Design Public

Ahh, a place where the green trend is not getting on my nerves in terms of its trendiness and actually is effecting change*:  Chicago is greening its alleys. This is the type of move I would expect from a landscape architecture studio student thesis, perhaps completed in Portland Oregon, or somewhere deep in Vermont. Yippee, these forward-thinking ideas are moving west!

Chicago is chock-full of non-permeable alleys, a major source of non-point-source pollution, and they are in the midst of changing that. In today’s New York Times, there was a fantastic article all about it - check it out here. As I am sure I won’t be able to stop myself from boring you with Atlanta drought stories in the upcoming weeks, I promise to send a copy of this to Mayor Shirley Franklin and Governor Sonny Perdue. While Mr. Perdue seeks to hoard water away from other states within the watershed in court case water wars and make a big show of praying for rain, let’s see if he actually will try to do something about our situation like Chicago is doing.

*I have nothing against the green movement, but the way I feel about it was summed up perfectly in 30 Rock’s NBC Green Week episode that featured David Schwimmer as Greenzo. It’s starting to get like the grunge trend; sometime after the movie Singles was released, Blaine Trump started showing up at fundraisers in haute couture wool and flannel, and soon after the trend went away while glamour made a big return. I don’t want the trendiness of the green movement to reach the tipping point and cause the backlash return of hedonistic wastefulness.

photo by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Sometimes inspiration is right outside your own door, other times you have to travel far and wide to find it.  I am a cruddy photographer and was waiting to snag my travelmate Christina’s pictures from Prague to share with you, but we just can’t seem to get it together, so you’re stuck with mine for awhile.

I get inspired by little things, like the color of this wall and the shape of these windows:

As a landscape architect, I am obsessed with paving and patterns in the stones… (more…)

Remember when I told you about Rebar’s PARK(ing) Day last year?  This year, it has continued to spread nationwide here in the states and even oversees (the above photo is from London in 2006). PARK(ing) day will take place on on September 21st.

Another green tidbit, this one comes from Maine.   My uncle Tommy’s cottage came with this entry deck, which is a  genius reuse idea - it used to be an old floating dock.  It’s functional, it was free,  and it adds great character to the property.  The next time you have construction debris that you are trying to toss, open your mind and try to think of creative repurposing ideas!

As I flipped through this month’s issue of Metropolitan Home, I found myself thinking “clean lines, modern, predictable…yawn, clean lines, modern, perfect but predictable…does anyone who lives here have a personality?…nice, modern, predictable…is this the same house I was looking at a few pages ago or is this a different one?” until I arrived at “The Well-Watered Garden.” As soon as I saw the industrial stencil writing on the wall, I knew it had to be Julie Bargmann’s work. I should admit a bias that Julie was my favorite and most inspiring professor. This space looks pretty damn cool though, bias or no. The only thing about it that through me off was that the writer used the term “water feature.” Julie would never say “water feature”, even if someone was trying to force her to say it via water torture. (more…)

Alright, with long waiting lists for spots in community gardens, yet lots of yuck all over our cities, there is an alternative. Guerrilla Gardens are launching a coup on all neglected and abandoned open spaces across the world.

This week I received an issue of GOOD magazine in the mail for no reason. I love it when that happens. Somehow this relatively new magazine’s first four issues flew right under my radar. It’s a pretty cool magazine - it’s bi-monthly, it’s printed on recycled paper, and the $20 subscription fee goes to the charity of the subscriber’s choice. If you need to overdose on goody-goody-ness, click here. It’s pretty inspiring.

My favorite feature is a blurb called “Horticultural Jamming.” It’s about a “cadre of illicit (more…)

I just wanted to share some information I received from the NYC A.I.A. chapter regarding a tour of Governor’s Island. If you have a few free hours on Tuesday afternoon (July 24), it sounds like it would be really cool to be in the know about future plans for the island:

Tour Governors Island and view the the exhibit of the five landscape proposals with GIPEC President Leslie Koch and Vice President, Planning, Design, & Preservation, Betty Chen. (more…)

LOW MAINTENANCE: I know I let you know just how tricky a green roof can be a few weeks ago when I posted about the ALSA’s new green roof project. Thus, I was excited to see these low maintenance Green Roof Blocks on Apartment Therapy therapy the other day. They are a quick and clean way to add a little life to a roof:

HIGH MAINTENANCE: Here is a much more complicated award-winning green roof project by Skip Burck and Associates. The project is the Harvard Graduate Student Housing at 29 Garden Street. The green roof is atop a parking garage structure.

NO MAINTENANCE*: If you roof issues that won’t allow so much as the green roof blocks, take some inspiration from one of my favorite gardens of all time, Martha Schwartz’s Splice Garden. No budget, no ability to hold weight, no water, an inhospitable climate, no maintenance? No Problem - Schwartz made a plastic fantastic half Japanese Zen, half French Renaissance garden. Appropriately, the client was a microbiology lab.

*By the way, the only kind of no maintenance designed landscape is the plastic kind.

photos from greenroofblocks.com, richardburck.com, and marthaschwartz.com

Do you ever have deja-magazine? I received my Country Living today and had flashbacks when I flipped to this photo. I know I cut out a very similar picture to this one 5-10 years ago (and I feel like it was from Country Living as well, but I can’t remember):

Now that’s a proper Hamptons farmhouse! It was built by interior designer extraordinaire, Victoria Hagen, and her husband around 11 years ago. I love the way this house respects the flat potato field landscape of the Hamptons. I love that someone built a new house there that does not look like Crockett and Tubbs should be peeling out of the driveway in a ‘vette. Check out the perfect landscape architect Lisa Bynon created: (more…)

Last week when I was writing my post about the ASLA green roof, I wound up getting sucked into Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ project gallery for about an hour or two. I’ve been dreaming of this spectacular image ever since. These sublime steps are from a project in Turtle Creek Texas, one where steep slopes dominate a one-acre site.

Here’s another thought-provoking image from the same project:

images from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc.