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Building Trust International has once again come up with a brilliant competition that calls for creativity and ingenuity, as well as a change for a good cause. The international PLAYscapes competition challenges professional and student architects, designers, engineers, and artists to use their imagination and design skills to turn a neglected, forgotten part of a city into a playscape. The aim is to show how we can make cities fun places with opportunities for interaction and play for children and adults alike. Think you’re capable of taking on the challenge? Ask yourself what part of your city is underused, undervalued, and bypassed every day because it’s unsafe, dirty, or just so boring that no one notices it. Whether it’s New York, Canberra, Baku, or Belgrade, disused locations can be ...Read More

During this month of April and celebrated “landscape architecture month”, let us introduce you to April Philips, a landscape architect and urban sustainability advisor and the principal and owner of April Philips Design Works in San Rafael, California. She is the author of the recently published Designing Urban Agriculture: A Complete Guide to the Planning, Design, Construction, Maintenance and Management of Edible Landscapes. April’s work spans a wide range of project types, but one of her main focuses is creating successful urban farm systems. This interview highlights April’s efforts in bringing urban edible landscapes, systems thinking, and community outreach to the forefront of the landscape architecture discourse.  You are originally from Louisiana but have spent most of ...Read More

We live in a technologically driven society filled with bits of information and data. We are the causers, the makers of this data. A definition, provided by IBM:  Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals, to name a few. This data is big data. The colorful image at top depicts word usage on Wikipedia, as users add text. IBM’s Visualization and Behavior Group create these diagrams as a way to visually process the information.  But what does it all mean? Do Facebook posts and Flickr pics actual...Read More

Hello all! Many of you have asked when I would come out with a drawing book. I am delighted to announce that after nine months of writing and another six of book design and production, my book Freehand Drawing and Discovery: Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers, has been released by John Wiley and Sons.  The book’s Amazon page and the reviews sum it up pretty well…please check it out.  Keep dreaming, and keep drawing!     Check out some of my sketches I have posted here on Land8: Top: Spanish Steps, Rome.  Above: Italian Market  View more… Freehand Drawing and Discovery   View down pedestrian street, Santo Domingo.  View more… 3rd International Urban Sketching Symposium – Dominican Republic   Machu Picchu, Peru bw – View more… Urban Sk...Read More

This summer we are proposing to build a park in the Los Angeles River under the auspices of a film permit. This will be a prototype for future summer parks all along the river until the river is permanently modified. In order to compete for funding from the Goldhirsh Foundation.  I’m excited to say that we are dancing with the heavy hitters and are currently #3 in the Environmental category. We want to be #1 to put us in the best position to get the $100k!  Please watch the video and follow the link to vote below: Please share the good news and inspire others to vote here: http://myla2050.maker.good.is/projects/LARiverLanding

Nowadays, there are bound to be architectural ghosts in any city, as old, unused buildings slowly rot away. If formal reconstruction doesn’t work, how about giving guerrilla development a go? This is exactly what the Asta association  did with the Boema Garden Project in Cluj. A forgotten building has become a hybrid environment for concerts, workshops, exhibitions, and other guerrilla cultural events. . This informal reconversion has injected life back into an old palace.I spoke with project coordinator Dan Ioanici to learn more about how this ruin was saved from its former fate. Tell us a bit about Cluj-Napoca’s Boema Garden. Why is it such a special place? The former palace and it’s luscious garden, home to the Kendeffyne family in the early to mid-19th century, is, simply put, a place ...Read More

While reading through the March 2013 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine and came across an article about Xiaoxuan Lu, student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design trying to make a true difference with her profession. The Challenge: During the Vietnam War, a large number of bombs dropped over Laos never exploded and are still buried underground and very much explosive if disturbed. Since the war, only 1% of the land has been cleared as safe. Laos also has another secret, gold deposits. Lu traveled to Laos looking for a thesis topic and came across this proposal: Gold mining companies work with local farmers to rid the land of the buried bombs. This proposal received much praise, along with the 2012 ASLA Student Award of Excellence.   This map shows the bombs on the Ho Chi Minh tra...Read More

The dry arroyo wasn’t dry when I visited Mesa Arts Center last fall. This gold tile and lava rock gash in the so-called Shadow Walk that arcs through the site was supposed to be dry most of the time—like an actual desert arroyo—but it seems the water runs almost constantly. “I don’t know of anybody that has seen it dry,” Shauna Gillies-Smith told me recently. She was one of the key designers of the project at Martha Schwartz Partners (Design Workshop’s Tempe, Arizona, office was the local LA of record). The planned dryness would reference the surrounding Sonora, of course, but Schwartz’s office also had a practical reason. Gillies-Smith, who now has her own office called Ground, remembers that MSP had just finished Exchange Square in Manchester, UK. There, it was unclear whether there woul...Read More

People are returning to nature and to the principles of ecology, especially through small-scale projects that reorganize urban spaces that lack greenery. Urban gardens and green spaces are the most popular of these projects, so we decided to talk to representatives of an association from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, which has started developing urban gardens. “Verdeata Isteata`” brings a new perspective on the disused city green spaces and engages the community in embracing a new perspective on ecology and urban gardening. How did you get this idea for an urban garden in such an urban neighborhood like Manastur? We were looking for quite a while for ways of expressing our ideas in the urban landscape of Cluj-Napoca. We took the local authorities’ program “Adopt a Green Space” and turn...Read More

With the follow-up to Daniel Tal’s 2009 book,”Rendering in SketchUp,” hitting stores last week, Land8 continued its Webinar series with Daniel Tal showcasing SketchUp Pro’s new layout space and the improved interfacing between SketchUp Pro and AutoCAD. Much like Daniel Tal’s book series offers a holistic foundation for SketchUp success, this post provides Tal’s book recommendations and technical references.   As we have learned over the past few months, Daniel Tal helps beta test SketchUp releases and provides keen insight to developers. As SketchUp’s new additions push to compete with more realistic, highly detailed, and dimensional programs like Revit, Maya, Rhino, and even AutoCAD’s rendering cloud, Daniel’s presentation suggests we ...Read More

Vista Hermosa Park, Los Angeles, CA We gravitate toward landscape architecture for many different reasons. Some enjoy horticulture and some are intrigued by the creative process involved. Whatever the reasons we all love landscape architecture, many people are still unaware that the profession exists. Luckily, April is National Landscape Architecture Month, and ASLA Chapters across the nation and other associations around the world are taking part in bringing greater awareness of the profession to everyone. As in previous years, landscape architects across the country plan to educate the public by hosting events, doing hands-on work in communities, having speaking engagements, and organizing and participating in design charettes. Central Park at Playa Vista, CA This year’s theme is H...Read More

In Pali, the term ‘Vijjacarana’ means the balance and use of knowledge and practice. Buddhists use this term to acknowledge the fact that the individual is responsible for his journey and that simply being well versed in the Dharma is only part of it. Without practice, knowledge can only become stagnant. Another term from the East that also insinuates this is “dragons head, snakes tail”. This evokes the image of one full of knowledge (the dragon’s head) without the body to balance the head (the snake’s tail). A Warning to Landscape Architecture Students   Although survivors of the architectural industry collapse in the early 1990s insist that it was worse than proclaimed, there is little doubt that those graduating from design professions do so with a little trepidation. S...Read More