Landscape Architecture Magazine December 2025

ERIN DESPARD (“The Beauty of Decline,” page 84) is a disabled writer and researcher who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is currently the writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden. You can follow her on Instagram @yourlupinesoryourlife. “Disability is actually quite common within landscapes; it’s just that gardeners are often skilled at both accommodating disability and disguising it, rather than highlighting it as something of interest or value.” BENJAMIN HACKENBERGER (“Seeking Shelter,” page 94) is a doctoral candidate in the LANDLABs Network at the University of Ljubljana and an associate at Ruderal in Tbilisi. You can follow him on Instagram @hackenberger.landscape. “By exposing how shade was stripped from the American landscape, Sam Bloch highlights the failure of urban form to allow for basic public health and challenges…

Our closest and most cherished landscapes are often those that we’ve had the most contact with over time. A grandparent’s backyard, the little parklet near the office where you ate lunch, the trail where you hiked every weekend with your dog, the fields seen out a car window as a child, or a strip of stoop or sidewalk with weeds poking through. These places, visited or just witnessed hundreds of times over the years, become part of a mental landscape inextricably connected with home, school, and community. When I see a residential landscape architecture project, I try to imagine it not just as an individual’s domain, but within a web of quotidian landscapes in which experience is embedded over time. Residential landscape architecture is far and away the most commonly…

Informed by extensive documentation and 3D modeling, the Karanga Plaza Jump Platform in New Zealand was commissioned by Auckland’s city council to safely encourage the continued practice of a popular sport: jumping off bridges and sea walls into Waitematā Harbour. “We have a culture here where a really cool thing to do is jump into the water and make the biggest splash that you can—kind of the opposite of Olympic diving,” says Ethan Reid, a principal at LandLAB (with offices in Auckland and Melbourne), which designed the jump platform. To announce its presence—and purpose—the precast concrete platform is wrapped in undulating, cerulean fins, an abstract hybridization of multiple marine structures (think gills and barnacles) but whose full form only reveals itself to those who take the leap. “There’s this easter…

FOREGROUND / NOW MEMORIAL In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the history and consequences of Indian Residential Schools, issued 94 calls to action, including the creation of public memorials to Indigenous survivors and lost children. In 2024, the City of Calgary, Alberta, along with First Nations and Métis representatives, organized a design competition for a permanent memorial to residential school victims. Located at the confluence of the Bow and the Elbow Rivers, the winning entry, Wandering Spirit by Ground Cubed and the Siksika artist Adrian Stimson, envisions “a place of healing, beauty, and celebration,” says Greg Stewart, a landscape architect and partner at Ground Cubed. Incorporating traditional iconography—a requirement of the competition, alongside an Indigenous design lead—the memorial centers on a ceremonial gathering ground that is paved with…

Occupying an enclosed 4,800-square-foot courtyard on the grounds of the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, a free public art center in Montevideo, Uruguay, Campo Sucio (loosely translated as “dirty field”) is part of a contemporary movement to reveal the concealed dynamics shaping the Uruguayan landscape. The garden brings species from a local ecosystem known as el chircal, characterized by woody shrubs such as Baccharis spicata, to an urban context, framing and drawing attention to a plant palette often derided by the public and neglected by the landscape trade. Reframing a plant palette derided by Uruguayans. In Uruguay, “‘campo sucio’ is the way people refer to—or disparagingly name—the spontaneous, local vegetation [that forms el chircal],” says Alejandro O’Neill, a Montevideo-based landscape designer who, with the artist Teresa Puppo, conceived the project. Unlike…

Arcing over a series of rail lines, Washington, D.C.’s New York Avenue meets Florida Avenue NE to form a prominent gateway to the city’s historic core, only to deposit drivers—and the stray pedestrian—into a tangle of roadways that previously ranked among the city’s most dangerous intersections. Because of a Wendy’s restaurant once orphaned in its center, the intersection was informally named “Dave Thomas Circle.” It has been redesigned with protected bike lanes and a trio of green spaces that create a new civic identity. Led by SWA/Balsley with Parker-Rodriguez, the $41 million traffic revamp and plaza—now named Mamie “Peanut” Johnson Plaza for a prominent African American woman baseball player—involved close collaboration with the District’s Department of Transportation. With the size and placement of the plaza’s three parcels dictated by the…