Landscape+Urbanism

Category: materials

  • Daily Drawdown 13: Urban Forests

    This is the thirteenth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. My presentation for Grey to Green is right around the corner, so if you’re at the conference come check it out (Thursday, April 5th in Toronto), so this will be the…

  • Daily Drawdown 11: Materials

    This is the eleventh in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. The decisions about materials we use on projects have implications in a number of areas, including loss of biodiversity, the pollution produced during manufacturing, and the overall greenhouse gas emissions that…

  • Daily Drawdown 10: Lighting & Energy

    This is the tenth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Compared to buildings, the relative energy demands for landscape architecture projects are a fraction of the energy usage, and this often means we forget to fully address opportunities for both reduction…

  • Daily Drawdown 8: Soils

    This is the eighth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Drawdown outlines a number of individual strategies, which allows areas to be isolated and the impacts. It’s also useful to think of those beneficial relationships, and how leveraging changes in one…

  • Daily Drawdown 5: Buildings & Cities

    This is the fifth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Beyond looking at a specific strategy, in this post I wanted to focus on a specific sector that compiles what seems most relevant to landscape architecture – Buildings and Cities. This…

  • Daily Drawdown 3: Green Roofs

    This is the third in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. In the last post, I focused on a Drawdown topic, Refrigerant Management, that seemed out to be well outside of the scope of landscape architecture, to point out that we have…

  • Got Moss?

    A cool vegitectural proposal from Sam Biroscak in collaboration with Gina Dyches, Stephanie Borchers, Annick Lang, and Anneli Rice is “Mossgrove is a proposal for an architectural pavilion to be built in Times Square during NYCxDESIGN from May 12-20, 2018. It highlights the possibilities of two under-appreciated urban elements: scaffolding and moss. Individually, scaffolding and moss…

  • Plants as Plants

    One of my favorite desk elements for years was a simple Lego tree, a plastic deciduous nondescript, species neutral, tree form.  Now, in a modern twist, those plants are actually made of plants.  See video below:

  • Irish Hunger Memorial

    I remember seeing images of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City a few years back, and was amazed by the hovering cantilevered structure holding a metaphorical ‘slice’ of Irish landscape.  The Memorial, designed by internationally renowned sculptor and public artist Brian Tolle, originally opened in 2002. It is a contemplative space devoted to…

  • Landscape Observatory: The Work of Terence Harkness

    I was really excited to learn about the publication of this book Landscape Observatory: The Work of Terence Harkness (2017, Applied Research & Design).  Having earned my undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture at North Dakota State University, our design milieu often focused on the sprawling plains, with design exercises that took us into the realms…