To Read
Landscape Migration
Places Journal
We are now well into a geologic era — the Anthropocene — characterized by the acceleration of environmental change. This is the landscape medium in which we design.
From Architecture to Landscape
Places Journal
Landscape architects have begun to venture from the confines of garden, park, and plaza into more adventurous practice. Now the field needs a new name: landscape science.
Landscape with Beavers
Places Journal
Beavers have gained a reputation as environmental engineers who can restore water systems — and challenge their human neighbors to think differently about land use.
Designing Indian Country
Places Journal
Suppose Native America is not over, that there is no “after colonialism.” How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?
The Scale of Nature: Modeling the Mississippi River
Places Journal
The ruins of an abandoned 200-acre hydraulic model of the Mississippi River Basin testify to the decades-long battle to control the great river.
Thirsty City
Places Journal
An environmental historian assesses the massive infrastructure that brings water to the American West — and makes it possible to take a shower in Los Angeles.
Revolution of the Thirsty
Places Journal
The ongoing Egyptian Revolution is about not only political freedom but also the right to water.
The Middle of Everywhere
Places Journal
In the Flint Hills of Kansas there are cattle ranches and art galleries, old barns and new architecture, ghost towns and growing cities. And there is the last stand of tallgrass prairie in America.
Perpetual Neglect
Places Journal
The racism that plagues African Americans in life is perpetuated in death. Today there is nothing less than a preservation crisis for Black burial grounds across the country.
Landscape Is Our Sex
Places Journal
Should the relationship of a building to its landscape be a key element of its design? Unpacking the logics and illogics of this powerful cultural presumption.
Experimental Preservation
Places Journal
Experimental preservationists are challenging old assumptions about cultural heritage, spotlighting objects once considered ugly or unsavory, long excluded from official narratives.
Placing Memory
Places Journal
A new book juxtaposes contemporary color photos of abandoned Japanese-American internment camps with period images.
Brasília and the Populist Frontier
Places Journal
In the late 1950s, the construction of Brazil’s new capital city was documented by government photographers who mythologized a new national identity.
The Last Days of Kaixian
Places Journal
Photographs of the last town on the Yangtze River to be submerged by the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam.
The Dying Sea
Places Journal
Photographs taken over several years document the death of the Aral Sea — once the fourth largest lake on earth, now a toxic desert.
Imagining a Past Future
Places Journal
City planner John B. Williams — and the photographic archive he commissioned — give us the opportunity to complicate received stories of failed urban renewal.
“The eye traffics in feelings, not thoughts”
Places Journal
“Havana: 1933” was one of the first major projects by photographer Walker Evans. Eight decades later it inspired a rephotographic journey through the Cuban capital.
Approaching Calcutta
Places Journal
Photographs of a once great but now peripheral city, where planning unfolds as if without a map.
The Gray Scale
Places Journal
The Boundary Monuments along the U.S.-Mexico border were erected back in an era content to mark the border with dignified stone sentinels.
The Mustard Gas in Sherwood Forest
Places Journal
The idea that violence leaves an invisible trace on the land has captivated artists and writers for centuries.
The Things They Piled
Places Journal
Mountains of petcoke in Southeast Chicago finally came down this month. Terry Evans photographs an industrial landscape in transition.
Play War: Homemade Recreational Battlefields
Places Journal
At paintball fields across the United States, the detritus of an industrial century is pushed to the urban margins to create apocalyptic playgrounds.
L.A. Day/L.A. Night
Places Journal
Los Angeles is a dream of substance, a built dream, a narrative imposed upon the land.
An Appalachian Trail
Places Journal
In its original concept, the Appalachian Trail was more than a hiking path. It was a wildly ambitious plan to reorganize the economic geography of the eastern United States.
A Short History of the Campsite
Places Journal
A landscape historian traces the story of the campground, from early wilderness caravans to today’s domesticated sites.
A Situation: A Tree in Palestine
Places Journal
A story about reckoning with a public secret that doesn’t want to be kept anymore.