As mediators between the built and natural environments, landscape architects have come to play a critical role in creating vibrant, sustainable public spaces. Recent successes like the High Line Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Park have put the spotlight on landscape architecture, and leading practitioners like Michael Van Valkenburgh have come to enjoy a certain celebrity. But while I know that there’s more to landscape design than pretty plantings, it is often tough for a non-initiate to get into the more technical aspects of what landscape architects do. Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes, a new online exhibition by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), is both an attempt to take stock at this moment in the profession, and to create a better understanding of the challenges landscape designers face. Read more…

On the Way to the Beach, by Derman Verbakel Architecture. Photo: Yuval Tebol.

The global cycle of recurring architecture exhibitions—biennales, triennales, and expos—has a nearly impossible balance to manage. Installations can be dismissed as too artsy, but technical presentations aren’t exactly crowd pleasers.  To make matters worse, these exhibition programs send projects hurtling through a flash-in-the-pan lifecycle: design, build, exhibit, deconstruct, and, in many cases, discard.  Even works that are now considered iconic—Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau—could not escape the forced obsolescence of this cycle.  

Tel Aviv landscape architect Yael Moria-Klain and cultural theorist Sigal Barnir have short-circuited this dilemma, proposing an alternate model for exhibitions with the  recent International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Bat Yam, Israel.  Now in its second year, the program doesn’t ask architects and landscape architects for projects to be displayed temporarily.  Instead, the organizers ask participants to design site-specific installations for the city of Bat Yam with a big caveat: no one takes them down once the Biennale is over.  To layer on added significance, the projects are not meant to remediate challenges facing the city.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) continues to sprawl. This week America’s most eclectic and oddest collection of art museum buildings opened a rather elegant new pavilion. The Italian architect Renzo Piano designed it and it holds about an acre of art. LACMA asked Piano to give its campus a more unified sense of place, but when his first work opened on the grounds, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opened in 2008, many people were less than thrilled.  This new, large, one-story, $54 million dollar Lynda and Stewart Resnick Pavilion, complements BCAM; its angled white fins on the roof diffuse sunlight and direct it through skylights into the spacious pavilion, to wash over a grey concrete floor. Renzo Piano spoke (on several occasions) with Edward Lifson; the following is edited from those conversations.

Edward Lifson: Michael Govan, the Director and CEO of LACMA, says there’s something “emotionally charged” about one-room buildings: when we walk into them, we feel oriented and we feel the great breadth of their space. He mentions the Pantheon, the Hagia Sophia, and Ronchamp—and says that’s what he wanted here. Do you see it like that? Why are you laughing, Renzo?

Renzo Piano: Oh, Michael! I like him because he is a visionary person. Yes, he wanted the purity of no stairs, no escalator, just space and light for art. I think that this building in reality is, well, it’s what he wanted: a tool, a tool to show art. Mainly visual art, but it’s a flexible space with a capacity to transform. You can play music in here, you can have dance or theater, or film. It’s what he needed in LACMA—this flexibility. To be able to show the treasures of the collection, but at the same time to explore other worlds. For example, before this officially opened, they placed a Walter De Maria in here, by itself (“The 2000 Sculpture,” 1992). It is so large, it’s rarely shown, because it’s difficult to find a place for it. I must say, it looked beautiful. Read more…

The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is the 91-acre park that surrounds Eero Saarinen’s monumental Gateway Arch in St. Louis. While the Arch is a national icon, the park is completely cut off from the city by an Interstate  Highway in the west and a patch of wasteland across the Mississippi in the east. Crisscrossed by thoroughfares and mostly ignored by tourists, it has come to be seen as an obstacle to the development of St. Louis downtown. Ten months ago, The City + The Arch + The River competition challenged architects to use the park grounds as a way to renew the bonds between St. Louis and its most famous monument.

The five finalists were announced last month, and a design proposed by an interdisciplinary team led by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) has just been declared the winner. Read more…

The architect Kevin Roche on the construction site of the Oakland Museum of California, circa 1969.

When we featured the Ford Foundation Building two years ago, I interviewed the landscape architect Peter Walker, who in talking about the importance of that Kevin Roche/John Dinkaloo-designed structure spent as much time extolling another building by those architects: the Oakland Museum of California. For our story on the restored building, I talked to Walker again. Peter has an encyclopedia grasp of landscape architecture history and the verbal ability to create a vivid picture of place. Here are his (slightly) edited memories of the building, as it was 41 years ago when it first opened.

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Dr. Dickson Despommier’s ten-year-old vision of vertical farm facilities for urban areas received a shot in the arm last week. When the architectural firm Weber Thompson presented their design for the Newark Vertical Farm to city officials and local businessmen from Newark, New Jersey, the response was generally positive. This is probably because, unlike previous vertical-farm designs, Weber Thompson’s sane, grey, industrial-style facility looks like it can actually be built. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy. All photos: Will Kirk

New York has P.S. 1’s courtyard installation; Baltimore has Sculpture at Evergreen. Every two years, the 26 acres surrounding the historic Evergreen Museum & Library transforms into a lab for artists. This year, equal presence was given to installations by architects, including New York’s Matter Practice and Yolande Daniels, the founding design principal of studio SUMO.

Sculpture at Evergreen’s curators—the University of Maryland architecture professor Ronit Eisenbach and the artist and curator Jennie Fleming—directed the ten individuals and teams to develop work responding to the site, a Gilded Age house with Italianate gardens owned by Johns Hopkins University. For architects, this kind of impermanent installation can become an extension of the studio, offering an opportunity to play with materials and processes in a fast and temporary setting. “It allows them to experiment,” Eisenbach says, “and take what they learned back to their practice.” Read more…

One of China’s historic tourist destinations is set to get a new, “super green” makeover. The architecture firm Woods Bagot has won an international design competition to transform the XiXi Wetlands region outside the city of Hangzhou in southwest China.

Hangzhou has been a tourist hub for centuries. Its famous West Lake was a favored haunt of the Chinese Emperors, and now the city wants to make the Xixi Wetlands a second tourist magnet. The Woods Bagot design, spread over 12 square miles, includes hospitality facilities, residential areas, and public spaces, all clustered around five square miles of wetlands. There will be an “entertainment zone,” complete with a humongous outdoor movie screen; a “cultural zone” with suitably futuristic-looking buildings; and water features everywhere.

But the development’s key feature will be its low carbon footprint. Read more…

With yesterday’s long-delayed opening of Pier 1, the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park is now approximately seven percent complete! OK, so there’s still a long way to go until New York’s third great urban landscape is whole—but, if this first section is any indication, it will be worth the wait. Pier 1 includes waterfront promenades, large lawns, a playground, and the “Granite Prospect,” an impressive riverside staircase made out of more than 300 pieces of salvaged granite.

If you can’t make it to Pier 1 in person—or if you want to wait for New York’s current dreary weather to pass by—the following video provides a good preview of the park-in-progress (set to a jazzy, Twin Peaks-style soundtrack no less.) Read more…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…