When landscape designer and artist Falon Mihalic was approached by Meow Wolf to create an environment for its Houston location, Radio Tave, she knew the work would “be about the landscape somehow.” But it was the discovery that her piece would connect to an anchor space known as “the ruin” that kick-started the creative process. “I was like, well, there would have been a garden,” she says. Continue reading Falon Mihalic’s Fictional Gardens
London: Filbert Press, 2024; 240 pages, $55.
The garden designer’s relationship to shrubs is moderately troubled. In the 1980s, the New Perennial movement rejected the rigid ubiquity of sculpted shrubs (typical of the early 20th-century British garden) in favor of prairie-style meadow plantings of matrix-based stands of grasses and perennials. The authors of Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, gardener Kevin Philip Williams and ecologist and horticultural researcher Michael Guidi, make a persuasive case for returning the shrub to the field of contemporary planting design to inspire a more ecologically responsible, botanically respectful, and conceptually “new wild” garden.
Though the warning signs had been present for months, the bad news officially came in March 2018, when forecasters at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (NWCC) in Portland, Oregon, released their long-range forecast of the upcoming fire season. Though it varied from state to state, in Oregon, light snowpack and higher-than-average temperatures combined to create a highly combustible landscape. “I’m worried about the 2018 fire season,” John Saltenberger, the fire weather program manager at the NWCC, told a Portland television station.
Between 2011 and 2023, more than 90 percent of the nation’s congressional districts had at least one county receive a federal disaster declaration because of extreme weather. Some states, including California, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have received dozens. The real number of congressional districts that have faced extreme weather could be even higher, says Amy Chester, the managing director for Rebuild by Design. The organization’s new publication, Atlas of Accountability, shows how climate disasters are occurring across the country, regardless of an area’s population density or geography.
“A lot of those districts [that didn’t receive a federal disaster declaration] have had high heat deaths and major heat waves,” she says. But “the federal government doesn’t give federal disaster declarations” for heat waves, so those events can’t be accounted for in the same way in the organization’s reports, such as its previous Atlas of Disaster. The data visualized by the map, which can be accessed on Rebuild by Design’s website, makes a nonpartisan case for more federal funding to adapt communities before a disaster, not just to build back what was destroyed. With additional funding, Chester says, designers and planners could “be a lot more creative in the way they want to respond.”
“We were in need of a suite of graphics to effectively communicate to decision makers how the choices they make can help their communities mitigate the risks of wildfire. We wanted our audience to learn about different mitigation techniques to reduce wildfire risk to the structure and surrounding landscape.” Continue reading Awards Focus: Talking to Communities about Wildfire
Every month, LAM’s Goods column features new products of interest to landscape architects, selected by the Goods editor. Sleek benches, fire pits, water features, lighting, and play equipment are some of the product category standouts. This year, the editors rounded up 2024’s most striking products, including a Snøhetta-designed paving system, play equipment, and an appealing outdoor lounger.
520VS SERIES: This new and versatile seating surface from DuMor features laser-cut bent steel straps. The method allows for a uniform gap between each strap, creating a clean and continuous look. The series will also include standard benches, tables, seat islands, and wall-mount benches. For more information, visit www.dumor.com. Continue reading 2024: The Year in Goods
On August 10, 2020, a derecho ripped across the Midwest with winds up to 140 miles an hour, causing $11 billion in damages, the most expensive thunderstorm in the United States to date. In the path of the wall of wind and thunderstorms was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which lost 65 percent of its tree canopy. Brucemore, a late Victorian country estate with a landscape designed in the early 20th century by ASLA cofounder O. C. Simonds, lost two-thirds of its tree canopy—300 mature trees. The $3 million repair bill put Brucemore in increasingly common company: a historic landscape devastated by climate change–accelerated natural disasters.
Continue reading After a Devastating Storm, an Iowa Landmark Finds the Silver Lining
