September 26, 2019 by LAM Staff
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
BY JARED BREY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA
Darren Damone, ASLA, and Katharine Griffiths were standing on a boardwalk at Avalon Park & Preserve, in Stony Brook, New York, looking across the pond at a gang of cormorants loitering in the branches of a beech tree.
“They used to nest over here, and it was a disaster zone,” said Griffiths, the director of the preserve. “It used to smell like a bluefish factory. It was nasty. They did a lot of damage to the trees in this area.… That’s what happens. They strip the leaves to put in their nest, and then their guano is so acidic that it just burns everything. They’re kind of sloppy birds.”
It was a May morning, and the squealing songs of cardinals spilled out of the woods behind us. We took a curving path up a hill to a smaller pond, fed by what looked like an underground stream, and I asked, credulously, where the headwaters were.
“This is just recirculating,” Damone said, looking amused. “This is completely created.”
In 1996, before the preserve existed, Paul Simons, a local nature lover who liked to ride his bike on a path through the property, was struck by a car on Long Island and killed. In his honor, the Simons family created the Paul Simons Foundation, and bought the eight-acre property that would later become Avalon Park & Preserve. Griffiths was a friend of the Simons family and had just finished college in Ontario, studying political science and horticulture, and she moved to Stony Brook to lead the preserve. Creating the preserve was a way for the Simons family to grieve, she said, and it was meant to be a place that Paul would have wanted to be. Beyond that, she told me later, “We didn’t have a vision, really.”
So it turned to Andropogon, the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm, to create Continue Reading »
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Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, GARDENS, PLANNING, PLANTS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE | Tagged Andropogon, ASLA Honor Award, ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award, Avalon Park & Preserve, BioBlitz, birds, business, Carol Franklin, Center for Sustainable Landscapes, Chestnut Hill, climate change, Colin Franklin, Darren Damone, David Barnett, Design Workshop, Drexel University, ECOLOGY, Emily McCoy, Green Roof, habitat, Ian McHarg, Integrative Research Division, INVASIVE SPECIES, José Almiñana, Journal of Green Building, Katharine Griffiths, Korman Quad, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lauren Mandel, Laurie Olin, Leslie Sauer, marsh, Metropolitan Paradise: The Struggle for Nature in the City, native plants, New York, Paul Simons, Paul Simons Foundation, Perelman Plaza, Philadelphia, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, PRACTICE, Research, Richard Piacentini, Rolf Sauer, SEEDdesign, Shoemaker Green, SITES v2 Rating System, soil, sound mapping, Stony Brook, stormwater, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Tom Amoroso, University of Pennsylvania, wetland, Yaki Miodovnik | 2 Comments »
September 24, 2019 by Brad McKee
BY BRADFORD MCKEE
Thaïsa Way, now leading Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, wants deeper histories for the profession.
The urban landscape historian Thaïsa Way, FASLA, relocated this summer from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has served on the faculty for 12 years, to Washington, D.C., to lead the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, an outpost of Harvard University. The program operates from an early 19th-century mansion surrounded by a Beatrix Farrand garden on 16 acres above Georgetown—one of the few largely intact designs of Farrand’s remaining. Way’s arrival follows the retirement of John Beardsley, who ran the program since 2008. We met on a hot July morning, and sat at the back of the garden inside a rustic stone pavilion called Catalogue House, which has two lead squirrels on top. The pavilion holds photographs that explain some of the garden’s plantings—such as the recent reinstallation of a famed aerial double hedge of hornbeams. The conversation quickly turned to history and the future of history. Continue Reading »
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Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, HISTORY, PEOPLE, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY | Tagged affordable housing, American Academy in Rome, ASLA, Beatrix Farrand, Brad McKee, Catalogue House, City Rivers, climate change, Cultural Landscapes, data responsibility, Dumbarton Oaks, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, Georgetown University, GIS, Harvard, homelessness, Interpreting Landscapes of Enslavement, John Beardsley, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Landscape History, Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, map, Mellon Foundation, Mildred Bliss, Monticello, Montpelier, People of Color, race, River Cities, Thaisa Way, the public realm, University of Alabama, University of Virginia, University of Washington, urban university, Urban@UW, Whitney Plantation, William O’Brien | 2 Comments »
September 21, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY JARED BREY
After two rare storms inundate Ellicott City, Maryland, the town tries to sort through what can be saved.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
The Tiber-Hudson watershed, in Howard County, Maryland, drains three-and-a-half square miles of mostly developed land in and around Ellicott City, a historic mill town founded in 1772 on the banks of the Patapsco River. The terrain surrounding the town is steep. On the south side of lower Main Street, a series of mill buildings is packed alongside and astride the Tiber Branch, one of the watershed’s three main tributaries to the Patapsco. On the north side, old stone buildings are backed up to a hill made of granite bedrock. Rainwater flows downhill, east toward the river, and in Ellicott City, there’s nothing farther downhill than lower Main Street, the historic center of the town.
