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Archive for the ‘SOIL’ Category

STUDIO OUTSIDE SAW HARVEY COMING

Posted in CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, OCEANS, PLANNING, PLANTS, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Galveston Island State Park in the year 2060. Image courtesy of Studio Outside/Google Earth.

This is Part 3 of our conversation about Hurricane Harvey with the design team at Studio Outside in Dallas, which has won a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning for its work on Galveston Island State Park. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found below. Correction appended below on August 28.

Studio Outside’s resiliency plan for Galveston Island State Park earned a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning, drawing praise from the jury for its comprehensive and forward-looking anticipation of the havoc a hurricane could release. But Studio Outside’s Andrew Duggan and the design team, led by principal in charge Mike Fraze, knew they were pondering ironclad eventualities, not hypothetical disasters.

Over the weekend, the city of Galveston and Galveston Island State Park to its southwest found themselves in the path of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall on Friday night, a Category 4 storm that has prompted mass evacuations of the Houston region.

Studio Outside’s project, “Storm + Sand + Sea + Strand: Barrier Island Resiliency Planning for Galveston Island State Park,” tracks the loss of habitat and land as perpetuated by sea-level rise, encroaching development, and hurricane flooding. It prescribes soft and green natural barriers to storm surges, assisted by flexible infrastructure. As a barrier island bordered by Texas’s West Bay to the northwest and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast, there are few places to hide from floodwaters or to absorb them, and even less given that this part of the island was partially paved over to accommodate RVs in the 1970s. On Friday and over the weekend, Duggan (based safely in Dallas) and members of the design team (Fraze and Duggan of Studio Outside, and Jennifer Dowdell and Ed Morgereth of Biohabitats) emailed LAM some thoughts on how the storm might play out for Galveston Island State Park.

****Post will be updated as the storm progresses**** (more…)

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ART DIRECTOR’S CUT, MAY 16

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, PARKS, PLANTS, RECREATION, SOIL, SPECIES, tagged , , , , , , on May 16, 2017| 1 Comment »

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

Photo by Rungkit Charoenwat.

From “Control of the Canopy” in the May 2017 issue, by James Trulove with photography by Rungkit Charoenwat, about an oasis of tropical forest in the midst of Bangkok’s unsightly sprawl.

“Stairway to heaven.”

–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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CONTROL OF THE CANOPY

Posted in ASLA, AWARDS, BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, FEATURES, HABITAT, LAM MAGAZINE, PLANTS, SOIL, VIEWS, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY JAMES TRULOVE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY RUNGKIT CHAROENWAT

Landscape Architects of Bangkok has reforested a speck of the Thai capital. The cobras seem to approve.

FROM THE MAY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

It would not be a stretch to think of this reforestation project as a “vest-pocket” park, much in the tradition of the work of the noted landscape architect Robert Zion in New York City. After all, the name of the project, “Metro-Forest,” might suggest as much. Though it is not bounded on all sides by encroaching office towers, this five-acre landscape rests squarely in the midst of equally inhospitable and unchecked suburban sprawl dotted by illegal dump sites (of which this was once one), a tangle of expressways and surface roads, and the din of more than 800 planes landing and departing nearby every day at Suvarnabhumi Airport, which serves Bangkok. Certainly many of the design elements of a vest-pocket park are present: a water feature to mask the clamor of planes and cars, native plants that recall a bygone era, seating to contemplate the surrounding nature, hardscape to create boundaries, and a carefully designed network of berms that increase the overall planting area of this small space while blocking views of the surroundings.

The project, which won a 2016 ASLA Professional Honor Award for General Design, is an oasis, (more…)

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SEED BOMBS AWAY

Posted in CITIES, GARDENS, LAM ONLINE, MATERIALS, PLANTS, RESEARCH, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 18, 2017| 3 Comments »

BY ZACH MORTICE

A hydrogel-enabled seed bomb. Credit: U.S. provisional patent application No. 62/465,341. Nahin Shah | Martina Decker, Material Dynamics Lab.

The tools for tactical urbanism seem more likely to be developed in community center meeting halls and anonymous Internet forums rather than university laboratories. But at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), an architecture professor is working on ways to give impromptu urban vegetation efforts staying power with hydrogel seed bombs.

Martina Decker, who directs NJIT’s Idea Factory and Material Dynamics Lab, is combining seed bombs—balls of organic matter that protect and help seeds packed within them grow—with hydrogel granulates, polymers that are extremely hydrophilic, (more…)

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THE DRILLING RADISHES OF ST. LOUIS

Posted in CITIES, FOOD, LAM ONLINE, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, PARKS, SOIL, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Tillage radish is similar in shape, size, taste, and color to daikon radish. Image courtesy of MVVA.

Oilseed radish, or Raphanus sativus, goes by the name “tillage radish,” “radish ripper,” “fracking radish,” and the comic book-worthy “turbo radish.” It can reach its two-inch-wide taproots down six feet, breaking up compacted soil and rebalancing nutrient levels, and is commonly put to work as a cover crop in agricultural fields. But the designers at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) found another, more high-profile use for them: to remediate the soil during the renovation of the Gateway Arch grounds in St. Louis, one of the largest and most important landscape revamp projects in the nation. This reimagining of Dan Kiley’s mid-20th-century landscape is using an unprecedented application of soil-remediating vegetation into this sort of sensitive and historic National Park Service property, says Adrienne Heflich, an MVVA senior project manager.

It’s one sort of drilling operating that, even though it’s in a national park, is entirely welcome.

MVVA’s plan makes the park more flexibly programmed, (more…)

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GHOSTS OF SHORELINES PAST

Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, LAM MAGAZINE, NOW, REGION, RESEARCH, SHORELINE, SOIL, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

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Mapping the historic dunes hidden beneath the surface of Chicago.

FROM THE FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

A few years ago, Mary Pat McGuire, ASLA, became fascinated by the South Side of Chicago—or rather, with what was beneath it. She was flying back to the East Coast often, leaving from Midway Airport, and she started to notice “really interesting patterns along the coastline that looked like stripes, ridges along the shore. They were some kind of remnant,” she says, describing the landscape south of the city. “I just started to wonder, ‘What’s really going on here? What was this place?’”

McGuire, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was already familiar with the South Side’s more recent history of white flight, shuttered industry, and disinvestment. Now, she became interested in the area’s geologic history, and how it might be put to work. The landforms she spied from the air prompted McGuire to look at early soil maps made by the U.S. Geological Survey. What she found were (more…)

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LIVESTOCK AND THE RHYTHM OF THE LAND

Posted in ECOLOGY, FARMS, FOOD, GOODS, INVASIVE SPECIES, LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANTS, SOIL, SPECIES, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

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All photos by Jose Ahedo.

Over the course of two years, the Spanish architect Jose Ahedo visited livestock farming landscapes in eight countries: Mongolia, China, Paraguay, Germany, India, Bolivia, New Zealand, and the Azores Islands in Portugal. He traveled 90,000 miles by plane, 9,000 miles by car, 23 miles by boat, nine miles by horse and camel, and—most excruciatingly for a vertigo sufferer like Ahedo—56 miles by hot air balloon. Documented through his photography and funded by a $100,000 Harvard Graduate School of Design Wheelwright Prize Fellowship, his travels kept him on the move for 103,000 miles.

Ahedo selected these disparate locations so that he could witness the extreme “asymmetry,” he says, in how cultures in different places with different levels of development produce livestock. “You have people that move on horses, and (more…)

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