36 Million Dollars on the Line. What Did They Plan to do with it? People Are Impressed

The New St.Petersburg Pier, Rogers Partners, ASD and Ken Smith Landscape Architect, St. Petersburg, Florida. Rogers Partners Architects & Urban Designers, in partnership with ASD and Ken Smith Landscape Architect, have been chosen as the team to redesign the iconic pier of St. Petersburg, Florida. Each town has its famous landmarks, and the pier is certainly a central element of St. Petersburg. Throughout its history, it has been known as the Railroad Pier, Electric Pier, Municipal Pier, Million-Dollar Pier, and simply The Pier. The pier, which is so essential to the identity of the city, is going to benefit from a redesign process that bears the trademark signature of a talented team. The New St.Petersburg Pier What is the Vision Behind the Project? In choosing the elements of the new...Read More

Baan Ladprao private residence, by Landscape Architects 49 Ltd., in Wang Thonglang District, Bangkok. As one of Thailand’s premier landscape architecture firms, Landscape Architects 49, a subgroup of Architects 49 Ltd., has been designing unique and innovative spaces since first opening in 1989. According to its website, the firm’s philosophy is to “apply its knowledge of urban design, landscape architecture, site planning and environmental analysis to solve design and planning problems, as well as to create innovative and workable environments.” Baan Ladprao, a stunning private residence in Bangkok, is an award-winning example of this philosophy. According to the design team, the client — the owner of Baan Ladprao and an artist — asked for a clubhouse to be situated among exis...Read More

Peak Experience, by Atlas Lab, Market Street, San Francisco. What does a main street in your city or town look like? A streetscape is typically a stretched linear entity that encourages circulation and has common elements such as street lighting; lanes paved in an orderly fashion for cars, bicycles and pedestrians; landscape planting; and some street furniture. One finds great diversity in a streetscape, and every street has a separate identity. However, we don’t always find streets that encourage us to partake in any activity besides fast-paced walking. As part of the Market Street Prototyping Festival, the unique streetscape prototype installation of the Peak Experience is driven by a desire to integrate play into traditional street models and provide opportunities for connection with ot...Read More

Central garden block B4, by TN Plus, in Boulogne Billancourt, suburbs of Paris, France. Located at Boulogne Billancourt, (suburbs of Paris, France, near the La Seine River) the Boulogne project, designed by TN Plus architects and also called “Central Garden Block B4”, is a landscape project whose leading idea is “to create an undulating green plinth stretching from facade to facade through the garden,” in the words of project manager Andras Jambor. The project integrates public spaces by using a central concrete plateau and proposing a sinuous topography aside the buildings to promote privacy. Because of its form and geometry, the concrete plateau becomes a green plinth that undulates from facade to facade through the open space. The green areas were proposed by considering the preservatio...Read More

A run through of 10 ways to be a top Landscape Architecture student. College is a hard time when you have to focus amongst many distractions. Everyone wants to do well and make his or her time in university worth it. But most of us are so busy either procrastinating or neck deep in our work that we forget to stop, breath, look around and see that there may be a better way of doing things. Ways to make us more efficient at getting things done and achieving better results. While some of these tips may be obvious to some of you, we can all use a little reminder from time to time, and ultimately the real question is, why aren’t you doing them? Top Landscape Architecture Student Here are 10 top tips to help you get there: 10. Ask Questions One of the most important aspects of learning is ...Read More

This week’s Sketchy Saturday top 10. Welcome to the internet’s biggest melting pot of sketchy talent. Each week you guys send us in your best handy work and the LA Team go through it, carefully selecting who should make it into the top 10. It’s no easy task, for two main reasons; one it’s hard to establish a criteria for selection when there are such a diversity of styles on display. Secondly a lot of you are so enthusiastic about Sketchy Saturday that you send in several sketches and as a Sketchy Saturday policy we only select a maximum of one sketch per artist to be featured, this does make things fair but it also means a lot if incredible work does not get featured. Enjoy this week’s Sketchy Saturday top 10! 10. by Kyle Schellhorn, Student at Iowa State University, Uni...Read More

Rakafot School, by BO Landscape Architects and KNAFO KLIMOR ARCHITECTS, in Kiryat Bialik, Israel. The Rakafot School is a project of BO Landscape Architects in Kiryat Bialik, a city in Israel’s Haifa District. This project was designed with the idea of reducing environmental impact and combining the lightness and diversity of nature, not only in the design but in the structures, too. From organic shapes to color palettes, the architects intended to give the kids a closer look at the environment by creating an outdoor space where they could play and learn. The Rakafot School is a pilot project of Israel’s Ministry of the Environment. The main idea is to produce a line of ecology-oriented construction for the future so that environmental education will be an essential component of new school...Read More

Quarry Garden in Shanghai Botanical Garden, by THUPDI and Tsinghua University, Shanghai, China. When reclaiming a quarry, many landscape architects typically return the site as close to its original context as possible — or at least downplay its industrial past. That is exactly the opposite of what THUPDI and Tsinghua University did when designing the Quarry Garden in Shanghai, China, and the results couldn’t be more dramatic. The stripped landscape offered a unique opportunity for the designers to create an unusual space that gives insight into the practice of mining in China, as well as breathe life back into the site by creating an eco-friendly public space. The design’s sensitivity and acceptance of the former quarry’s historical, cultural, and ecological context are largel...Read More

Offenbacher Hafen, Atelier Dreiseitl, Frankfurt, Germany. For the past two decades, sustainability and creating ecological cities have become the buzz words dominating discussions on nature in the city. But these countless discussions and debates on the matter are often accompanied by a shadow of skepticism in regard to their actual implementation. Landscape architects are among the main key players — although not the only ones — who have taken on the responsibility of showing how these concepts can be applied to real-life projects. So what are the factors that can contribute to shaping an ecological city through a landscape architecture project? The award-winning design of Offenbach Harbor (Offenbacher Hafen) shows a genuine example of how it can be done. Offenbacher Hafen The...Read More

Levinson Plaza, Mission Park, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, by Mikyoung Kim Design. A city plaza is more or less like an urban jungle where people can unwind and get in touch with their inner naturalist. Maybe they do not even know that they secretly admire nature in this mechanized world. But a plaza in the midst of busy roads and lanes has always attracted people of all ages and has helped people to unveil that secret. Located on what had once been a raised plaza that was largely exposed to the traffic and train congestion of nearby Huntington Avenue in Boston, Levinson Plaza in Mission Park was redesigned to shelter it from the nuisances of the busy thoroughfare and to satisfy the need for a children’s play area, a community gathering space, recreational spaces, and other multi-programmat...Read More

Turn Useless Objects into Gold from our resident AutoCAD expert UrbanLISP to make your work in AutoCAD more efficient. After the conceptual phase during which you make a lot of sketches, it’s time to get real. A good drawing of the existing situation of the site is essential for making a proper plan drawing. Although AutoCAD is the industry standard for these drawings, when working on projects across the world, it becomes clear that there is no standard on how information is organized. So you will have to work with the information you get. Take trees for instance. The way they are represented is quite essential to your drawing. But if you only receive points for the tree locations, you are far off from a nice plan drawing. It’s easy to place a block on a point. Just make sure you snap to t...Read More