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Archive for the ‘WATER’ Category

THE LOS ANGELES RIVER, CUT LOOSE

Posted in ART, BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, PLANNING, PLAYGROUNDS, RECREATION, REUSE, RIVER RESTORATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

AECOM’s plan turns the riverbed into an outdoor activities park. Image courtesy of the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering and AECOM.

The big conundrum of the Los Angeles River—that it is so imposing yet so divorced from the city—shows in the visions for its future proposed in early June by seven architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture firms. The occasion was the Los Angeles River Downtown Design Dialogue, a pro bono charrette that took place on the 10th anniversary of the city’s original master plan for the river. The design firms showed ways that visitors could step down to its shallow waters, although the concrete-lined waterway runs so low at times it can seem more like a quasi-natural splash pad. But the most fascinating plans marginalized the typically modest amounts of water in the river almost entirely.

There are no immediate plans to execute any of the projects. Rather, Gary Lee Moore, the city engineer of Los Angeles, described the charrette as an opportunity to (more…)

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LAMCAST: PATRICIA JOHANSON’S INCHWORM VIEW

Posted in ART, ECOLOGY, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, PARKS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2017| Leave a Comment »

The artist and landscape designer Patricia Johanson sees her ecologically driven, site-specific artworks as a way to weave together two disciplines that seemed to have parted ways a long time ago: science and art. She imagines them to be “parallel explorations” that share the same goal (exploring and interpreting the world), gone about in different ways. “In a way, we’re like inchworms,” she says in an interview from 2010. “We’re out on a twig, feeling around, testing the air. Where do we go from here? What can we learn? And you begin to look at these things, and you begin to discover the world. I think that’s what scientists do, and I think that’s what artists do.”

Johanson grants herself the opportunity to try it both ways. Her Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility in Petaluma, California, clocks in to perform all the progressive landscape-as-infrastructure functions asked of it. It’s a sewage treatment plant, and a park with three miles of trails whose wetlands help filter and clean Petaluma’s water. It’s also a wetland wildlife habitat where visitors set up easels and sketch the landscape, part of which playfully resembles a mouse (with two beady little eyes that are islands in a pond) from above.

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ART DIRECTOR’S CUT, JUNE 19

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, FEATURES, LAM ONLINE, PARKS, PHOTOGRAPHY, RECREATION, REUSE, SHORELINE, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2017| Leave a Comment »

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

Photo by Simon Devitt.

From “The Wharf at Work” in the June 2017 issue by Gweneth Leigh, ASLA, about the North Wharf Promenade and Silo Park in Auckland, New Zealand, where industry and leisure carry on side by side.

“Gantry perch.”

–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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MAPPING DAPL

Posted in ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, LAM ONLINE, POLLUTION, REGION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

The DAPL crosses two watershed systems. Map by Alma and Friends.

The recently completed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) will run for 1,172 miles from northwest North Dakota to downstate Illinois, pumping 450,000 barrels of oil per day and costing $3.8 billion to build. Those are superlative numbers that can blot out the complexity and vulnerability of the landscapes and watersheds the pipeline traverses. Making these facets of the DAPL clear is the goal of maps created by an anonymous group of designers calling themselves Alma and Friends. Their work has been collected and packaged by the Los Angeles public television station KCET with a series of articles on the ecological consequences of the pipeline.

These maps detail regional watersheds, individual bodies of water, indigenous lands, the blotches of human settlement that dot this stretch of the Great Plains and midwestern prairie, and past and potential oil spills. Collected into a series of seven interactive maps by KCET, (more…)

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THE WHARF AT WORK

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, LAM MAGAZINE, PARKS, RECREATION, SHORELINE, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA

Wraight + Associates and Taylor Cullity Lethlean have domesticated a waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand (though you can still smell the fish).

FROM THE JUNE 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

For more than 30 years, shipping activity within historic ports has been in rapid decline. Facilities are often relocated to larger and more modernized harbors where the machinery is bigger, the roads are closer, and the waters are deeper. Left behind is a postindustrial waterfront that’s seen by the city as an opportunity for a glamorous maritime makeover. But in the effort to maximize development profits, these face-lifts often erase the industrial beauty marks that make these places unique. In their place, generic recipes are followed for creating comfortable waterfront living: one part cobblestone street, two parts pedestrian walkway, a healthy dose of waterside eateries, with a dash of history through a moored two-mast schooner. The experience may be clean and comfortable, but it’s also terribly bland.

The Wynyard Quarter waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand, is different. It’s a landscape that (more…)

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THE OBAMA CENTER: NEW VIEWS FOR WHOM?

Posted in CITIES, GREEN ROOFS, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, LAM ONLINE, PARKS, PRESERVATION, SHORELINE, STREETS, UNIVERSITY, VIEWS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 22, 2017| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

The most important question related to the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side doesn’t have that much to do with its architecture.

It is instead: What kind of landscape stewardship can a presidential museum and library offer? To be located in Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson Park, the project already has a heap of canonical landscape history to contend with. So can the Obama library make a great park greater?

The answer is… (more…)

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CUTTING THE FAT WITH SHARP GRAPHICS

Posted in CITIES, FOOD, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, LAM ONLINE, MAINTENANCE, PEOPLE, RESIDENTIAL, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2017| 1 Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

City sewer maintenance trucks get a new graphic rebranding. Image courtesy of group projects.

City officials in San Jose, California, have an environmental graphics and public art project they hope will reduce sewer clogs from fats, oils, and grease that residents put down their kitchen sinks—and it only costs $60,000, a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars it would take to update existing infrastructure to handle more cooking waste. The project, called FOG Waste (FOG stands for fats, oils, and grease) was designed by Brett Snyder, an associate professor of design at the University of California, Davis, and Claire Napawan, an associate professor of landscape architecture at UC Davis, who practice together under the name group projects.

When fatty waste is disposed of in a sink or drain, it can solidify and block sewer lines, causing raw sewage to back up into homes, yards, and streets and potentially affect local watersheds. (You might remember the viral footage of the bus-sized ball of fat discovered in a London sewer, dubbed the “fatberg.”) In San Jose, that means raw sewage in San Francisco Bay, causing havoc in local aquatic ecosystems and posing health risks for residents.

The main design challenge for Napawan and Snyder was developing a graphic identity that could educate people on (more…)

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