Archive for the ‘SOIL’ Category

NATURAL RESTING PLACE

Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HEALING GARDENS, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, INVASIVE SPECIES, NOW, PEOPLE, REUSE, SOIL, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »

BY LYDIA LEE

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

FROM THE AUGUST 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

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). Memorial stones are set into a nearby wall. The area, which is designated for green burials, is the first cemetery to earn certification under the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). As such, the cemetery was the subject of an ASLA webinar earlier this year, available for purchase (1.0 PDH (LA CES/HSW)/1.0 GBCI SITES-Specific CE).

To date, approximately 50 landscapes have been certified through the SITES program, which was developed jointly by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the United States Botanic Garden. But Nature’s Sanctuary is the first burial ground. “The model here is assisted ecological succession, where the maintenance for the site will be carried out by nature,” says Adam Supplee, ASLA, until recently a principal at Alta Planning + Design who worked on the design. “It’s more sustainable than running a lawn mower over a grave for eternity.” (more…)

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PLAYING IN THE RAIN (GARDEN)

Posted in ASLA, CITIES, ECOLOGY, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PLANTS, PLAYGROUNDS, RESIDENTIAL, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, STREETS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 25, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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. In many ways, this ambition was realized, but with one important exception: the lack of a lively downtown. An inward-facing mall sits at Columbia’s center, looped by a small ring road, but the city has struggled to bring activity back to its center in recent years.

Just across from the mall’s ring road is the Metropolitan, downtown Columbia’s first mixed-use multifamily residential complex. Its signature amenity is a 40,000-square-foot open space called the Promenade, a hybrid playscape and rain garden intended to be a didactic showcase for stormwater retention and native plantings. (The project won a Merit Award from ASLA Maryland last year). The Promenade encourages kids to have some rambunctious fun while learning a thing or two about how these landscapes can shepherd rainwater from the sky to the ground. (more…)

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THE GREEN NEW DEAL, LANDSCAPE, AND PUBLIC IMAGINATION

Posted in ARCHIVES, ART, BOOKS, BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, EPA, FARMS, FEATURES, FOOD, HABITAT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, PARKS, PLANTS, POLLUTION, PRACTICE, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2019| 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.

BY NICHOLAS PEVZNER

FROM THE JULY 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Since the 2018 midterm elections, the Green New Deal has catapulted into the public conversation about tackling climate change and income inequality in America. It has inspired a diverse coalition of groups on the left, including climate activists, mainstream environmental groups, and social justice warriors. The Green New Deal is not yet fully fleshed out in Congress—the most complete iteration so far is a nonbinding resolution put forward in the House by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and a companion measure introduced in the Senate by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). At their cores, these bills are an urgent call to arms for accelerating the decarbonization of the U.S. economy through a federal jobs program that would create millions of green jobs—a 10-year national mobilization on a number of fronts aimed at reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The resolution text itself is a laundry list of possible goals and strategies aimed at immediately addressing climate change and radically cutting U.S. carbon emissions. These proposals are ambitious in scale and breadth: a national target of 100 percent “clean, renewable, and zero-emission” energy generation; a national “smart” grid; aggressive building upgrades for energy efficiency; decarbonization of the manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation sectors; increased investment in carbon capture technologies; and the establishment of the United States as a global exporter of green technology. What such an effort will entail on the ground is not yet clear, but if even only some of these stated goals are achieved, the Green New Deal will represent a transformation of both the American economy and landscape on a scale not seen since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his original New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s. (more…)

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EVERY BRANCH & BLADE

Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, INTERVIEW, PEOPLE, PLANTS, RECREATION, RESIDENTIAL, SOIL, THE CLIENT, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2019| 1 Comment »

BY MARK R. EISCHEID

The site manager Ben Wever talks about maintenance at Dan Kiley’s Miller Garden.

FROM THE JULY 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Considered a modernist masterpiece, Dan Kiley’s Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana, is now more than 60 years old. Previously the private residence of the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller family (1957–2008), the property has been owned and managed by Newfields (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art) since 2009. Ben Wever, the site manager of the Miller House and Garden, was born and raised in Columbus and has a decades-long history with the site. His grandmother, Barbara Voelz, worked for the Miller family, and he would occasionally visit the property as a child. He later became a part-time gardener for the Millers while in high school, and eventually a seasonal and then a full-time groundskeeper and a personal assistant to J. Irwin Miller. Wever—an Indiana-accredited horticulturist, member of Landmark Columbus’s Advocacy and Education Committee, and a midcentury furniture collector—also has experience maintaining other Kiley designs throughout Columbus. In his current role, Wever oversees the care, curation, and maintenance of both the Miller House and Garden. The following are excerpts from a conversation regarding the practices and challenges of maintaining the Miller Garden. (more…)

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JULY LAM: BETWEEN BREADTH AND DETAIL

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, FEATURES, HISTORY, MAINTENANCE, MATERIALS, NURSERY, ONLINE ONLY, PLANNING, PLANTS, RECREATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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FOREGROUND

Every Branch and Blade (Interview)
At the Miller House and Garden, in Columbus, Indiana, the site manager Ben Wever
knows exactly how to maintain Dan Kiley’s original vision for the place.

For Floods, a Stage (Planning)
On the Indiana banks of the Ohio River that look at Louisville, OLIN is planning
ways for people to come out and see the river when it swells.

FEATURES

The Green New Deal, Landscape, and Public Imagination
Ambitious proposals to attack climate breakdown and social inequity together could dramatically alter the American landscape, ideally without the compromises of the first New Deal.

What’s in a Nativar?
Among the hottest items in the nursery industry are cultivars of native plants bred to behave better in designed landscapes. The trick is in creating new plants that offer the
ecological benefits of the originals.

Sound Gardens
How to compose the score for a landscape? The Swiss acoustic designer
Nadine Schütz is figuring that out.

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

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 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 July articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “The Green New Deal, Landscape, and Public Imagination,” Tennessee Valley. United States, None. Between 1933 and 1945. Photograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW33-015672-ZC https://www.loc.gov/item/2017877279/; “What’s in a Nativar?” courtesy Shedd Aquarium; “Sound Gardens,” Courtesy Kyoto Institute of Technology; “Every Branch and Blade,” Mark R. Eischeid; “For Floods, a Stage,” Troy McCormick.

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LAWNMOWER MAN

Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, MAINTENANCE, ONLINE ONLY, RESEARCH, SOIL, SPECIES, THE CLIENT, UNIVERSITY, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2019| 1 Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Michael Geffel’s Field Mechanics installation. The site is a former pasture, Christmas tree farm, and nursery. Photo by Michael Geffel, ASLA.

For a few years after his undergraduate studies in geography, Michael Geffel, ASLA, worked as a gardener, performing the most literally and conceptually reductive type of landscape maintenance—weeding.

But after a while, Geffel, now a visiting professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, found his compositional hand here, even if it was glued to a Weedwacker. “Because we’re removing things that are aggregating, we feel we’re not changing anything,” he says. “We’re removing what’s accumulated and we’re trying to keep what’s there. But in the removal, and how we remove these things, there’s all the different outcomes in the landscape.”

It’s an idea he carried with him while in graduate school at the University of Virginia’s landscape architecture program, where Julian Raxworthy, another gardener turned landscape architect with transformative ideas about landscape maintenance, was then a visiting professor. Geffel pitched a thesis on “the generative capacity of maintenance and how it might be a design instrument,” he says, and was on his way. (more…)

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DOCOMOMO AWARDS FOCUS ON LANDSCAPE

Posted in AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, ONLINE ONLY, PARKS, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, RESIDENTIAL, SOIL, SPECIES, STREETS, VIEWS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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. And in many cases, landscapes have lagged behind modern architecture in receiving formal recognition and valuation.

But over the past several years, the modernism preservation nonprofit Docomomo US has used its primary awards program to bring visibility to the vulnerability and value of historic modern landscapes. The projects recognized by Docomomo US’s sixth annual Modernism in America Awards show the ways that all disciplines of the designed environment come together as a defining element of modernism: architecture, landscape architecture, art, interior design, and more. That’s been a recurring theme through the years, though this year’s awards were the first time it was “expressed so clearly or comprehensively,” says awards juror and Docomomo US President Theodore Prudon. Several projects honored put the preservation of historic modernist landscapes front and center: the rehabilitation of Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, honored with a Design Award of Excellence, and the restoration of Olav Hammarstrom’s Pond House in Massachusetts, which received a Design Citation of Merit. (more…)

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