Sunset Triangle Plaza in Los Angeles, by Rios Clementi Hale Studios. Photo by Jim Simmons.

Welcome to spring! For World Landscape Architecture Month, the April issue of LAM is FREE! We’ve taken this month to go back a decade and mark the start of a movement, the Pop-Up Decade, which, who knows, could become the pop-up century. Remember 2009? Everyone was blue. There was no work—or money. But designers and their clients picked up something potent begun by the firm Rebar (now Gehl) in San Francisco with the creation of Park(ing) Day: quick, cheap, usually temporary projects to wet the public’s feet with ideas about civic spaces, try them out, see how they respond. Many of those projects went away; many more turned into something lasting. It was an idea that suited the bad old days of the early teens, but it also has continued to translate well to more prosperous times, as our feature stories show you here.

In the Back is a piece every person in the profession should read, a conversation among four successful women designers on why they left powerful jobs in high-profile firms to chart their own ways ahead. It covers what is often a lot of unspoken ground—unspoken because many women don’t dare air their concerns at work, and because men in the workplace can be rather obtuse at times.

Please share the issue far and wide with colleagues, clients, and friends.

FOREGROUND

A Floodplain Forest (Water)
This setback levee project will give a river room to meander and help protect Hamilton City, California, from flooding.

Open Book (Planning)
A new stormwater management manual for multifamily residences aids resilience in
Lexington, Kentucky.

FEATURES

Get It Done
The Great Recession helped launch a wave of quick, low-cost projects to suit budgets
of the era. It’s still going strong.

Make It Pop
Some popped up and popped back down. Some stuck around or led to bigger things.
An album from a decade of pop-up.

Power Play
The nonprofit KaBOOM! has perfected a seemingly guerrilla approach to making playgrounds where kids lack them.

THE BACK

The Big Time. The Bigger Time.
A conversation among the women behind the Women’s Landscape Equality (re)Solution.

An Antidote to Excess (Books)
A review of Doing Almost Nothing: The Landscapes of Georges Descombes, by Marc Treib.

A Planetary Proposal (Backstory)
A sprawling corridor park could connect Earth’s most biodiverse places.

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

The digital edition of the April LAM is FREE, and you can access it here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. You can also buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. Single digital issues are available for only $5.25 at Zinio or you can 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), for more updates on #WLAM and the April issue.

Read Full Post »