Author: Lucy Wang

Acclaimed international architecture firm BIG cleverly slipped a multifunctional gymnasium beneath a molehill courtyard, blending a social arena up top with a new sports facility down below. (inhabitat)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• Philadelphia-based Groundswell Design Group transforms a vacant lot into a lively Pop Up Beer Garden with upcycled shipping containers, colorful umbrellas and lights, locally sourced fare, and an array of artistic and cultural activities. (World Landscape Architect)

• What happens when a plant biologist and a landscape architect team up to create a garden on a California hillside? Surprising plant combos at every turn! (Sunset)

• ASLA is hiring a web and graphic designer. (ASLA)

• Welcome to the United States of Mulch. Thomas Rainer asks why Americans love mulch so much–it’s not a universally shared addiction–and looks to promote “green mulch” in his upcoming book. (grounded design)

& RELATED

• Oh, honey. High above suntanning New Yorkers, honeybees are hard at work atop the seven-story rooftop of One Bryant Park, where their pollination efforts help expedite the growth of sedums, maintain the health of green roofs, and create delicious honey, perfect for office gifts. (NY Times)

• Shanghai is in the midst of an intense, record-setting heat wave. Experts blame it on a variety of factors, including climate change, Shanghai’s construction density, and the decreasing numbers of green space. (NPR)

• Urbanists get ready to geek out! Code for America’s street-sectioning Street Mix App has just been released to public beta. (Code For America) 

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!

Say hello to drip irrigation in its funky new form. Aqueduct is a 3D-printed modular mini planter system that can be set up in numerous different configurations. (Urban Gardens)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• A highway that has long choked the flow of the Everglades and upset the ecosystem is slowly being raised, segment by segment, to allow water to flow underneath the road. (Landscape Architecture Magazine)

• Open Voice sits down with Principal Thomas Woltz, FASLA, CLARB and Senior Associate Jeffrey Longhenry of Nelson Byrd Woltz to discuss their sustainable design approach to the Naval Cemetery Landscape project. (Nature Sacred)

• James Patchett, FASLA, has been announced the 2013 recipient of the Christian Petersen Design Award by the Iowa State University College of Design. Patchett is founder and president of one of the nation’s first sustainable design firms, Conservation Design Forum, and has been involved in a number of other sustainable groups and designs. (Iowa State University)

• “Green in the City,” a national landscape design competition to launch mid-September, challenges designers to transform a 70′ x 100′ section of Omaha’s urban core into a model green space. The winning design team will receive $200,000 to implement their vision. (The Dirt)

& RELATED

• Grist looks at the transformative potential of a parking space, from bike corral parking to hot tub parklet. (Grist)

• China’s abandoned steel mills are polluting the environment and are strongly correlated to increasing numbers of cancer victims. Brownfield remediation is a long and costly process, however, and one that the government is neglecting to prioritize. (china dialogue)

• Consistently voted one of the most livable cities in the world, Vancouver owes much of its success to smart planning strategies that focused on pedestrian-oriented development. (Streetsblog)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!

Crochet Queen Olek takes yarn bombing on a whole new track after covering an entire locomotive with crochet in just two days. (Inhabitat)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• SWA Group selected to lead a team of design firms in conducting a $500,000 study of how to best develop Fort Wayne’s downtown riverfronts in Indiana. (News Sentinel) 

• St. Louis’ “Park over the Highway” broke ground last Friday–a long anticipated project that aims to reconnect the downtown area with the iconic Gateway Arch and riverfront. Though Eric Jaffe acknowledge’s the progress the city has made, it would have been better to demolish the underutilized highway and to construct a park closer to grade-level of the riverfront. (Atlantic Cities)

• Newark celebrated the opening of Newark Riverfront Park last Saturday. The park’s design was produced by a collaborative team of Lee Weintraub Landscape Architecture, the Newark Planning Office, Hatch Mott MacDonald engineers, and MTWTF graphic designers. (Trust for Public Land)

& RELATED

• Fascinating maps revealed by geocoded tweets created by Alan Mislove. You can also zoom into the map (embedded in the article) to see what interesting infrastructure Twitter has mapped–such as the tweet trail on ferry boat crossings. (Atlantic Cities)

• Costa Rica plans to shut down all of its zoos and transform them into urban parks and gardens. (Treehugger)

• These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do…London is experiencing a walking boom. The Economist dives into the reasons behind the surge in pedestrians–population growth accounts for part of it–and why cities would do well to replicate London’s strategies. (The Economist)

• August’s Tree of the Month is the Pawpaw! Bearer of the United States’ largest native edible fruit and cherished by the Native Americans and European settlers, the Pawpaw is experiencing a renaissance of sorts with foodies and native plant peoples. (Casey Trees)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!

