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Archive for the ‘WATER’ Category

TINKERING WITH A “TOTAL WORK”

Posted in ART, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORY, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s plan for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden. Image courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

At the Hirshhorn, a preservation row tests the bounds of unity between building and landscape.

 

The Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden is a cloistered 1.5-acre art landscape just across Jefferson Drive SW from the museum. Stepped into the earth and filled with modern sculpture arranged in intimate outdoor rooms, it’s a definitive change of pace from the broad civic expanse of the National Mall, though no less significant as it’s the only Smithsonian entity with “Sculpture Garden” in its official name, per the law that established the institution.

The sculpture garden was originally designed by the Hirshhorn Museum’s architect, Gordon Bunshaft. His initial sculpture garden was a harsh, wide expanse of hardscape and gravel when it opened in 1974, centered on a 60-foot-wide rectangular reflecting pool. In 1977 the Smithsonian enlisted Lester Collins to soften the landscape and make it more hospitable, especially during Washington, D.C.’s sweltering summers. When the new landscape opened in 1981, it was with additional lawn and shade cover recessed into the ground—a more layered experience of concrete walls that cordoned off and defined outdoor rooms for the quiet contemplation of sculpture. Collins selected trees with an intense sculptural presence (weeping willows, weeping beeches, ginkgoes, dawn redwoods) and was lauded for his progressively accessible design, nearly a decade before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But the museum’s new plan for a revised landscape by the artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto is drawing the attention of landscape advocates who charge that the changes proposed will alter the relationship between the landscape and Bunshaft’s monumental ring of aggregate concrete, two elements of the museum campus that were conceived as one. With the new landscape, the Hirshhorn (the staff is quick to point out that only 15 percent of museum visitors make a visit to the sculpture garden) hopes to offer art lovers more programmatic flexibility in the garden and the chance to host larger, more performance-driven events. (more…)

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MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, DETAILS, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, MAINTENANCE, NOW, RESILIENCE, STREETS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY KAMILA GRIGO

Copenhagen’s stormwater detention roads are everything but.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

As part of its climate change and urban flood mitigation strategy, Copenhagen aims to build 300 stormwater management projects over the next 20 to 30 years. Among the projects are a series of detention roads, entire streets redesigned to convey and detain rainwater locally to relieve the existing storm sewer system. It’s an ambitious target that reflects the city’s understanding that investment in these projects is a way of managing greater long-term risk to city infrastructure while providing citizens with multifunctional spaces in the short term.

The Sankt Kjelds Square and Bryggervangen by SLA is a pilot of the detention road concept. Completed in 2019, it comprises the entirety of the 2,300-foot-long Bryggervangen road and Sankt Kjelds Square, the roundabout in the middle. “It’s quite a simple project,” says Bjørn Ginman, a project director at SLA, who says that the fundamental concept is about seeing water move through the site. Rain gardens lining the pedestrian rights-of-way receive rainwater from sidewalks and the roofs of adjacent residential buildings, while road runoff is directed into larger infiltration ponds at the roundabout and at intersections, though not before an in-ground diverter (one of the municipality’s first applications in a public road context) deals with the most polluted first flush. (more…)

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RAISE SOME GREEN

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POLLUTION, PRACTICE, REAL ESTATE, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, STREETS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY JARED BREY

Buffalo plans the country’s biggest environmental impact bond to fund green infrastructure.

FROM THE AUGUST 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

In 2018, the City of Buffalo, New York, cut the ribbon on Jesse Clipper Square, a small park named for the first Black soldier from Buffalo to die in World War I. The square, originally dedicated in the 1930s, was designed by John Edmonston Brent, one of Buffalo’s first Black architects. Today it sits in the median of William Street, a wide arterial street connecting downtown Buffalo to the neighborhood of Willert Park. As part of a broader greening of William Street, the park was expanded and planted with new trees and a rain garden. According to the Buffalo Sewer Authority, the project helps prevent some 284,000 gallons of water from entering the city’s combined sewer system during typical rain storms.

Green infrastructure projects like the William Street overhaul—small-scale interventions designed to manage stormwater on public streets, parking lots, and rooftops—are the bread and butter of the Buffalo Sewer Authority’s Rain Check program, a $380 million commitment that originated in a 2014 consent agreement between the city and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and improve water quality. Under the terms of its Long Term Control Plan, Buffalo committed to spending $93 million on green infrastructure to manage stormwater on at least 1,315 impervious acres. In the first phase of the plan, Rain Check 1.0, which began in 2015, the sewer authority focused on public projects that could be carried out relatively easily, according to documents. But Rain Check 2.0, announced last spring, is going for tougher targets, mostly on private property.

