Archive for the ‘PLANNING’ 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…)

Read Full Post »

WE DECLARE

Posted in AWARDS, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HABITAT, PEOPLE, PLANNING, PLANTS, PRACTICE, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »

FEATURE: We Declare

Reformulating a historic agenda after half a century.

FROM THE MAY 2016 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

At Independence Hall in Philadelphia in June of 1966, Ian McHarg, Grady Clay, Campbell Miller, Charles R. Hammond, George E. Patton, and John O. Simonds presented “A Declaration of Concern” on behalf of landscape architecture, reproduced below. It was a statement on the growing crisis in the natural environment and the claim of landscape architects in averting the environment’s total destruction. To the degree the declaration was dramatic and self-regarding, it was also true. It preceded much of the formal regulatory protection—preventive, punitive, and remedial—of resources that we know now. The declaration’s alarm over pollution and ecological ruin speaks for itself, but it managed to be both critical and optimistic. Its hope lay in the ability of landscape architects to figure out across disciplines how to make nature and society work as a whole, healthy system.

In 2016, the Landscape Architecture Foundation marked the half century of “A Declaration of Concern” with “The New Landscape Declaration,” a gathering of landscape architects, scholars, and advocates at the University of Pennsylvania in June of that year. The foundation, which was also turning 50, asked a number of participants to write declarations of their own for the occasion as latter-day responses to the original. Five are linked to below. Landscape architects have by no means retired the threats of 50 years ago, and other threats have proliferated around them, but the moral vision of the profession conceived at the midcentury has enlarged accordingly.

“A Declaration of Concern—June 1966” 

We urge a new, collaborative effort to improve the American environment and to train a new generation of Americans equipped by education, inspiring example, and improved organizations to help create that environment.

A sense of crisis has brought us together. What is merely offensive or disturbing today threatens life itself tomorrow. We are concerned over misuse of the environment and development which has lost all contact with the basic processes of nature. Lake Erie is becoming septic, New York City is short of water, the Delaware River is infused with salt, the Potomac River with sewage and silt. Air is polluted in major cities and their citizens breathe and see with difficulty. Most urban Americans are being separated from visual and physical contact with nature in any form. All too soon life in such polluted environments will be the national human experience. (more…)

Read Full Post »

NO US AND THEM

Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, GARDENS, PLANNING, PLANTS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 26, 2019| 2 Comments »

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.

BY JARED BREY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Darren Damone, ASLA, and Katharine Griffiths were standing on a boardwalk at Avalon Park & Preserve, in Stony Brook, New York, looking across the pond at a gang of cormorants loitering in the branches of a beech tree.

“They used to nest over here, and it was a disaster zone,” said Griffiths, the director of the preserve. “It used to smell like a bluefish factory. It was nasty. They did a lot of damage to the trees in this area.… That’s what happens. They strip the leaves to put in their nest, and then their guano is so acidic that it just burns everything. They’re kind of sloppy birds.”

It was a May morning, and the squealing songs of cardinals spilled out of the woods behind us. We took a curving path up a hill to a smaller pond, fed by what looked like an underground stream, and I asked, credulously, where the headwaters were.

“This is just recirculating,” Damone said, looking amused. “This is completely created.”

In 1996, before the preserve existed, Paul Simons, a local nature lover who liked to ride his bike on a path through the property, was struck by a car on Long Island and killed. In his honor, the Simons family created the Paul Simons Foundation, and bought the eight-acre property that would later become Avalon Park & Preserve. Griffiths was a friend of the Simons family and had just finished college in Ontario, studying political science and horticulture, and she moved to Stony Brook to lead the preserve. Creating the preserve was a way for the Simons family to grieve, she said, and it was meant to be a place that Paul would have wanted to be. Beyond that, she told me later, “We didn’t have a vision, really.”

So it turned to Andropogon, the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm, to create (more…)

Read Full Post »

THE RISING TIDEWATER

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, SOIL, UNIVERSITY, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY BRETT ANDERSON / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA

Disparate but urgent efforts to address sea-level rise in the Virginia Tidewater, one of the country’s most important strategic centers, are striving to keep up with visible realities.

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 DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

The first question that sprang to Ann C. Phillips’s mind soon after she moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in 2006 was, “Why, when it rains, does the whole place submerge?”

She wasn’t referring only to dramatic weather events, although Phillips, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, landed in Norfolk during a bumper crop of those: Norfolk saw more major coastal storms and hurricanes in the 2000s than in the four previous decades combined, according to the city government.

Harder to fathom were the floods caused by light rains and “blue sky floods” triggered by lunar tides. Tidal flooding affects low-lying areas of Norfolk nine times per year on average.

These more regular floods were unlike anything Phillips experienced growing up in Annapolis, Maryland. They’re an alarmingly routine part of life in Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads area (more…)

Read Full Post »

CAN WE GET TO ZERO? 

Posted in ECOLOGY, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, PLANNING, PRACTICE, RESILIENCE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2019| 1 Comment »

BY STEVE AUSTIN, ASLA

Landscape architecture can mitigate carbon emissions, but it is also implicated amoung the causes.

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 JUNE 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

The Paris Agreement on climate change, created by the consensus of 197 nations, went into effect in November 2016 and has enormous implications for the practice of landscape architecture. If adhered to by its signatories, the agreement signals the end of the fossil fuel era by midcentury, well within the life spans of many landscape architects currently practicing. Though it may seem wonderfully “green,” this energy transition poses profound questions for the practice of landscape architecture at a time when the discipline is needed more than ever. (more…)

Read Full Post »

POWER PLAY 2050

Posted in CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, PLANNING, REGION, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, TECH, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY MICHAEL DUMIAK

A Dutch vision of clean energy in northern water. Does it have a chance?

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 APRIL 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

A tall blond man is walking a Russian wolfhound along a stream. The stream is moving through beach sand into a large lagoon off the Kijkduin promenade in a seaside suburb of The Hague, Netherlands. It’s not quite beach season, and it’s blustery. Over scudding clouds the sun coming up is bright, but the gray sea is running fast and flecked with white, and the wind blows foam up the beach. Over the man’s shoulder are tall, reedy dunes and the tips of towering chimneys, billowing clouds of steam.

These chimneys, up to 575 feet high, rise from the Maasvlakte 2 harbor complex, where the Port of Rotterdam sits across from the Hook of Holland. This point is where some of the most important interactions between the North Sea and its neighbors are happening and will happen over the next three decades.

Maasvlakte 2 is a massive human intervention, another grand bargain between Dutch ingenuity and the sea: In exchange for not swallowing them in cold saltwater, the Netherlands promises the sea a modicum of foresight, hardheaded commercial instincts, and very good engineering. With 365 million cubic meters of sand, (more…)

Read Full Post »

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 »

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: