Archive for the ‘MATERIALS’ Category

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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MATERIALS & METHODS AT MACDOWELL

Posted in ART, BOOKS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PLANTS, REGION, RESEARCH, SCHOOLS, SPECIES, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION, UNIVERSITY, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Detail, paving, and construction of cable car line on Broadway, 1891. Photograph by C. C. Langill and William Gray. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

THE PRESTIGIOUS RESIDENTIAL FELLOWSHIP WELCOMES A NEW GROUP OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROFESSORS.

 

The MacDowell Colony, which grants artists across different disciplines residential fellowships to pursue their craft, is welcoming four landscape architecture educators into the program for its Spring 2019 residencies. The duo of Present Practice (Parker Sutton and Katherine Jenkins), who teach landscape architecture at the Ohio State University; the Harvard Graduate School of Design landscape architecture professor Robert Pietrusko; and Jane Hutton, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, will all spend up to eight weeks through May in Peterborough, New Hampshire, working in scholarly isolation. Now in its 112th year, MacDowell provides a private studio, as well as meals, accommodations, and some stipends.

This spring term’s fellows are architects and landscape architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theater artists, visual artists, poets, nonfiction writers, and fiction writers. Each crop of fellows is selected by a panel of subject matter experts. (more…)

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LEI OF THE LAND

Posted in ART, COMPETITIONS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORY, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PLANTS, UNIVERSITY, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

A lei by PBR HAWAII references the island’s dark colonial past. Courtesy PBR HAWAII.

As the receptionist for the Honolulu office of Belt Collins, Dawn Higa is not typically involved in design discussions. Her tasks, while vital to the day-to-day operations of the global design firm, tend toward the administrative: answering phones, directing calls, taking messages. It’s a job Higa’s held since 1987, when as a single mother she was placed at the company, which today has offices in multiple countries, including China, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, by a temp agency. “I don’t think I even knew what an engineer did for the first year,” Higa says.

But once every two years, Higa becomes an integral part of the team competing in Honolulu’s biennial RE-LEI competition, in which individuals and teams craft traditional Hawaiian lei—a garland typically made out of flowers, ferns, leaves, or nuts—out of 100 percent postconsumer waste. Registration for this year’s competition, which is open to anyone, not just those living in Hawaii, closes Saturday, March 23, 2019. The cost is $75 for individuals and $250 for teams, with discounted rates for students. RE-LEI was first organized by a group of landscape architects and planners in 2015; its proceeds support landscape architecture education and the recently created MLA program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). (more…)

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WHAT MAKES US US

Posted in BOOKS, ECOLOGY, GARDENS, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PLANTS, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, VIEWS, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2018| 5 Comments »

BY ZACH MORTICE

The lago at Roberto Burle Marx’s Sítio, which he composed by eye from truckloads of species collected during his botanical expeditions. Image courtesy Julian Raxworthy.

It’s time for landscape architects to re-embrace what makes them fundamentally different.

 

Since its inception, it’s been hard to find much agreement in landscape architecture over the profession’s purpose and how it should work. For some contemporary designers, landscape architecture, in theory if a bit less in practice, is most visible when ecological systems are designed and deployed to remediate the earth, water, air, and biomes, often at an infrastructural scale. And yet, a profession wholly obsessed with infrastructure would seem to miss the trees for the forest.

The Australian landscape architect Julian Raxworthy posits a way forward in his new book, Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by The MIT Press. Landscape architects, he notes, have retreated from the defining element of their corner of the spatial world: the development and management of planting design. Plants, he argues, are defined by their growth over time and the maintenance used to train them. Gardeners (whose ranks Raxworthy once populated) haven’t lost track of this fact. Growth is landscape architecture’s fundamental currency. From there, he launches into a populist call to tear down the blue collar/white collar divide between gardeners and landscape architects. Raxworthy (who is headed to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, after living in Cape Town, South Africa, for five years, teaching at the University of Cape Town) seems to admire messiness and rebellion against the bespoke and delicate. That preference is not surprising if you chat him up about his days as a music writer in the 1980s in Sydney, attending shows by Public Enemy and Dead Kennedys. Of one of his case study projects (created by a designer who never studied landscape architecture), he writes: “As a gardener rather than a landscape architect, the only plans Korte produced for the project were to satisfy the authorities. All other decisions arose organically through spending four years on site with a gang of four young German laborers who had returned from Brazil and smoked marijuana constantly. He looked back on this way of working with some nostalgia, saying that this time on site was the height of his career.” (more…)

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UPSTREAM D.C.

Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, GARDENS, IN THE ISSUE, MATERIALS, PLANNING, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »

BY BRADFORD MCKEE

Gray infrastructure has given way to green to prevent sewer overflows into Washington, D.C.’s waters.

FROM “THE RIVER BENEATH THE RIVER,” IN THE NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Green infrastructure is now an important part of the Clean Rivers Project. The colossal Anacostia River tunnel remains a fixture in the effort on the east side of the city to hold and carry stormwater to DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. But to the west, the introduction of green infrastructure is allowing the elimination of one smaller tunnel for a combined sewer network above Rock Creek, which drains into the Potomac River, and the scaling back of another large tunnel along the Potomac itself.

The notion of complementing gray infrastructure with green was a priority of George Hawkins when he became general manager of DC Water in 2009. It was not an easy sell. Clean-water advocates were skeptical of green infrastructure’s performance capability and also feared delays in achieving the goals of the Clean Rivers Project—to end 96 percent of the District of Columbia’s combined sewer overflows. Hawkins was able to make a case for the efficacy of green infrastructure and also to show that significant improvements to water quality would occur well before the tunnels’ projected completion.

The Clean Rivers program is deploying a mix of bioretention, porous pavements, rain barrels, and downspout disconnection from combined sewers. In the Rock Creek sewershed, enough green infrastructure is planned to manage (more…)

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THICKET OF THE MIND

Posted in ART, AWARDS, COMPETITIONS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, IN THE ISSUE, MATERIALS, NOW, SPECIES, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 2, 2018| 1 Comment »

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

An American garden at the Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire garden festival is a landscape of endless possibility.

FROM THE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

When Phoebe Lickwar, ASLA,  and Matt Donham arrived in a small town in central France this past March, everyone knew who they were. The designers, principals at FORGE Landscape Architecture and RAFT Landscape Architecture, respectively, were one of some 24 teams (and the only Americans) competing in this year’s Domaine Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival. And as they walked around, Donham remembers, “every person was like, ‘Ohhhh, the Americans with the 400 trees.’ Even the guy who took our tickets in the chateau was like, ‘Oh, you’re the ones with the 400 trees.’”

The festival’s theme was “Garden of Thoughts,” and Lickwar’s and Donham’s concept, Dans les Bois or Into the Woods, was based loosely on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which presents a labyrinthine garden as a metaphor for (more…)

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