Category: wetlands
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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…
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Daily Drawdown 6: Coastal Wetlands
This is the sixth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. There are a number of solutions mentioned in Drawdown that interface with the natural environment, and in doing so have a direct interface to landscape architecture. Coastal Wetlands are an important…
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Daily Drawdown 1: Lessons for Landscape Architects
As you delve into the various publications related to climate change, you find it runs the gamut from impenetrable to porous. I personally find much of design writing on the subject a bit toothless, and as far as scientific writings, the NCA4 pretty readable and compelling, whereas the IPCC reports require a bit of a…
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The Shape of Water
An amazing resource posted on ASLA’s The Dirt (here) focuses on Design Guidelines for Urban Wetlands, specifically what shapes are optimal for performance. Using simulations and physical testing to investigate hydraulic performance the team from the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT. Led by Heidi Nepf, Alan Berger and Celina Balderas Guzman along with a team…
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Resilience Matters
Fans of Island Press (myself included) know of that, beyond their publication of a great diversity of books, the non-profit has a mission, to “provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems”. In this regard, beyond publication around these themes, they have…
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Living Shorelines
Amidst the political crazy we like to call our United States government, and specifically what seems like a daily dismantling of environmental policies, there’s at least some folks at work on alternatives. Per a recent ASLA Advocacy brief: “On December 1, 2017, Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ) introduced H.R. 4525, the Living Shorelines Act of 2017.…
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Hidden Hydrology Origins 2: David James Duncan
Originally published on Terra Fluxus – 01/19/2011 Another inspiration for the Hidden Hydrology of Portland is the writing of David James Duncan (author of a couple of my favorite books, the Brothers K amongst the best). In a book of essays from 2002 entitled ‘My Story as Told by Water‘ Duncan tells some stories with…
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Hidden Hydrology Redux
Last week, I had the honor recently of presenting at a conference with one of my idols of landscape architecture, Anne Whiston Spirn. Aside from stimulating conversation, she presented the old and new of her work from The Granite Garden through her ongoing work on the Mill Creek Project in Philadelphia, i was reminded of…