The other day I was on Beacon Hill and spotted this mostly dead hemlock tree, completely swathed in Boston ivy: Perhaps the owners were simply neglecting their courtyard garden, but I like to think that they saw the mature tree’s size as an asset to the place, and decided to use the deadwood as an [...]
Posts Tagged ‘spatial design’
Boston hemlock
Posted in Biodiversity and Biophilia, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Plant management, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, spatial design, trees, vines on July 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Renaissance view
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Places, Plant management, tagged Crane Reservation, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, spatial design, The Trustees of Reservations on June 18, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Don’t you love that new header? Toby took the photo at the Crane Reservation in Ipswich, a property of The Trustees of Reservations. He said that for him it has the quality of an oil painting; I agree completely. It has that same dark/light/dark sequence, that same frame/focal point/background flavor as a painting by an [...]
If a tree falls in a garden…
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Places, Plant management, Plants, tagged landscape, landscape architecture, spatial design, tree planting, waterfront on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Following up on the list post item from June 9, about what to use to replace a lost Norway maple: it will be a honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos inermis ‘Shademaster’), placed slightly upslope from the Norway stump. Last week I visited the North Shore seaside site (where last year we revamped the drive court planting [...]
Grist for the mill — landscape architects talk
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Toby's posts, Walls, What we're thinking, tagged ASLA, ISA, landscape, landscape architecture, LID Center, native plants, North End Parks, Rose Kennedy Greenway, spatial design, stone walls on June 9, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Every now and again Toby and I get together at a local coffeehouse to talk about our practices and about landscape architectural issues in general. Conversation never lags — as we did when we worked together at Copley-Wolff, and over meals with other LA friends, and even before then, when we were both grad students [...]
Up and down at Naumkeag, Part 1
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, Steps, tagged Naumkeag, slopes, spatial design, Steps, The Trustees of Reservations on October 10, 2009 | 1 Comment »
What do we see if we look at one place through a particular lens? Last week I was out at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, MA, and found myself appreciating the wide vocabulary of ways that Fletcher Steele used to get garden guests up and down the slopes. Here’s a partial list: Naumkeag, the Choate family estate [...]
How we see and how we say it
Posted in Deb's posts, Education, Miscellaneous, What we're thinking, Working Landscape, tagged engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, Site Engineering, slope, spatial design on September 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Toby’s latest post in his site engineering series reminded me that there’s yet another consideration in how we define slope — the audience to whom we’re communicating. When I’m discussing the pitch of a walk with another landscape architect, I’ll talk about it as a percentage (“From the wall to the driveway the walk slopes [...]
Tilted planes
Posted in Deb's posts, Materials, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking, tagged Cornell Arts Quad, engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, linkedin, sensory experience of landscape, spatial design, tilted planes, turf panels on August 14, 2009 | 5 Comments »
To digress just a little from the line discussion: That Parc Citroen photo puts me in mind of the Cornell Arts Quad, around which are ranged some of Cornell’s most historically and academically significant buildings. The Arts Quad is huge (obviously not what it has in common with the Parc Citroen lawns shown), and there [...]
No photos here
Posted in Deb's posts, Materials, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, Working Landscape, tagged arboriculture in landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, spatial design, tree planting, trees on July 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What is a landscape architect doing writing about these methods of tree planting and moving? Well, for one thing, I don’t like to waste woody plants. Planting an ingrown-root tree (or even a healthy one) in a new landscape without attending to the tree’s requirements — for rooting space, for decent soil porosity, for adequate [...]
Either, or, or both
Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged spatial design, spatial form on November 13, 2008 | 4 Comments »
These last few posts about the nature of a central space as opposed to a central object lead to a question: are we looking at places from a formal standpoint (the void as center, with building mass and plants as enclosing elements, for instance), or from a personal-experience standpoint? The answer, of course, is [...]
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged Boston, Fenway Park, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, space, spatial design on November 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Last week I joined two friends from Kansas on a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It’s a stunning building, and houses an astonishing collection of Western art. The collection ranges from a slew of Italian Renaissance paintings (including a Piero della Francesca ‘Hercules’ in which Hercules holds a wooden club in [...]