Archive for the ‘MATERIALS’ Category

PETER WALKER’S POINT

Posted in AWARDS, BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MATERIALS, NURSERY, PARKS, PEOPLE, PLANNING, RECREATION, RESILIENCE, REUSE, SHORELINE, SOIL, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

The Barangaroo Reserve transforms Sydney Harbour’s old industrial landscape.

FROM THE NOVEMBER 2016 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

When I was a child growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my understanding of landscape was one of changing purpose. Cornfields were converted into housing subdivisions and office parks. Old winding roads were straightened, thickened with extra lanes, and punctuated by traffic lights. It was the small discoveries—an arrowhead in the garden, a bullet lodged in a tree—that revealed the older stories of these fractured landscapes. The layers of roads, power lines, and strip malls made any trace of a site’s earlier history difficult to imagine.

But what if we were to allow a landscape to break free from the confines of concrete curbs, smooth out its industrial wrinkles, and pluck off architectural blemishes in an effort to recapture a semblance of its younger, more picturesque self? Where injections of earth and rock serve as the Botox for an aging landscape, erasing the creases of human development in favor of a more natural topography. So begins the story of Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, Australia. (more…)

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MADE TO DISAPPEAR

Posted in AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FARMS, FEATURES, GARDENS, GREEN ROOFS, HABITAT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, MATERIALS, PLANTS, RECREATION, SPECIES, THE CLIENT, VIEWS, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER / PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN SCOTT

In dry western Washington, a fruit company compound by Berger Partnership all but vanishes in a shroud of native plantings.

FROM THE AUGUST 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

The shift takes place just past Cle Elum. Driving the 140 miles from Seattle to Yakima, Washington, crossing the Cascade Range at Snoqualmie Pass, the landscape seems to dissolve in the span of a few minutes. The ponderosa pine forest gives way to high desert so quickly it’s as if the towering trees had been shrunk by a laser, transfigured into gnarly sagebrush. Dotting eastern Washington’s arid, gray-brown shrub steppe are green pastures, fields, orchards, and farms. The Yakima Valley is one of the most productive regions in Washington, thanks to a massive irrigation project undertaken around the turn of the 20th century. Farmers here grow apples, peaches, pears, cherries, and plums, as well as grapes for wine and hops for beer. The Yakima Valley produces more hops than anywhere else in the United States and more than two-thirds of Washington’s wine grapes, an industry worth nearly $5 billion.

And yet the sparsely vegetated ridges reveal the climatological truth of this place: that under normal conditions, the Cascades are a good enough goalie to prevent all but a fraction of western Washington’s wetness from slipping past them, and the presence of even the smallest amount of water is broadcast in bright pops of color. The draws and gullies appear as gashes of green, yellow, pink, and white, as if someone took a landscape painting, folded it in two, and stuffed the canvas into a crevice.

I take in the view from the cab of a 2016 Toyota Tacoma hurtling eastward on Interstate 90. Jason Henry, ASLA, a principal at the Seattle-based Berger Partnership, is driving. We’re on our way to Yakima, a sprawled-out town of roughly 100,000 people, where Berger Partnership recently completed the landscape for the headquarters of the Washington Fruit & Produce Company, a family-owned grower founded in 1916. Although Henry has lived in Seattle since 1996, the landscape architect has a deep connection to the Yakima Valley. His mother was born in Selah, just north of Yakima, and as a child, he spent summers at his aunt and uncle’s ranch outside the city, exploring and fishing and occasionally helping out in the family orchards. He still has cousins in the fruit industry. (more…)

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CONCRETE MINUS CARBON

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, CONSTRUCTION, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS, PRACTICE, REGULATIONS, RESEARCH, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA

New technologies can reduce the environmental footprint of the most-used construction material.

This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.

FROM THE JULY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Concrete in the 21st century promises to be a more sustainable material, and given the nine billion metric tons used globally each year, it must be. Portland cement, the binding agent in ordinary concrete, has a very high carbon footprint, resulting in just under one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) released for every ton of cement produced. With 4.2 billion metric tons of the binder used each year worldwide, cement production is responsible for nearly 8 percent of total global carbon emissions. The high lime content of ordinary portland cement contributes about two-thirds of cement’s CO2 impact through the process of limestone calcination. The other one-third of CO2 released is from combustion of fossil fuels.

Technologies to improve the carbon footprint of concrete are currently in the early stages of development, but some, including carbon sequestration in concrete and substantial reductions of cement using energetically modified cement, are now commercially available. Concrete surface products for paving and walls to scrub air pollution, as well as new self-healing concrete products, are also worth investigating. We have heard about some of these innovations for a decade or more in the research community, but many are finally being brought to market—some more quickly than others. Europe is ahead of the United States in the adoption of these technologies, largely because of more rigorous clean air and carbon reduction initiatives.

New technologies in any field can take a long time to move from the laboratory to the marketplace, but (more…)

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ART DIRECTOR’S CUT, SEPTEMBER 10

Posted in DETAILS, ECOLOGY, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANTS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, REUSE, SOIL, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

From “The Glass Is Greener” in the September 2019 issue by Timothy A. Schuler, about the use of recycled waste glass fragments as sustainable substitutes for soil.

“Soil solution.”

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 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.

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SEPTEMBER LAM: DEEP INQUIRY

Posted in ASLA, AWARDS, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, STREETS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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FOREGROUND

Where Are We Sitting? (Interview)
Thaïsa Way, FASLA, the new director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, wants to push the profession’s history in new directions.

A Merger Makes a New Market (Office)
Calvin Abe, FASLA, made moves toward an ownership transition for his Los Angeles firm, AHBE Landscape Architects, then pulled back, and then went for it with MIG.

FEATURES

No Us and Them
Forty years after its founding, the office of Andropogon, which received the 2018 ASLA
Firm Award, keeps expanding the research base on which it was built and advancing the notion that people and nature are one.

Downtown, Deliberately
Over 35 years, a featureless corner in Boise, Idaho, was galvanized to life by ZGF Architects with help from some local talent.

Toronto in Deep
Below its towers, Toronto’s ravines carve dramatic veins of forest through the city. But their biodiversity is at risk of collapse under intense environmental pressures, and their guardians think they have not much time to reverse the problem.

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

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 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 September articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “No Us and Them,” Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA; “Toronto in Deep,” Robert Burley, Courtesy the Stephen Bulger Gallery; “Downtown, Deliberately,” ZGF Architects; “Where Are We Sitting?” © Courtney M. Randolph; “A Merger Makes a New Market,” Sibylle Allgaier.

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JULY LAM: BETWEEN BREADTH AND DETAIL

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, FEATURES, HISTORY, MAINTENANCE, MATERIALS, NURSERY, ONLINE ONLY, PLANNING, PLANTS, RECREATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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FOREGROUND

Every Branch and Blade (Interview)
At the Miller House and Garden, in Columbus, Indiana, the site manager Ben Wever
knows exactly how to maintain Dan Kiley’s original vision for the place.

For Floods, a Stage (Planning)
On the Indiana banks of the Ohio River that look at Louisville, OLIN is planning
ways for people to come out and see the river when it swells.

FEATURES

The Green New Deal, Landscape, and Public Imagination
Ambitious proposals to attack climate breakdown and social inequity together could dramatically alter the American landscape, ideally without the compromises of the first New Deal.

What’s in a Nativar?
Among the hottest items in the nursery industry are cultivars of native plants bred to behave better in designed landscapes. The trick is in creating new plants that offer the
ecological benefits of the originals.

Sound Gardens
How to compose the score for a landscape? The Swiss acoustic designer
Nadine Schütz is figuring that out.

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

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 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 July articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “The Green New Deal, Landscape, and Public Imagination,” Tennessee Valley. United States, None. Between 1933 and 1945. Photograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW33-015672-ZC https://www.loc.gov/item/2017877279/; “What’s in a Nativar?” courtesy Shedd Aquarium; “Sound Gardens,” Courtesy Kyoto Institute of Technology; “Every Branch and Blade,” Mark R. Eischeid; “For Floods, a Stage,” Troy McCormick.

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TREE LINE

Posted in ART, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, MAINTENANCE, MATERIALS, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, REGION, SPECIES, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY MICHAEL DUMIAK

Trees in the landscape around Ypres, in Belgium, mark stubborn boundaries of the first World War.

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Off the Menin Road in Flanders, Belgium, there is a lane leading to a working farm and a stand of trees. This copse is called Railway Wood.

On a raw day in early spring, the wind runs through the wood over the adjoining field, rustling the leaves of a slight elm sapling at the side of the lane. The elm is protected by a steel frame, and it is marked with a red-trimmed sign. The tree stands in a spot that looked very different once upon a time, from June 1915 to July 1917. At that point there were no trees, none with leaves, or branches, or tops, anyway, and this place was called the Idiot Trench. (more…)

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