Toronto’s cold-savvy planners adapt the city to hotter summers.
By Sam Bloch Illustration by Meg Studer
When cities plan to mitigate extreme heat, many draw from a now-familiar playbook—more trees, more reflective surfaces, and more air-conditioning. In Toronto, city officials are exploring a different strategy: changing the orientation, massing, and materials of new buildings to improve the habitability of public space. The project, currently billed as a “thermal comfort study,” represents a new frontier in urban adaptation. “We can’t change the climate,” says Dorsa Jalalian, an urban designer at Dialog, a design firm retained for the study. “We are just trying to extend the number of hours that we can be comfortable.”Continue reading Keeping Their Cool→
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→
On a leftover site in Punta Pite, landscape architect Teresa Moller’s house is a study in give and take.
By Jimena Martignoni/Photography by Cristóbal Palma
The terraced gardens behind the house showcase many different species that can now be appreciated as one composition.
Nestled into steep cliffs that face the Pacific Coast of Chile, the landscape architect Teresa Moller’s house combines a small-scale rewilding and a site for the study of seacoast plants. The experimental gardens at Moller’s house, in the residential development Punta Pite, are part of a 27-acre property that follows the contours of a bay between Zapallar and Papudo, two sea towns located about 100 miles north of Santiago. Started more than 15 years ago, the gardens seem to have realized their full potential, though they are also, fundamentally, an evolving work in progress.Continue reading A Certain Sacrifice→
To meet the ambitious climate targets ahead, designers, developers, and construction firms need common standards. And soon.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Climate Positive Design, whose Pathfinder platform is another emissions calculator, is among the ECHO Project’s participants. Image courtesy Climate Positive Design.
As municipal governments, developers, universities, and corporations begin to collect emissions data, either voluntarily or to comply with local regulations, experts say that the building sector will need better standards for reporting embodied carbon data. “We need to be aligned at the highest levels of guidance and leadership, or else it’s going to lose its impact,” says Pamela Conrad, ASLA, the founder of Climate Positive Design and the creative force behind Pathfinder, a free carbon calculator designed for landscape architects (see “The Plus Side,” LAM, October 2020).Continue reading Fast Tracked→
“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→
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→
Marvel and Mecanoo give a storied dance theater in the Berkshires a second life.
By Jane Margolies
A rendering of the artist’s quad for what was once an informal gathering place. Courtesy Marvel and Mecanoo.
When a fire destroyed the Doris Duke Theatre on the campus of Jacob’s Pillow in 2020, it was an enormous blow to the renowned dance venue in Becket, Massachusetts, and, more broadly, the international dance community. The Duke, as it was commonly known, had been a beloved part of the rustic 220-acre campus in the Berkshires, in a barnlike building where experimental works were incubated and performed and legendary artists got their start.Continue reading The Show Will Go On →
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
