Tag Archives: By P. Sisson

The Lab in the Backyard

USC’s Landscape Justice Initiative aims to give students grassroots perspective on their field.

By Patrick Sisson

Installing plants at a Test Plot site with USC student Yiyi Peng, studio instructor and USC Test Plot lead Jen Toy, and local resident Maria Arroyo, a member of the Abuelas de Parque. Image courtesy USC Architecture.

In 2018, after discovering that city arborists planned to plant Australian and South African plant species in response to a future of sustained droughts, the Los Angeles landscape architecture studio Terremoto launched Test Plot, a small-scale scheme designed to engage community groups in growing native plants in city parks and ultimately show that residents can play a role in maintaining the city’s landscape. “There’s a fear of maintenance,” Jenny Jones, ASLA, a partner at Terremoto, says. “We want to celebrate the maintenance.” Continue reading The Lab in the Backyard

Supernatural

L.A. River advocate Kat Superfisky is the subject of a new docuseries.

By Patrick Sisson

“It’s hard to tell the story of the L.A. River without flying through it,” says Michael Todoran, a landscape designer, lecturer, and podcast host. Along with his students at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in January Todoran began filming “Superfisky: The Allure of the Urban Wild,” the first episode of Larchitect, a docuseries devoted to landscape architecture. Continue reading Supernatural

American Gothic 2.0

A high-tech greenhouse developer argues that preserving the agricultural landscape requires a sustainable, scalable start-up.

By Patrick Sisson

The AppHarvest facility during construction in the summer of 2020. A key argument for this kind of concentrated, tech-heavy agriculture is that it will help keep other land from being developed. Photo courtesy AppHarvest.

One of the first things visitors will notice inside the sprawling AppHarvest complex—a 60-acre, 2.76-million-square-foot, 30-foot-high greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky—is the blinding, almost antiseptic whiteness. Continue reading American Gothic 2.0