Landscape Architecture Magazine May 2022

CONTRIBUTORS WENDY GILMARTIN (“What’s Fun Is Fun,” page 126) is an architect and journalist living and working in Los Angeles. You can follow her on Instagram @wendy.gilmartin.architecture. “The breadth, wit, attention to detail, care, and engagement to site in Claude Cormier’s body of work is truly staggering.” LAURIE A. SHUSTER (“The Feeling Is Mutual,” page 34) is the deputy editor of LAM. You can contact her at lshuster@asla.org. “My ideal garden would include lavender, hyacinth, jasmine, peppermint, and basil.” DANIEL WINTERBOTTOM, FASLA, (“Walking Witness,” page 114) has focused his work on serving marginalized communities and has been hand-drawing and field sketching throughout most of his career. You can follow him on Instagram @koolbreeeeeeze. “In time, as memories fade, these sketches are part of the documentation for future generations, a witnessing of our urban histories, a reflection on…

In April, which is also World Landscape Architecture Month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final installment of the Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change, and the news is fairly (though not unre-mittingly) dismal. The previous installment, released in late February, coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But instead of being drowned out by the news, the geopolitical maneuvering of fossil fuel flows in response to the invasion only exposed that war and human suffering are not distinct from climate change; they are an outcome. The 195-member IPCC is charged with assessing climate science but also the impacts and opportunities for reducing risk. The current report, a product of Working Group III, comprises 278 authors from 65 countries. In addition to its assessment reports, the panel releases…

Lulu Loquidis, ASLA, and Daniel Luis Martinez are comfortable in the gaps. As the founders of the multidisciplinary practice LAA Office (pronounced “law office”), the designers’ work exists between the disciplines of landscape, art, and architecture and, more often than not, in the voids of the built environment. Even their chosen home of Columbus, Indiana, represents a certain enthusiasm for the in-between. “That willingness to explore the territory between disciplines is something that I think we were pretty keen on early on. And it’s been really fruitful, not only in Columbus, but we’re starting to work now generally in the Midwest, in Southern Indiana, in towns that are smaller than Columbus, and a lot of the driving force behind it is looking at these spaces between disciplines,” Martinez says. The duo moved…

In 2018, the socioecologist Zbigniew Grabowski decided to examine how city governments considered equity in their plans for green infrastructure. But the closer he and his co-researchers looked, the more it became apparent that this question was premature. “We quickly realized what green infrastructure meant was highly variable between city agencies and especially across cities,” says Grabowski, a visiting faculty member at the New School and a postdoctoral researcher at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. So Grabowski and his team took a step back and asked: What is green infrastructure? The research team combed through 122 city plans from 20 American cities. They learned that green infrastructure is often given ambiguous, ad hoc, or reductionist definitions, when it’s defined at all. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published the results of…

Undergraduate students in Iowa State University’s landscape architecture program spend up to six weeks of their first sophomore semester on the road, exploring the profoundly altered savanna lands of the central United States. As part of the requirements of the Traveling Savanna Studio, students have journeyed from Canada to Mexico, through Minneapolis and San Antonio, sometimes putting as many as 4,000 miles on their vans in the course of a semester. A recent syllabus states the goal of the studio is “to understand ‘landscape’ by actively observing all aspects of it—including landform, vegetation, architecture, urban form, culture, and art.” In the past two decades, the Savanna Studio has become the cornerstone of the Iowa State program, establishing lasting bonds between students and their instructors. In 2019, the studio alumni marked…

Is it possible (or even valuable) to design an ideal garden ina time of climate upheaval, food insecurity, and war? The International Garden Festival has strolled directly into this fraught question with a new theme to mark its 30th year. Hosted by the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire Centre for Arts and Nature, this year’s festival produced 24 designs embodying the theme of the ideal garden. Participants were asked to consider the characteristics of an ideal garden in a time of climate change, increased urbanization, and pandemic recovery. Designed by RIOS’s Jason Shinoda, ASLA; Elisa Read Pappaterra; and Stephanie Lin, Le Jardin de la Réciprocité (the Garden of Reciprocity) challenges visitors to see themselves as one with the garden. “We wanted to have a garden that talked about our relationship to nature,” says Shinoda,…