August 26, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Galveston Island State Park in the year 2060. Image courtesy of Studio Outside/Google Earth.
This is Part 3 of our conversation about Hurricane Harvey with the design team at Studio Outside in Dallas, which has won a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning for its work on Galveston Island State Park. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found below. Correction appended below on August 28.
Studio Outside’s resiliency plan for Galveston Island State Park earned a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning, drawing praise from the jury for its comprehensive and forward-looking anticipation of the havoc a hurricane could release. But Studio Outside’s Andrew Duggan and the design team, led by principal in charge Mike Fraze, knew they were pondering ironclad eventualities, not hypothetical disasters.
Over the weekend, the city of Galveston and Galveston Island State Park to its southwest found themselves in the path of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall on Friday night, a Category 4 storm that has prompted mass evacuations of the Houston region.
Studio Outside’s project, “Storm + Sand + Sea + Strand: Barrier Island Resiliency Planning for Galveston Island State Park,” tracks the loss of habitat and land as perpetuated by sea-level rise, encroaching development, and hurricane flooding. It prescribes soft and green natural barriers to storm surges, assisted by flexible infrastructure. As a barrier island bordered by Texas’s West Bay to the northwest and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast, there are few places to hide from floodwaters or to absorb them, and even less given that this part of the island was partially paved over to accommodate RVs in the 1970s. On Friday and over the weekend, Duggan (based safely in Dallas) and members of the design team (Fraze and Duggan of Studio Outside, and Jennifer Dowdell and Ed Morgereth of Biohabitats) emailed LAM some thoughts on how the storm might play out for Galveston Island State Park.
****Post will be updated as the storm progresses**** Continue Reading »
Posted in CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, OCEANS, PLANNING, PLANTS, SHORELINE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE | Tagged 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning, Andrew Duggan, Barrier Island, Bay, Beach, Biohabitats, climate change, Diaster, Ed Morgereth, erosion, flooding, Freshwater, Galveston, Galveston Island State Park, habitat, Hurricane, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Ike, Infrastructure, Jennifer Dowdell, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, marshes, Migration, Mike Fraze, Rain, resiliency, Saltwater, Sand Dunes, sea-level rise, Storm + Sand + Sea + Strand: Barrier Island Resiliency Planning for Galveston Island State Park, Storm Surge, Studio Outside, Texas, wetland, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
August 24, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Improbable Botany. Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.
Wayward is a collective of landscape architects, architects, urban growers, artists, and other assorted creative types who design landscape installations for “exploring new models for how green space can work in cities,” says its founder, Heather Ring. The group’s experimental and often temporary projects emphasize creating “narrative environments that tell stories through the spaces.” The projects have included chromatic explorations of algae growth and weaving slow-growth sculpture from living trees.
It’s an outsider’s perspective on landscape design that might have earned Ring’s London-based band of designers the high school graduation accolade of “landscape architect most likely to commission a science fiction anthology,” because that’s just what Wayward has done.
Having raised nearly $16,000 during a successful Kickstarter campaign, Wayward will publish Continue Reading »
Posted in BOOKS, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, FARMS, LAM ONLINE, PLANTS, RESEARCH, TECH | Tagged book, climate change, Experimental, Gary Dalkin, Heather Ring, horticulture, Improbable Botany, Kickstarter, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, London, plants, science, Science Fiction, technology, wayward | 1 Comment »
August 22, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY JANE MARGOLIES
Randall’s Island, situated at the center of New York City, has become the park and recreational mecca long dreamed about.
It’s a sunny afternoon in May, and lacrosse games are in full swing on Randall’s Island, a 516-acre landmass surrounded by water and, beyond, the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Cyclists pedal on a path under the heroic arches of a 1917 railroad trestle. A middle school track team is warming up outside the stadium where Usain Bolt broke the world record in the men’s 100-meter dash in 2008.
The landscape architect Rick Parisi, FASLA, and I are not playing lacrosse or cycling or running. But we are roving around the island—which is bordered by the Harlem and East Rivers, the Bronx Kill, and a treacherous strait known as the Hell Gate. Parisi, the managing principal of MPFP, has helped with the transformation of the island over the past couple of decades, and I’ve asked for a tour of some of his firm’s accomplishments. Besides, I have a special request: Continue Reading »
Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, CONSTRUCTION, FEATURES, HISTORY, LAM MAGAZINE, NEW YORK CITY, PARKS, PEOPLE, RECREATION | Tagged Adrian Benepe, Aimee Boden, Andrew Tisch, Anne Wilson, Arches, asylum, bridges, Bronx Kill, Carl Icahn, Central Park Conservancy, East River, Environmental Champion award, Eric Peterson, excavation, fill, Frank Rossi, Frieze art fair, Geoarcheology Research Associates, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, Harlem River, Hospital, Islands, Jane Margolies, Karen Cohen, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, living shoreline, Manhattan, Mathews Nielsen, Michael Barnicle, Michael Bloomberg, MPFP, New York City, PARKS, potters field, Queens, Quennell Rothschild & Partners, Randall’s Island, Randall’s Island Access Plan, Randall’s Island Park Alliance, RGR Landscape, Ricardo Zurita, Rick Parisi, Robert Moses, salt marsh, Sports fields, Starr Whitehouse, Stephen Whitehouse, the boneyard, the Bronx, The French Connection, Triborough Bridge Authority, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, wetlands | 1 Comment »
August 21, 2017 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy.
