My Bookmarks
An Illustrated History of the Picnic Table
Places Journal
From campground to crab shack to suburban backyard, the ingenious form of the picnic table has remained largely unchanged since the 1930s.
Why A Marsh
Places Journal
A writer and a scientist trace the deep history of a marsh on the Hudson River, from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age and from the industrial era to our problematic present.
Visualizing Extraction
Places Journal
Photographing a coal-fired power plant can convey its environmental impact — brownfields and runoff, black soot belching into the sky. But what about the people who work in the mine? Or their families?
The Importance of the Personal
Places Journal
Writer and curator Elizabeth Bauer Mock Kassler revolutionized the architectural exhibit, making it speak to regular citizens. In this, as in much else, she was ahead of her time.
The Case for Truly Public Housing
Places Journal
A municipal authority in Massachusetts has deftly negotiated the privatization and deregulation of the market. But its hard-won success underscores the need for a new narrative of public housing in America.
California Forest Dispatch
Places Journal
A photographer trains a lens on the magnificent trees that have long embodied the evolutionary wealth of the west coast — and that today struggle for their very survival.
A Situation: A Tree in Palestine
Places Journal
A story about reckoning with a public secret that doesn’t want to be kept anymore.
Accelerated and Decelerated Landscapes
Places Journal
People who study, design, or care for landscapes need to become experts at the techniques, knowledges, and ethics of bending time.
The Problem with Solutions
Places Journal
We need to engage troubled landscapes without presuming to fix them. Notes toward a history of non-solutionist design.
“The poorest details of the world resurfaced”
Places Journal
Using a drone-mounted camera, in his latest book Stephen Shore continues his photographic survey of the everyday American landscape.
Lost Water
Places Journal
The desert city of Amman is running out of water. Meanwhile, officials fixate on gleaming visions of growth, perpetuating the fantasy that urban dysfunction can be escaped rather than addressed.
“Nothing without water”
Places Journal
To be poor in Lagos today is to be at constant risk of displacement, as local leaders funnel money and land into exclusive development. Climate change is only making it worse.
Máquinas en el Jardín
Places Journal
Aprovechar el viento para producir energía sin duda moderará el daño ambiental y social que se desarrolla a nuestro alrededor. Pero, ¿a qué costo para las economías y ecologías rurales?
Landscape as Resistance in the West Bank
Places Journal
Under mounting political and ecological stress, environmentalists in the Palestinian village of Battir are working to protect a 4,000-year-old agricultural landscape.
Field Notes on Design Activism: 1
Places Journal
The first installment of a narrative survey in which practitioners and educators share perspectives on the intensifying demands for change across design pedagogy and practice.