Author: Lucy Wang

Did you feel the heat last week? You’re not alone. Above is NOAA’s temperature gradient map of the US with temperatures ranging from 70 to 107+ degrees Fahrenheit from last week. Check out the link for more stats. (Atlantic Cities)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• MNLA’s landscape architect Terrie Brightman sings the praises of stainless steel and cites its strength, uses, and forms in the landscape and beyond. (Metropolis)

• OMA sweeps to victory in the competition to design the $1 billion Miami Beach Convention Center and the surrounding 52-acre mixed-use development. ArchDaily also has a video interview with OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu on the Miami project. (ArchDaily)

• Started by a group of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers, Projexity is an online, crowdsourcing platform that makes neighborhoods better, one local project at a time. (Projexity)

• In grim Newark, Riverfront Park’s neon orange boardwalk hopes to pave the way to the city’s revival. (NY Times)

& RELATED

• Trade compost for locally grown, fresh produce in Hello Compost, a novel pilot program set to roll out in NYC this fall. (Co.Design)

• Bicycles rock. In addition to being human-powered machines of fun, they can also be used to sharpen knives, purify water, and churn ice cream. And now, they may even be the low-cost key to safely recycling e-waste in developing nations, thanks to the designs of Harvard grad Rachel Field. (GOOD)

• The “Reasonably Polite Seattleites” use cordial activism and polite letters to make a guerrilla bike lane permanent. (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!

With the recent article, ‘Architect Jeanne Gang threads nature into urban landscapes’, making the rounds in landscape architecture news feeds, I thought that now might be a good time to highlight one of Studio Gang’s projects, The Nature Boardwalk & Landscape at Lincoln Park Zoo.

The goal of the project was to create a “slice of prairie in the big-city” by revitalizing Lincoln Park’s South Pond at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Led by the design team of Studio Gang Architects,—the first female-led firm to commission a skyscraper in Chicago–and the landscape architecture and sustainable design firm WRD Environmental, the project transformed a once-polluted and neglected urban pond to an educational, family-oriented space buzzing with people and wildlife.

Previously the site of a decrepit cemetery, South Pond was created alongside the opening of the Lincoln Park Zoo in the 1860s. Until the redesign of the pond and the surrounding landscape however, the pond’s ecosystem had become severely oxygen-starved and unhealthy due to lax management and poor construction.

Design Analysis. Image credit: Studio Gang 

Today, the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, pond ecosystem, and landscape covers 14-acres of restored habitat and wetlands, natural shorelines, and native plantings. Stormwater mitigation and pond aeration was improved by deepening the pond to increase stormwater storage capacity and through the creation of a natural biofiltration strip planted around the pond edge. The pond’s transformation successfully attracted a large number and diversity of wildlife that had deserted the area years before.

The half-mile long Nature Boardwalk serves as an outdoor, environmental classroom and has become an easily recognizable icon by its column-free, tortoise-shell education pavilion.

From Studio Gang’s description:

A new boardwalk circumscribing the pond passes through various educational zones that explicate the different animals, plants, and habitat found in each. A pavilion integrated into the boardwalk sequence provides shelter for open-air classes on the site. Inspired by the tortoise shell, its laminated structure consists of prefabricated, bent-wood members and a series of interconnected fiberglass pods that give global curvature to the surface.

A small structure with a big impact, the unique structure immediately draws people underneath its canopy. The boardwalk is also equally impressive with its naturalistic plantings and large, educational signage.

Though the open-air pavilion receives the most media coverage, it’s the landscape that keeps people (and animals) coming back. As you can see from the pictures, I visited in late October, and the landscape was still so inviting, even in fall–from the layered colors and textures in the grasses to the shrill bird calls and frog noises, this project has succeeded in not only celebrating the prairie-style landscape and revitalizing the area, but also in becoming an attractive space for education and recreation.

All photos, unless otherwise credited, were taken by author Lucy Wang. Please ask before using.

About the Journey:

Hi! My name is Lucy Wang and I’m a landscape architecture grad from the University of Maryland. I travelled the U.S. (and parts of Canada) by mass transportation for several months in search of great, publicly-accessible landscape architecture sites, as well as landscape architecture firms and universities. I also was able to make a trip out to Shanghai in China for six weeks. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite finds on Land8 along the way. For more information, check out my profile.  As always, feel free to leave a comment below!

