Landscape Architecture Magazine

07/29/2025

AUGUST 2025: YOU’RE WELCOME

On the cover: At the Missouri Botanical Garden, Michael Vergason Landscape Architects, LTD brings the inside out with 27,000 plants, a seed bank of rare species, and a few non-negotiable ground rules.

Also in the issue: A rewilding campus in Colorado; a serene pool at Holocene House with exquisite detailing in water and stone; SE Group planning year-round play on Utah’s mountains; a review of The African Ancestors Garden by Walter Hood at the International African American Museum; and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects' vision for Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. Plus: your late-summer reading list~

07/28/2025

COLLAB is a collective of six independent, women-owned landscape architecture practices supporting one another through project partnerships, shared knowledge, and real community.

Together, they take on larger projects and find the “water cooler” camaraderie often missing from solo practice.

“The reason we are out on our own [is] in part because we couldn’t find places in a standard firm structure.” —Emma Kelly, ASLA

Read the full story at LAM Online. https://bit.ly/4kYvSl6

What landscape architects need to know. The small design firms in the collective can team up on bigger projects and find “water cooler” camaraderie. By Elaine Stokes, ASLA “We’re not a firm,” says Jessalyn Jarest, ASLA. “That’s what’s different about us,” adds Elise Nash, ASLA. Thi...

07/18/2025

In Indianapolis, Ahmaud Carroll Tubbs, Student ASLA, uncovered the stories of nearly 1,300 Black residents buried in unmarked graves and proposed a landscape-forward memorial to honor them.

His summer internship has become a teachable moment for the whole city.

Read the story at LAM Online. https://bit.ly/4kIy8gl

Ahmaud Carroll-Tubbs' summer internship has become a teachable moment for the whole city. By Anjulie Rao Just east of the White River in Indianapolis sat the Greenlawn Cemetery, one of the city’s oldest public burial sites. Divided into six sections across 25 acres, the grounds had interred more t...

07/09/2025

SLA's design for Grønningen-Bispeparken is their “most radical” yet.

Water that once flooded buildings now flows through a series of “social swales,” where stormwater basins double as play spaces and meeting places for friends when dry.

Read the story at LAM Online.

SLA’s design for Grønningen-Bispeparken is their “most radical” yet. By Irina Zhorov When rain started falling several days after the opening of Copenhagen’s Grønningen-Bispeparken, an employee from SLA, the design studio that reimagined the site, live streamed the storm to her colleagues....

07/02/2025

In 1966, Arizona State University's Hayden Library—the subject of Jonathan Lerner’s cover story in Landscape Architecture Magazine—made an imposing impression with a trench-like “moat” surrounding the building and first- and second-floor facades clad in granite. Programmable outdoor space was scarce. “Thirty years ago, there were no native plants on campus. Every single piece of open space was either sidewalk or grass,” says Todd Briggs, ASLA, an ASU alumnus and principal of TRUEFORM landscape architecture studio, tasked with reimagining the space along with Ayers Saint Gross.

To make the setting more permeable and cooler amid the intense desert heat, the design team—also including TRUEFORM’s Roger Socha, ASLA, and Kennetha Perkins, ASLA—focused the project on plantings and outdoor rooms to add much-needed shade and promote a sense of community. “For TRUEFORM the challenge was to make the revamped building’s periphery ‘as porous as possible,’ Briggs says.”

Read more on LAM Online.

What landscape architects need to know. How fresh planting and reused materials help a mid-century library keep its cool. By Jonathan Lerner In 1966, the Hayden Library opened at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. Byron Sampson, ASLA, the university landscape architect, says that with its mass...

06/30/2025

JULY 2025: SHADE CURE

On the cover: A new campus hub at Arizona State University's Hayden Library, by TRUEFORM landscape architecture studio and Ayers Saint Gross.

Also in the issue: Ahmaud Carroll Tubbs, a student at Ball State University turns the reemergence of a cemetery in Indianapolis into a teachable moment; revisiting a 2005 debate in the magazine about landscape architecture’s future; how the six women of COLLAB, a New England-based collective of independent landscape architects, are challenging the binary choice of sole ownership or group practice; SLA equips a park in Copenhagen to protect public housing residents from flooding; and more~

06/25/2025

Waterstreet Studio and Baskervill are part of the team hired by the City of Richmond, VA Government to help the Virginia capital shine a light on the history of Shockoe Bottom. Kim O’Connell’s story in Landscape Architecture Magazine and on LAM Online discusses how the area’s pre-Civil War past as a site where slaves were tortured and trafficked—containing a former jail and two African burial grounds—was largely forgotten.

