Landscape Architecture Magazine December 2022

KATIE KINGERY-PAGE, ASLA, (“Support System,” page 88) is a landscape architect, associate dean, and professor in the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design at Kansas State University. You can follow her on Instagram @grassland_interview. “Elke Mertens’s Resilient City left me curious about lessons small towns and dense metropolitan areas can share, especially as Americans consider building less, building smarter.” MARGARET SHAKESPEARE (“Jacksonville Steps Ahead,” page 34) lives in New York City and the farmlands of Long Island. “I loved discovering that the Emerald Trail has engendered both neighborhood pride of place and opportunities for personal expression—such as the Sugar Hill Mosaic, based on existing graffiti, tucked underneath an interstate highway elevation.” GOT A STORY? At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an…

I enjoyed reading the recent article on the site of the Woodstock Music Festival (“Back to the Garden,” LAM, September), and I offer a backstory in the form of a cautionary tale. Douglas Way and I were in our last year of a master’s degree program in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design when we got a call from the organizers of the event, the “pig farm,” wondering if we could come out to help them with suggestions as to how they might organize Max Yasgur’s farmland for a pending folk concert dedicated to “peace, love, and rock and roll.” The challenge intrigued both of us and we did our best to plan the essential infrastructure for an anticipated crowd of 10,000 fans. Needless to say, the crowd size…

Like many design enthusiasts, I sometimes fetishize architectural materials as designed objects, displaying them in white space on social media, detached from their sources where I can admire their form. I’m encouraged by the many Instagram accounts and podcasts that are devoted to materials, particularly the addictive Material Matters, hosted by the writer Grant Gibson. Gibson interviews individual designers about a single material (wool, eggshells, bread) or process of manipulation (steam bending, embroidery, taxidermy) over a discursive and engrossing hour-long podcast. You come away with both a history of that material and a tactile sense of its properties, as well as the experience of spending an hour with the inquisitive creators who explore and push their limits. MATERIAL SOURCING IS ALWAYS A HISTORICAL INQUIRY, ENTRENCHED IN PEOPLE AND CULTURE, NOT JUST…

The Corridor Écologique Darlington in Montreal belongs to an emerging school of thought—one that often falls under the banner of “rewilding” in Europe—and argues that, for the sake of biodiversity and prevention of mass extinction, urban spaces should be densely repopulated by greenery and wildlife, merging human and animal habitats. If the ecological corridor’s full vision is realized, it will eventually trace a continuous pathway between three large parks in central Montreal—Parc du Mont-Royal (Mount Royal), Parc Jarry, and Parc Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau—and intersect with an active railway, expanding biodiversity within the urban environment and gradually allowing red foxes and other wildlife from the nearby Mount Royal hills to make their way into the city. The far-off dream: to daylight an underground stream buried below Darlington Avenue, which extends northwest from Mount…

The first thing most people notice about the Portland Japanese Garden’s new campus is the natural sense of arrival. “You’re winding through these neighborhoods, and you end up crossing this little, skinny bridge, and there’s this feeling like, where am I going? And then you break through the trees, and there’s this clearing and a campus sitting almost like in a meadow,” says Chelsea McCann, ASLA, a principal at Walker Macy, describing her first visit. “That sequence of events is definitely something we want to make sure we accentuate and preserve.” Located on the eastern periphery of Portland, Oregon’s Forest Park, the 3.65-acre property was designed to be unseen. The existing campus, built in 1917 by the Salvation Army, originally served as a birthing center for unwed mothers. It was purchased…

That the Sears Sunken Garden, completed in 1907 as part of the 40-acre Sears, Roebuck and Company campus that dominated Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood for decades, was originally shared by managers, executives, and warehouse stockers is something Reshorna Fitzpatrick, a pastor at North Lawndale’s Proceeding Word Church, hammers home when telling people about the garden. “What the Sears owners did is show that there shouldn’t be green space [that’s] beneficial for one group; it should be beneficial for all,” she says. Sears closed its West Side operations in the 1980s, and the garden fell into disrepair. Today, no one remembers who the original landscape designer was. People likely won’t forget its next one. North Lawndale residents and nonprofits are currently working with the Trust for Public Land and the garden…