Archive for the ‘PLANTS’ Category

DOCOMOMO AWARDS FOCUS ON LANDSCAPE

Posted in AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, RESIDENTIAL, SOIL, SPECIES, STREETS, VIEWS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

The plan by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates retains the fundamental elements of Dan Kiley’s original design. Photo by Nic Lehoux.

The protection of modernist design is a relatively new topic in preservationist circles. And in many cases, landscapes have lagged behind modern architecture in receiving formal recognition and valuation.

But over the past several years, the modernism preservation nonprofit Docomomo US has used its primary awards program to bring visibility to the vulnerability and value of historic modern landscapes. The projects recognized by Docomomo US’s sixth annual Modernism in America Awards show the ways that all disciplines of the designed environment come together as a defining element of modernism: architecture, landscape architecture, art, interior design, and more. That’s been a recurring theme through the years, though this year’s awards were the first time it was “expressed so clearly or comprehensively,” says awards juror and Docomomo US President Theodore Prudon. Several projects honored put the preservation of historic modernist landscapes front and center: the rehabilitation of Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, honored with a Design Award of Excellence, and the restoration of Olav Hammarstrom’s Pond House in Massachusetts, which received a Design Citation of Merit. (more…)

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MAY LAM: FINDING REFUGE

Posted in ASLA, BOOKS, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FARMS, HABITAT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, INTERVIEW, MAINTENANCE, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, PLANTS, POLLUTION, PRACTICE, RECREATION, REGION, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SPECIES, STREETS, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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FOREGROUND

What Makes Us Us (Interview)
Julian Raxworthy talks about the proletarian roots of his new book, Overgrown.

Hog-Tied (Waste)
A few landscape architects have begun to focus on the huge ecological hazards
of animal waste from agriculture operations.

Linked In (Habitat)
A Seattle neighborhood is the starting point of the artist Sarah Bergmann’s
realization of a living network called Pollinator Pathways.

FEATURES

MLA ROI
Although the landscape architecture profession is poised to grow, master’s degree programs are struggling to gain enrollments. One major reason is the cost and eventual payoff of pursuing a degree.

Refuge Found
Outside Denver, Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge, a Design Workshop project that received the 2018 ASLA Landmark Award, continues to rebuild a high-prairie ecosystem scorched by weapons and chemical production.

Twice Bitten
Two flash floods in three years gutted the historic heart of Ellicott City, Maryland. Mahan Rykiel Associates is working to help the town figure out how to meet a future of extreme weather.

All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for May 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 May articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Refuge Found,” D. A. Horchner/Design Workshop; “Twice Bitten,” Josh Ganzermiller Photography; “Hog-Tied,” Waterkeeper Alliance; “Linked In,” © David E. Perry; “What Makes Us Us,” Julian Raxworthy. 

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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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GIANT STEPS

Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, PARKS, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, TRANSPORTATION, VIEWS, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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 JONATHAN LERNER

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

If you visit one of our national parks nowadays to commune with nature, you may find yourself having instead an experience of mass tourism. Many parks are huge. You’d expect plenty of elbow room. But much of any wilderness park is inaccessible to the public. Besides, people generally head for a few famous spots—you probably want to see those too—which quickly become overwhelmed. Attendance is up over the past few years. Infrastructure typically went in over decades, usually piecemeal, not by comprehensive plan, and for smaller crowds, so both visitor experiences and the places themselves become degraded. And the National Park Service has money problems. By 2017, the bill for deferred maintenance—apart from any new capacity—was $11.6 billion (see “Roads to Ruin,” LAM, February 2016).

Still, where it can, often with help from citizen conservancies, the park service is commissioning landscape architecture interventions to redress the gridlock and throngs. Most people will still find themselves among multitudes of strangers, but these redesigns can provide more authentically natural, less contrived interactions with the environment. The Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park was until recently a prime example of the problem. A project there, which opened to the public last summer, is a model response. Half of its $40 million cost was donated by the Yosemite Conservancy. It was designed by Seattle-based Mithun.

Mariposa Grove actually has two concentrations of the great trees, the lower grove and the upper grove. Before, when you reached the lower grove you were in a parking lot. Several giant sequoias were stranded there like islets in the sea of asphalt; you might not even have realized you’d arrived. This lot filled up early. Overflow traffic returned some seven miles on a winding, two-lane park road to Wawona, where there is a historic hotel, a convenience store, and a small Yosemite history museum. Visitors there caught a shuttle back to the grove. But Wawona had only “a makeshift drop-off for the shuttle and no parking infrastructure for the hundreds who would come through—quite a fiasco,” says Christian Runge, ASLA, a Mithun senior associate.

When you finally shuttled back to the lower grove, “there was a sense of confusion,” Runge says. “Wayfinding wasn’t clear. There were redundant loops of trails. They had to have rangers telling (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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SUGAR SUBSTITUTES

Posted in ART, DETAILS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, MAINTENANCE, PARKS, PLANTS, SOIL, SPECIES, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY JONATHAN LERNER

An enchanting but failing maple allée gets a second life.

FROM THE MARCH 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

An allée can dignify an arrival, draw the eye to a focal point, even partition an open space. To do any of these effectively, it must appear linear, uniform, and repetitive. Of course, composed of living trees it can’t really be flawless; still, it ought to give the illusion of perfection. So there’s a problem if some of an allée’s constituent trees fail to thrive, leaving gaps and slumps in an assemblage meant to appear continuous and taut. That’s what was happening at Storm King.

The Storm King Art Center occupies 500 acres of rolling terrain about 50 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Highlands, a region of lushly vegetated, softly eroded low mountains. More than 100 monumental works by renowned artists are sited permanently throughout (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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