A new strategy for public spaceplanning takes the stops offsmall-wheeled sports.
By Katharine Logan
Image by van der Zalm + associates.
There’s no question that skateboarding gets a bad rap. The National Safety Council ranks it safer than baseball—not to mention hockey and football—but it’s perceived as risky. Noise from skate wheels is negligible at 50 feet, but it’s perceived as noisy. And although skaters comprise a wide demographic, they’re stereotyped as teenage boys with a predilection for delinquency.Continue reading Skate The City→
Transforming a defunct monorail into an elevated trail was an exercise in creative friction.
By Timothy A. Schuler
TEN x TEN’s vision for the trail treats the former monorail as part of the cultural landscape. Photo by Corey Gaffer Photography LLC.
For some designers, a zoo may not have the same appeal or design potential as, say, a postindustrial site. But for the Minneapolis-based designers at TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, a project to repurpose a former monorail at the Minnesota Zoo as a 1.25-mile-long elevated walking path was as rich as any historic site.Continue reading A View To The Zoo→
“What would a monument to [a] river look like?” This was the question that Bruce Willen asked himself in the summer of 2020. The artist and founder of Baltimore’s Public Mechanics design studio was, like a lot of people during the pandemic, spending an unusual amount of time outside, and one day he heard water running below the street. It jogged a memory of a historic map and a river called the Sumwalt Run that no longer existed. “There was a lot of conversation about monuments going on, and I was thinking about, how do you not just memorialize an event or person but a place?” Willen says. Continue reading A River Remembered→
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→
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→
Four Vermont landscape architects talk about the state’s devastating floods and how its unique culture and topography could be both a limitation and a strength in a climate-plagued future.
Interview by Jennifer Reut
Emily Lewis, ASLA, working on-site; at DuBois & King, she focuses on community planning and design for small towns in New England. Photo courtesy DuBois & King.
Last July, Vermont experienced catastrophic flooding the likes of which had not been seen since Hurricane Irene hit the state in 2011. Over just 48 hours, Vermont received between three and nine inches of rain. In central Vermont, where the state’s capital, Montpelier, is located, the tally of rainfall at nearby North Calais was 9.2 inches.
Dryland farming comes to the suburbs, thanks to an innovative community park.
By Timothy A. Schuler
An early sketch illustrates the designers’ blended, permaculture-inspired approach to the site. Courtesy Superbloom.
When Diane Lipovsky, ASLA, and Stacy Passmore, ASLA, the founding principals of Superbloom, first visited the Windler homestead in Aurora, Colorado, to develop a proposal for a new community park, they knew they didn’t want to treat the buildings like dollhouses. “We tried to think through how it wasn’t just a museum where people go to learn about farming; it was also your community park,” Lipovsky says. “We want this to be a place where we can celebrate the history of dryland agriculture but [also] have a more future-oriented approach to what that means.”Continue reading Space To Grow→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
