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Archive for the ‘PRACTICE’ Category

THE PROVOCATEUR

Posted in AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, ONLINE ONLY, PEOPLE, POLLUTION, PRACTICE, RESILIENCE, tagged , , , , , , , on October 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Julie Bargmann and her Core City Park in Detroit. Left photo courtesy Barrett Doherty, The Cultural Landscape Foundation; right photo courtesy Prince Concepts and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Julie Bargmann Awarded Oberlander Prize

 

Julie Bargmann is the first recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, established by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Known for the many students who cite her as an influence as much as for her work as the founder of D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio, Bargmann is revered for remediating polluted and neglected postindustrial sites with designs that celebrate infrastructural refinement and industrial power. A master at regenerating degraded land without erasing its history, Bargmann reveals layers of strata and ruin, but also layers of narrative, granting her projects strength, performance, and a kind of raw beauty.

According to the Oberlander Prize jury, Bargmann “has been a provocateur, a critical practitioner, and a public intellectual. She embodies the kind of activism required of landscape architects in an era of severe environmental challenges and persistent social inequities.” (more…)

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THE 2021 ASLA AWARDS

Posted in ASLA, AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, ONLINE ONLY, PRACTICE, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY, tagged , , , , , , on October 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

The 2021 ASLA Awards issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine showcases 75 winning projects selected out of the 926 submissions to this year’s awards program. The highly anticipated October issue is free this month and includes all of the 2021 Awards and Honors, including this year’s recipients of the Bradford Williams Medal, which honors excellence in journalism about landscape.

Complete details and images for the full slate of the Student and Professional award-winning projects can be seen at ASLA’s website. For more insight into the awards, check back here next month for exclusive behind-the-boards content from Student and Professional award winners. And join us to celebrate the winners at the ASLA Awards ceremony at the Conference on Landscape Architecture, November 19–22 in Nashville, Tennessee.

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LICENSURE ON THE LINE

Posted in ASLA, EDUCATION, FEATURES, LICENSURE, PEOPLE, PRACTICE, REGULATIONS, tagged , , , , , , on September 14, 2021| 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.

BY STEPHEN ZACKS

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

The state of Virginia has regulated landscape architecture as a profession since 1980, certifying practitioners through its professional occupational agency. In 2010, landscape architecture became a licensed profession in the state.

A few bills attempted to deregulate or lower the level of regulation back to certification, but none of them made it out of legislative committee. Around 2011, Republican then-Governor Robert McDonnell set up a commission to eliminate regulations in general, including of professions such as landscape architecture and interior design. Members of the Virginia chapter of ASLA persuaded the governor to remove landscape architects from the list.

Robert McGinnis, FASLA, an associate principal at Kennon Williams Landscape Studio and a member of the Virginia ASLA chapter’s government affairs committee, says that interior designers and landscape architects get targeted because people don’t know what they do. “They see the word landscape and think we put trees in the ground.” (more…)

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IMAGINE THAT

Posted in ASLA, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, ONLINE ONLY, PRACTICE, SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, TECH, tagged , , , , on August 24, 2021| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Jennifer Mok’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park, set on the planet of Batuu. Image courtesy Disney 2021 Marvel.

 

Dream Big with Design meets kids where they are to help them find their place in landscape architecture.

 

Jennifer Mok doesn’t have a job like most landscape architects. “We build worlds,” she says. Mok, a landscape architecture studio executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, designs theme parks and resorts. “Our designs have to be complete; it has to be immersive. It’s putting the magic into that experience [for] the guest.”

The newest example of this design philosophy is her team’s designs for the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park. Set on the planet of Batuu, on the far rim of the galaxy, Black Spire Outpost is a dusty haven for villainy. There are seedy bazaars, parked space freighters, and spire-like petrified trees that meld into domed structures: unmistakably alien, but also of a piece with one of the most richly realized sci-fi universes ever made.

What Mok and her team of a dozen-plus landscape designers do is both a continuation of the legacy of Ruth Shellhorn, one of Disney’s first landscape architects, and also a wild extrapolation from it. As acts of sheer invention, where the singular purpose is amazement, these places are landscape architecture at a scale that’s unforgettable, and that makes Mok an ideal participant for “Dream Big with Design: A Showcase of Landscape Architecture and Pre-K–12 Design Learning,” ASLA’s two-day session of design introduction and education for primary and secondary school students. Mok and her team at Disney will present their work as landscape design Imagineers, along with landscape designers from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Legoland theme parks, and Minecraft-related programming, on September 23rd and 24th. “If it excites students to see what landscape architecture does with Imagineering, but opens up for them a world of, ‘This is what you could do as a designer, and apply that anywhere,’ that’s what we’re hoping to do,” Mok says. (more…)

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i, DESIGNER?

Posted in IDEAS, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, TECH, THE BACK, tagged , , , , , on August 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

BY PHILLIP FERNBERG, ASSOCIATE ASLA, AND BRENT CHAMBERLAIN

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence creativity should make us rethink the future of landscape architecture practice.