To help push the project along, Buffalo’s Mayor, Byron Brown, announced in February that the city would issue a $30 million environmental impact bond (EIB) to help fund a grant program that will encourage private landowners to install green infrastructure. Environmental impact bonds are a kind of municipal borrowing that links bond investors’ returns to the performance of the projects funded by the bond. One of the first EIBs in the United States was issued in 2016 by DC Water, Washington, D.C.’s water authority, to help fund green infrastructure related to its own agreement with the EPA (see “The River Beneath the River,” LAM, November 2018). Since then, more cities have begun experimenting with the bonds, including Atlanta, New Orleans, and Baltimore. In many cases, new funds for green infrastructure equates to more work for landscape architects. (more…)

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AUGUST LAM: EQUITY AND ACCESS

Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HISTORY, ONLINE ONLY, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SAN FRANCISCO, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

FOREGROUND        

Raise Some Green (Water)
With a $30 million investment, the City of Buffalo is joining a small group of cities that have
turned to environmental impact bonds to fund soft infrastructure.        

Count Them In (Planning)
Long neglected by planners, the people in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley harness a history of community advocacy and a plan by Groundworks Office to connect residents to city life.

FEATURES

The Twin Pandemics
Seven Black landscape architects and designers discuss the spatial factors around a deadly virus and
deadly policing for besieged Black people in the United States.

        A Subtropical Second Take
To reflect a change in mission, New York’s Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice reopens its renowned interior landscape, originally designed by Dan Kiley, with the lower-latitude palette of
Raymond Jungles, FASLA.

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

Credits: “The Twin Pandemics,” Laura Haddad, artist and landscape architect; “A Subtropical Second Take,” Barrett Doherty, ASLA; “Count Them In,” Ninon Scotto di Uccio.

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LEASES TO DESTROY

Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, HABITAT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, POLLUTION, PRESERVATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, THE BACK, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY KATHARINE LOGAN

Resource extraction companies are moving on public lands like never before.

FROM THE JULY 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

Since the creation of the Antiquities Act in 1906, American presidents have had the authority, the honor, and the privilege of designating as national monuments the country’s most culturally and scientifically significant public lands—including, by corollary, some of the most spectacular, biodiverse, heritage-rich, and downright magnificent landscapes in America.

It’s doubtful whether presidents also have the inverse authority—to deconsecrate a national monument once protected—but doubtful is good enough for the current incumbent. In December of 2017, the Trump administration announced the reduction of two national monuments in southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, to shards of their former expanses, exposing culturally and ecologically important places to oil and mineral development.

The deconsecration of Grand Staircase and Bears Ears exemplifies a larger trend in this administration’s management of public lands. Since 2017, federally owned lands and waters totaling more than four times the area of California have been put up for lease to the energy sector. Utah, with its oil, gas, and mineral resources underlying the vistas of the Colorado Plateau, is on the front line. About 65 percent of the state is federally owned, and the U.S. Department of the Interior has received some 230 lease nominations covering more than 150,000 acres. Development of these leases threatens iconic Red Rock Canyon lands, forested plateaus, indigenous cultural sites, archaeological troves, and geological marvels. Some of the leases would allow drilling within half a mile of renowned protected sites, such as Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, and within 10 miles of Bears Ears’s radically shrunken limits. (more…)

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SUPERFUND SLUMP

Posted in BROWNFIELDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, EPA, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, NOW, PLANNING, POLLUTION, REGULATIONS, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 16, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY MADELINE BODIN

Work on the nation’s most toxic sites has slowed.

FROM THE JULY 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

 

The nation’s most complex and extensive toxic waste sites are designated Superfund sites and have their cleanup overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For landscape architects, Superfund sites are complex problems, says Julie Bargmann, ASLA, a professor at the University of Virginia and the principal of D.I.R.T. Studio, a landscape architecture firm with several Superfund site projects in its portfolio. The work takes years to complete, and local stakeholders often struggle with strong, conflicting emotions, she says.

If you hear less about Superfund sites these days, it may be because less work is being done. (more…)

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CURBSIDE COLLECTOR

Posted in CONSTRUCTION, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ONLINE ONLY, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SOIL, STREETS, STUDENTS, TECH, UNIVERSITY, WATER, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

BY ZACH MORTICE

Curbing Sediment collects sediment washed along curbs and street aprons in shallow troughs. Image courtesy Halina Steiner and Ryan Winston.

Research at the Ohio State University aims to keep stormwater sediment stranded on the road.

 

When Halina Steiner tested new sediment-collecting infrastructure in her lab at the Ohio State University (OSU), she noticed a mysterious magnetism pulling people toward the bits of beveled foamboard she had crafted into sediment collectors. As water mixes with dirt and sand starts flowing across the planks of foam, and sediment settles into intricately carved CNC-milled grooves, “it’s very mesmerizing,” Steiner says. It’s like sending a paper boat down a stream or, more accurately, “down the gutter,” she says, because that’s the exact place Steiner is looking to intercept sediment that pollutes and clogs waterways. (more…)

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