and planting beds can play nicely—but it takes thought.

FROM THE JANUARY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

It is a classic landscape architecture problem: placing pavements next to lawn or planting bed areas. The commonplace nature of this situation belies its complexity, an adjacency that represents an interface between two systems with antithetical requirements. In this case, the edge between pavement and planting bed is an area where an engineered structural system abuts a living horticultural system. Successful design solutions frequently require landscape architects to reconcile competing interests, but it is not always easy, given the demands of a project. In SiteWorks’s practice, we see the pavement–planting edge as a challenge for both designers and contractors alike. The edge merits special attention with regard to how we design and document the condition, how it’s built, and how its thoughtful assembly can benefit long-term performance.

The Basics
Let’s start with what a successful pavement system needs. The structural support of a pavement relies on (more…)

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JANUARY LAM: FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

Posted in ECOLOGY, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, MATERIALS, PLANNING, PLANTS, POLLUTION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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January’s issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine does a global scan to see how different countries tackle familiar problems. In Europe, the writer Michael Dumiak travels across Switzerland, where almost every corner of the country is accessible by public transportation. An ocean away, efforts to mitigate the effects of future disasters ramp up after the devastating tsunami that rocked Japan’s shores in 2011.  San Francisco has required downtown projects to add privately owned public spaces since 1985. But private ownership can sometimes make it hard for the public to find, much less access, these spaces that are meant for the public.

In Materials, SiteWorks’s Andrew Lavallee, FASLA, details common problems and remedies for natural and human-made edging in the landscape. In Water, lessons in evolving a moribund cranberry bog into its former glory as an ecologically productive wetland. And in Interview, planner Damon Rich discusses his firm’s work and his recent MacArthur Fellowship. All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for January can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting January articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “New Roots,” Nate Berg; “Public, with an Asterisk,” Kyle Jeffers; “Clockwork,” Michael Dumiak; “Exit Strategy,” Nick Nelson, Inter-Fluve; “Trouble on the Edge,” James Dudley, ASLA, SiteWorks; “A Force for People,” John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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PIER REVIEW / UNA VISITA AL MUELLE

Posted in CITIES, FEATURES, LAM MAGAZINE, MATERIALS, PARKS, PLANTS, RECREATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »

As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.

Click above for a full PDF of the translated text with English text available below.

BY ZACH MORTICE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY

FROM THE DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

New Yorkers avoid Times Square, and Chicagoans stay away from Navy Pier. It’s an ironclad rule. The public spaces that are most popular are there to attract tourists. Locals don’t go there.

In Chicago, going to Navy Pier had been something like a grudging civic responsibility you accept when you have out-of-town guests. It’s always been the most meta of Chicago’s architectural landmarks—essentially a large viewing platform, at more than half a mile long, for the city’s epic skyline, the finest way to see it all without a boat. But best to keep your eyes on the horizon, and not look at the motley collection of cotton candy vendors and garish signs that crowded the waterfront.

But today Navy Pier is looking and acting more like an authentic part of the city, for locals and tourists alike. A renovation by James Corner Field Operations has turned it from a tourist mall to a (more…)

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