Archive for the ‘RIVER RESTORATION’ Category

DESIGN SCHOOL ABODES FOR THE BIRDS

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, ONLINE ONLY, PLANTS, RECREATION, RIVER RESTORATION, SHORELINE, SPECIES, STUDENTS, THE CLIENT, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

University of Illinois at Chicago students’ birdhouse designs for the Chicago River. Photo courtesy Lendlease.

While working with a group of University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) industrial design students on their birdhouse design studio, Ted Wolff had a few pointers on how they should approach interior dimensions and ventilation. There should be enough room at its base for eggs, but not much extra. A slit that allows crosscurrent air circulation is good, but much bigger and cold winds might howl through the birdhouse in the winter.

“You want them to feel snug, if you will,” says Wolff, of Wolff Landscape Architecture. “That’s probably anthropomorphizing them a bit much.” (more…)

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LAMCAST: SWEPT AWAY

Posted in HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, ONLINE ONLY, PLANNING, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, STREETS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Most of the time, Ellicott City, Maryland is a historic mill town with picturesque stone shops nestled next to granite hills and a boisterous, yet still peaceful, river. But more and more, it’s becoming a crucible for the cost of climate change-induced downpours and development that’s ill-placed, if intensely historic. (The town was founded in 1772.) Twice since 2016, Ellicott City has seen branches of the Patapsco River jump their banks after torrential rains, devastating its downtown with two “1,000-year floods,” a description rapidly losing its meaning in an era of increased extreme weather.

This PBS NewsHour segment from the most recent flood looked in on how one Ellicott City business fared: an antique shop where the owner doggedly pushed furniture away from the front door, where a torrent of water outside whisked cars down the street. That is, until a sudden eruption of water knocked down walls, sending display cases toppling like dominoes.

The town’s newest flood-proofing plan, developed with help from Baltimore’s Mahan Rykiel, calls for 10 buildings to be demolished downtown to widen the river canal at a cost of $50 million, as well as a new terraced river park. As explored in Jared Brey’s “Twice Bitten” (to be posted here later this month), it’s a plan that preserves Ellicott City’s future by destroying a bit of its past.

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APRIL LAM: BETTER WAYS

Posted in ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PLANNING, PRACTICE, RECREATION, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, STREETS, THE CLIENT, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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 250 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.

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UPSTREAM D.C.

Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, GARDENS, IN THE ISSUE, MATERIALS, PLANNING, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »

BY BRADFORD MCKEE

Gray infrastructure has given way to green to prevent sewer overflows into Washington, D.C.’s waters.

FROM “THE RIVER BENEATH THE RIVER,” IN THE NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Green infrastructure is now an important part of the Clean Rivers Project. The colossal Anacostia River tunnel remains a fixture in the effort on the east side of the city to hold and carry stormwater to DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. But to the west, the introduction of green infrastructure is allowing the elimination of one smaller tunnel for a combined sewer network above Rock Creek, which drains into the Potomac River, and the scaling back of another large tunnel along the Potomac itself.

The notion of complementing gray infrastructure with green was a priority of George Hawkins when he became general manager of DC Water in 2009. It was not an easy sell. Clean-water advocates were skeptical of green infrastructure’s performance capability and also feared delays in achieving the goals of the Clean Rivers Project—to end 96 percent of the District of Columbia’s combined sewer overflows. Hawkins was able to make a case for the efficacy of green infrastructure and also to show that significant improvements to water quality would occur well before the tunnels’ projected completion.

The Clean Rivers program is deploying a mix of bioretention, porous pavements, rain barrels, and downspout disconnection from combined sewers. In the Rock Creek sewershed, enough green infrastructure is planned to manage (more…)

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THE RIVER BENEATH THE RIVER

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HEALING GARDENS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, IN THE ISSUE, PARKS, PEOPLE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, PLANTS, POLLUTION, REAL ESTATE, RECREATION, REGION, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, SHORELINE, SOIL, TRANSLATED, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 27, 2018| 2 Comments »

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.

Click above for a full PDF of the translated text, with English text available below.

BY JENNIFER REUT

FROM THE NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

For a long time, the Anacostia River didn’t even have a name. It was just the Eastern Branch, the other, less promising section of Washington, D.C.’s better known and more distinguished river, the Potomac. But it was always known as a fortunate course to the Nacotchtank, the Native Americans who used it as a trading post, and later to the European colonists who relied on the river’s deep port at Bladensburg, Maryland, to carry tobacco, and to the generations of farmers, tradesmen, and laborers who never seemed to run out of fish, fowl, and game to hunt. For nearly nine miles, the Anacostia eased in and out with the tide, with no particular urgency, toward its confluence with the Potomac, tracing an unhurried flow through thousands of acres of tidal wetlands.

Of course, that was before the port and the shipping channels silted up in the 19th century from agricultural misuse; before the river was (more…)

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ART DIRECTOR’S CUT, NOVEMBER 20

Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, ONLINE ONLY, PHOTOGRAPHY, POLLUTION, RECREATION, REGION, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, SHORELINE, SOIL, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.

From “The River Beneath the River” in the November 2018 issue by Jennifer Reut, about Washington D.C.’s quest to make its second most famous river, the Anacostia, vibrant and healthy once more. Here, kids scoot out of the sun at the Anacostia Park Roller Skating Pavilion along the river’s shores.

“Keeping cool in Anacostia Park”

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 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.

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NOVEMBER LAM: ACROSS TWO COASTS

Posted in CITIES, CONSTRUCTION, FEATURES, HABITAT, HEALING GARDENS, HISTORY, INVASIVE SPECIES, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PEOPLE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, PLANTS, POLLUTION, PRACTICE, REGION, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, SHORELINE, SPECIES, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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It’s the first of November, which means the latest issue of LAM is here! You’ll find these stories inside:

FOREGROUND

Lighting from the Inside Out (Lighting)
With the rising popularity of outdoor living comes a shining new crop of luminaires.

The Last Ash Standing (Plants)
The emerald ash borer beetle isn’t too fond of boring into the blue ash. If scientists can find out why, they may be able to save more trees.

Timing Is Everything (Construction)
Landscape installation should be driven by weather and nature, not financial models—but climate change is making best planting times unpredictable.

FEATURES

The River Beneath the River
After decades of neglect, the Anacostia River— Washington, D.C.’s lesser-known waterway—is poised at the edge of a hard-won environmental recovery. But where will it flow from there?

Upstream D.C.
Upland from Washington, D.C.’s two rivers, the city is planning major investments
in rain-soaking infrastructure.

Found in Translation
In Seattle, MIG | SvR and Turenscape’s Hing Hay Park provides a place to gather—with a
lively nod toward the Asian Pacific American experience.

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

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 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 November articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Found in Translation,” Miranda Estes Photography; “The River Beneath the River,” Krista Schlyer; “Upstream DC,” Rhodeside & Harwell; “The Last Ash Standing,” Christopher Asaro, Virginia Department of Forestry, Bugwood.org; “Lighting from the Inside Out,” Courtesy Rondo; “Timing Is Everything,” Siteworks. 

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