Landscape Architecture Magazine August 2025

WILL JENNINGS (“The Garden Museum’s Expanding Scope,” page 28) is an art and architecture writer, the editor of recessed. space, the director of the arts charity Hypha Studios, and an instructor at UCL Bartlett and the University of Greenwich. You can follow him on Instagram @willjennings80. “There are so many important gardens (not all of which remain) that William Andrews Nesfield designed, especially his work at Kew Gardens, including the wonderful Broad Walk Avenue.” THAÏSA WAY, FASLA, (“A Garden of Reckoning,” page 90) is a landscape historian and the director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. She teaches history at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “As place is our history, landscape architects agree to an enormous responsibility when they redesign a site, reshaping the relationships between land…

Awesome! Memphis has some amazing public spaces and is really sharpening its design sense. Great to see this feature. Cameron Yates, ASLA Memphis, Tennessee ON SHIFTING GROUND Eight Designers on Finding Level The sentiments my colleagues express are thoughtful and familiar. We’ve all seen so much change in recent years that it’s hard to predict what will have the biggest impact. Only five years ago, we were in the depths of the pandemic, figuring out how to keep our businesses running and morale up while we all learned to work and design remotely. Public open spaces sat empty and then became even more important as the pandemic wore on. Online collaboration platforms and AI quietly became commonplace. The current political discourse could cause the next big shift; I worry about…

Editors traditionally use their page to comment on ideas that arise in the course of putting together an issue, or to tie articles to news or current topics. This column is unlike any I’ve written in the past because it’s about something we didn’t publish, and why. A few months ago, I was pitched an essay coauthored by a group of researchers and landscape architects that focused on energy infrastructure and the opportunities afforded to landscape architects in the expansion of the national grid. The authors submitted it to LAM in part because of an essay we’d published back in 2021, “Power Player: Designing for Just and Multifunctional Energy Landscapes.” That essay started some interesting conversations and led to more research opportunities for the authors, and, most recently, a webinar…

In the late 1990s, Rebecca Orozco, a history and anthropology professor at southern Arizona’s Cochise College, became interested in a group of weathered adobe buildings less than half a mile north of the U.S.–Mexico border in the small town of Naco, Arizona. The buildings, called Camp Naco, had been a U.S. Army installation dating to the Mexican Revolution—one of three dozen outposts built to deal with conflict at the border. Yet the 200-person camp was unique in two ways: It was the only outpost still standing, and it had housed Buffalo Soldiers, segregated companies of African American personnel. Over the next 20 years, Orozco sought funds to preserve the site while watching its structures gradually fall into disrepair. She convinced a local municipal government to acquire the site and created…

In 2017, two students at the University of California, Berkeley, made it their mission to rid their campus of the common herbicide glyphosate. Eight years later, that advocacy has become Re:wild Your Campus, a nonprofit that helps colleges across the country ditch synthetic pesticides and fertilizers without giving up the character of their landscapes. “The two biggest concerns that we hear [are] that it will cost more and the landscape isn’t going to look good,” says Sheina Crystal, who started a chapter of Re:wild Your Campus while a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who is now a co-director. The organization wants to confront those concerns and “reorient landscape maintenance from a product-based approach to ‘organic land care,’” Crystal says, an approach that focuses on soil health…

The successful scheme for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s recent design competition needed to balance reverence for the existing sculpture park designed by Dan Kiley with a modern imperative to open up the campus and unify its disparate pieces. “There’s a lot of placement of things and not really a big composition,” says Kate Orff, FASLA, the founder of SCAPE, about the brief for the new landscape. Selected by the museum in April, SCAPE’s proposal, developed with Weiss/Manfredi, envisions a terraced and largely transparent wing opposite Steven Holl’s luminescent 2007 Bloch Building, a framing device that would provide new views of the sculpture park, which opened in 1989. The design adds a more prominent entry at the southeast corner of the museum’s imposing lawn, and a curving path slices through…