The American Academy in Rome announced the winners of the 116th annual Rome Prize Competition. Karen M’Closkey, co-founder of PEG office of landscape + architecture and Ross Benjamin Altheimer, Landscape Architecture Studio Leader at Hammel Green and Abrahamson have won the Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture. Recipients of the 2012-2013 Rome Prizes are provided with a fellowship that includes a stipend, a study or studio, and room and board for a period of six months to two years in Rome, Italy.
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A prevalent problem facing cities and regions is inadequate stormwater infrastructure. Sixteen billion gallons of raw sewage get dumped into Philadelphia’s rivers and streams each year after rain events. Because wet-weather flow is a dispersed problem, it has become increasingly clear that it requires a dispersed solution. Consequently, cities have started to explore alternatives for stormwater capture and treatment that are decentralized and incremental, rather than a system-wide upgrade. Individual lots in aggregate can have a significant impact on water quality. With funds being directed towards infrastructure rather than recreational or public space per se, we must explore creative ways to use infrastructural improvements as open space amenities.
PEG created a follow up to Not Gardens project we published recently and the projects was titled ‘Dew Point’. Pattern is an effective means for making environmental factors legible. Following in the spirit of the Not Gardens, this project explores the potential of material retardants to render surface patterns. The use of digital media and fabrication technologies enables innovative methods for controlling the relationship between organic and inorganic materials or between fixed material and temporal phenomena. These tools provide simple means to craft patterns that perform in both visual and environmental terms. In this case, we used these techniques to produce an ephemeral pattern that becomes visible only during moments of precipitation. By enhancing the properties of a common landscape material, we can embed temporal change, thus producing a technique that offers an environmentally responsive expression. Continue reading Dew Point – an ephmeral pattern | Philadelphia | PEG  Not Garden ©PEG PEG‘s Not Garden/ Not Again project renders visible those materials that typically remain unseen. They used the untapped design potential of low-cost engineering substrates as a means for developing new techniques of surface control and display. Customized geotextiles hold great potential for configuring new relationships between organic and inorganic materials as expressed on the ground’s surface. Philadelphia is a perfect laboratory for experimental greening techniques given its immense stock of vacant land – over 60,000 properties. Approximately 3,000 abandoned lots have been cleaned and planted over the past six years through the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (2002). This interim land management program has succeeded in providing neighborhoods with relatively low-cost ways to lessen unsanitary conditions and garbage dumping on abandoned sites. The current greening strategy involves re-grading, lawn installation, a perimeter picket fence, and several trees. Our goal is to derive a cost-effective way to achieve the same aesthetics of care but provide more expressive diversity with lower maintenance. |
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