Landscape Architecture Magazine April 2025

ROBERT Z. MELNICK, FASLA, (“Cultural Landscapes in an Uncertain Future,” page 40) has taught, researched, and developed guidelines about cultural landscapes for more than 45 years and was the National Park Service’s first historical landscape architect. You can contact him at rzm920@gmail.com. “Historic cultural landscapes add meaning to people’s lives while enriching the future in time and space.” SALA ELISE PATTERSON (“Monuments and Memory,” page 116) is a serial expatriate (eight countries) and linguist (five languages) who writes about the influence of art and design on culture and society. You can follow her on Instagram @salaelise. “I was surprised to learn how subversively Confederate monuments have been used, hiding behind the label of cultural heritage.” MONICA SHENOUDA (“The People’s Pompeii,” page 84) is an art and architectural historian based in Florence, Italy,…

I welcomed Justin Parscher’s excursion into design theory in the February issue. It brought to mind a discomfort that I have been experiencing with landscape modifications on a nearby university campus. I have known this campus over a 50-year span of time, and recently I have noticed a change of direction in their landscape palette. This article pushed me to ask, “Is there any theoretical justification for my complaint?” Yes, there is. The new plantings are a deviation from what seems to me to be a fundamental principle for our work—a sense of place. I see plant materials typical of our mid-Atlantic landscape palette replaced by exotic evergreens. There are fundamental design principles—scale, spatial definition, sense of place—that we learn in Design 101. CHARLES BRENTON, ASLA BALTIMORE I applaud Justin…

The tariffs are here. Or they’re not. Critical federal agencies are being crippled. Or they’re becoming more efficient. TikTok is going away. Or it’s changing hands. The government is in a free-for-all of chaos and corruption. Or it’s becoming more effective. Elon Musk is the unelected president. Or… Well, I’m not sure what the converse of that is right now. But you see where I’m going. I didn’t write these out to provoke a response, and for now, I’ll set aside arguing for or against any of the purposefully conflicting messages that define this unruly moment. Because I think this experience of social conflict is devastating in ways that haven’t been unpacked. Scientists of many stripes now study the complex and reciprocal relationship between conflict and anxiety. In these studies,…

PARKS Luther George Park’s sinuous performance pavilion could easily have been an architectural folly developed to place Springdale, Arkansas, among its design-forward neighboring cities of Bentonville, Fayetteville, and Rogers. But the 150-foot-wide weathered-steel proscenium is an integral part of the 14-acre park’s revitalization, responding directly to the community’s desire for a venue for events and gatherings and alternately serving as a landmark, shade structure, and stage. Jointly designed by Trahan Architects and SMM—which led the park master plan for the Downtown Springdale Alliance—and fabricated by the Dutch company CIG Architecture, the 33.5-foot-high structure perches above the park’s central promenade. It meets the ground at just two points, “like that bird that barely touches the sand as it walks along the beach,” says Trahan Architects’ Trey Trahan. The pavilion frames a…

URBAN PLANNING In 2001, Walmart closed a store in the north-central part of The Village, an enclave of 10,000 people almost entirely surrounded by Oklahoma City. A neighboring Albertsons grocery store closed two years later. The exodus of these big box stores, which helped form the backbone of the city’s commercial and civic core, such as it was, struck a blow to the city’s municipal budget, which relies on a mix of property and sales taxes. The city pursued an economic development plan that included a risky purchase of a dilapidated apartment complex across from the shuttered stores. As the city found its footing, it hired LAUD Studio, an Oklahoma City–based landscape architecture and urban design firm, to develop a citywide parks plan in 2017. In listening sessions, Jessica Lerner,…

CLIMATE A few years ago, Pippa Brashear, ASLA, a partner and the resilience principal at SCAPE, was approached by an intern with the New York Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. She recalls him saying, “I’m really excited to be interning [here], because when I was in middle school, we studied the Living Breakwaters.” The statement made her “feel really old,” she says, but also proud. The moment underscored both the glacial pace of landscape projects initiated as part of the Rebuild by Design competition (which kicked off in 2013 after Hurricane Sandy) and the reach of the Living Breakwaters curriculum, which is taught in schools throughout New York. Last fall, the $111 million coastal resilience project celebrated its official completion, becoming one of Rebuild by Design’s highest-profile projects to be…