A floating resort designed by EDSA helps preserve fragile coastal terrain in the Yucatán.
By Scott Sowers
The odd layout of the resort is a response to a decision to preserve as many mangroves as possible. Courtesy Ian Lizaranzu (photographer), GIM Desarrollos (client).
At the Etéreo beach resort on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the typical vacation experience is transformed into a floating holiday amid a carpet of pygmy mangroves. Pathways to the resort’s pools, restaurants, and beaches are rendered as boardwalks constructed of treated hardwood and mounted on timber pilings. The walkways serve as a staging ground for nature walks and photographic safaris. “The boardwalks feel like they’re floating in the mangroves,” says Devon King, a landscape architect and vice president at EDSA, which led the site’s design. “We wanted to create an ethereal journey and make the walk from the hotel to the beach with moments of discovery, seating areas, and educational moments that made people slow down.”Continue reading Over And Above→
Fire is both ruly and unruly. It conforms to physical principles, yet it’s also incredibly dynamic and unpredictable. Across the world we are witnessing changes in what wildfire is, due to past and current human actions, and in tandem, fire risks are increasing and expanding. In the western United States, so are wildfire severity and frequency. Continue reading Stewarding Change in a Time of Fire→
The drought conditions affecting western states, along with increased water demands from a growing population and industrialized agriculture, have drained Utah’s Great Salt Lake to its lowest levels on record. A study conducted last year by a team of experts from Utah’s research universities, known as the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, concluded that if current conditions persist, and without interventions, the lake will disappear in five years.Continue reading A Lake at Its Limit→
As hurricanes increase in frequency and intensity, Puerto Rico’s landscape architects have solutions for managing rivers, stormwater, erosion, and coastal development—if only the government would ask.
By Laurie A. Shuster
A road blocked by a mudslide caused by Hurricane Fiona in Cayey, Puerto Rico. Photo by Stephanie Rojas/AP/Shutterstock.
In 2017, back-to-back hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and taking roughly 3,000 lives. The territory was still recovering when Hurricane Fiona struck in September 2022, bringing up to 30 inches of rain in some areas, killing 25 people, knocking out power to the entire island, and causing some $10 billion in additional damage.Continue reading Storm Warnings→
Albert Kahn Associates mines original drawings for the restoration of the historic Ford House.
By Jeff Link
The design team consulted Jens Jensen’s original drawings for the restoration, including this 1929 plan for the pool and lagoon. FOE31 Jens Jensen Drawings and Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
The restoration of the 87-acre grounds of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, may be among the most historically faithful re-creations of the work of Jens Jensen and Albert Kahn to date. Pieced together from Jensen’s original drawings, detailed construction logs, archival photographs, and digitized film reels, the restored landscape just outside Detroit features a 185,000-gallon clamshell-shaped pool, a lagoon, a meadow, and a wagon-wheel-shaped rose garden.
When Sears closed its West Side campus in the 1980s, the garden received less maintenance and upkeep. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction Number ILL,16-CHIG,110-12.
That the Sears Sunken Garden, completed in 1907 as part of the 40-acre Sears, Roebuck and Company campus that dominated Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood for decades, was originally shared by managers, executives, and warehouse stockers is something Reshorna Fitzpatrick, a pastor at North Lawndale’s Proceeding Word Church, hammers home when telling people about the garden.
A new gorilla conservation campus by MASS Design Group and TEN x TEN is a laboratory for reforestation.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The experimental landscape at the new Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund headquarters features plant communities that are critical to mountain gorillas’ survival. Photo by Iwan Baan.
The plan was ambitious, even by MASS Design Group standards. For the headquarters of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the world’s foremost mountain gorilla conservation organization, the designers envisioned a series of lily pad-like buildings nestled into a landscape made up of plant communities drawn almost exclusively from the gorillas’ native habitat in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.