Where I’ve been:

Classical Chinese Gardens, Suzhou

Houtan Park, Shanghai

Quarry Garden, Shanghai

Discovery Green, Houston

San Antonio Japanese Tea Garden, San Antonio

Henry C. Beck Park, Dallas

Waterfall Garden Park, Seattle

Tanner Springs Park, Portland

California Academy of Sciences Green Roof, San Francisco

Citygarden, St. Louis

Gary Comer Youth Center Green Roof, Chicago

Chop Stick, Indianapolis

Lafayette Greens, Downtown Detroit

Yorkville Park, Toronto

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Move over Eiffel Tower, there’s a new eye-catching attraction on the Siene River Banks: a four-meter-tall chrome T-Rex Skeleton. (Inhabitat)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• Project for Public Spaces shares ’26 Ways to Make Great Spaces,’ an excerpt from the new e-book ‘How to Design Our World for Happiness.’ A lot of the advice centers on embracing the outdoors, having fun, and staying friendly; tips that could also be applied to everyday life. (Project for Public Spaces)

• ASLA releases the latest LAND E-News. (ASLA)

Here are some highlights:

• The Landscape Architect’s Guide to DC gets an update: Georgetown’s Tudor Place. (ASLA)

& RELATED

• Gehl Architects talk about cities increasingly turning to people-first policies as a lead-up to their release of ‘Public Space Public Life study of Moscow.’ Many of the ideas Gehl champions are well-known in landscape architecture, however, it’ll be interesting to see his take on Moscow, a city struggling with high traffic levels that yearns for a high livability ranking; I’ll update when his study goes public. (Gehl Architects)

This is Shanghai from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

• An amazing time-lapse video entitled ‘This is Shanghai.’ I don’t understand how he gets these shots, but they are incredible. It brings me back to the time I lived in Shanghai for six weeks. (Urbanophile) 

• If you’ve been following this roundups, you know how much I love mapping. Active cartographers in the group Spatial Collective are using slum-mapping to render the “invisible” visible, and as a way to start the conversation for better planning and project implementation. (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! 

 Swiss photographer Gus Petro performs some “Photoshop magic” to blend together the extremes of “emptiness and density” in the U.S. landscape. (The Atlantic Cities)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• ASLA honors 33 members to the ASLA Council of Fellows for 2013. (ASLA) 

• Oakland adds Bird Safety Measures to its building permit requirements, limiting types of materials and lighting in the landscape to curb rising bird mortality rates. (Golden Gate Audubon)

• Landscape Forms puts the spotlight on campus planning for the 2013 annual round table. (PR Web)

• A look at creating play environments and educational public spaces in zoos. (The Field)

& RELATED

• L.A. residents in drought-plagued Southern California have been taking advantage of the “green-for-green trade:” getting paid to kill their lawns and lower their monthly water bill. (The Atlantic Cities)

• Parklets have come a long way since Rebar’s first mini-park in 2005. San Francisco has fully embraced the funky “placemaking” tool that’s spreading to residential areas. (Grist)

• Corporate marketing is testing the power of civic spaces. After Virgin Atlantic launched the world’s first airplane art gallery, their creative marketing team turned it up a notch by bringing a first-class passenger experience on a Virgin flight to an ordinary park bench. (Pop-Up City)

• Landscape architects know how influential well-maintained parks can be to revitalizing neighborhoods. According to Michael Rubinger, the two main federal tax credits that stimulate parks and housing projects in low-income neighborhoods are at risk of disappearing. (New York 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!

Design students tackle environmental problems in Electrolux’s “Inspired Urban Living” design competition. (Atlantic Cities)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• Rutgers landscape architecture students travel to work on design projects in the Caribbean island of St. Croix. They also created a video (well done, I might add) that covers the students’ love for the field as well as lessons learned. (Rutgers)

• ASLA is looking to hire a Professional Practice Coordinator. (ASLA)

• Garden historian Tom Turner welcomes the birth of the Royal Baby with a somewhat hilarious plea for its support of a London Greenway Network. (Garden Visit) 

& RELATED

• Strengthening our urban commons is key to improved city life and sustainable futures. (Switchboard)

• Imagine sharing one house with fifty other people. An article about Accra’s housing crisis–“90 percent of urban housing in Ghana is informal”–and what is being done about it. (Next City) 

• D.C.’s planners abandon proposal to eliminate parking minimums in transit-oriented neighborhoods. (Washington Post)

• China to roll out one of the “largest peacetime population transfers in history:” a painful push of 2.4 million farmers from their rural homelands into urban centers. (New York 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!

