Landscape Architecture Magazine November 2025

JOE ADLER (“Amid D.C.’s Dying Trees, Olmsted Woods Is a Success Story,” LAM Online) recently joined the staff of Landscape Architecture Magazine as its senior editor. “Speaking to Brad McKee and reading his article about the restoration of the forest adjacent to Washington National Cathedral revealed to me, as a D.C. area resident, what is at stake in protecting our local tree canopy.” DIANA BUDDS (“A Fresh Take on Multigenerational Play,” page 18) is a design writer based in New York whose work has recently appeared in the New York Times, Dwell, Wallpaper*, and the Architect’s Newspaper. You can follow her on Instagram @diana_b. “I interviewed Alex Hart, the landscape architect behind Wise Towers’s public spaces, on-site on a hot, humid July afternoon, and often got distracted by how much…

The news that Kongjian Yu, the founder of Turenscape and the Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, had died in a plane crash came through to ASLA headquarters early on the morning of September 24. He was one of the best-known public figures the profession has produced and is largely credited with transforming the way the Chinese government approaches land development, flood control, and urbanization. If you noticed his name or the phrase “sponge city” in the press more often in the past year, it was because Yu had been wrapping up his two-year term as the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture laureate when he died, a role focused on public engagement and raising the visibility of landscape architecture. Many ASLA staff knew him personally, but all admired…

Envision Resilience has worked with 500 students, 19 universities, and 12 communities across New England over five years. That’s already a pretty good record for the program, which brings university design studios to communities facing climate challenges. But to expand its reach, Envision Resilience announced in February it was taking a new step, spinning off from its parent foundation, Remain, to become a stand-alone nonprofit. The biggest change with this reorganization is an increase in operational bandwidth that will make Envision Resilience better able to stay engaged with the communities it serves, says Claire Martin, Envision Resilience’s executive director. “As we’ve scaled up our community engagement efforts, [they] have been more closely aligned to the goals and long-range planning efforts of these cities,” she says. The studio has brought teams…

Scientists have mapped forests and deserts for centuries, but underground ecosystems have remained uncharted territory. Now, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an international scientific consortium, has created what may be the first global atlas of mycorrhizal fungal biodiversity. To map fungal networks, SPUN scientists used high-resolution satellite images, machine learning models, and extensive soil sampling. The resulting Underground Atlas is a free online tool that predicts mycorrhizal biodiversity patterns at a resolution of one square kilometer, with the aim of informing conservation and agricultural development. The researchers admit that the atlas isn’t complete or perfect. Fungal networks in cities, for example, are less well understood, owing to the extreme heterogeneity of urban landscapes. Still, the mapping effort has generated useful findings: The most biodiverse mycorrhizal networks,…

Opened in 1965, Wise Towers is a public housing complex in New York City comprising two 19-story towers and an all-ages playscape designed by the architect Richard Stein and the artist Costantino Nivola. They enlivened the space with murals and sculptures, including a herd of horses that have become unofficial mascots of the neighborhood. However, over the years, the New York City Housing Authority fenced off areas and erected a jungle gym for young children, hampering the playground’s open and inclusive qualities. Elsewhere, seniors competed for a couple of tables in the northwestern corner to play dominoes, vandals knocked the noses off the beloved horses, and the lack of a level path through the courtyard made accessibility difficult. In 2019, the complex was converted to private management through the city’s…

It’s doubtful that children glean real scientific information about the taxonomical class Pisces from the classic card game Go Fish. But that’s what Topophyla’s Eric Arneson and Nahal Sohbati hope for players of their new game, Go Native. Featuring 52 species from 13 families of plants native to California, the game was born out of the pair’s own botanical discoveries. “Once you start learning small things, like apple is related to rose, it makes it so much more interesting,” Sohbati says. The designers enlisted the help of Alejandro Lemus, a horticultural educator at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and Samantha Morales Johnson Yang, an Indigenous ethnobotanist. The illustrator Lesley Goren helped refine the look of the cards, balancing botanical accuracy with kidfriendliness. Every Friday, the team reviewed mock-ups from Goren…