The Nuestro Lugar park in North Shore, California, by KDI. Photo by KDI.
THE INAUGURAL CLASS OF KNIGHT FOUNDATION PUBLIC SPACES FELLOWS INCLUDES TWO LANDSCAPE DESIGN ORGANIZATIONS.
A new fellowship from the Knight Foundation focused on public space is putting landscape designers front and center. Of the seven Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellows, two are designers with an emphasis on landscape. The foundation announced in June that Walter Hood, ASLA, of Hood Design Studio and Chelina Odbert of the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) will each receive $150,000. Other grantees are public parks officials, social scientists, and more, who in all will receive more than $1 million.
The goal is to promote work that engenders civic engagement for all citizens, connecting communities, “drawing people out of their homes and encouraging them to meet, play, and discuss important issues, while finding common ground,” the foundation said.(more…)
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
Not long ago, the schoolyard of Eagle Rock Elementary, in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, was a sea of cracked asphalt. Now it has rows of budding trees that divide up the three-acre expanse, and there’s a large grassy area and little enclaves with stumps and log seating away from the hustle and bustle. By offering a variety of settings, the schoolyard gives students the ability to choose where and how they spend their time at recess. Claire Latané, ASLA, the Los Angeles-based ecological designer who led the renovation of the grounds, says it also should improve their mental health.
Latané believes supporting the mental health of students is key to their happiness and well-being. Her conviction is based on decades of academic research by others, her own experience analyzing and designing schoolyards, and her gut feeling about the topic, as both a designer and a mother. Despite all we know about the impact our surroundings have on us—and the progress being made to introduce therapeutic environments to health care facilities—schools aren’t being designed with mental health as a consideration, let alone a priority. They are defensive (and ever more so, even provisionally, given gun violence in schools). Many schools have as much charm as storage facilities these days, and the worst are, in their environmental design, practically penal.
Detail, paving, and construction of cable car line on Broadway, 1891. Photograph by C. C. Langill and William Gray. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).
THE PRESTIGIOUS RESIDENTIAL FELLOWSHIP WELCOMES A NEW GROUP OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROFESSORS.
This spring term’s fellows are architects and landscape architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theater artists, visual artists, poets, nonfiction writers, and fiction writers. Each crop of fellows is selected by a panel of subject matter experts. (more…)
Orff is the founder of SCAPE Landscape Architecture in New York, and the director of the urban design program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The firm’s work has achieved wide renown in recent years for its novel and intensely collaborative approaches (more…)
It’s always been a bit of a mystery why more landscape architects don’t apply for the Rome Prize. It isn’t because it’s obscure: The fellowship is one of the best-known and most prestigious awards for designers and humanities scholars, the kind of résumé bell ringer that’s recognized across the professions. At its center is an 11-month (on average) residency at the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia among a diverse group of scholars, musicians, and artists, and the rich community working in and around the academy. But while the architecture fellowship has always been highly enrolled, perhaps because of the academy’s early association with the architect Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead, and White, the two (on average) fellowships for landscape architecture do not receive nearly the same amount of applications. And that’s a shame: “This is an opportunity not to be passed up,” says Mary Margaret Jones, FASLA, a principal at Hargreaves Associates.
Jones was a Rome Prize fellow in 1997–98, and she describes her fellowship year, when she made topographic models of Renaissance gardens, with unabashed enthusiasm as “life changing” and “transformative.” She now chairs the board of trustees, the first woman and the first landscape architect to do so, and she’d like to see more landscape architects throw their portfolios in the ring.
Despite its lofty origins and association with classical studies, the academy supports a wide range of new work from emerging artists and designers, and the city of Rome is so rich that there are many ways to develop project proposals that overlap with contemporary research and practice. Jones suggests those applying should focus on the portfolio—the body of work is paramount—and that those at any point in their career should apply. “Juries are looking for people for whom it will be game changing,” says Jones. “It really is a time to take time to really look and see things.”
The current Rome Prize fellows in landscape architecture are Kim Karlsrud and Daniel Phillips of Commonstudio and Adam Kuby, an environmental designer from Portland, Oregon. Recent past landscape architecture fellows have included Bradley E. Cantrell and Elizabeth Fain LaBombard, and Walter Hood, ASLA, Thomas Oslund, Peter Walker, FASLA, and Eric Reid Fulford have also been fellows. Applications for the next year’s Rome Prize are due November 1, 2014, and carry a small fee of $30 per application. Late applications will be accepted until November 15 with a fee of $60 per application. More info about the fellowship as well as eligibility and requirements can be found on the AAR’s website.