Architect Jeanne Gang is profiled for her design work that merges nature with urban design. (Grist) (photo by Lucy Wang)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• The Dirt calls attention to the under-appreciated landscape addition to the newly restored Rijksmuseum, Netherland’s national museum. (The Dirt)

• Douglas Hoerr, principal at the Chicago firm Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, shares ten of his favorite things. (ChicagoMag)

• Landscape architect Peter Latz, of Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park fame, has recently been awarded the Topos Landscape Award 2013–the first time Topos has honored a landscape architect for his life’s work. (Topos)

• New York-based SCAPE/Landscape Architecture with Roger Marvel Architects were unanimously chosen to design Minneapolis’ Water Works Park, one of the “most dynamic destinations on the Mississippi River.” (MPLS Parks Foundation)

& RELATED

• Officials in Denver to limit fitness classes in the city’s open spaces and parks. I agree with this approach; the comments section says it best: “This is a case of simple fairness…pay for the use of the space instead of socializing the overhead while privatizing the profit.” (The Atlantic Cities)

• Grist curates a hip hop and rap mix tape “celebrating the role of parks in city life.” (Grist)

• Downtown Brooklyn will soon open their own version of Bryant Park–which is built over New York Public Library’s archives–with Willoughby Square, a one-acre park that will be built over and partially financed by a high-tech, mammoth underground garage. The square is a critical part of Bloomberg’s plan to revitalize Downtown Brooklyn and was designed by Hargreaves Associates with community input. (New York Times)

• A behind-the-scenes tour of Jardí Tarradellas, Barcelona’s tallest residential vertical garden. (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!

The world’s largest standalone structure opens in Chengdu, China. Almost equal in size to the country of Monaco, this cavernous shopping mall will even include an artificial sun to give off light and heat 24 hours a day. Does this set up remind anyone of the ship Axiom from the movie WALL-E? You can also watch their 15-minute promotional video (if you don’t mind text-to-speech narration). (Dezeen)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• A look at beautiful contemporary paving patterns in Europe. (The Dirt)

• In collaboration with Boyer-Percheron-Assus architects, West 8 wins an urban design competition to redesign the 35-hectare, former School of Infantry site in one of France’s most forward-looking cities, Montpellier. (West 8)

• ASLA announced results of their residential and hospitality design survey yesterday, confirming “anecdotal evidence that most landscape architects now select the furnishings for their projects, from contract to custom,” a finding that is consistent with the growing lucrative market for high quality outdoor furniture. (Market Watch)

• DC’s bocce boom spices up backyards. (Landscape Architecture Magazine)

• As part of LAF’s Case Study Investigations (CSI), a research team at the Boston Architectural College use various methods to assess the performance of built projects, from green roofs to plazas. (Landscape Architecture Foundation)

& RELATED

• Detroit still struggles as a whole, but its central business district is enjoying a renaissance thanks to a billionaire’s contributions and an influx of hipsters. (Architect Magazine)

• Is “white infill”–the “back-to-the-city” movement–our new “white flight?” (New Geography)

• California Supreme Court recently ruled that government GIS databases be made publicly accessible. Hurray open data! (LA Times)

• Speaking of open, publicly accessible data, Sarah Cordivano champions their use for crisis response in some well-chosen examples. (Azavea Atlas)

Have any good stories you’d like to share? Post them on Land8’s Story Board section!

Chinese artist Xu Bing creates two 12-ton phoenixes from materials collected found in Chinese construction sites, a striking visual commentary on the effects of China’s rapid commercial development on the country’s landscape. Check out the time-lapse video down below. (Colossal)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates has been selected to work on updating the Menil Collection’s museum grounds in Houston, TX. The Renzo Piano-designed museum is renowned not only for its stunning collection of twentieth century art, but also for its lush park surroundings. (ArchDaily)

• Low-impact development has become a hot topic in light of recent climate change-induced disasters. From August 18 to August 31, the 2013 International Low Impact Development (LID) Symposium will bring together over 1,000 professionals to exchange research, ideas, and best practices in St. Paul, MN. Early registration ends soon. (Trout Headwaters)

• The largest single-phase project in China is being built in the southern Chinese city, Zhuhai. Headed by landscape architecture and urban design firm Christopher Counts Studio, the designs suggest “a new model for the Asian Mega City landscape.” (World Landscape Architecture)

• A guest post on The Dirt reminds us that in addition to the National Medal of Arts, landscape architect Laurie Olin was also the recipient of UVA’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture. Along with his acceptance speech of that award, Olin also discussed the question of “what is real” in landscape architecture. (The Dirt)

& RELATED

• The NYC Summer YouthWRAP program connects teen probation clients with paid summer jobs rebuilding Hurricane Sandy-affected sites in the five boroughs. (Inhabitat)

• Heads up, this is an awesome project that you should keep your eye on. ESRI, Richard Saul Wurman (the father of TED talks) and Radical Media launch Urban Observatory, a comparative mapping tool that aspires to be “a live museum with a data pulse” and will use crowdsourcing to expand its database. You can compare cities side by side from availability of open space to traffic patterns. (Atlantic Cities)

• Landscape architecture programs often have access to laser cutters and 3D printers–an expensive luxury that students soon miss after graduation (I know I did!). But, if you live in Chicago, you might get to play with these expensive machines once more. Chicago has just opened a maker lab–stocked with three 3D printers, two laser cutters, a milling machine and a vinyl cutter–at one of its libraries earlier this week. (Gigaom)

Have a link or story that you want to share? Post your findings on Land8’s Story Board!