“For decades, there was no public acknowledgment of the site’s history outside the Black community—'exactly the way to tell a story so that no one will hear it,’ as the author Kristen Green puts it in her book The Devil’s Half Acre.”

The Shockoe Project is an effort to put that story front and center. “At Shockoe Bottom, the landscape plan includes interpretive, memorial, and gathering spaces that move visitors through a historic narrative from grief and despair to salvation and personal agency.”

Read more at LAM Online: https://bit.ly/3TFJ9Ul

What landscape architects need to know. Waterstreet Studio creates a landscape plan for historic site of former jail and two forgotten African burial grounds. By Kim O’Connell On a typical weekday, the historic Main Street Station in Richmond, Virginia, is a blur of motion. Passenger and freight t...

06/18/2025

The Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania featured 40 memorial groves—one for each of Flight 93’s victims—with over 1,500 trees, but a 2020 assessment by Cornell University revealed that 76 had died, 276 were in fair or poor condition, and 175 were missing.

Now, teams of experts—including landscape architects—from the National Park Service's Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and the Center for Cultural Landscape Preservation at SUNY ESF (State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry) are attempting to diagnose underlying causes and develop a long-term management strategy. One contributing factor they’re focusing on is that after 50 years of coal mining, the site was remediated with just a few inches of soil and some treatment ponds.

Read more at LAM Online: https://bit.ly/3FOf95A

What landscape architects need to know. More than 70 of the 1,600 trees died and many more are suffering or missing. A multidisciplinary team is seeking solutions. By Timothy A. Schuler Signs that the trees were struggling at the Flight 93 National Memorial were apparent almost as soon as the saplin...

06/11/2025

An inflection point in the design evolution for Tom Lee Park in Memphis came at a meeting when representatives of neighborhoods outside the city center asked the designers: “Is this a park for downtown, or is this also our park?”

Aiming to make a park that could be accessed and utilized by all Memphians, the landscape architecture team of SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC and Studio Gang conceived of “micro-deltas” or microparks within the larger 30-acre space, “each with an entrance that is directed toward a different kind of community.”

“You have to go beyond just opening the fence; you really have to reach out to people,” says Kate Orff, FASLA, SCAPE’s founder.

Read more at LAM Online: https://bit.ly/3ZOKnQX

What landscape architects need to know. When concerns surfaced that the redesign of Tom Lee Park would only benefit downtown, the firm returned to the drawing board. By Gale Fulton, ASLA What is the agency of the urban designer? How do we not just make landscapes, buildings, and public space, but ma...

06/05/2025

The American Academy in Rome has awarded its 2025-2026 Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture to Sean Burkholder, ASLA, and Karen Lutsky, respectively, of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and to Tameka Baba of The Ohio State University.

Lutsky and Burkholder’s gonzo approach to landscape interpretation — incorporating unconventional methods — will extend to their investigation of Lake Bracciano outside of Rome. Baba’s project, Urban Tapestry: Exploring Soft Density in Rome’s Public Spaces, will focus on Rome’s Piazza del Popolo as she continues her practice of using salvaged materials from deconstructed woven baskets to inform diverse and pluralistic public spaces.

Read more at LAM Online: https://bit.ly/3ZTinvc

What landscape architects need to know. The 2025 Rome Prize in landscape architecture was awarded to Sean Burkholder, Karen Lutsky, and Tameka Baba, who will incorporate unconventional methods to explore a variety of spaces. By Timothy A. Schuler This year’s Rome Prize recipients in landscape arch...

05/29/2025

In Memphis, Barbara Keathley, ASLA, and Roger Dale Skaggs, ASLA, collaborated to renovate a columbarium at the Church of the Holy Communion. https://bit.ly/3Z9ntDj

What landscape architects need to know. “These are lighter because they represent the four elms, and we didn’t want to completely screen out the building, so we have this transparency through those trees. Even before, even from our drawings, I don’t think we realized how much that quatrefoil w...

05/28/2025

JUNE 2025: TOM LEE PARK

On the cover: Tom Lee Park in Memphis, Tennessee, by SCAPE.

Also in the issue: Students’ digital modeling informs a memorial grove; Mayer/Reed garnishes the tiniest park on the continent; a landscape plan in Richmond uncovers the histories of enslavement along the James River; a critical look at algorithms in urban design; a review of Intangible Heritage by Roberto Burle Marx and collaborators; Second Nature, an exhibition of photography in the Anthropocene; and more~