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.
