Blog

Halloween is coming up and we here at LAN have some awesome holiday features in store for you guys, that we hope will both freak you out as well as make you laugh and expand your knowledge and imagination; and what better way to do that than to talk to the experts? We’re talking about experts in horror here. RevenantFX are a small, budding business in Newmarket, Ontario that specialize in Halloween decorations, mainly un-dead garden gnomes, zombie make-up and masks. The dedicated group of self-described starving artists make their works in their home and garage with their own hands and with the utmost attention to details. This passion of theirs came from an obsession with films and television series that deal with zombies, ghosts and horror in general. That was the spark that led to these...Read More

Decorated with numerous awards including a recent 2012 ASLA Landmark Award of Excellence, Yorkville Village Park is a popular and celebrated series of gardens tucked into Toronto’s high-end shopping district. Originally a parking lot built over a subway, a design team composed of Martha Schwartz, Ken Smith, David Meyer Landscape Architects, and local firm Oleson Worland Architects sculpted a linear park that would represent a selection of Ontario’s major bioregions and ecosystems, with each landscape bounded by the lot lines of former Victorian row houses situated in the space. The Village of Yorkville Park Conceptual Plan. Credit: asla.org   The desire for a public park to be built over the underground Bloor subway line was voiced since the 1950s, however, it wasn’t unti...Read More

Awareness on ecological matters, climate changes and the resource crisis that humankind is experiencing in our time is gradually growing through national projects as well as individual concern and action. This is not to say that all creative human requirements like an ideal living space and innovative designs are left aside. Moreover, it is striven to ideally combine these two important points for an ideal home project.  One such endeavour is the Solar Decathlon Europe project held every two years in Madrid, in an organized space named Villa Solar. Building designs put forward by universities around the world and compete in 10 contests which are based on energy efficiency, home design, recyclable materials used and alternative energy sources. The aim is to find efficient solutions combatin...Read More

I have two kids, ages almost 6 and 3, and while they love reading books, I enjoy reading their books as much if not more than they do.  I love the nostalgia and silliness of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and the clever stories and terms that Mo Willems churns. The way my kids respond to books has shown me the power within their pages. One book can spark a new interest that lasts days, months – even years. One book can lead to the insistence that we read tens more on the same topic. So naturally, I try to select books on topics that are also interesting to me (after all, I’m equally invested in reading these). This prompted an unofficial research project on children’s books about the built environment. With the exception of the immense stock of books about construction, trucks, trains and planes...Read More

‘In Place’ is a Land8 column that resurrects the design field trip. If you haven’t yet, read the intro here.   What’s a path, really? A way to move people from one place to another? Or a design statement? Visiting 100 Acres in Indianapolis, I initially assumed the former (and in fact wondered why a big name landscape architect was needed to lay out a few paths). But I’ve changed my mind.   The officially named “100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art + Nature Park” is one in a series of landscapes managed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. IMA is what some would call an encyclopedic museum—meaning it has a little bit of everything, from across historical artistic periods. Most major cities have one of these, but the IMA is odd in that it also “collects landscapes,” as Frank Ed...Read More

A housing demolition project in Rotterdam Netherlands has turned into an opportunity for a community to grow together.  The removal of the houses on Gaffelstraat 70-88 created a temporary open space between existing streets and houses and has been reclaimed by local residents to create a vibrant community garden dubbed De Tussentuin, the “in between” garden.   The design of this temporary garden tells the story of the demolishing houses and of the colorful histories of the people who lived there. The former house lots are now used as a flower or a kitchen garden. The result is a patchwork of different colors, images and atmospheres with a strong relationship between each other. The neighborhood uses the garden just for watching, for hanging around, gardening or to listen to mus...Read More

Remember college field trips? Besides the imbibing and canoodling and hijinx (to resurrect a few words sure to make me seem older than I am), do you remember the places you went? You might have sketchbooks or slide-sleeves or flash-drives full of your recollections. You must have spent hours (initially at the urging of a prof but later out of your own fascination) documenting materials, finicky details, flows of water, tree selections, whatever. Remember how this informed both your designs and your in-studio discussions?  Richmond Olympic Oval, Vancouver   Where I went to school, our big field trips were these: Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest; Columbus and Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago; and the desert southwest.  I vividly recall the changes in vegetation and temperature (aka micr...Read More

With the Olympics and the Euro Cup in the rear view mirror, the world looks on to other sporting events and sports in general to fill the gap. One sport in particular that is the most popular around the world, soccer, has some of the most architecturally striking stadiums. Highbury Stadium, where Arsenal Football Club of London played before moving to the Emirates Stadium in 2006, has created a unique place in North London by taking the old stadium and transforming it into luxury apartments and usable public space. Highbury Stadium “was originally constructed in 1913 and designed by Archibald Leitch as Arsenal Stadium in the Art Deco style familiar to Arsenal supporters. It remained the home of Arsenal for 93 years until 2006.” Many aspects of the stadium were salvaged and used...Read More

Chop Stick functions as a concession stand, but it’s a far cry from what you might find at your local skating rink. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the innovative Swedish architecture duo vision division carved the outdoor pavilion/concession stand (with swings) almost entirely out of a single, massive 100-foot-tall tulip tree—also the state tree of Indiana. Transported with many of its limbs intact from a forest near Anderson Indiana to the 100 Acres Museum Art Park, this massive tulip tree was carefully cut apart and stripped of tree bark so as to retain its original structure and as to reuse other portions of the tree for site furnishings such as swings, benches, and tables. The removed tree bark was even repurposed and kiln-dried to create the shingles that cover the co...Read More

What do a warehouse, boxing ring, hula hoops, and a double decker bus have in common?  Answer, an unforgettable night at the Land8 Happy Hour: PHX-Style!   In the heart of Phoenix’s warehouse district, just a half mile from downtown, a gem of a space called The Duce welcomed over 250 landscape architects with 5 hours of fun, food, drinks, networking, and all the dancing they could handle. The evening was epic and the energy was…HOT.  (The 80 degrees weather that night didn’t hurt the mood either.)   The evening started off on a mellow note with some indy tunes that lead us to a toast to Adam Regn Arvidson’s for the launch of his new book, Greening the Landscape: Strategies for Environmentally Sound Practice.  From there, the energy quickly picked up and the dance fl...Read More