Category: water
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Viva le Cité
The holiday season has given me a chance to catch up on a LOT of reading, so stay tuned for a mash-up of some of the most notable new work in the coffers… as well as a few book reviews and other little projects that I’ve been trying to finish up to no avail. One…
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Holes | Sites
One of the main contextual starting points of site design is the topography of sites… flat, sloped, steep, gradual – all influence the eventual end. What do we do when there is a significant depression – either natural, or created via cultural activities. Whereas we consider the malleability of the site as a generic field…
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Too Much of a Good Thing
As a follow-up to my previous post that referenced the minor annoyance (ok, maybe not minor) that requires an urban adaptation that residents of Venice must make to navigate the watery public spaces during high water seasons. Through puddles and raised walkways, urban dwellers deal with this in fine form by the age-old tradition of…
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The Notorious H2O
Blue is the New Green – runs the headlines in last weeks NY Times blog, and not a moment too soon for that. Allison Arieff give an explanation: “A range of alternative energy technologies are available to us today; there is, however, no substitute for water. But there are new ways of thinking about water…
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Salmon-Safe SoWa
I’ve riffed a bit on SoWa previously on Landscape+Urbanism as filled with potential but needing some time… A recent report by Dyland Rivera from the Oregonian and picked up on Jetson Green as well, that the 35-acre area in the South Waterfront area in Portland has acheived Salmon Safe Certification, the first urban neighborhood to…
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Unnatural Waters
This post stems from a fascinating post I spotted a while back on Treehugger. The topic was the Foreclosure Fish… a resultant reaction from the abandonment of homes, and more specifically swimming pools. “The mortgage crisis is not only wrecking peoples’ lives, it’s not doing much good for the environment, either. The swimming pools of…
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Grey to Green: Action?
I mentioned previously the announcement of a proposal by Portland City Commissioner (and mayoral candidate) Sam Adams for ‘Grey to Green’… after an epic roll-out – there has been little talk since. Well that has changed in a flash with another big invite to City Council for an event this week to take some action.…
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Aqueous Solutions Pt.3: Restoration
We complete this aqueous journey (don’t you love when something simple turns into something wonderful?) and we end with some brutal reality and some hope as to our ability to turn the tide of our technological wrong-doing. I would posit that perhaps the most compelling reading of the year so far in landscape architecture were…
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Aqueous Solutions Pt. 2: Provision
Picking up on a previous thread about Water – we deal with a bit more applicable material to large- and landscape-scale interventions and systems. A few of my favorite blogs – BLDGBLOG, Pruned, and Treehugger offered a variety of recent material regarding water – its provision and perhaps with some more time and luck, (and…
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Stormwater to the Streets
A short while back I was surprised to see in one of my favorite blogs, Pruned, an article entitled: ‘Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape’. For most, is just a hyperbolic hydrologic way of saying, look, green streets! The profile focusses on the award-winning work of Portland’s own Kevin Robert Perry, currently employed at…