May 29, 2018 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
Stoss’s greenway begins just south of the Gateway Arch, amid a tangle of freeways and rail lines. Image courtesy Stoss.
The Chouteau Greenway (pronounced “show-toe”), which is planned to run about five miles from Forest Park on St. Louis’s western edge to the newly rejuvenated Gateway Arch National Park at the Mississippi River, is not a park. It’s not even a park system. It’s a landscape-driven development strategy for an entire swath of the city. Its goal is to break down the city’s stark north-south racial divide by attracting St. Louisans from across a socioeconomic spectrum toward a corridor defined by a tangle of transit infrastructure. Along the way are some of the region’s most eminent education, medical, and cultural institutions.
The plan is led by the Great Rivers Greenway, a public agency that works to connect the city’s three rivers with a network of greenway trails (which currently measures 117 miles). It envisions these often desolate and transit-scaled corridors as a series of parks, memorials, trails, and art spaces that tell the cultural history of the city. The proposed greenway could put St. Louis’s two premier urban landscapes—and the city itself—on a new pedestal. But inspiration for the winning plan from the Great Rivers Greenway’s design competition, concluded earlier this month, draws from subtle histories.
The winning prescriptions, by Stoss, call for reviving ecologies long paved over and making visible the erased narratives of African American communities. “We wanted to use this project as an opportunity to unearth these buried histories,” says Stoss’s founding director, Chris Reed, FASLA. Especially in its treatment of the bulldozed African American neighborhood of Mill Creek Valley, Continue Reading »
Posted in ART, CITIES, LAM ONLINE, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, REAL ESTATE, RECREATION, STREETS, TRANSPORTATION | Tagged African-American, Amanda Williams, art, art installation, Chouteau Greenway, Chris Reed, Damon Davis, forest, Forest Park, foundation, Gateway Arch National Park, gentrification, Great Rivers Greenway, greenway, Interstate 64, land bridge, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Marlon Blackwell Architects, Mill Creek, Mill Creek Valley, Missouri, MVVA, Neighborhood, orchard, plantings, prairie, race, segregation, St. Louis, Stoss, subterranean, Susan Trautman, The Loop and the Stitch, Toni Griffin, trail, trestle, urban planning, urban renewal, Zach Mortice | 1 Comment »
May 24, 2018 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Image courtesy Traction team members.
From “Where Least Matters Most” by Katarina Katsma, ASLA, in the May 2018 issue, an interview with Coco Alarcón, whose design collective Traction is forging new models of grassroots participatory design in the developing world.
“Floating garden framework.”
–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 ASLA, AWARDS, HEALING GARDENS, INTERVIEW, LAM ONLINE, PEOPLE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PRACTICE, STUDENTS | Tagged Coco Alarcón, Developing World, grassroots, health, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Peru, Traction | Leave a Comment »
May 22, 2018 by Brad McKee
BY BRADFORD MCKEE
A quirky nook at UC Berkeley memorializes Bill Callaway in style.
Peter Walker, FASLA, has thought quite a lot about memorial design. With Michael Arad, he completed the World Trade Center Memorial in Lower Manhattan, which opened in 2011. But a more recent call about a memorial commission was quite personal. It came from Jennifer Wolch, the dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, near where Walker has his firm, PWP Landscape Architecture. She wanted to create a memorial within the school’s Wurster Hall to William Byrd Callaway, known to his friends as Bill. Callaway, who died in 2014 at the age of 71, joined Walker at SWA in 1967 and eventually became its CEO—and a legend to his colleagues.
Wolch “had quite an interesting space, but it was really ugly,” Walker said. “Everyone just threw stuff in it.” The space is a two-story light well for which no use was specified when the building opened in 1964. Faculty members at that time debated its best use but couldn’t agree on what that would be. “The decision was made to put all plans on the back burner,” Wolch said. “For 52 years.” Continue Reading »
Posted in LAM MAGAZINE, MEMORIAL, PEOPLE, SCHOOLS, THE BACK, UNIVERSITY | Tagged Berkeley, Bill’s Beach, Brad McKee, BrightView Design Group, Jennifer Wolch, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, memorial, Michael Arad, Peter Walker, PWP Landscape Architecture, University of California, William Byrd Callaway, World Trade Center Memorial, Wurster Hall | Leave a Comment »
May 17, 2018 by zachmortice
BY ZACH MORTICE
The Upstate Archipelago proposal. Image courtesy Cornell Design, H+N+S, and SOAR (Strengthening Our Area Residents) of the Cornell University Cooperative Extension.
New York’s Erie Canal once projected a young nation’s power and commercial ambitions across half a continent. Connecting New York City and the Hudson River north of Albany all the way to the Great Lakes, at 363 miles long, it was the second largest canal in the world when it opened in 1825, and one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of America’s early history. It reduced bulk commodity costs by 90 percent, according to some estimates, and it’s been immortalized in stories and songs ever since.
But in the 201 years since it began construction, the canal has been leapfrogged by nearly every manner of freight and commodity transit: rail, road, pipelines, and even the now-navigable St. Lawrence River. Vessel traffic on the canal peaked in the early 1950s, and recreational boating peaked in 1989.