The 2013 international mosaiculture competition, Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, opened mid-June and will run through September 29 at the Montréal Botanical Garden. According to their website, mosaiculture “is a refined horticultural art that involves creating and mounting living artworks made primarily from plants with colourful foliage (generally annuals, and occasionally perennials).” (Colossal, photo credit: Guy Boily)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• ASLA’s Advocacy and Public Awareness Summit will be held this weekend, July 12 – 14, in Alexandria, VA. (ASLA)

• The University of Tennessee appoints Gale Fulton, former assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as the new landscape architecture chair. (UTK)

• In honor of Laurie Olin and his acceptance of the prestigious National Medal of Arts award from President Obama tomorrow, landscape architect Mark Hough pens a congratulatory article covering Olin’s background, work, and successes. (Planetizen)

• So here’s a blast from the past: Terragrams, the podcast series created by landscape architect Craig Verzone features the movers and shakers of landscape architecture, including Michael Vergason, James Corner, and Kongjian Yu. I know this isn’t recent news, but I only just discovered the site today (last update was 2012) and thought this great project was worth a 2013 shout out. (Terragrams)

& RELATED

• Next week, Majora Carter and Enrique Peñalosa–two of the most influential names in urban thinking today– will meet on New York City’s High Line to host a discussion on the future of public space, equity, and social justice. (Next City)

• Vancouver’s greening eye-sore alleyways into grassy country lanes, a great example of rethinking our urban environment. (Sustainable Cities Collective)

• Gizmodo digs into the New York City archives to give us six radical urban infrastructure proposals that today, sound like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Robert Moses’ infamous plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway is included in the list–could you even imagine a ten-lane highway slicing through modern SoHo? (Gizmodo)

• Design Matters. An inspiring short film documents the work of a couple Art Center students and their innovative design solutions to help Peruvian families overcome water poverty. (Vimeo) 

• This might be slightly unrelated, but it’s a current issue that I care deeply about. After New York City installed CitiBike, the bike share craze has taken over American streets. Chicago just launched their Divvy bike share, Milwaukee presented their first B-cycle kiosk yesterday, and even car-centric Los Angeles wants one of their own; and now the bicycle manufacturer Dahon plans to launch an innovative folding bike-share program this fall. Wow! (Urban Velo)

One of the most beautiful tree-lined streets in the world can be found at the heart of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Dense Tipuana trees planted in the 1930s line the 500 meter stretch of Rua Gonçalo de Carvalho. (Inhabitat)

(photos from Inhabitat)

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

• EDSA, one of the top five highest-grossing landscape architecture firms in the U.S., is profiled in the Miami Herald, starting with their design work that helped transform the reputation of Fort Lauderdale. (Miami Herald)

• In an effort to change Los Angeles’ reputation as a concrete-choked city, the City of Angels launched the 50 Parks Initiative in August 2012. Converted from a parking lot to green space, Spring Street Park, which was designed by Lehrer Architects, became the 16th and latest addition to the program. (thisbigcity)

• New York City’s recently reopened Rockaway beaches feature a few new, storm-resistant upgrades designed by architects Jennifer Sage and Peter Coombe in collaboration with landscape architect Signe Nielsen of the design firm Mathew Nielsen. (Bloomberg)

• The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects releases their 2013 summer issue of Landscapes Paysages, a digital magazine that includes the 2013 Canadian landscape architecture award of excellence recipients. (CSLA)

& RELATED

• The Bloomberg administration will leave a legacy of parks–over 830 acres of new parkland created–but now the city is debating where long-term funding for those parks should come from. (Wall Street Journal)

• New Yorkers find imaginative ways to use the Citibike bike share docks beyond their intended purpose. (New York Times)

• Parks & People’s executive director, Steve Coleman, shares his inspiring story of determination and hard work to bring parks and green space to the impoverished, northeast neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. (Grist)

• In the project ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ Belgian artist and activist Karl Philips transforms urban billboards into “small parasite apartments for urbanites.” (Pop Up City)