Decorated with numerous awards including a recent 2012 ASLA Landmark Award of Excellence, Yorkville Village Park is a popular and celebrated series of gardens tucked into Toronto's high-end shopping district. Originally a parking lot built over a subway, a design team composed of Martha Schwartz, Ken Smith,…

One of the world’s leading sculpture parks lies just over 30 miles (50 km) north of Auckland, New Zealand; the passion of art collector Alan Gibbs, Gibbs Farm combines a spectacular setting on New Zealand’s Kaipara Harbour with monumental…

Dear Readers,

The entire essay can be found at: http://m.designobserver.com/places/feature/landscape-is-our-sex/31228/

David wrote:…

THE LANDSCAPE CHANGES OVER TIME........

When a landscape design is initially installed, is is sometimes hard for the homeowner to envision how it will drastically change over time. Trees and shrubs will grow, stone and other hardscape items will weather and new shade patterns will be introduced by…

This week was busier than I would have liked, what with tax day and Portal 2.  I did want to give you a quick progress update however. 

I tweaked some of the major areas in my deck and public turf area, refining shapes, and moving the parking slightly.  The combination of the changes create spaces that are more vibrant, draw your eye towards the areas you want to look, and have good spaces created for gardening and herbs (Sea Foam Green).…

Now that I have a site and a client, the first thing to do is to walk the site, and create a site analysis based on what the client needs and what the site and borrowed landscape provides.  My first cut at the site analysis stayed at a large scale and was somewhat bold.

This analysis was made with Sharpies on a trace sheet laid over the base map, and serves as a first…

Recently, as I have continued my search for full-time employment, I've forced myself to take another look at myself in terms of what I can do to improve my chances in the hyper-competitive job market of today.  Without boring you with the full list, I'll just say that I figured out a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Starting today, I am going to run my own design studios.  I'm going to run it similar to how some of my MLA studios were.  I have 6 weeks to go from site visit to…

A few weeks ago I posted a blog asking for critiques on some 3D models components I had made.  I posted it on IGN, Wordpress, and Land8Lounge.  The response was fairly low, and I tried posting it as a…

Diana Balmori understands the power of visibility.



Her firm, Balmori Associates (which by the way is made up of super talented dedicated designers and amazing design alums), has projects around the globe and is known for highly creative landscapes…

THE INTERNATIONAL LAMP LIGHTING SOLUTIONS AWARDS 2011

values the creativity, innovation…

One of the fairly unique features of this site is the granite outcropping that runs along its eastern edge. Giving a feature like this both realism and readability is something that requires multiple

layers of textures, with manual manipulation required to give it an

organic, natural feel.

I am again using a photo I took as the base for my granite material. This…

Congratulations to Gábor Horváth for his award-winning model, Tokyo 100 x 100 for the SketchUp 3D Challenge, Shape Your Landscape! The next 3D…

Dirt is one material that, while rarely fully exposed, is often a base material that other elements are placed over. Many times these elements will have gaps between them where there is exposed dirt, whether it be in a mulch-less planting bed, or in areas like a dense forest as we have here. You cold also combine the dirt with another layer of material, like a scattered moss or leaf-litter, to add some depth and realism. I have used this in 3D models before with good results, but in a 2D…

As it is with many things, my technique for turf, and the similar techniques I use for other materials, were born of other needs. Namely, I hated the way my turf looked in 3D renderings. You could use a created texture, but it never looked organic. You could use a photo, but you got TERRIBLE tiling effects. You could do a slight color overlay to soften the impact of the tiling, but the color was always off, and you would lose to much of the internal texture. I tried all of these, before…

When starting a digital rendering, just like with a hand rendering, the first step is always to create the lines you are going to render within. Generally people use lines directly taken from AutoCAD for digital renderings as these are the "cleanest" lines, and allow for some shortcuts such as exporting each area as its own file.

This method, which I have used often, involves turning every layer off…

After about a week and a half of fine tuning techniques, taking tens of photos for reference use, and taking hundreds of screen shots, my relaunch of Tutorial Tuesday is imminent. This time, I am adding a twist to the formula. Last year, I came up with the idea of doing the tutorials based on a single project, and walking you through my process. This started with my SketchUp models. Unfortunately, soon after I began making the project model, intended to be a base for a new website, I decided…