From “Game On” by Jane Margolies in the August 2017 issue, about Randall’s Island’s long and winding road to becoming the sports field megavenue it is today.
“Shade break.”
–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.
Posted in BROWNFIELDS, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, NEW YORK CITY, PHOTOGRAPHY, REUSE, Uncategorized | Tagged Jane Margolies, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, New York City, PHOTOGRAPHY, Randall’s Island, RGR Landscape, Sahar Coston-Hardy, Sports fields | Leave a Comment »
August 17, 2017 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
A basin and spillway near Las Vegas. Image courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation Photo Archive.
On the outskirts of the parched city of Las Vegas are dozens of basins dug into the earth, connected to hundreds of miles of arterial concrete channels that weave through the city to Lake Mead, some 30 miles to the east. Begun in the mid-1980s, this $2 billion land works infrastructure project is now 80 percent complete. The full plan calls for 121 basins and 800 miles of channel.
What’s the purpose of all this megascaled trench work? Las Vegas, plopped arbitrarily in the Mojave Desert with no permanent source of surface water and annual average rainfall of four inches, is prone to flash floods. These basins, spillways, and channels collect rainwater and whisk it away just every so often.
This paradox is the subject of Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles. Up through mid-September, its eerily steady gaze Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, ECOLOGY, LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, REGION, WATER | Tagged basin, Canal, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Channel, Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood, development, drone, exhibition, flood, Irony, irrigation, Lake Mead, Land Art, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Matthew Coolidge, Nevada, Photo, Rainfall, Ramparts, Valley, video, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
August 15, 2017 by LAM Staff
BY BRIAN BARTH
One practitioner defies the handicaps of building Information modeling for landscape, determined not to remain an exception.
Meghen Quinn, ASLA, has a secret. BIM—an acronym that puts moonbeams in the eyes of architects, but makes some landscape architects cringe—is her software of choice. BIM, shorthand for building information modeling, is the 3-D, data-rich software platform embodied by Revit, a product launched in 2000 by Charles River Software and acquired by Autodesk two years later. By 2012, 70 percent of architecture firms in North America reported using BIM, and in 2016 the American Institute of Architects reported that BIM was used for nearly 100 percent of projects at large firms.
It seems that so few landscape architects use BIM, however, that no one has ever bothered to collect the data. Its reputation in the field is as a clunky, building-centric, overly complex tool that has put up yet another barrier between landscape designers and architects.
Yet Quinn, who merged her San Francisco practice with the Office of Cheryl Barton in January, is all moonbeams. Well, mostly. “I never want to use CAD again,” she says. “Moving to BIM is like Continue Reading »
Posted in CONSTRUCTION, LAM MAGAZINE, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, TECH | Tagged 3-D, architect, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, Brian Barth, Charles River Software, Cloud-based, coordination, data, Illustration, interdisciplinary, Jeffrey Galbraith, landarchBIM, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Meghen Quinn, modeling, PRACTICE, Revit, Rhino, Site Designer Extension, SketchUp, software, Solomon Cordwell Buenz, tool | 2 Comments »
August 14, 2017 by LAM Staff
When the landscape architects at Mahan Rykiel Associates found themselves with uprooted trees they couldn’t fit back onto a newly designed and built mixed-use building site, they offered them to a local Baltimore middle school in the Locust Point neighborhood. But after talking with the principal of Francis Scott Key Middle School, they quickly realized that there was an opportunity for a much deeper collaboration than simply donating some foliage. So the landscape architects began designing a school yard with four different types of learning environments, to aid what they call “STEM-based environmental education.” Project Birdland will be the first phase of a partnership between Mahan Rykiel Associates and Francis Scott Key Middle School. Students will work with a biologist and the fabricators at Gutierrez Studios to design and build birdhouses for endangered and threatened bird species. From the outset, the project gives students an introduction to the humancentric world of design and craft and also to the creation of habitats for their neighboring fauna.
Posted in EDUCATION, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, PEOPLE, PLANTS, SCHOOLS, SPECIES, STUDENTS, WILDLIFE | Tagged Baltimore, Birdhouses, birds, Environmental Education, Francis Scott Key Middle School, habitat, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Locust Point, Mahan Rykiel Associates, Mixed-Use, Project Birdland, STEM, students, tree | Leave a Comment »
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