When I visited at the beginning of February, the sun was out and it was warm enough to leave my jacket in the car. Walking downhill into lower Main, where the street is narrower, the air temperature dropped and the shadows darkened. On my right, behind a row of boarded-up storefronts, I could hear the Tiber Branch rushing along parallel to Main Street. It smelled like a basement.
On the night of July 30, 2016, a storm rolled in and sat directly on top of Ellicott City, dropping 6.5 inches of rain in the watershed in just three hours. Water jumped the banks of the Hudson Branch uphill and flowed down Main Street, Continue Reading »
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Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, FEATURES, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, PARKS, PEOPLE, PLANTS, REGION, RESILIENCE, WATER | Tagged 100 year flood, 1000 year flood, Allan Kittleman, Angela Tersiguel, B&O Railroad, Baltimore, Bryan Dunn, Chris Brooks, Covering Climate Now, development, Eddison Hermond, Ellicott City, Ellicott City Partnership, Ellicott City Safe and Sound, Ellicott City Station, flood, granite bedrock, Historic Ellicott City, Howard County, Howard County Department of Public Works, Hudson Branch, hydrology, Infrastructure, Isaac Hametz, Jared Brey, Jim Irvin, Joan Becker, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, life safety, Mahan Rykiel, Main Street, Maryland, McCormick Taylor, mill town, National Historic District, National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, New Cut Branch, Nicholas Redding, Patapsco River, planning, Preservation, Preservation Maryland, resilient, river park, Rob Brennan, Section 106, stormwater, Tiber Branch, Tiber-Hudson, Tiber-Hudson watershed, Tom McGilloway, watershed | Leave a Comment »
September 20, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY ANNE RAVER / PHOTOGRAPHY BY IHOR PONA
Around a school in an arctic town, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander has made a landscape to withstand the prospect of a warming world.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
FROM THE NOVEMBER 2013 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
The permafrost is melting in Inuvik, a flat delta town in the Northwest Territories, 2 degrees north of the Arctic Circle. You can see the drunken trees, leaning this way and that along the banks of the Mackenzie River. The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit—native people who make up 40 percent of the some 3,500 residents here—have to go farther out to hunt seals, because of the melting ice.
The caribou get stuck in the mud, instead of running across snow, as they migrate to their calving grounds north of Tuktoyaktuk, or Tuk, as people here say, on the coast of the Beaufort Sea. The lichen that has sustained them for millennia is getting crowded out by species that thrive in warmer temperatures.
Local people tell of landslides and collapsing banks along the Mackenzie River, or slumping—where the land simply caves in—on a road or in the forest. The pingos, or subterranean ice houses, may be melting up in Tuk, but most people have freezers anyway.
“Come, I want to show you where I sank into the permafrost that was melted,” Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA, the Canadian landscape architect, said one unseasonably cold day in July. Continue Reading »
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Posted in ASLA, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, FOOD, HEALING GARDENS, MAINTENANCE, PEOPLE, PLAYGROUNDS, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, STUDENTS, THE CLIENT | Tagged Anne Raver, Arctic Circle, Arthur Erickson, ASLA Medal, Barrenland Beauties: Showy Plants of the Canadian Arctic, bearberry, Beate Hahn, Beaufort Sea, birch, boreal forest, Camilla Verbonac, cloudberry, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Covering Climate Now, cranberry, culture, Dan Kiley, Darren Karst, Dempster Highway, Dowland Contracting Ltd, drift, dwarf birch, East Three School, edible plants, Expo 67, First Nations, food security, gabion baskets, groundcover, Gwich’in, ICE, Inuvialuit, Inuvialuit Nautchiangit: Relationships Between People and Plants, Inuvik, Inuvik District Education Authority, Judy Harder, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, landscape model, landslides, larch, Legislative Assembly, Louis Kahn, M. Paul Friedberg, Mackenzie River, maintenance, Matsuzaki/Wright Architects, medicinal plants, melting, native plants, natural gas, natural light, North by Northwest Ventures, Northwest Territories, oil, Oscar Stonorov, Page Burt, Paul Arthorne, peat bog, Permafrost, Peter Oberlander, Pin/Matthews Architects, Pin/Taylor Architects, pipeline, playground, Richard Dattner, Robson Square, school, shelterbelt, shrubby willow, Simon Taylor, spruce, swale, Vancouver Public Library, VanDusen Botanical Garden, Walter Gropius, weather model, wild arctic rose, wild rose, wind, Yellowknife | Leave a Comment »
September 19, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY MEG CALKINS, FASLA
New technologies can reduce the environmental footprint of the most-used construction material.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
Concrete in the 21st century promises to be a more sustainable material, and given the nine billion metric tons used globally each year, it must be. Portland cement, the binding agent in ordinary concrete, has a very high carbon footprint, resulting in just under one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) released for every ton of cement produced. With 4.2 billion metric tons of the binder used each year worldwide, cement production is responsible for nearly 8 percent of total global carbon emissions. The high lime content of ordinary portland cement contributes about two-thirds of cement’s CO2 impact through the process of limestone calcination. The other one-third of CO2 released is from combustion of fossil fuels.
Technologies to improve the carbon footprint of concrete are currently in the early stages of development, but some, including carbon sequestration in concrete and substantial reductions of cement using energetically modified cement, are now commercially available. Concrete surface products for paving and walls to scrub air pollution, as well as new self-healing concrete products, are also worth investigating. We have heard about some of these innovations for a decade or more in the research community, but many are finally being brought to market—some more quickly than others. Europe is ahead of the United States in the adoption of these technologies, largely because of more rigorous clean air and carbon reduction initiatives.
New technologies in any field can take a long time to move from the laboratory to the marketplace, but Continue Reading »
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Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, CONSTRUCTION, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, MATERIALS, PRACTICE, REGULATIONS, RESEARCH | Tagged accelerated carbonation technology, Aggregate, bacteria, Blue Planet, calcium lactate, Carbon 8, carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, carbon sequestering concrete, carbon sequestration, CemPozzNP, City of Chicago Department of Transportation, climate change, concrete, Covering Climate Now, EMC Cement, Energetically modified cement, Fabrication, fly ash, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lehigh Hanson, Photocatalytic concrete, portland cement, Self-healing concrete, slag ground granulated blast furnace slag, Solidia Technologies, titanium dioxide, Unilock | Leave a Comment »
September 18, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
An ambitious forest restoration project in Ashland, Oregon, aims to reduce the risk that wildfire poses to residents—and their water supply.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
Though the warning signs had been present for months, the bad news officially came in March 2018, when forecasters at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (NWCC) in Portland, Oregon, released their long-range forecast of the upcoming fire season. Though it varied from state to state, in Oregon, light snowpack and higher-than-average temperatures combined to create a highly combustible landscape. “I’m worried about the 2018 fire season,” John Saltenberger, the fire weather program manager at the NWCC, told a Portland television station.
