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Archive for September, 2011

ASLA Announces 2011 Professional Awards

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Opportunities on 09/28/2011 | Leave a Comment »

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced the winners of the 2011 Professional Awards. More than 560 submissions were received and 37 were selected for recognition. ASLA will present awards in the categories of General Design, Residential Design, Analysis and Planning, Communications, Research, along with the Landmark Award during a ceremony that will take place on Wednesday, November [...]

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Penn Park: A Coherent Public Space Forms Out of a Mess of Infrastructure

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 09/28/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Penn Park, a new $46-million 24-acre park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) on the eastern edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus, manages to create a coherent space out of a mess of transportation infrastructure. The main goal of the park, which used to be a giant parking lot for mail trucks, is to provide a mix of park and sports facilities for [...]

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Should SITES Offer a Professional Credential? Take a Survey

Posted in Opportunities on 09/28/2011 | Leave a Comment »

There may be a new green professional credential for design and construction professionals on the horizon. The Sustainable Sites Initiative™ (SITES™) has launched a survey to gauge market demand for a new SITES credential and project certification. In one possible future scenario, credentialed professionals would use a ”SITES AP” or something similar after their names. SITES – a partnership between the [...]

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ASLA Releases More than 475 Green Infrastructure Case Studies

Posted in Ecosystem Services, Environment, Green Roofs, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 09/26/2011 | Leave a Comment »

The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) recently started a national rulemaking process, with the goal of creating a new, comprehensive program to reduce stormwater runoff. The E.P.A. announced that during this rulemaking it will evaluate green infrastructure design techniques that mimic natural processes to evapo-transpire, infiltrate and recharge, and harvest and re-use stormwater. Typical green infrastructure systems for managing stormwater include green roofs and [...]

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The Primacy of Pathways

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Technology, Urban Design on 09/23/2011 | Leave a Comment »

At Dumbarton Oaks, Suzanne Preston Blier, a professor at Harvard University, said not all landscapes are enchanted in the ancient Yoruban city of Ife in southwestern Nigeria, but many are. Combining landscape architecture with a rich cosmological system, the Yoruban kings and Ifa priestly castes laid out Ife as a giant turtle, with criss-crossing pathways embedded with deep cultural and [...]

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Solar Decathlon 2011 Innovations: Constructed Wetlands, Edible Landscapes, Rain Gardens, and More

Posted in Gardens, Green Buildings, Landscape Architecture, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Materials, Water Management on 09/22/2011 | 2 Comments »

The Solar Decathlon, a design competition and public education program run by the U.S. Department of Energy, returns to the National Mall this year, where it will be open September 23 – October 2. Like the competition two years ago (see earlier post), teams of architecture and landscape architecture students from universities around the world compete to design, build, and then operate the [...]

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Making the Case for Sustainable Streets

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 09/21/2011 | 1 Comment »

Riding high on the announcement of New York City’s bike-share program just a day earlier, NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan gave the keynote lecture at the two-day conference A Roadmap to Sustainable Infrastructure & Green Cities at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Striding through her talk as briskly as New Yorkers like to [...]

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Designing Views of Nature

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Land Art on 09/15/2011 | 1 Comment »

Lonely Planet, producer of travel guides, has just put out a new book on the 1,000 Ultimate Sights. One can spend hours just looking through the different lists of “ultimate” natural sights around the world, including sections on the ”greatest wildlife spectacles,” “most iconic trees,” and “most impressive waterfalls.” There are also segments that explore extraordinary forms of human interaction [...]

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New Web Site Tries to Answer the Question: What Is Landscape Urbanism?

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Sustainable Design, Urban Design on 09/14/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Landscape Urbanism, a relatively new theory that took more solid form through a book released in 2006 and is now actively promoted by the likes of Professor Charles Waldheim, Affiliate ASLA, chair of the landscape architecture department at Harvard University, and James Corner, ASLA, the head of Field Operations and chair of the landscape architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania, has [...]

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A Landscape of Glass

Posted in Land Art on 09/14/2011 | 2 Comments »

Shayna Leib, an artist based in Madison, creates glass landscapes using what can only be imagined is a very time-consuming process. According to Colossal, some of her works involve creating almost one mile of thin glass tubes (baked at 2,400 degrees) and then cut into tens of thousands of tiny pieces. She then begins the ”tedious process of building the [...]

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