Category Archives: Soil

The Long Game

Landscape architects are working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and building new networks through the Engineering With Nature program. The implications could be transformative for both.

By Jared Brey

Photo of people standing on the shore, pointing toward the bay.
Monica Chasten (foreground) and Sean Burkholder (center, holding a coffee) survey the opportunities with the team near Matts Landing in New Jersey. Photo by Jared Brey.

A needle that falls in the southern reaches of the New Jersey Pinelands might find itself washed into the Maurice River and carried by its current to Delaware Bay. The Maurice flows south in tight coils, and before it reaches the estuary, it’s forced into one final wide bend around a long dike at Matts Landing, near the old bayside oyster towns of Bivalve and Shell Pile. Continue reading The Long Game

Bog Wild

Guarded by isolated landscapes and rough ocean waters, Argentina’s remote peatlands are among the world’s most effective and fragile carbon sinks.

By Jimena Martignoni / Photography by Joel Reyero

Peatlands appear in the landscape as extensive, soft surfaces slightly undulated and dotted by small pools of water.
Peatlands appear in the landscape as extensive, soft surfaces slightly undulated and dotted by small pools of water.

At the southern tip of South America, between the Strait of Magellan to the north and west and Beagle Channel to the south, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago may hold one of the keys to global carbon sequestration: nearly pristine peatlands. Continue reading Bog Wild

The Glass is Greener

Can waste glass be repurposed as a planting medium for green infrastructure?

By Timothy A. Schuler 

OLIN Labs has found that the pH of crushed glass exceeds that of sand but can be lowered with the addition of ferrous sulfate. Photo by OLIN.

It is easy to paint landscape architecture as an inherent “greener” of communities, particularly when it comes to green infrastructure and the profession’s more recent emphasis on creating and sustaining urban ecologies. Continue reading The Glass is Greener

Natural Resting Place

The world’s first SITES-certified cemetery is designed as a successional forest.

By Lydia Lee 

To create a native meadow and burial ground from the former dump, the soil down to four feet was screened for debris and then amended with compost. Image courtesy Alta Planning + Design.

In the summer, the 400 grave sites in a section of West Laurel Hill Cemetery outside Philadelphia that is known as Nature’s Sanctuary are marked only by a meadow blazing with native scarlet bee balm (Monarda didyma). Continue reading Natural Resting Place

Playing in the Rain (Garden)

Play structures that double as public art and native plantings that double as stormwater infrastructure adorn The Metropolitan, by The Design Collective.

By Zach Mortice 

The Promenade at the Metropolitan is a 40,000-square-foot park space serving a mixed-use multifamily building. Photo by Design Collective/Jennifer Hughes.

The developer James Rouse planned Columbia, Maryland, as a tabula rasa New Town in the 1960s, including ample green space woven throughout, a robust public realm, racially integrated housing, and the ability to make a tidy profit. Continue reading Playing in the Rain (Garden)

Docomomo Awards Focus on Landscape

Modernism in the landscape that’s both heroic and subtle takes center stage.

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. Continue reading Docomomo Awards Focus on Landscape