New Orleans is ubiquitous in our collective imagination because of its robust sense of place. Tourism brochures and conference programs essentialize the city—its food, music, architecture, and nightlife. In Cityscapes of New Orleans, the geographer Richard Campanella implores the reader to observe the city, mind the details, and ask questions gleaned from tiny clues. He does this by presenting a series of vignettes that span the 300-year history of New Orleans. Campanella argues that there are always new lessons to learn from each discovery, lessons that can guide us about how to exist within the particular cultural geography of New Orleans. (more…)
In Southern Louisiana, Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture is helping the people of Isle de Jean Charles move away from a disappearing coast.
Every year LAM honors two articles that stand out in the realm of landscape architecture with the Bradford Williams Medal—one that has appeared in LAM, and one from outside the magazine. After a nomination and selection process by the LAM Editorial Advisory Committee, this year’s 2017 Bradford Williams Medal LAM winner is Brian Barth for his article “Let’s Beat It,” below, which appeared in the October 2016 issue.
Wenceslaus Billiot often spies dolphins leaping in the bay behind his house in Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. Just shy of his 90th birthday, he remembers his backyard as a vast, forested wetland when he raised his family here as a young man. In dry weather, the land was firm enough for his kids to walk to the store in the nearby hamlet of Chauvin. This June day the water is calm—a fisherman’s paradise—but hurricane season is another story. Billiot, a World War II veteran, former tugboat captain, and boat builder, says every year the water comes higher.
He lives in a dwindling community of the Biloxi–Chitimacha–Choctaw tribe, and like most of the 27 families who remain, Billiot and his wife, Denecia, are making plans to move inland. “But I don’t want to go,” he says in a Cajun accent.
He has no choice. Isle de Jean Charles, once 22,000 acres, has lost 98 percent of its land area since 1955, and state officials warn that (more…)
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Julie Dermansky
From “Let’s Beat It” by Brian Barth in the October 2016 issue,which looks at the efforts of Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture to help a community of Native Americans find a new home after their current one, Isle de Jean Charles, is subsumed by floodwaters, making them among America’s first climate refugees.
“Julie’s signature Stan Smiths with red laces. Liked them so much, she bought 30 pairs!”
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Forbes Lipschitz, ASLA
From “Catch of the Day” by Brett Anderson, in the October 2016 issue, featuring Forbes Lipschitz’s deep dive into catfish farms and Mississippi Delta foodstuffs.
When Forbes Lipschitz, ASLA, was a senior at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, she created a series of larger-than-life portraits. The subjects were genetically modified animals. One portrays a sheep that, rendered bald by an injection, resembles a shar-pei. Another captures a goat bred to produce spider silk protein. “I was basically just interested in the moral ambiguity of biotechnology,” Lipschitz explains. “I was using the portrait as a means to reveal that complexity.”
The portraits constituted Lipschitz’s senior thesis at Pomona, where she studied environmental studies and art, a combo major she designed herself. The animal portraits are precociously accomplished feats of realism notably lacking in judgment. The fluoro-pig, for example, (more…)
Since 2010, the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, D.C., has played host to a speaker series that touches on a wide range of planning issues. One of its most recent lectures was Nature in the City | The City in Nature, featuring Douglas Meffert, the executive director of Audubon Louisiana, and Beth White, the director of the Trust for Public Land’s Chicago office, who each described the opportunities opened to these two cities by introducing active living infrastructure. For more information, please click here.
This season marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and the city of New Orleans finds there is still a long way to go to fully heal. But there are a lot of great revitalization stories, including those involving the beloved green spaces at the heart of the city, old and new. This three-minute video highlights four of these spaces, including the 2013 ASLA award-winning Lafitte Greenway by Design Workshop, which connects City Park to downtown, and Arnold Park, which plays host to Jazz in the Park, a free, weekly concert from September to October.
