In August, the Cultural Landscape Foundation announced that it was launching a major new international prize in landscape architecture. On Tuesday, the foundation made it official that the prize will be named for the landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA, for her “leading role in addressing environmental, ecological, and social issues and the impact of climate change.”
The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize will be awarded every two years beginning in 2021, and will be the only prize in the profession with a $100,000 award attached. Recipients will also be the subject of events sponsored by the foundation that focus on their practice to show the development and achievements of landscape architecture. (more…)
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. (more…)
Since 2012, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has brought in big names in landscape architecture—Cochran, Van Valkenburgh, Galí-Izard, and more—to speak as part of its Landscape Lectures series. Each lecture is roughly an hour long and highlights the work and achievements of the speaker. The above video contains a playlist of the available lectures through the museum’s YouTube channel, starting with one of the first lectures in 2012 up through June 2015. The next lecture in the 2015–2016 series will feature Walter Hood on November 12. For more information, please click here.
A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye. In this month’s issue of the Queue, the staff wades through a myriad of headlines to find $2.4 billion might not be enough for New York City’s new green infrastructure, reads about gender and urban farming, and slows down to enjoy a dancing stoplight.
CATCHING UP WITH…
Frequent contributor Alex Ulam looks at the benefits of New York City’s plan to spend $2.4 billion on green infrastructure, including stormwater management in priority neighborhoods—but some wonder whether it reaches far enough.
The Van Alen Institute (“Take Aim at New Orleans’s Vacant Land,” August 12, 2014) is a veritable competition machine this fall. They’ve just launched a new effort with the U.S. National Park Service, National Parks Now, aimed at reenvisioning the four national parks.
FIELD STUDIES
With urban agriculture’s popularity on the rise, Michael Tortorello of The New York Times wonders why the majority of workers are female (and why it matters).
San Francisco’s new tax breaks for converting vacant lots into urban farms might not make sense when there’s a lack of affordable housing in the city.
D.C. residents are slowly shaping alleyways from dark corners of miscreant activity to vibrant social assets for the community—one alley at a time.
For every mile of road in Nashville and its county, there is only half a mile of sidewalks, according to the Tennessean. And the city’s new flat rate fee that allows developers to opt out of building sidewalks altogether isn’t going to help.
An Op-Ed in the New York Times says Colony Collapse Disorder is in the rear-view mirror, but it’s still too early to breathe a sigh of relief: The United States averages a 30 percent loss of our pollinator friends annually.
Think the drought in California isn’t so bad? These before and after photos suggest otherwise.
A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye.
CATCHING UP WITH…
Annette Wilkus, FASLA, ASLA’s VP of Professional Practice, talks to Forbes magazine about her company, SiteWorks, and her career in construction management.
Al-Azhar Park, in Cairo, covered in LAM in April 2011, is part of PBS’s e2 series. The series, narrated by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, looks at “the economies of being environmentally conscious.” Not new (2009), but new to us, and an intriguing look at the city before its current turmoil.
Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and the secretary of energy during the Clinton years, weighs in on Politico about what it will take to meet the Obama administration’s clean-energy goals in “America’s Third-World Energy Grid.”
What’s wrong with calling them “invasives”? Plenty, apparently. (But if bishop’s weed shows up at your place, you should still call a Realtor.)
OUT AND ABOUT
The Cities and Nature: Urban Ecological Design and Planning conference at the University of Texas at Austin (February 27–March 1, 2014) will reprise the ground-breaking conference that led to Ecological Design and Planning (1997).
A bit late but worth keeping an eye on: the Rivers of the Anthropocene project just held its first conference at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. The event brought an international group together to focus on “rivers and their landscapes as human-nature entanglements,” particularly the Ohio and Tyne River systems.