FROM THE AUGUST 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

If you were to thumb through old issues of Science magazine, once you hit 1967 you would come across an obscure article coauthored by Allen Newell, an esteemed pioneer of artificial intelligence research, arguing for the validity of a new discipline called computer science. In the article, Newell and his colleagues Alan J. Perlis and Herbert A. Simon address some fundamental objections within academia to the idea that the study of computers was, in fact, a science or even a worthwhile pursuit. The questions are simple but fundamental: Is there such a thing as computer science? If so, what is it?

As you read the objections and their respective responses, you might begin to think as we did about the similar line of questioning that has been employed in landscape architecture. Substitute the computer speak with our own professional jargon and you have near carbon copies of themes from licensure advocacy meetings, ASLA conferences, or academic treatises on the state of the discipline. Computer science and landscape architecture have a surprising amount in common. They are both relatively new (at least in the official sense), they have both evolved in significant ways over the past century, and they both have been in an ongoing existential discussion about their position amid peer disciplines. This is nice to know but not revelatory.

Yet the intersection gets more interesting. One of the objections in the article states: “The term ‘computer’ is not well defined, and its meaning will change with new developments, hence computer science does not have a well-defined subject matter.” The authors’ reply is astute and resonant: “The phenomena of all sciences change over time; the process of understanding assures that this will be the case. Astronomy did not originally include the study of interstellar gases; physics did not include radioactivity; psychology did not include the study of animal behavior. Mathematics was once defined as the ‘science of quantity.’” So too is the phenomenon of landscape architecture; it just happens to work on an accelerated timeline. The field is ever shifting, retooling, and reassessing our place as our understanding of our medium and our instruments evolves. Before Olmsted, landscapes were gardens rather than systems; before Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, those systems were not intertwined with ecology; before CAD, GIS, or Adobe, our only tools were pen and paper. (more…)

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PATHS FORWARD

Posted in ECOLOGY, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, HEALING GARDENS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, PEOPLE, PRACTICE, REGION, RESEARCH, THE CLIENT, TRANSPORTATION, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »

BY KATHARINE LOGAN

FROM THE AUGUST 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Across the Yukon River from Dawson City, up around 64 degrees latitude, the Top of the World Highway wends its way over 65 miles of unglaciated landscape to the border with Alaska. Unlike the Yukon Territory’s typical highways, which track the river valleys, Top of the World runs along a ridgeline. For hundreds of miles in all directions, travelers look out over forested valleys, subalpine meadows, distant mountain ranges, and spectacular vistas that comprise the traditional lands of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people.

Long before Top of the World was graded and graveled and designated a territorial highway, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in walked this path on seasonal journeys between the river and the mountains—hunting caribou, harvesting berries and wild rhubarb, gathering for celebrations, telling stories. When gold prospectors began arriving in the late 1890s, the leader of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Chief Isaac, growing concerned for the heritage of his people, entrusted their songs, dances, and gänhäk (dancing stick, a symbol of their culture) to a related branch of the larger Hän nation. Top of the World is the route along which this treasure was taken into the mountains for safekeeping.

More than 3,400 miles to the southeast, the traditional lands of the Saugeen First Nation form part of Ontario’s Mixedwood Plains Ecozone, once temperate deciduous forest, and now the most populous and commercially and industrially productive region in Canada. A three-hour drive from Toronto, at the base of the Bruce Peninsula (where a popular national park protects the region’s last unbroken stand of forest), the Saugeen River flows into the eastern edge of Lake Huron. Upstream of the river mouth, in a 100-acre park on Saugeen First Nation’s reserve, a stone amphitheater and 20 acres of terraced gardens overlook the wide river valley. Built in the 1970s with nearly a million tons of locally quarried limestone, the project, known as the Creator’s Garden, was created as a place to foster understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. As a setting for gatherings, ceremonies, music, and theater, the site welcomes thousands of visitors a year. But over the decades, it has fallen into disrepair.

These two landscape interventions—Top of the World and the Creator’s Garden—at different scales and in different bioregions, are each the subject of recent, landscape architect–guided master plans. Through both their substance and processes, these plans illustrate the potential for the profession to help heal the injustice and strife that stem from the colonial history of North America. (more…)

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THE OUTSIDE TRACK

Posted in ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, INTERVIEW, PEOPLE, PRACTICE, SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, TRANSLATED, tagged , , , , on August 10, 2021| 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.

BY JAMIE MASLYN LARSON, ASLA

FROM THE AUGUST 2021 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE. 

 

Jamie Maslyn Larson, ASLA, met Gabe Jenkins, Student ASLA, when he contacted her last summer through LinkedIn. Jenkins, then a BLA candidate at Clemson University, was interested in an internship at BIG, her former firm. He asked if she had “any advice about landscape architecture, because I’m always willing to learn.” In subsequent conversations, Maslyn says, “Gabe’s life stories and his tenacity and positivity made such an impact on me. I learned that I need to work harder to give platforms for the next generation of voices in our profession.” In September, Jenkins will be starting as a landscape designer at Sasaki in Boston. (more…)

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