Amazing and disturbing photographs of Texas’s most valuable landscapes–its feedlots and its oilfields–as assembled from satellite imagery by British photographer Mishka Henner. (Edible Geography) 

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• What can be done about Detroit? In addition to incorporating lessons of the city’s downfall into our classrooms, Tom Turner suggests looking at landscape architecture as a solution with a planned regeneration of the city’s ecosystem. (Garden Visit)

• Urban Gardens takes us on tour of the lush, eco-friendly landscape design at Nizuc Resort near Cancun, Mexico. (Urban Gardens) 

• The success of a landscape architect’s vision depends heavily on landscape management. Kathy Blaha explains how Atlanta’s Piedmont Park–the “Central Park of the South”–owes much to the management strategy of the Piedmont Park Conservancy. (City Parks Alliance)

& RELATED

• How investing in walkable and dense urban development has turned rust-belt Cleveland into a magnet for millennials and baby boomers. (Atlantic Cities)

• The first rule of fracking is: don’t talk about fracking. The background of how families are pressured into gag orders on the topic of fracking in exchange for self-preservation. (Grist)

• In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color, Yale University Press released the stunning eponymous app for the iPad in honor of the “Bible for Color Theory.” (Co.Design)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!

Created by the same photography who brought us the deliciously elaborate Foodscapes series, Carl Warner ventures into slightly different territory with ‘Bodyscapes,’ a set of photographs that cleverly contorts human bodies into a landscape of rising hills, valleys, and ridges. (Colossal) 

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• The Kentucky Chapter of ASLA announced their 2013 Design Winners in the following four categories: Constructed Design Work, Non-Constructed Design Work, Constructed Residential Design, and Planning and Analysis. (KYASLA)

• The National Endowment for the Arts invests $4.7 million in 59 creative placemaking grants, with three projects that will directly support the designs of landscape architects. Curiously, ASLA doesn’t mention how the House Subcommittee is trying to cut funding NEA by 49%. Maybe they’re not worried? It’s not the first time it’s been tried… (ASLA)

• Our beloved National Park System is falling apart. To supplement the needed funding, some members of the U.S. Senate Committee suggest tapping into the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), one of our greatest and overlooked assets, in exchange for fully funding the LWCF for a decade. Others disagreed, saying that it would be an inappropriate use of LWCF funds. What do you think? (ASLA)

• Decreasing tourism numbers leads casino-famous Atlantic City to turn their hands to reinventing the city, starting with a contemporary outdoor sculpture park designed by Balmori Associates. (The Dirt)

& RELATED

• Remember the golden rule: correlation does not mean causation. However, the groundbreaking research that strongly suggests sprawl as a major limiting factor to upward income mobility is worth looking into. In ‘Stranded by Sprawl,’ Paul Krugman shares his thoughts on how city planning affects income mobility. (NY Times)

• One neighborhood. One month. No cars. For the entire month of September, the streets of Suwon, South Korea will be completely car-free as part of the world’s first Ecomobility Festival. (Ecomobility Festival)

• As our world heats up, trees in the west lose their ability to survive wildfires. (NPR)

• A pair of satellite images released by NASA show the shocking effects of historic drought on New Mexico’s largest reservoir. (Yale)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section! 

David Tulloch, Associate Professor of landscape architecture at Rutgers, shares some great pictures of public art in city landscapes to draw attention to proposed 49% funding cut to the National Endowment for the Arts budget. The photo above is from El Parc de l’Estació del Nord.  (Places and Spaces)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• Adriaan Geuze joined Mayor Bloomberg last week to officially launch The Trust for Governors Island’s campaign to privately fund the construction of The Hills, the centerpiece of the Governors Island Park and Public Space Master Plan, designed by West8. The large hills, which draw design inspiration from Olmsted’s Central Park, will be completely constructed from recycled construction material and provide panoramic views of the Lower Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor. Land8

• In anticipation of the upcoming 2013 ASLA conference, GSD professor Tom Ryan, FASLA, writes a love letter on the city of Boston. (IFLA)

• Jeffrey Tumlin’s piece ‘How Better Urban Design Makes Us Healthier, Happier, and Sexier’ has been making the rounds in landscape architecture news for the past week. I hesitated to share because, as the comments point out, the article is preaching to the choir. However, there are some interesting points raised in the comments section, so make sure you take a look at the discussion after the article. (GOOD)

& RELATED

• Do you Geocache? Geocaching is a wildly popular “free real-word outdoor treasure hunt” that is played all around the world. Not only is it fun, the game also has the potential to bring people closer to the cities around them, by uncovering urban gems and forgotten histories, like in Exmachina’s DC mural-specific geocaching series. (Greater Greater Washington)

• Another story of re-adaptive space use: New York City repurposes under-utilized parking garages for swanky bars, art galleries, and music venues. Take a look at the list of transformed spaces, you may be surprised to find that you’ve been to one or two of these places without realizing its architectural past! (Untapped Cities)

• If you’re in New York City this Saturday and were waffling on attending (the amazing!) Summer Streets, here’s a concrete reason why you must go: for the first time since the 1930s, the cavernous tunnel will be open to pedestrians. What’s more, the car-free tunnel will be transformed into an incandescent, echoing, interactive art show. (NY Times)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section! 