To reverse this slide, the New York State Canal Corporation is hosting the Reimagine the Canals Competition to re-envision how this feat of 19th-century land engineering can be better integrated into the 21st century. Continue Reading »
Posted in COMPETITIONS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, LAM ONLINE, NEW YORK CITY, PARKS, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, RECREATION, REGION, RESILIENCE, REUSE, SHORELINE, TRANSPORTATION, WATER | Tagged Canal, Cayuga-Seneca Canal, Champlain Canal, Clare Lyster, Clare Lyster Urbanism and Architecture, Cornell, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Design Competition, Empire Trail, Erie Canal, Frank Talsma, Great Lakes, H+N+S, Hudson River, industry, Infrastructure, Jamie Vanucchi, John Ronan Architects, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Maria Goula, Mia Lehrer, New York Power Authority, New York State, New York State Canal Corporation, Oswego Canal, recreation, Reimagining the Canals, Steven Gosset, University of Illinois at Chicago, Urban Engineers, wetland, winter, Zach Mortice | Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2018 by LAM Staff
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Jaymi Heimbuch.
From “Closer Quarters” by Jeff Link in the May 2018 issue, about researchers’ attempts to study how wild urban canines such as foxes and coyotes adjust to city life.
“Field test and tag.”
–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 CITIES, HABITAT, LAM ONLINE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, SPECIES, Uncategorized, UNIVERSITY, WILDLIFE | Tagged Art Director's Cut, COYOTE, Jeff Link, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Migration, range, Research, urban, urban canid, Vox, wildlife | Leave a Comment »
May 15, 2018 by Katarina Katsma
BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA
Traction believes landscape architecture is for the people, not just the elite.
In 2016, as a student at the University of Washington, Coco Alarcón won the ASLA Student Residential Design Award of Excellence for his project to improve public health by creating food gardens in a soggy, stressed neighborhood in Iquitos, Peru. He was also named a National Olmsted Scholar finalist that same year. Since then, Alarcón, who is Peruvian, has been working with a multidisciplinary collective he co-founded called Traction (formerly the Informal Urban Communities Initiative) to try to bring his ideas to fruition. Using research, community outreach, activism, and educational workshops, Traction works with people from communities where resources are scarce to create new social and physical infrastructure that promotes health, safety, and beauty for residents. LAM recently caught up with Alarcón to find out how his group’s work has progressed toward giving people, as he hopes, the motivation they need to transform their environments into equitable, healthy places.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
What are you working on now?
One of our projects is to design and construct a landscape architecture intervention in a slum community and measure the impacts on human, ecological, and environmental health. For example, we are documenting changes in human microbiome, water quality, mental health, and biodiversity of birds and amphibians—among other measurements—in the community to understand the effects of a productive community garden.
Another project focuses on the collection of literature, local experiences, and interviews with experts from different disciplines to understand the role that landscape architecture has on the pandemic of vector-borne diseases related to the Aedes aegypti mosquito, including Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Continue Reading »
Posted in ASLA, AWARDS, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, HEALING GARDENS, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, INTERVIEW, LAM MAGAZINE, PEOPLE, PRACTICE, RESILIENCE, STUDENTS | Tagged activism, animals, ASLA Student Residential Design Award of Excellence, Coco Alarcón, community garden, community outreach, data, design activism, Developing World, disease, ecological remediation, educational workshops, elitism, equity, evidence-based, fauna, FOOD, food security, GARDENS, health, Informal settlement, Informal Urban Communities Initiative, injury reduction, Iquitos, Katarina Katsma, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, mental health and well-being, microbiomes, mosquito, National Olmsted Scholar, Peru, PRACTICE, public health, quantifiable, Research, Residential Gardens as a Health Strategy in Impoverished Communities in Developing Countries: A Case Study in Iquitos, slum, social health, Traction, University of Washington | Leave a Comment »
May 10, 2018 by LAM Staff
BY JEFF LINK
A two-year study of coyotes and red foxes reveals the impact of urban environments.
Over the past half century, coyotes have expanded their range across the continental United States and live in many North American cities—literally, in some cases, in people’s backyards. Their increased presence, says Katie Coyne, a senior associate planner and ecologist at Asakura Robinson in Austin, Texas, is one reason for landscape architects, planners, and wildlife managers to reexamine the design implications of large natural areas beyond their role as habitat for migratory birds and pollinators. Think of these areas as preferred foraging zones, she says, functional landscapes that accommodate coyotes and limit potential conflict with people and other species.
A recently published two-year study of urban canids in and around Madison, Wisconsin, sheds light on the issue. Researchers used radio collars and statistical analysis to assess the movement and home ranges of coyotes and foxes through a mosaic of residential, commercial, and public natural areas, including tallgrass prairie and oak savanna located within the University of Wisconsin–Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserve.
Breaking from established behavioral patterns in rural areas, where coyotes will typically displace or kill red foxes to eliminate competition for resources, the two species were observed foraging within a hundred yards of one another for extended periods of time. On a weekly basis for a month, a pair of coyotes visited Continue Reading »
Posted in CITIES, FORWARD, HABITAT, LAM MAGAZINE, PARKS, SPECIES, UNIVERSITY, WILDLIFE | Tagged Asakura Robinson, COYOTE, David Drake, dog, foraging, fox, habitat, Jeff Link, Katie Coyne, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Madison, Marcus Mueller, Migration, PARKS, PLOS ONE, prairie, predators, preferred foraging zones, range, refuge, savanna, territory, University of Wisconsin–Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserve, Urban Canid Project, urban canids, Urban predators, Wisconsin | Leave a Comment »
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