Landscape Architecture Magazine June 2025

DANIELLE N. CHOI (“Our Green Is Dark, Almost Black,” page 84) is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. You can follow her on Instagram @danielle_choi. “I was surprised to learn that deforestation in the Amazon declined in the early years of the 21st century, only to rise again quickly over the last decade.” GALE FULTON, ASLA, (“Long Division,” page 54) is the director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “While both the planning and design processes that led to the realization of Tom Lee Park were nuanced and complex, the most surprising part was how contentious the process was at times.” GOT A STORY? At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have…

One of my favorite moments among many in this month’s feature on Tom Lee Park (“Long Division,” page 54) by Gale Fulton, ASLA, is when he stops and makes a series of observations about the way the design team has enhanced the relationship between the public artworks in the park: Theaster Gates’s A Monument to Listening and the existing memorial to Tom Lee, the historical figure from whom the park gets its name. Fulton notes the spatial elements and plantings intended to heighten the dialogue between the sculptures and calls the overall experience of the ensemble “poignant” and a “profound” moment in the park that will only become more so as it grows in. It’s a small detail in a high-profile, very complex public space, but it’s one that’s been…

Signs that the trees were struggling at the Flight 93 National Memorial were apparent almost as soon as the saplings went in. Located on a former coal strip mine outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the memorial was designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and Paul Murdoch Architects. It features roughly 2,000 trees arranged in a 1.2-mile-long allée of red maples and 40 memorial groves, one for each of Flight 93’s victims. Within three years of the memorial’s completion in 2016, the trees were showing symptoms ofstress and early mortality, so much staff began documenting the issue. so that National Park Service (NPS) staff began documenting the issue. A 2020 conditions assessment conducted by Cornell University found that of the 1,600 trees in the memorial groves, 76 had died, 276 were in…

With its neon LEDs refracted through shards of clear acrylic, Chasing Rainbows, a temporary art installation Mayer/Reed designed for the Portland Winter Light Festival, looms over Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon. It’s a more intimate experience than it might sound, because Mill Ends Park is exactly 452 square inches. Until December 2024, when it was overtaken by a copycat park in Japan, it held the record for the world’s smallest park. Its origins are traced to Oregon Journal columnist Dick Fagan, an Irishman who looked down from his second-story office window in 1946 and saw both an unused hole for a utility pole and an opportunity for ethnic whimsy. He planted some flowers in the hole, and in his newspaper column, called “Mill Ends,” he described it as the…

LULU LOQUIDIS Cofounder, LAA Office, Columbus, Indiana SEATTLE OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK Charles Anderson, FASLA, Seattle This groundbreaking landscape urbanism project—one of the first I studied as a student—masterfully navigates challenging topography and infrastructural barriers, creating an ecologically restorative public space that integrates art and nature. COPACABANA BEACH Roberto Burle Marx, Rio de Janeiro Our practice focuses on place-based iconographic motifs in public spaces to amplify the identity of cities, districts, and neighborhoods. On a recent research trip to Lisboa, Portugal, with Indiana University students, we explored calçada portuguesa, the traditional stone paving technique that Burle Marx famously modernized in Brazil. LURIE GARDEN Piet Oudolf and GGN, Chicago Oudolf’s pioneering garden design has redefined cultural norms, and experiencing the Lurie Garden’s breathtaking textures, colors, and poetic contrast with its urban surroundings…

The conversion of a strip mall in Austin, Texas, into a dense, mixed-use development is being treated as a potential model for growth in the city and in other water-scarce regions. Led by the landscape architects at Lionheart, the 38-acre development will replace a 1980s car-centric shopping center called Brodie Oaks, reducing the site’s impervious cover from 84 percent to 54 percent while adding 1,700 housing units and more than a million square feet of office, retail, and hotel space. The project has garnered awards and headlines alike, winning in 2024 an ASLA Professional Merit Award from the Texas Chapter and the Next Big Idea Award from the Urban Land Institute’s Austin Chapter, and leading planning pundits to call for the “Brodie Oaksification” of Austin’s other shopping centers. LEGEND HERITAGE…