Image courtesy of Land8: Landscape Architects Network.
The landscape architecture websites Land8 and Landscape Architects Network (LAN) have merged. The resulting media platform aims to add focus to original content creation while serving an international audience. “We want to be the most visited website in landscape architecture,” says Matt Alcide, Land8’s majority owner.
LAN will largely dissolve into Land8 with the merger, as the Arlington, Virginia-based Land8 will (more…)
LAM will be in the house at this year’s LABASH, the annual student-led landscape architecture conference, which looks to be the sleeper hit of the spring. Hosted by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, in San Luis Obispo, California, the gathering’s program includes Kona Gray, ASLA; Mia Lehrer, FASLA; Susan Van Atta, FASLA; and Laurie Olin, FASLA—just a few of the big names who will be attending and meeting with students.
The three-day conference combines portfolio reviews, panels, tours, charrettes, and workshops organized by and for landscape architecture students. It’s LAM’s first year attending LABASH, and we are pretty excited about the slate of events and people coming together this year. And let’s face it, California’s legendary Central Coast is no small draw.
Associate Editor Jennifer Reut will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about how the magazine is put together, and ASLA staff Leighton Yates, James Taylor, Barbara Fles, and Debbie Steinberg will all be there as well. Among the many ASLA activities at LABASH are a “parklet” in the expo area, a brunch for ASLA student chapter presidents, and the opening ceremony with ASLA President K. Richard Zwiefel, FASLA. We’ll also be around for panels, reviews, and workshops throughout the weekend.
Drop by and say hello and look out for the LAM and ASLA staff at LABASH from March 19 to 21, 2015. Registration is still open, but if you can’t make it, follow LAM@landarchmag and ASLA @landarchitects on Twitter or follow the #LABASH2015 hashtag.
A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye.
This month’s issue of the Queue delights in OLIN Studio’s new digital magazine, absorbs the inevitable wave of backflow on Rebuild by Design, and ponders the goat invasion of Long Island.
CATCHING UP WITH…
Jan Ellen Spiegel explores the landscape architect Alexander Felson’s work along the Connecticut coast (“Sooner or Later at Seaside,” LAM, November 2013), expressing his eye for “opportunity” when working on everything from sea-level rise adaptations to rain gardens described as “designed experiments.”
Something interesting is afoot at OLIN Studio (“A Cultural Homecoming,” LAM, January 2014), which has released the first issue of Reframe, a digital magazine with the focus on “exploring the complex and evolving issues facing our cities and environments.” With a focus on “Resiliency,” the first collection of features looks at climate change adaptation projects in California, New York, and the Midwest, as well as a roundtable with Henk Ovink, who has been running the Rebuild by Design initiative for the federal government.
There’s oil, and then there’s water. The New Scientist reports on the potentially devastating consequences on the water supply from the recent conflicts in Iraq. As control of the dams in Haditha, Mosul, Samarra, and Fallujah has fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents, there are fears that they could weaponize the water supply by withholding water to Shiite cities and farms to the south, or let loose a catastrophic flood downstream that would wipe out Mosul and rise through Baghdad as well.
FIELD STUDIES
Before there were horses, there were horseshoe crabs? Four hundred fifty million years ago, the ground 40 feet below downtown Lexington, Kentucky, was a wet, steamy place on the continent Laurentia in the southern hemisphere. A local geologist takes the columnist Tom Eblen of the Herald-Leader back, and down, in time.
Amid the excitement around the recent winners of the Rebuild by Design competition, questions are being raised about the Meadowlands project and the many regulations it must satisfy, habitat it could alter, and concerns about floodwaters displaced to nearby communities.
Clipped-grass turf is the most heavily used material in most American landscapes. The NASA researcher Cristina Milesi used satellite imagery to estimate that lawn occupies some 49,000 square miles of the United States, and it’s increasing by roughly 600 square miles per year, according to a study conducted by Paul Robbins and Trevor Birkenholtz of Ohio State University’s Department of Geography.
Yet, since the 1950s, landscape architects have typically ceded decisions concerning this vast area to turf-industry technicians. Turf became an industrial product after World War II. Which grass to use was dictated by mowers, sprayers, blowers, and spreaders, and choices were limited to a very few varieties of grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis) and hybrid Bermuda grasses (Cynodon spp.), that lent themselves to chemical maintenance. Today, though, new alternatives are emerging that landscape architects can use to create healthier and more aesthetically dynamic models for what a domestic grassland can be—a source of environmental renewal rather than an ecological villain. It will also please the increasing numbers of clients who dislike not only the sterile monotony of conventional turf and its high maintenance costs, but also, more critical, the threat that the required maintenance chemicals pose to kids, animals, and communities.
A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye.
In this dispatch of the Queue, the staff steps gingerly over the four million Earth Day press releases and the Frederick Law Olmsted birthday doodles to read about urban drawing, urban light, and soil science.
The Architectural League of New York and Columbia University’s GSAPP will host The Five Thousand Pound Life: The Energy Issue, a symposium on energy and architecture, on Saturday, May 10, 2014, at 2:00 p.m.
The exhibition on the architect Lebbeus Woods, which has already developed a cult following after stops in San Francisco and Michigan, alights briefly at New York’s Drawing Center for a stay from April 17 to June 15, 2014.