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Archive for October, 2010

Guerilla Street Artist JR Wins TED Prize

Posted in Land Art on 10/28/2010 | Leave a Comment »

TED writes that street photographer and artist JR shows his work in the “biggest art gallery on the planet” — the streets. His work features colossal blown-up photos of everyday people taken in their neighborhoods and then pasted illegally on the side of buildings and structures for the whole community to view. The group says his work focuses on both ”art and action and talks about [...]

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Building Support for San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks Program

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/27/2010 | 1 Comment »

John King, architecture critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, says the city’s innovative Pavement to Parks program (see earlier post), which reclaims unused stretches of streets and turns them into public parks and plazas created with salvaged materials, will needs lots more public or private support and investment if it’s going to expand from five to 25 parklets. The five parklets now in place are [...]

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World’s Largest Solar Thermal Plant Coming to the Mojave Desert

Posted in Policy and Regulation, Renewable Energy, Wildlife on 10/26/2010 | Leave a Comment »

At a forum organized by The Atlantic magazine, David Hayes, Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department, said the department just gave approval for the world’s largest solar thermal facility in California’s Mojave desert. The Blythe Solar Project, a $6 billion project, will generate more than 1,000MW of renewable energy and span 7,000 acres in an area 200 miles east of Los [...]

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Goldhagen: “Democracies Need Physical Spaces”

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Sustainable Design, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/22/2010 | 7 Comments »

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, architecture critic for The New Republic, argues that America’s public realm is best served by physical urban spaces that can enable “non-structured and non-goal-orientated” interactions among many kinds of people. The best places for these types of interactions? Great urban parks. She covers the role parks have played in enabling democracy, traces the impact  of Frederick Law Olmsted’s pioneering urban parks, [...]

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U.S. Announces 70 Transportation Projects Will Receive $600m

Posted in Smart Growth, Sustainable Transportation on 10/22/2010 | 1 Comment »

The U.S. Department of Transportation says it has applied a “merit-based selection process” to award 42 capital construction projects and 33 planning projects in 40 states nearly $600 million from its popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) II program, which covers major infrastructure projects like highways, bridges, ports, mass transit, and rail systems. Demand for this second round of financing [...]

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Interview with Diane Dale, FASLA

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Renewable Energy, Smart Growth, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Materials, Sustainable Transportation, Technology, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/20/2010 | 1 Comment »

Diane Dale, FASLA, JD, is Director of Community Design at William McDonough + Partners. Dale has won numerous awards for planning work and frequently speaks as conferences and universities. William McDonough + Partners, recognized internationally for leadership in sustainable design, won the 2004 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Environment. Joining up with William McDonough + [...]

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Tragedy of the Commons: Himalayan Glacier Melt

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 10/19/2010 | 1 Comment »

The tragedy of the commons is the idea that individuals all acting independently in their own self-interest in the short-term can destroy valuable shared resources over the long-term. This idea is often used to explain how it’s very difficult to get individual people, communities, or even countries, to take the initiative on reducing their own adverse long-term impact on the environment — there’s simply no [...]

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Nathaniel Rackowe’s Garden Fence Uprising

Posted in Gardens, Land Art on 10/18/2010 | Leave a Comment »

Sculptor Nathaniel Rackowe has turned the everyday materials that make up a backyard fence and shape our daily aesthetic experience into a sculpture that offers a critique of the suburbs, writes Icon magazine. The artist is taking aim at ”the subtle, subliminal components [...] that remain once you remove all architectural interventions.” Rackowe explains: “A lot of my work deals with in-between [...]

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Los Angeles Green District Competition Winners Offer Visions of a Sustainable City

Posted in Exhibits, Green Buildings, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Renewable Energy, Smart Growth, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Waste, Water Management on 10/18/2010 | 3 Comments »

The Architect’s Newspaper and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) sponsored the Cleantech Corridor and Green District competition, which asked designers to come up with bold concepts for a 2,000-acre redevelopment zone at the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles (see earlier post). According to The Architect’s Newspaper, the city has set aside the zone as a base for future clean [...]

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Using Abandoned Coal Mines as a Platform for Restoring Nature

Posted in Environment, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Sustainable Design, Water Management, Wildlife on 10/18/2010 | Leave a Comment »

Abandoned coal mines, which are some of the most dramatic examples of human interventions in the landscape, are being used as platforms for restoring nature in Germany and the U.S. Appalachian region. In two very different examples, governments, foundations, and local communities are creating and implementing positive visions for ecosystem development or restoration. One involves creating an ecosystem from scratch out a [...]

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