landscape architecture
What happens when you take a large group of landscape architecture students and, for a solid week, rigorously school them in the fundamentals of watershaping? You might be surprised: Even though that seems like a short span, my charges took to watershaping like fish to water when I introduced them to the subject this past spring - and the results were both remarkable and inspiring. As their instructor, I witnessed not only their keen interest but also saw ample evidence that they were applying highly refined design processes and quality design productions in their watershape-related coursework. So despite what some skeptics have been telling me for years, you actually can
It’s an unfortunate fact that landscape architects receive little or no formal education in watershaping while they’re in school. As a result, where the typical landscape architect’s irrigation plan will show every pipe, fitting, wire and component for a given project, that same project’s pool plan will carry almost no detail at all. This phenomenon begs the question: Why don’t our colleges and universities do more to educate landscape architects about watershaping? The answer to this question causes me double pain, because I know full well that
Sometimes finding just what you need is as easy as looking in your own backyard. That’s what happened for Greg Whittaker of Whittaker Homes, one of Missouri’s largest home builders, when he began searching for the right partner to provide dramatic watershapes for New Town, an innovative community in St. Charles, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. Situated on the site of what had been a farming community, New Town is intended to invoke and embody a comfortable lifestyle for the 21st Century. Parklands filled with water were the key to Whittaker’s vision not just for aesthetic and thematic reasons, but also for stormwater management. While visiting St. Louis’ Forest Park, a venerable civic treasure, Whittaker saw the
Why isn't the appropriate use of water a defining, central component in the education of landscape architects? That question has rattled around in my head for a long, long time, basically because it has no adequate or satisfactory answer. I'm a trained landscape architect and, as luck would have it, for nearly 20 years I've had one foot in the pool industry and the other in landscape architecture - and I've always felt like a rare beast moving back and forth between two entirely separate worlds. As I see it, this lack of affinity between these water-related industries has been a limiting factor in the advancement of the watershaping trades. For me, the lack of connection has always seemed nonsensical when it hasn't seemed tragic. As a watershaper, a big part of my work in recent years has been seeking ways to combine the best of both worlds and share what I know with university-level students in landscape architecture departments - students whose chairs I occupied some years ago and who still stand a good chance of graduating without ever having been taught anything at all about how water can
Why isn't the appropriate use of water a defining, central component in the education of landscape architects? That question has rattled around in my head for a long, long time, basically because it has no adequate or satisfactory answer. I'm a trained landscape architect and, as luck would have it, for nearly 20 years I've had one foot in the pool industry and the other in landscape architecture - and I've always felt like a rare beast moving back and forth between two entirely separate worlds. As I see it, this lack of affinity between these water-related industries has been a limiting factor in the advancement of the watershaping trades. For me, the lack of connection has always seemed nonsensical when it hasn't seemed tragic. As a watershaper, a big part of my work in recent years has been seeking ways to combine the best of both worlds and share what I know with university-level students in landscape architecture departments - students whose chairs I occupied some years ago and who still stand a good chance of graduating without ever having been taught anything at all about how water can
The plaza island at Columbus Circle in New York is an example of urban and civic design at its best. Encircling the heart of this grand space is a subtle fountain system that has turned a busy traffic hub into a welcome gathering place for the city’s residents and visitors. Here, principal designer Claire Kahn Tuttle of WET Design in Sun Valley, Calif., describes the project and the philosophy the company brought to bear in bringing it to fruition. Tradition has it that, in measuring the distance a place is from New York, the geographical tape measure is placed at the center of Columbus Circle. This makes it easy to see this southwest corner of Manhattan’s Central Park (and the intersection of Broadway, 59th Street and Eighth Avenue) as the true heart of the city. A massive 70-foot obelisk topped by Gaetano Russo’s statue of Christopher Columbus has stood at the center of the bustling traffic circle since 1892, when it was installed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the explorer’s arrival in the Americas. The circle itself was part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s
A tremendous amount of synergy and teamwork went into the making of "The Ultimate Family Home." Initiated by Builder magazine (the official publication of the National Association of Home Builders) and Pardee Homes (the Los Angeles-based developer of the Nevada Trails neighborhood in which the home was built), the project unfolded as a partnership between the magazine and the developer's Las Vegas office along with Bassenian-Lagoni Architects (Newport Beach, Calif.), Color Design Art (Los Angeles) and Lifescapes International (the Newport Beach-based landscape-architecture firm). "The Ultimate Family Home" opened in January 2004 in conjunction with
I envy landscape architects and designers and your involvement in the design of everything from small, intimate residential spaces to sweeping acreage intended for public use. This creation of "exterior spaces for human occupation," as some have called it, is a
One of the first books about landscape architecture I ever read was Gardens Are for People by Thomas Church, a designer justly famous for changing the way exterior spaces are treated today - especially in the residential environment. This book was first published in 1953, but a second edition (published in 1983 by Reinhold Publishing Corp.) is still widely available in bookstores and on the Internet. The 250-plus-page book traces Church's long career, which started in California in the 1930s and lasted through the late '70s and almost to his death in 1978. His great gift was taking the art of landscape architecture and applying it to the masses. Before him, landscape architecture was
