Landscape Architecture Magazine September 2022

CONTRIBUTORS JEFF LINK (“Sidecar Wetlands,” page 42) is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @JeffJefflink. “What’s curious about the Wild Mile is how it uses technology to reanimate natural processes: essentially, reverse engineering portions of a channelized river to conditions resembling their indigenous ecology.” KATHARINE LOGAN (“Reinventing the Lost Road,” page 80) is based in the Pacific Northwest and trained as an architect before turning to writing that focuses on sustainability, well-being, and the experience of place. You can view her work at katharine.logan@gmail.com. “Along the Historic Columbia River Highway, there’s a plaque that reads, ‘A work of art worthy of a lifetime of devotion.’ Whether that refers to the road or the landscape, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge director Kevin Gorman told me, ‘I just know…

When I joined the LAM staff eight years ago this month, I brought a background in historic preservation with me. I knew that landscapes were underrecognized in historic preservation practice, but I hadn’t really understood how ill-suited the entire technical framework of preservation was for landscapes. Readers are likely familiar with the handful of efforts that exist to document landscapes—the Historic American Landscapes Survey and the myriad initiatives of the Cultural Landscape Foundation are the best known, in part because of long-term partnerships with ASLA. The programs administered by the National Park Service, including the National Register of Historic Places, are the most important structures for preservation in the United States, but it has only been recently that these programs expanded to include landscape in a substantive way. Landscape preservation has been…

I finally had a moment this evening to read the July LAM, and I am very concerned about how the national organization perceives our state and our chapter of the national organization. As you are aware, in the issue there is a conversation with Kinder Baumgardner, ASLA, one of our Texas chapter members based in Houston, along with a discussion about a binational park at the border in Laredo that is led by Overland Partners based in San Antonio. Almost every month, LAM has a reference to Texas in some form or fashion. Our Texas chapter of ASLA leadership takes a very bipartisan approach in everything we do, similar to our local governments (although that might not always be the case), because we are representing our members, who may not always see…

If there were good, recent books on passing a design firm’s ownership from founders to successors (there aren’t), it sounds as if Cheryl Barton, FASLA, and Kate Orff, FASLA, would have had little use for them. In March, the San Francisco-based Office of Cheryl Barton, Barton’s firm since 1995, became the West Coast office of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, the firm Orff founded in New York in 2004. SCAPE’s absorption of Barton’s firm fits what Orff describes as an organic enlargement of SCAPE’s footprint, rather than growth for growth’s sake. Barton says the move provides a satisfying answer to the post-CEO life that she has long contemplated as part of a 25-year plan. “It’s neither a merger nor an acquisition. It’s our invention,” Barton said in June on a joint call with…

Every watershed is unique. But in the United States, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which drains 64,000 square miles of land, including some of the country’s most densely populated communities, is in a class of its own. Landscape architects who practice in the region need to know something not just about the ecology of the watershed, but about its singular regulatory environment—the product of collaboration between the federal government, six states, and hundreds of municipalities. That’s the proposition behind the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional (CBLP) certification program, which has offered training and certification in locally tailored sustainable practices since 2016. The program offers voluntary credentials for landscape architects, designers, and managers, and continuing education credits integrated with various professional associations, including the Landscape Architecture Continuing Education System. While other states and cities…

One of the most densely populated urban centers in North America, Vancouver, Canada, has opened its first new park in 10 years. It’s called sθəqəlxenəm ts’exwts’áxwi7, which means “rainbow” in two Indigenous languages. The name is a gift of the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation, and Tsleil-Waututh Nation, on whose unceded territories the park sits. (For pronunciation, the Vancouver Park Board has posted a video on its social media accounts.) Designed by the multidisciplinary studio DIALOG, sθəqəlxenə mts’exwts’áxwi7 is helping shift the paradigm for what an urban park can be. Located in a downtown neighborhood where an acre of land currently sells for more than $75 million (the park’s 0.8-acre parcel was assembled years ago for about $10 million), the park lies within a 10-minute walk of close to 30,000 people.…