The dedication ceremony for George W. Bush Presidential Center will be held today including a parkland designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The design reflects the Bush’s love for their native Texas landscape and includes trees from their ranch tree farm. MVVA have spent over 2 and half years on site creating a 15 acre parkland that includes praries and meadows, bioswales and an irrigation cistern.
The spring edition of Landscape – The Journal of the Landscape Institute has arrived in the WLA mailbox with some great articles covering the impact of heritage on park design, practical articles on spotting disease in trees and selection and nurturing trees. This edition also includes some great information on BIM for landscape architects, changes in UK legislation and some featured projects. Best of all was a great pull out poster(see below) of urban parks from 1839 to 2012. Another good read available from the Landscape Institute.
The objective in this project was to create a unique space in the main entrance of the house and for that we found inspiration in the volcanic gardens, we chose magnolias, ferns, salvias and rosemary so we could make a multi-sensory space where you could touch, smell, see, eat, and hear the garden.
Pinterest is a great way to curate images for the office image library and projects. Starting is as easy as setting up a user account and then creating ‘Boards‘ which are like categories for your images so for landscape office you might start with ‘Boards’ like trees, plants, urban parks, squares, stone, and so on and then start collating images by uploading from your computer, phone or ‘pinning’ images from websites. You just need to remember that the images you are ‘pinning’ are public for everyone on the web to see which can be good for publicising your work or what your working on, but you might want to keep it in-house which I’ll cover later.
Philanthropy and public-private partnerships should not be faulted but encouraged, especially following Hurricane Sandy’s damage to the parks when it’s most needed.
