Category Archives: General

General

Honor Roll

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Preserving the private gardens of a pioneering landscape architect should have been a breeze.

By Timothy A. Schuler

Picture of Joe and Liz Yamada in the May 1977 issue of San Diego Magazine
Many of the landscape features seen in this portrait of Joe and Liz Yamada, from the May 1977 issue of San Diego Magazine, still exist today. Photo by Zenia Cleigh, courtesy Insun Lee and Troy Wu.

When Joseph Yamada and his wife, Elizabeth, died within nine days of each other in May 2020, obituaries and appreciations appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and NPR. Most focused on the couple’s incredible story: Born two days apart in 1930, the two met at age 11 at a Japanese internment camp.

They later attended the same high school, studied together at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved back to San Diego, where Joe Yamada became one of the most celebrated landscape architects of his generation and Liz Yamada was the first Asian faculty member at San Diego High School, later joining her husband’s firm, Wimmer Yamada & Associates, as a partner. Continue reading Honor Roll →

General, Practice

A Bumpy Reentry

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Women landscape architects are finding the road from part-time to full-time work full of potholes.

By Jared Brey

Barbara Peterson, ASLA, is a night owl. During the 16 years she worked as a part-time landscape architect, she typically spent the hours of 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. sending emails, working on designs, and stamping plans. When her son, Eric, got a little older, she would pack a lunch and leave it in the fridge for him to take on his way to the bus in the morning. She spent much of her day carting him back and forth to sporting events and skateparks. Continue reading A Bumpy Reentry →

Design, General, Parks

Destination Hemp Farm

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A Virginia landscape architect thinks cannabis farms could be the state’s next tourist attraction.

By Kim O’Connell

A concept by Kirk Bereuter, ASLA, shows how working hemp farms could incorporate the amenities of wineries or breweries. Photo by Kirk Bereuter Landscape Architecture.

On a farm in Loudoun County, Virginia, the first thing you might notice is the smell. Some say it’s citrusy, others say it’s piney, and still others say it’s skunky. Most visitors find it pleasantly earthy. This is the Cannabreeze Hemp Farm, nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Continue reading Destination Hemp Farm →

Climate, Environment, General, Water

Tier Drops

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Water out West is disappearing. Seven states, 30 tribes, and millions of people will need to adjust.

By Lisa Owens Viani

The Central Arizona Project carries Colorado River water across a stretch of desert north of Bouse, Arizona. Photo © Ted Wood/The Water Desk.

In early August 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared the first ever Tier 1 shortage for the Colorado River, based on the agency’s projection that Lake Mead would drop below a threshold of 1,075 feet above sea level in January. Water levels in the river’s two main reservoirs—Lake Powell (behind Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona) and Lake Mead (behind Hoover Dam on the Arizona–Nevada border)—are now at their lowest since they were filled and flows in the river have declined. Continue reading Tier Drops →

General

Sketching the Housing Crisis

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A pandemic sketchbook becomes a prompt to design activism.

Text and images by Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA

Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA, sketching outdoors. He calls urban sketching a public act, one of vulnerability and frustration balanced with unique opportunities for dialogue, discovery, and fulfillment. In these conditions, the scene, weather, and stamina are always shifting. Focus, adaptation, fortitude, and luck become some of the best assets.

In The Thinking Hand, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how sketching is a multilayered process of interpretation, one that requires rapid decisions and adjustments. For example, the darkening of one form affects our understanding of those around it, or when we notice the foreground object is a certain size, we understand that a distant object must be half the size, and so on. Through this continuing dialogue a memory is imprinted.

Continue reading Sketching the Housing Crisis →

General

April LAM: Designing Policy

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FOREGROUND    

In the Tank (Water)
Amid the wetlands and steel plants of Chicago’s Big Marsh Park, a new water recycling system at the Ford Calumet Environmental Center renews the region’s ecological potential.

       Tavern on the Scene (Preservation)
The historic Dunham Tavern in Midtown Cleveland was a destination of interest to all but its neighbors. Merritt Chase and LAND Studio folded the community and some missing pieces of the region’s story into a new master plan for the landscape.

FEATURES     

In Their Elements
Farm, family, and the fundamentals of drawing, topped with a dash of social media, might seem like an uncommon recipe for a nationally recognized landscape architecture firm. But at Stimson, that’s just how they’ve always done it.

The Year of the Superstudio
With its clarion call for green jobs, environmental justice, and national decarbonization, the Green New Deal reads like a set of prompts for a landscape architecture studio, so why not make it one? Inside the yearlong experiment in grounding policy in real-life regional problems.

The full table of contents for April 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 April articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “In Their Elements,” Ngoc Doan; “The Year of the Superstudio,” Yuehui Gong, courtesy LAF; “Tavern on the Scene,” Merritt Chase; “In the Tank,” Tom Harris.