I signed the Women’s Landscape Equality (re)Solution, which appears in full on page 143, as soon as it came out last fall. In some way, it was a redress of the times much earlier in my career when I’d failed to observe the very first commitment the (re)Solution asks everyone to make: “We condemn inequality wherever we see it.” I saw inequality right in front of me at a job I used to have, more than once, and did nothing.
The boss in this case went through staff the way some of us go through facial tissues, so we were frequently interviewing new candidates for jobs. After an interview, in private, the conversation would become discomfiting when the candidate, however qualified, had been a woman of childbearing age. “Did you see that ring on her finger?” the boss once asked me after an interview. “You know what comes next.” (more…)
Twelve Colorado State University Master of Landscape Architecture graduates are suing the school for promising to become an accredited degree program and failing to follow through, even seven years after the program began.
The lawsuit alleges that the school promised to pursue accreditation after an initial class had graduated, as Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board (LAAB) regulations require. Shelley Don, of Don, Galleher & Associates in Denver, is the attorney for all 12 plaintiffs. “The students understood that they were not getting into an accredited program,” Don said, “but were made to understand that the school was applying for accreditation, and that their role was going to be a necessary component of the accreditation process.”
E-mails transcribed in the formal complaint, and first reported by the Coloradoan, show that Brad Goetz, a Colorado State landscape architecture professor and the director of the MLA program, repeatedly assured the plaintiffs that the school was indeed seeking MLA accreditation. (more…)
A federal judge has halted Pier 55 in New York City’s Hudson River Park, a constructed island of 2.75 acres expected to cost $200 million.
Plans for Pier 55, by the British design sensation Thomas Heatherwick and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, call for a sloping, verdant extravaganza atop hundreds of mushroom-shaped concrete pilings driven into the riverbed. The new parkland was designed to do double duty as performance space and would be largely paid for by the billionaire Barry Diller and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, who had established a nonprofit to maintain the place and establish programming for the venues.
But now, owing to a lawsuit by the City Club of New York and other opponents, the permit for Pier 55 has been revoked (more…)
Joshua Tree National Park in California, where the park’s signature Joshua trees are threatened by climate change. Photo by Zach Mortice.
The national parks advocacy nonprofit—created by the federal government—is pushing back against the new administration on all fronts.
In the months since Donald Trump’s election, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit parks advocacy group, has taken aim at oil and gas drilling bills and rule changes from Republican majorities in Congress, draconian budget cut proposals from the White House, and a host of Trump-appointed agency administrators who’ll affect the health of the national park system. It’s even addressed the coarsening public rhetoric around basic civil rights granted to American citizens. These are all issues Theresa Pierno, NPCA’s president and CEO, sees as under assault by a cast of characters including climate-change deniers, pollution bystanders, and resource-extraction enthusiasts. All are newly empowered with Trump in the White House.
When the Trump administration ordered the Department of the Interior (DOI), the parent agency of the National Park Service (NPS), to stop tweeting(more…)
The city of Fresno sits in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley. When you drive into town from Los Angeles, the landscape is agricultural and framed by roadside eucalyptus trees. It gives way to off-ramp clusters of gas stations, fast-food chains, and light industrial warehouses. Most of Fresno’s neighborhoods, after nearly 50 years of decentralization and flight from the urban core, sprawl north, tracking the edge of the San Joaquin River. The city’s historic downtown and civic center are a near ghost town.
At the heart of downtown is the Fulton Mall. In the early part of the 20th century, it was Fresno’s main drag, Fulton Street, six blocks lined with banks and department stores. In 1964, the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo turned the street into a modernist pedestrian mall as part of a master plan for downtown Fresno by Victor Gruen Associates. Photographs of the period show a wide promenade full of people flanked by the awnings of existing buildings. Daffodils peek out of Eckbo’s sculptural planting beds, fountains gurgle, and a clock tower by Jan de Swart, an expressive interpretation of a historic form, unambiguously marks the mall as the new town square.
Today, the mall is the center of a fight over downtown Fresno’s redevelopment. The city government, with a $14 million federal transportation grant, supports plans to put a new complete street down the center of the mall. Preservationists plan to file a lawsuit to block the scheme. The rhetorical standoff between sides comes down to revive versus destroy, but the conditions on the ground tell a more complicated story about the role of design as a catalyst and a scapegoat in a changing urban landscape.
