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.
• Kevan Williams’s article on preserving folk art landscapes picked up a bit of traction when we published it back in December 2013, but we missed the Utne Reader’s hat tip in its piece on unconventional and underrepresented art spaces and SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), a group aimed at their preservation.

OUR WOBBLY WORLD

• Climate change comes to Norfolk, Virginia, a “sea-level-rise hot spot” along the Atlantic coast. The sea is rising, but the land is also sinking. Near an inlet, a church now puts the tide schedules on its website to let the congregation know whether they can get to services and, nearby, the Chrysler Museum of Art prepares for the worst behind a flood wall.
• 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.
• John King of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that while the city worries about its building heights, there should likewise be concern for adapting to a four-foot rise in water levels by 2100. “We need to be nimble as it expands,” he says.
• The Landscape Architecture Foundation debuted a new feature as part of its ongoing effort to publish research on landscape performance. The new searchable “Collections” site will consist of everything from case studies to scholarly works.
• 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.
• The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s latest threatened landscape is Greynolds Park, in Miami-Dade County. Advocates filed a lawsuit against North Miami Beach’s city council’s decision to rezone an area next to the park for high-rise development, arguing that its construction would have a “devastating effect on the the park’s myriad scenic, cultural, and ecological values.”

DISTRACT ME FROM MY DEADLINE DEPT.

• The goat takeover of Long Island starts this summer.
• Climate change as an alien invasion? Jon Stewart thinks so.

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