Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Landscape Architecture Magazine

CONTRIBUTORS KOFI BOONE, FASLA, (“Tracing Bass Street,” page 70) is the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University. You can follow him on Twitter @kbbop. “I think that we are in a transformational moment when landscape architecture has never been as visible as a profession, consisting of professionals willing to tackle the grand challenges, including issues of justice and equity.” MACI NELSON, ASSOCIATE ASLA, (“Gateway Games,” page 44) is a nerd on a mission to help the general public better understand the world of landscape architecture. You can follow her on Instagram @thelandscapenerd. “This conversation explores a connection to designing experiences, regardless of discipline, and showcases how prioritizing fun can be a catalyst for good design.” JULIAN RAXWORTHY (“Mind the Milieu,” page 106)…

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Mill Race Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Columbus, Indiana, a now-beloved landscape and an early example of a community green space designed to absorb and even choreograph periodic flooding. Among this year’s Exhibit Columbus installations is a Studio Zewde–designed paean to the park, as well as two other landscape projects that complement its ecosystems and activities. Echoes of the Hill is a spare and poetic piece of sculptural placemaking, and less didactic than the other landscape installations being assembled for the fourth iteration of the event. Opening in August, the piece is an arcing, metal double spine connected to the ground by red cables. It embraces the park’s hill and faces the concert stage, a wide crescent that gradually rises…

As climate change and urban growth stress the ability of combined storm and sewer systems to handle the volume of water besieging cities, infrastructure that would once have been relegated to industrial outskirts increasingly needs to fit within mixed-use neighborhoods. In south Seattle, the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station is meant to model replicable solutions while becoming “an integrated part of the community: accepted, acknowledged, actually liked,” says Michael Popiwny, the architectural design and mitigation manager for the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, who served as the senior project manager during the design phase of the facility. The $275 million treatment plant, which will come online only during storms, is designed to prevent up to 70 million gallons a day of combined sewer overflow (CSO) from streaming…

Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game where imagination and strategy are the core of play. To participate, you must build a world that does not physically exist but must be understood by others. Dungeon Masters are similar to designers in that they design experiences for people and curate encounters specific to their players and their world for dynamic interactions. In this interview, Frank Tedeschi, a biochemist and the founder of Dead Box Games, discusses the interdisciplinary process of world-building and the way his professional training influences his game making, mirroring the efforts of designers to create spaces. Maci Nelson, Associate ASLA: I talked to you about being a landscape designer and the world of landscape architecture, but I think Dungeons & Dragons [D&D] and landscape collide because…

A RECENT VISIT TO NASHVILLE immediately placed me in the throes of challenges facing many fast-growing southern cities. The skyline was dotted with the silhouettes of cranes and the air was filled with the sounds of construction activity. Local historic places sat side by side with (and sometimes dwarfed by) large-scale new developments capitalizing on nationally famous arts, entertainment, and culinary scenes. But what was not apparent was how this growing city, as well as the entire mid-South, are reckoning with the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, two epochs that were essential to the growth and identity of a region that has been decidedly ambivalent on public recognition of both. For Nashville, Fort Negley, a rampart and landscape built to repel the Confederate army during the American…

At the National Geographic Society headquarters, the sculpture formerly known as Marabar once created pleasing dissonance in a corner of downtown Washington, D.C. Designed by the Los Angeles-based artist Elyn Zimmerman and dedicated in 1984, the sculpture’s massive boulders were set around a narrow rectangular pool, injecting a welcome natural element into a highly urbanized space. Yet that space was somewhat cloistered, flanked, and literally overshadowed by the society’s two buildings. Now, with a new name—Sudama—and a new location on the nearby campus of American University, the sculpture has been brought into the open, forging a far stronger connection to the city. In 2019, when the society announced that the sculpture would need to be removed to make way for new construction, Marabar seemed doomed. Advocacy by the Cultural Landscape…

