Landscape Architecture Magazine October 2025

Contributors JOHN BEARDSLEY (“Living Color,” page 148) is an author, curator, and educator who taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and directed the program in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. You can see his work at johnbeardsley.com. “ I’ve known Kathleen John-Alder for a long time, but her deep exploration of the Pine Barrens really took me by surprise—as I suspect it will anyone who knows her as just a designer and teacher.” AZZURRA COX (“To The Brim,” page 164) is the Andrew Gordon Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research centers on the myths and memories that live in the land. You can contact her at azzurrac@design.upenn.edu. “ This story has resonance beyond this moment, because the fundamental notion of…

AN APOCALYPTIC MANIFESTO I just finished reading “An Apocalyptic Manifesto,” and I found it fascinating! As a practitioner who graduated at the tail-end of the recession, it was a glimpse into the past of this ongoing conversation of professional “why-ness.” It was almost like being forwarded an old email chain about a current project; it doesn’t tell you the next steps, but it does tell you a lot about how you got where you are. The essay highlights that we are very much just further along in the same conversation. I didn’t realize it, but we have come so far in our commitment to public involvement with everything from the FrameWorks Institute report to a shifting zeitgeist encouraging landscape architects into public office, with so far left to go. It…

Like many readers, I’ve been encouraged to integrate AI into my “workflows,” as they are now called (workpiles might be more accurate) to increase productivity and thereby supposedly free up time for more creative, human-centered endeavors. Though I may be wary of this flavor of tech evangelism, there is so much administration in modern life that a flicker of hope remains in my heart that I might indeed be set “free” from some of it. Like writers, designers also spend endless hours not designing but administrating design. Addressing this imbalance, rather than producing AI-slop renderings or planting plans, could be AI’s best-case use for the design professions. The many critical questions cast at this idea of AI “freeing” humans (which humans? is “free” another word for unemployed? or uneducated?) needn’t…

As public agencies in Oregon and California demolish massive dams along the Klamath and other major rivers, smaller communities nationwide are replacing their own modest dams with more natural, fish-friendly systems. In Pine River, Minnesota, a working-class town of roughly 900 people, an aging 200-foot-long dam has been redesigned as a series of stepped naturalistic rock rapids flanked by wildflowers and other native riparian plantings, a change that has generated public investment upstream and down. The opportunity to rethink Pine River’s riverfront followed a decision by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to rebuild a bridge over the river and decouple the road from the dam that supported it. A 2014 feasibility study commissioned by the City of Pine River and led by the multidisciplinary firm Bolton & Menk laid out…

When cities consider how and where to invest in park space, the most common metrics are based on acres or amenities per person. These measures were also used in San Diego, but now the city is taking a new approach: a recreational value-based park standard that’s based on a points system. “While park acreage is important, it is not the only way to bring real investments to a community,” says Jonathan Avila, a principal planner and landscape architect with the San Diego Parks and Recreation department. Here’s how the new standard works. Parks receive scores based on a variety of factors: acreage, yes, and amenities like play areas, basketball courts, dog parks, and community gardens. But there are also points for trail linkages, connections to civic and commercial uses, interpretive…

Perhaps the most surprising thing aboutVisual Communication for Landscape Architects, a free zine-style guide created by Tessa Wiley for landscape architecture students, is the absence of examples. Instead, the 109-page booklet tackles topics such as graphic design fundamentals and how to communicate abstract concepts with hand-drawn diagrams and doodles rendered in black and white. Partially inspired by the work of the writer Austin Kleon, Wiley wanted to avoid existing graphic styles and instead “use visual communication to talk about visual communication.” The spare approach is designed to encourage students to think about why a particular diagram or graphic style is useful, says Weimin Li, ASLA, Wiley’s collaborator and the graduate coordinator for Cal Poly Pomona’s MLA program. (Wiley graduated from the program in 2024 and is a landscape designer at…