Cleveland’s DERU Landscape Architecture sees big stories in small spaces. By Zach Mortice Photography by Amber N. Ford  Inside the Cozad-Bates House, a handsome, red brick Italianate building on the east side of Cleveland that’s the last pre-Civil War house in the University Circle neighborhood, is a small exhibit that tells the history of Ohio and Cleveland’s role in the Underground Railroad. A map of Ohio created in the late 19th century by the Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert traces the clandestine network, with thin arteries arrayed south to north, reaching across almost all its counties. Seven of these […]

Louisville’s Speed Outdoors sets contemporary art amid a new Reed Hilderbrand landscape.  By Mark R. Long  The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is employing landscape architecture and urban planning to broaden its audience and help fill a gap in green space for its urban neighbors, transforming its grounds into an always-open art park that will display more than a dozen sculptures by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Sol LeWitt, and Deborah Butterfield. Scheduled to open in late 2025, the Reed Hilderbrand–designed green space will feature furniture and spaces for people to walk, relax, dine, study, and enjoy cultural programs […]

The allegorical assemblages of the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument. By Kofi Boone, FASLA Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA I’ve been to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., many times: day and night, individually and in groups. I’ve sat and watched groups as they moved through the Mountain of Despair sculpture, touched the walls of quotes, and took selfies in front of the Stone of Hope. I have many friends and family who love the memorial. The site works as a linear narrative experience, and it does, in scale, material, and level of detail, mirror other […]

The recent announcement of Kongjian Yu, FASLA, as the winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize sent us back to the archives for this piece on his work at Hing Hay Park in Seattle. —October 26, 2023  By Betsy Anderson, Associate ASLA On a steely afternoon in late January, the soft notes of a dizi floated over the sound of construction in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The flutist played amid a line of safety fencing and the maneuvers of a carry deck crane. This was not an unusual scene in a city filled with building projects, in a neighborhood that […]

Terrain-NYC turns a bedrock cliff in the Bronx into a garden for all seasons. By Zach Mortice Faced with the need for a meditative and richly planted landscape for an affordable and supportive housing project in the Bronx on top of exposed bedrock, Brian Green, a landscape architect at Terrain-NYC, looked to the other geologic formations in Manhattan, particularly in Central Park, and in the Bronx. What he noticed most were the ferns that grew in these places. Typically considered too delicate to take root in rock, they were surprisingly persistent. “They’ll find their way, somehow, into these little crevices,” […]