At the Etéreo beach resort on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the typical vacation experience is transformed into a floating holiday amid a carpet of pygmy mangroves. Pathways to the resort’s pools, restaurants, and beaches are rendered as boardwalks constructed of treated hardwood and mounted on timber pilings. The walkways serve as a staging ground for nature walks and photographic safaris. “The boardwalks feel like they’re floating in the mangroves,” says Devon King, a landscape architect and vice president at EDSA, which led the site’s design. “We wanted to create an ethereal journey and make the walk from the hotel to the beach with moments of discovery, seating areas, and educational moments that made people slow down.” The immersive nature of the hotel is a direct response to a drawn-out environmental battle…

Faced with the need for a meditative and richly planted landscape for an affordable and supportive housing project in the Bronx on top of exposed bedrock, Brian Green, a landscape architect at Terrain-NYC, looked to the other geologic formations in Manhattan, particularly in Central Park, and in the Bronx. What he noticed most were the ferns that grew in these places. Typically considered too delicate to take root in rock, they were surprisingly persistent. “They’ll find their way, somehow, into these little crevices,” he says. Reassured by this discovery, Green planted Christmas ferns as well as a diverse array of hardier species on the exposed bedrock that defines the site of St. Augustine Terrace, a 12-story housing tower designed by Magnusson Architecture and Planning. His confidence was rewarded: Within a…

PRESENCE OF PLANTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Through September 17 Eight contemporary artists comprise this multigallery show with live plants, including a vertical garden suspended across one of the museum’s facades by Natalie Jeremijenko. Chosen for their incorporation of plant material, the artworks, including Antoine’s Organ by Rashid Johnson, shown above, explore the climate crisis and biodiversity loss through collective memories and personal narratives. Charles Waldheim, Honorary ASLA, the museum’s Ruettgers Curator of Landscape, will be a participant in two related public programs. “While landscape architects work with time as a medium, they often aspire for their work to be enduring and resilient,” he says. These artworks, “freed from those expectations, allow visitors to consider the fragility of all life through works that will not endure.”…

In September 2022, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, announced that he and his family had given up their ownership stake in the company—valued at about $3 billion—and transferred it to a nonprofit trust that would ensure that all future profits were directed toward protecting the planet. Keith Bowers, FASLA, the founder of Biohabitats, took note of this news with a mix of admiration and annoyance. Though he had long looked up to Patagonia and understood the momentous nature of Chouinard’s decision, he was irritated that the company had beaten Biohabitats to the punch. “I was bummed because we had been working on our perpetual purpose trust for a year and a half,” Bowers recalls. “But then I sat back and thought about it, and I…

In the 12 years since Alice Walton’s vision for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was realized in a forested pocket on the outskirts of Bentonville, Arkansas, it has become the anchor of a growing cultural district. A children’s museum opened in 2015, the Whole Health Institute will move into a Marlon Blackwell–designed building in 2024, and in 2025, Crystal Bridges plans to open an “expansive outdoor play space” called Convergence. In 2021, the museum announced an expansion of its own campus, designed by the museum’s original architect Moshe Safdie with Coen+Partners. The district’s latest addition is the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, planned in conjunction with the Whole Health Institute and designed by Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects and OSD. Set to welcome its first students in 2025,…

There are times when it’s almost impossible to describe a project with words because it’s mainly—or only—about sensory experiences. The more than 80 Skyspaces by the North American artist James Turrell—carefully crafted chambers with apertures for viewing the sky at specific times—are among these. Skyspaces are immersive installations that invite the visitor to believe in their own perceptions, especially of light, space, and sky. Offering a fascinating and contemplative experience, these site-determined works become strong and meaningful landmarks wherever they are built. In November 2021, as the culmination of a process mostly carried out during the COVID-19 global lockdown, the latest and second Skyspace in South America was opened to the public. Commissioned by Robert and Edda Kofler, an Austrian couple who chose the seacoast of Uruguay as their main…