Blog

Artistic wire sculptures from Fantasywire. Outdoor sculptures cannot be viewed as a separate entity from its surrounding environment. They are powerful in a sense that they have the power to change the way you read your surrounding, depending on their scale and design. Placing a sculpture within a landscape design means it can either enhance the space or give emphasis to design and planting throughout the year, or it can make the design look distasteful. For this reason, making and siting a sculpture involves all of the creative, intuitive and rational skills. Every so often, we manage to find talented artists who can make sculptural artwork blend beautifully well with the environment. Robin Wight from Fantasywire is one of those examples. He can transform our childhood fantasy into realit...Read More

Via Botani Sukhmvit 47 by OpenBox Architects. In the midst of one of the commercial districts of Bangkok (Wathana), comprising a cluster of Condominiums, the Via Botani development stands out as remarkable. The contemporary design preserves a 70 year old tree utilizing a minimal impact design that improves the ambiance of the scheme, while providing a link to nature within the hi-tech urban environment. Via Botani is a blissful residential condominium project developed by Sansiri. The site is situated at Soi 49, Sukhumvit Rd., Khlong Tan Nuea Sukhumvit, Wathana, Bangkok. The boundaries of the site are delineated by smaller trees, providing fresh oxygen while filtering dust from the urban environment, and providing shade and mitigating the urban heat island effect within the site. It could ...Read More

Informative infographic on bike lanes. We were so happy to come across this infographic on bike lanes for the Green Lane Project, outlining innovative ways to highlight bike lane development and ensure safe journeys for riders; we felt we had to share it with the LAN community. As landscape architects one thing is sure in order to encourage more people to adopt the environmentally friendly practice of riding their bikes we must do whatever we can in the design process to ensure their safety and implement design measures to the best of our ability. “Feel free to share or republish this image in any way you’d like. It’s based primarily on research by Austin engineer Nathan Wilkes, whose work on this issue we published in March in the form of a less web-friendly (but much mo...Read More

Have you ever walked in a park between old industrial buildings getting a scent of the industrial era, while having a thousand things to explore? The park area, located in the northern part of Duisburg, was abandoned by the steel industry, Thyssen AG, in 1985 and began decaying before 1989.  It became a part of the International Building exhibition, “IBA EmscherPark“, and was converted to what it is now. It was a segment of a ten-year transformation process combining more than one hundred projects, revitalizing a former industrial stretch of more than 300 km along the Emscher River. The Duisburg-Nord innovative landscape masterpiece took about ten years to complete and is constantly changing. The first part opened in 1994. Industrial Landscapes The aim of IBA Emscherpark project was to set...Read More

Vancouver land bridge, designed by Jones & Jones Architecture. The biggest of the six installations of Confluence Project, the Vancouver Land Bridge reconnects the Columbia River with Fort Vancouver in the most natural way. A serpentine pedestrian walk full of native vegetation with a strong concept that commemorates the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a journey made from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast in the beginning of the 19th century. Jones & Jones Architecture and a Landscape Architecture team from Seattle proposed a smooth, elegant and sustainably conscious bridge. The project has been awarded several times, including 2009 Engineering Excellence Grand Award, 2009 Excellence in Concrete Award, among many others. History and Site Overview It all sta...Read More

Dyslexia in Design – A deeper look at how Dyslexia has bonded with the world of design.  The lexicography of the word dyslexia translates as ‘trouble with words’ from the Greek ‘dys’ meaning ‘bad, abnormal or difficult’ and ‘lexis’ meaning ‘word’.  In popular culture the term dyslexia is primarily employed to describe children and young people who have a specific learning disability with regards to written language.  Historically, other terms used synonymously with dyslexia have included ‘word blindness’ and ‘strephosymbolia’. Both of these terms focus on the difficulties faced by dyslexics, thus defining them by what they can’t do, rather than what they can. Dyslexia in Design The Problem It is estimated that dyslexia affects 4-5% of the UK population. With such low figures, it is, ...Read More

One of Spain’s crown jewels, Barcelona Botanical Garden is located on Montjuich´s mountainside between the Castle and the Olympic Stadium. Today, I’d like to bring you on a journey into a garden-mountain landscape that captures the perfect design balance between nature and the city of Barcelona. The entrance to the Barcelona Botanical Garden is marked by four large folding doors. This botanical garden specializes in flora characteristic of areas homoclimatic with the coveted Mediterranean climate, such as places like South Africa, Chile, southern California, and the Canary Islands. Because of this setup, visitors can take a tour “around the world” so-to-speak through the varied Mediterranean plant palettes. Many plants at risk of disappearance are also preserved on ...Read More

It’s a common problem that’s caught us all out at some point: a dead phone battery and nowhere to charge it. But this frustration could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new wave of street furniture that’s sweeping through cities. Street Charge Solar Phone Charging Stations. Image via Street Charge. It began in the US back in June 2013 when Street Charge was launched in New York City. Intended to give power on-the-go to any electrical device with a USB connection, the open-air charging stations were installed across NYC by telecommunications corporation AT&T. Designed by Pensa, each charging station harnesses the power of the sun via three 20-watt solar panels. The sun’s energy is stored within an internal battery, ready to give users a burst of power at ...Read More

A guide to places in the USA, which are world renowned centres to study landscape architecture.  Have you decided that you want to be a landscape architect but aren’t sure about where to get the most bang for your college bucks? The following list of ten schools (in alphabetical order) offers the best and most comprehensive education money can buy for either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in landscape architecture. 10. California State Polytechnic University One of five departments in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, the landscape architecture “curriculum is structured to help students develop the values, knowledge, and skills necessary to address human and societal needs within a broad range of project types and environmental scales.” This program has braggin...Read More

1315 Peachtree Street by Perkins + Will. Not many wake up in the morning and say, “I’m going to design the most sustainable building and site in the world.” Neither do firms for that matter. But back in 2011, the Atlanta office of Perkins+Will completed this goal. Driven by a passion to practice what they preach, Perkins+Will began the process of a multiyear and multidisciplinary planning effort which would place their new office as the highest-scoring LEED certified project in the world at the time of completion. Sustainable Design Perkins+Will is an international multidisciplinary firm which specializes in landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, planning, and more. They have become known for their sustainably innovative designs and more recently for their work on the Atlan...Read More

The Bartlett Parklet, named after the orchards that used to stud the ground of Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, CA, was built ground up on top of a “drop-down” trailer originally intended to move Minnesotan ice shanties. It is designed to be mobile and parked in various locations in Bishop Ranch–a corporate office park, and is the first of its kind in San Ramon as well as in a corporate setting. The Bartlett Parklet origins began when Bishop Ranch sponsored a contest for their employees to design a parklet for their campus.  After all the votes were in, the “Bartlett Parklet” was the winner, and BASE was then hired to develop the design, plan, teach, and run the build week with employees. It features community seating, a bike rack, a responsible waste station, solar-powered out...Read More