Artist and designer Aki Inomata uses 3D printing to create crystalline hermit shells modeled after iconic skylines.(Inhabitat)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• The Masters of Modern Landscape Design Conference, organized by the Library of American Landscape History, will be held September 28 and 29, at the phenomenal Indianapolis Museum of Art. The two-day conference will feature eight of the mid-20th century’s most influential landscape architects, from Thomas Church to Lawrence Halprin. (IMA Museum)

• Another look into LAF’s ongoing Case Study Investigations, this time spotlighting three landscape projects in Illinois. (Landscape Architecture Foundation)

• What’s the world’s best and most influential public park? Garden historian Tom Turner argues that there could only be one answer: St. James’s Park in London. (Garden Visit)

• Vertical gardens are all the rage now, but that climb to the top isn’t as easy as it looks. (NY Times)

& RELATED

• When road rage gets put in park: Grist explores how curb parking brings out the crazy in people, the root causes, and how thoughtful urban planning should turn those trends around. (Grist)

• What comes to mind when you think of Chicago’s Union Station? Empty comes to my mind. Help designers breathe life into Chicago’s Union Station by casting your vote in the Activate Union Station platemaking contest, hosted by the Metropolitan Planning Council. (Atlantic Cities)

• Getting on a crowded bus in the heat of summer can be suffocating. But buses might get “cooler” thanks to Phyto Kinetic, a project that aims to dress up public buses with lush green roofs. (Urban Gardens)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section! 

See that tiny blue pinprick in the lower right? That’s Earth. Is your mind blown? This photograph was taken 898 million miles away on the dark side of Saturn by a wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Colossal)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

•  Four finalists have been selected from over a hundred unique design proposals for the FAR ROC Design Competition that calls for more storm-resilient neighborhood designs. (GOOD)

• In celebration of the UC Berkeley landscape architecture program centennial, Rebar has organized Adaptive Metropolis: User-Generated Urbanism, a three-day symposium that will take place September 27 – 29 and invites participants from all around the globe to “discuss the power of emergent collaborative networks in shaping the urban realm.” If you know anything about the work Rebar does, you know that this is going to be a fantastic, not-to-be-missed experience. (Rebar)

• Playscapes calls San Francisco’s Lafayette Park Playground the “new municipal playground.” The play space, designed by Miller Company Landscape Architects, looks like a mountain landscape distilled into play equipment. (Playscapes)

& RELATED

• Action Alert! National funding for biking and walking is under attack by Senator Rand Paul, who seeks to cut all funding from the already reduced Transportation Alternatives program. Contact your Senators and ask them to save Transportation Alternatives by voting NO on amendment 1742! (League of American Bicyclists)

• In the last two days, I’ve featured articles on the grim landscape of abandoned gas stations and deserted big box stores. To round off the week with a more uplifting tale, we’ll travel down to Mexico City and their innovative program, Under Bridges (“Bajo Puentes”), that turns vacant, trash-strewn spaces under the city’s overpasses and freeways into thriving public plazas and playgrounds. Plus, the government doesn’t even need to spend a single cent! Private developers foot the bill of cleanup, construction and maintenance. (Washington Post)

• Despite the buzz about Millennials renouncing cars for bicycles, more Americans are driving to work–and driving alone–than ever before. The numbers of workers taking public transportation have also experienced a steep decline, as have the share of workers who work at home. (NPR)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section! 

Would you believe these beautiful colors were painted from toxic runoff? Two Ohio professors turn the polluted byproducts of acid mine drainage-afflicted streams  into beautiful pigments with hopes that the sales of these paints will fund stream remediation. (Smithsonian)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• LSU shares tales of the orient with an article spotlighting landscape architecture professor Max Conrad’s teaching experience at Sichuan Agricultural University in Chengdu, China. (LSU)

• The silent killer: outdoor air pollution claims as many as 2.5 million lives a year, and has even estimated to be shortening the lifespan of an average Chinese person living in smog-ridden urban centers by 5.5 years. Climate change exacerbates this problem, but landscape architects may help combat these trends. (The Dirt)

• Sharpen your drawing pencils! Gasper Habjanic has just launched Linescapes, a Youtube channel that will contain drawing tutorials for landscape architecture. (Youtube)

• Whether it’s a fellowship, a RFQ, or a design competition, ASLA is hoping to keep your landscape architecture needs covered with their Opportunities & Events database. (ASLA)

& RELATED

• Mosstika produces green graffiti in every sense of the phrase. These living, mossy works of art breathe life onto some of NYC’s most unexpected and neglected alleys. (Jetson Green)

• Yesterday, I featured an article that tackled defunct gas stations. But that’s just the beginning; what are we going to do with all these empty box box stores and empty malls? Today’s teenagers favor social media over malls, forcing major retailers to close down stores across the country. Karl Benfield discusses some grim facts about the suburbia landscape as well as some hopeful tales. (Switchboard)

• Can you identify a city by the density and locations of Starbucks? If so, try out Slate’s fun Starbucks Urbanism quiz! (Slate)

• Metropolis interviews architect, planner, and founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, on his interactions with the Chinese government on urban growth in China, how America is starting to right the wrongs of suburban sprawl, and the future of high-speed rail in California. (Metropolis)

The Daily Blend is Breaking Ground on the Latest in Landscape Architecture.  Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!