Resources for Eco Designs

Doing some research for a wetland/woodland design and I found these great websites with fun designs for waterways, stormwater management, and creative reuse of materials:

http://ecologiadesign.com/author/ecologiadesign/page/2/

http://www.metrocouncil.org/environment/Water/BMP/manual.htm

Philadelphia Flower Show Temple Ambler Wins Best In Show

Today was the first day of the Flower Show for the general public and I worked the first shift at the Temple Ambler display, Aloha Aina: A Return to Life with the Land

 I was excited to see the display after watching the students build the displays and grow the plants, forcing the trees to flower in the green house and packing all the supplies in the box truck to bring to the show, not to mention building the display at the Convention Center for a week.

So I was really proud to see they won Best in Show Academic Education and Best Acheivement: Incorporating Food, Water, Shelter and Food into a Natural Landscape.

What Makes a Neighborhood

Great local color and history

 My design class has been focusing on one neighborhood in Philadelphia and researching the neighborhood's history, the current uses, the projects planned for the space and the community members and their opinions on what is and could be happening there. We're reading Image of the City by Kevin Lynch at the same time, where three cities, Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles (circa 1960) are examined for their successes and failures of imagability and what people who live there think of the cities, remember and love. It's an interesting thing to think about what makes a neighborhood great and what makes it miss the mark.

 

Historic details and architecture

Landscape Architecture Blog

I'm taking on some new interests by pursuing a degree in Landscape Architecture, with a concentration in Environmental Restoration, and in my first semester we started blogs for a landscape history class:

http://formsandlandscapes.wordpress.com/

The classes include drawing, native plant id, design, engineering, drafting and work outdoors, so it combines alot of my interests and I get to keep photographing and exploring (more excuses to travel!). Looking at the work of Frederick Law Olmstead makes me want to visit NYC in the near future to check out Central Park and Prospect Park with a new focus on design, as well as some of his parks in the Pacific Northwest and Louisville, KY.

Here is a basic graphics drawing assignment, actually one of the
short projects we did this semester, from start to finish: