Blog

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 skylin...Read More

There are hills rising in New York City harbor!  On July 25, Mayor Michael Bloomberg broke ground on the latest phase of construction for the West8 design of Governors Island.  A flat area on the southern end of the island, which was once occupied by vacant and derelict buildings, is currently being transformed into a lush, undulating terrain.   A new video presented by West 8 provides a cinematic tour of the future park, capturing the sublime landscape that can be experienced when the hills are opened to the public.  The dramatic video montage also demonstrates how the landforms are being constructed, using a simple cartoon-like animation that may appeal to the engineer in all of us.   Not long ago I visited Governors Island to witness the progress of the construction and the new topograp...Read More

Take a look around you in any urban area – on any street, bus or train, in any mall, park or cafe – we’re all at it; tapping and sliding and thumb-flicking. The smartphone is changing the way we interact with the world, changing the way we communicate with one another and changing the way we behave in public places.  But what does this mean for the dynamic of our built environments? A recent event hosted by the Urban Design Group in London aimed to explore this question. Based on the premise that ‘smart phones will have as much impact on towns and cities as the motor car’, the event examined the possibilities and limitations associated with an increasingly technologically-driven society.  According to Ian Ralph of Alan Baxter Associates, worldwide sales of sma...Read More

So far, LAN has presented the Top 10 squares of the world in a more traditional sense and the Top 10 modern squares in the form of urban plazas. In many ways, these are the most famous of their typology. Here, as we continue LAN’s Top 10 squares series, we give you a few that challenge the notion of what a public square can be. City squares are places for people: They are places to sit and reflect, to move through, to be entertained in; and they are places for people to ingratiate themselves into their environment. These spaces should inspire and invigorate people. Here are 10 squares that do just that. 10 Parade Ground, University of the Arts, London by Planet Earth This square was transformed into a gallery without walls in 2008. Planet Earth was respectful of the need for the design to ...Read More

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...Read More

It  the 2013 Hortillonnages Art, Ville et Paysage Garden Festival in Amiens, France. Through this festival, the Maison de la Culture de Amiens (MCA) aims to re-define the Hortillonnages – a series of man-made islands situated within the flooding area of the Somme. These islands were originally created for the production of food, but due to the evolution of agriculture in the last century they have fallen into disrepair. Through the Art, Ville et Paysage (Art, Cities and Landscape) project the MCA aims to engage young artists and designers to come up with new sustainable uses for these islands and assist in their conservation.  My submission, Floating Delights, responded to the brief on three levels.  The design aimed to protect the island against erosion by using native planting. The...Read More

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.” I...Read More

A new film, released tomorrow, demonstrates that by creating ‘water sensitive cities’ it is possible to address the major challenges of water shortage, flooding and pollution. The film, commissioned by the Landscape Institute and based on work by CIRIA, Arup and AECOM, explains the concept of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) and argues the case for designing ‘with’ water when planning any new development.  WSUD is an integrated solution to flooding, droughts and water quality, which promotes a more rational and frugal use of water alongside the creation of beautiful and resilient places. WSUD is about looking beyond the idea that a pipe in the ground is the best option for dealing with rain water – it is about prioritising all elements of the water cycle when designing and developing ne...Read More

The 4th International Urban Sketching Symposium was held last week in Barcelona, Spain.  It was attended by about 200 “registered” participants from 30 different countries; another 100 or so showed up from across the globe just to meet each other, draw together, and celebrate the urban sketching phenomenon.  My fellow ASLA member Richard Alomar and I were among the workshop instructors.  Participants included landscape architects, architects, artists, illustrators, film animators, computer game designers, as well as accountants, biologists, and entrepreneurs – all brought together by a love of on-location sketching.  More landscape architects attend each year; building skills and learning how location sketching – capturing “what is” – can be a spri...Read More

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 t...Read More

Austin-based MINIMIS amazed us with their outdoor lighting – which they claim to be ‘the world’s smallest’. 1PUCK LP is a tiny-aperture recessed LED indoor/outdoor luminaire for installation in to walls, floors, decks, soffits, and ceilings of wood or any drillable material. Fixture diameter is the size of an American half-dollar. Powered by standard, readily-available 12 volt DC (constant voltage), 1PUCK LP consumes only 1 watt, yet has a powerful 12-14-foot beam throw. The fixture is made of marine-grade aluminium, suitable for installation anywhere including beachside or yachting projects. We can see from the minimalist, functional design – not too modern or too traditional – that 1PUCK LP would dramatically reduce the fixture selection process with c...Read More