Lone Oaks Farm had a master plan as ambitious as they come. Implementation has been rocky.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The cabins opened in summer 2023, but the site was cleared prior to construction. Image by Penny Russell.
From the beginning, the idea behind Lone Oaks Farm in Middleton, Tennessee, was ambitious. Acquired by the University of Tennessee (UT) in 2015, the 1,200-acre property was to be a new home for 4-H summer camps; offer hunter education programs and a world-class sporting clays course; host corporate retreats and private events; and serve as a model for ecological restoration and environmental conservation, all while continuing to operate as a working cattle farm. The goal was to connect people of all ages, especially youth, to the Tennessee landscape, which the farm would do through education, sport, hospitality, food, and agricultural science.Continue reading Form Follows Funding→
For the past 20 years, the places where President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed have been marked on Dallas’s Elm Street on the north side of Dealey Plaza by two white Xs—not as part of an official commemoration, but at the hands of what Mark Lamster, the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, describes as “assassination tourist guides.” “[They] come and spray-paint these really tawdry Xs on the ground, and every time the city tries to erase them, they just get spray-painted back there,” says Lamster, who began thinking about Dealey Plaza and its shortcomings in 2013, during the 50th anniversary of the assassination.Continue reading Creative Writing→
Revamping the landscape history curriculum to uproot racist histories.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Participants toured sites such as Piscataway Park and the National Colonial Farm. Photo by Andrea Roberts.
On the evening of June 11, 2020, amid mass protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Marc Miller, ASLA, tweeted: “It’s time y’all. Revive American landscape history and reboot it to reflect the long history of systemic racism that helps to make it.”Continue reading Past Imperfect→
A survey sheds light on why midcareer women leave design firms.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Maya Sharfi, the founder of Build Yourself. Photo by Jessie Wyman Photography.
Rachel Wilkins was 28 years old when she got her first job in landscape architecture. Since graduate school, she had dreamed of working for a woman, but at the large Houston firm where she’d been hired—which Wilkins declined to name—all her bosses were men. Though she had “two wonderful male mentors,” she says she also regularly felt demeaned as a woman, passed over for promotions that went to male colleagues or, when the firm was called out for its lack of women in leadership, to women with less experience but more social capital. Her bosses, Wilkins says, seemed to “consider themselves the dads of the office,” a dynamic she says is omnipresent in landscape architecture—and problematic. “I don’t need a dad,” Wilkins says. “I need a boss who’s invested in my growth.” Continue reading Roadblocks Remain→
Prioritizing health and safety helps focus resources and design skills on rural schoolyards.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The redesigned play area at Chiloquin Elementary School serves both students and the greater community. Photo courtesy Trust for Public Land.
Until recently, when the children of Oregon’s Chiloquin Elementary School went to recess, their play equipment consisted of a buckling blacktop, a single slide, a handful of swings, and some old tires. It was so dismal, recalls Art Ochoa, a retired principal who grew up in Chiloquin, that whenever students went on field trips to places like Klamath Falls, “the first thing the kids asked was, ‘Do we get to stop at a park? Can we go play?’”Continue reading Better By A Yard→
Preserving the private gardens of a pioneering landscape architect should have been a breeze.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Many of the landscape features seen in this portrait of Joe and Liz Yamada, from the May 1977 issue of San Diego Magazine, still exist today. Photo by Zenia Cleigh, courtesy Insun Lee and Troy Wu.
When Joseph Yamada and his wife, Elizabeth, died within nine days of each other in May 2020, obituaries and appreciations appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and NPR. Most focused on the couple’s incredible story: Born two days apart in 1930, the two met at age 11 at a Japanese internment camp.
They later attended the same high school, studied together at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved back to San Diego, where Joe Yamada became one of the most celebrated landscape architects of his generation and Liz Yamada was the first Asian faculty member at San Diego High School, later joining her husband’s firm, Wimmer Yamada & Associates, as a partner.Continue reading Honor Roll→
A pair of landscape designers come up with a winning idea for the land-starved Louisiana coast.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Larix Underground’s floating planter is designed to be accessible in multiple locations, including alongside docks or even in the open water. Image courtesy Larix Underground.
Like many residents of southern Louisiana, the Indigenous residents of Grand Bayou Village, located among the southernmost reaches of Plaquemines Parish in the Mississippi River Delta and accessible only by boat, live with the varied effects of coastal land loss.Continue reading Made for the Marsh→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