It was discouraging news for a state that, like California and other western states, has seen a growing number of increasingly intense wildfires in recent years. According to Oregon Department of Forestry statistics, 69 percent of the state’s largest recorded wildfires have occurred in the past 20 years. The largest, 2012’s Long Draw Fire, scorched nearly 560,000 acres of predominantly federal land in the southeastern part of the state. In the geological age known as the Anthropocene, the current epoch might one day be known as the Era of Megafires. A megafire is typically defined as a single wildfire that exceeds 100,000 acres. Such fires are “nearly commonplace now,” says Chris Chambers, who for the past 15 years has served as the forest division chief for the City of Ashland, Oregon. “Whereas 20, 30 years ago, a 100,000-acre fire was unheard of.” Continue Reading »
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Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, REGION, RESEARCH, WATER, WILDLIFE | Tagged Anthropocene, ash, Ashland, Ashland Creek, Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project, brush, carbon emissions, Chris Chambers, climate change, conifers, controlled burns, Covering Climate Now, ECOLOGY, Elkhorn Mountains, fire, firebreak, forest, fuel load, global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, Jackson County, John Saltenberger, John Stromberg, Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership, land use, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Logging, Lomakatsi Restoration Project, Long Draw Fire, lumber, mudslide, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, Nature Conservancy, Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, Oregon, Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Park, Paul Hessburg, Reeder Reservoir, Rogue River Valley, Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, SILVIS Lab, Siskiyou Mountains, smoke, Timothy A. Schuler, Tracy Peddicord, tree, U.S. Forest Service, understory, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington, Water, Wenatchee, wildfire, Wildfire Mitigation Commission, wildland–urban interface, WUI | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2019 by LAM Staff
BY BRETT ANDERSON / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA
Disparate but urgent efforts to address sea-level rise in the Virginia Tidewater, one of the country’s most important strategic centers, are striving to keep up with visible realities.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
The first question that sprang to Ann C. Phillips’s mind soon after she moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in 2006 was, “Why, when it rains, does the whole place submerge?”
She wasn’t referring only to dramatic weather events, although Phillips, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, landed in Norfolk during a bumper crop of those: Norfolk saw more major coastal storms and hurricanes in the 2000s than in the four previous decades combined, according to the city government.
Harder to fathom were the floods caused by light rains and “blue sky floods” triggered by lunar tides. Tidal flooding affects low-lying areas of Norfolk nine times per year on average.
These more regular floods were unlike anything Phillips experienced growing up in Annapolis, Maryland. They’re an alarmingly routine part of life in Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads area Continue Reading »
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Posted in CITIES, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, SOIL, UNIVERSITY, WATER | Tagged Ann C. Phillips, Ann P. Stokes, Ann P. Stokes Landscape Architects, Arcadis, bioretention cells, Brett Anderson, Carol Considine, Chesapeake Bay, Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification, Chesterfield Heights, cisterns, climate science, Covering Climate Now, Creek Watershed Project, Dale Morris, David Imburgia, David Waggonner, Donald Whipple, Dutch Dialogues, engineering, erosion, flooding, Fort Monroe, gate, Glenn Oder, grasslands, Hampton, Hampton Roads, Hampton University’s Department of Architecture, Haynes Creek Stormwater Park, HUD, Hurricane, Hurricane Florence, hydrology, Lafayette River, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Larry Atkinson, living shorelines, Mason Andrews, Military, Mujde Erten-Unal, National Disaster Resilience Competition, National Historic Landmark District, Netherlands, New Orleans, Newmarket Creek, Newport News, Norfolk, oceanography, ODU Resilience Collaborative, Old Dominion University, Phoebus, Pippa Brashear, Portsmouth, raised road, Ramiro Diaz, RESILIENCE, Rockefeller Foundation, runoff, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, sea-level rise, Security Center for Climate and Security, Shereen Hughes, SHORELINE, Structures of Coastal Resilience, Terry O’Neill, Tidewater, US Navy, Virginia, Virginia Beach, Waggonner & Ball Architects, Water, water retention, waterfront park, watershed, Wayne Creek, wetlands, wetlands watch | Leave a Comment »
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