Brandywine, Green Zebras, and German Queens

With spring on the horizon and the grass in my backyard finally being revealed from the 5 feet of snow that has covered it for the last 3 months, it’s time to start my heirloom tomatoes!  What are heirloom tomatoes you ask?  They are the beautiful, multi-colored, and generally expensive tomatoes sold in [...]

Jacob Javits Plaza: Redesigned Again

Future Plaza Rendering by Michael VanValkenburgh . Courtesy MVV

For anyone who has been in Landscape Architecture school in the last 10 years, I am sure you are familiar with the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan.  I came across an article this morning that announced [...]

Holocaust Memorial in Berlin

I was lucky enough to travel to Berlin at the beginning of November and was in awe of the amazing Holocaust Memorial designed by New York City architect Peter Eisenman.  It consists of 2,711 concrete slabs that cover an entire City block.  The blocks are 7.8′ long x 3′ 1.5″ wide and vary [...]

Reclaiming for the Future. Part 3

Durango has a long history of mining, from coal and uranium to exploration by the oil and gas industries.  With this history comes a lot of interesting waste-  tubes, gears, housings, diffusers, matrix cans, covers, headers, sinks, counters and galley equipment -you name it, it’s sitting in a scrap yard somewhere [...]

Reclaiming for the Future. Part 1

In times like these, we need to critically examine the way we have designed in the past and how we can be more economically and environmentally sustainable in the future. For instance, what if developers had spent their money rehabilitating and revitalizing existing city centers rather than expanding development [...]