Category Archives: Housing

Ten Times Better

At Quarry House, TEN x TEN uses Minnesota stone and lissome birch to sculpt a residential garden in three dimensions.

By Aaron King

Stacked quarry stone in a parklike setting
A set of collages explored design possibilities for the backyard. Courtesy TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism.

The backyard as a distinct space has not always been with us. It is, according to the cultural landscape historian Paul Groth, a relatively recent invention that was made possible by technological innovations in the 1930s and 1940s.

Continue reading Ten Times Better

A Wilder West

This article is also available in Spanish

Colwell-Shelor embraces “ugly-pretty” ecology on a Camelback Mountain estate.

By Brian Barth / Photography by Caitlin Atkinson

Stormwater runoff from the property collects in a steel basin before seeping into the lawn through a series of weeps. Photo by Marion Brenner, Affiliate ASLA.

Rare is the landscape architecture client who enjoys a view of decay out their window. Continue reading A Wilder West

In Their Elements

Stimson takes on the challenges of success by staying true to its New England roots.

By Jonathan Lerner

Stephen Stimson, FASLA, and Lauren Stimson, ASLA, built a new house and utility building on property Steve’s family has long farmed. Photo by Ngoc Doan.

Outside the kitchen door of the Massachusetts farm where Stephen (Steve) Stimson, FASLA, and his wife and partner, Lauren Stimson, ASLA, live with their two kids is a water feature created by Steve in the agrarian spirit of thrift. Continue reading In Their Elements

The Wright Way

Bayer Landscape Architecture brings Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House back into full bloom.

By Joann Greco

Photo courtesy Bayer Landscape Architecture.

Daylilies and phlox are thriving along the terrace with the pergola in the background .Darwin and Isabelle Martin were getting tired of waiting. “We want a garden,” Darwin wrote to their architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, late in 1903. “We do not want the whole thing a lawn.” Continue reading The Wright Way

Interview: Fire at the Doorstep

The Los Angeles-based designer Greg Kochanowski researches wildfire mitigation close to home.

By Timothy A. Schuler

Greg Kochanowski documented the loss of his own home in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which destroyed 110 of 217 houses in Seminole Springs, California. Photo by GK.

Earth is a water planet. It is also, as Stephen J. Pyne has written, a fire planet. The Earth “has held fires as long as plants have lived on land,” Pyne recently wrote in Yale Environment 360. To remove fire from landscapes that have coevolved with it “can be as ruinous as putting fire into landscapes that have no history of it. Continue reading Interview: Fire at the Doorstep

Home Away from No Home

Landscape architects can’t solve homelessness with just design. As Brice Maryman, ASLA, is finding, they have to grasp the phenomenon—and are only beginning.

By Jonathan Lerner

Blue tarps, reminiscent of refugee crises, announce the presence of unsanctioned encampments. Photo by Brice Maryman, ASLA.

One morning last March, Brice Maryman, ASLA, walked to his downtown Seattle office at MIG|SvR through linear parkland that hugs Interstate 90. Maryman recently completed a Landscape Architecture Foundation fellowship to explore the intersection of homelessness and public space; one result is his podcast HomeLandLab. Now he wanted to check on some encampments. Continue reading Home Away from No Home