Archinect - News

Oberlander Prize winner Julie Bargmann's work and life featured in 'Pioneers of American Landscape Design' series

2023-05-30T18:06:00-04:00

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has just released the latest episode of their ongoing Pioneers of American Landscape Design series featuring an oral history and overview of the work of the 2021 inaugural Oberlander Prize winner Julie Bargmann.

The D.I.R.T. founder and University of Virginia professor emerita profiles her career in landscape architecture beginning with her graduation from the Harvard GSD in 1987. From there, Bargmann went on to become a Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome before establishing the studio in Minnesota in 1992. Bargmann has since gone on to win the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and is elsewhere recognized as the "Queen of Slag" for her work outside of academia, which focuses heavily on post-industrial sites and the public realm.

The Turtle Creek Water Works in Dallas, Texas. Photo: © Charles A. Birnbaum, courtesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Adriaan Geuze and Michael Van Valkenburgh are also ...

Mabel O. Wilson, Deborah Berke, Thomas Phifer, and Michael Van Valkenburgh among members of the 2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters

2022-03-10T13:19:00-05:00

Writer and academic Mabel O. Wilson, architect Thomas Phifer, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Yale SoA Dean Deborah Berke are among the newly-elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters according to an announcement from the institution yesterday.

The quartet joined the Academy with fourteen other honorees in music, art, and literature on a list of names that included painter Charles Gaines and The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien.

Deborah Berke of Deborah Berke Partners

2022 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education recipient, Deborah Berke, FAIA. Photo: Winnie Au, courtesy Deborah Berke Partners

Berke has served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture since 2016 in addition to operating her own New York-based practice, which she founded in 1982.

Thomas Phifer of Thomas Phifer and Partners

Image courtesy Thomas Pfifer and Partners

Phifer is the architect behind the recent expansion of Maryland’s Glenstone Museum and...

Obama Center parking garage proposal: community groups offer feedback after latest design revisions

2017-12-28T14:15:00-05:00

The Obama Center design team has been reworking plans for a proposed controversial garage on a portion of the historic Midway Plaisance, across the street from where the presidential complex is to be built in Jackson Park. [...] When I left off on this story in November, Tod Williams, one of the architects, said relocating the garage was under consideration, given the concerns of community groups for the historic publicly owned Midway property.

Curbed Chicago picks up the story where the Chicago Sun-Times left off and reports about some of the praise and criticism that was presented at a meeting the Obama Foundation had called on December 20 at its Hyde Park Headquarters. The hearing was led by the project's architects Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, Dina Griffin as well as the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh.

Obama's Presidential Center through the landscape architecture lens

2017-05-24T15:15:00-04:00

The most important question related to the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side doesn’t have that much to do with its architecture. It is instead: What kind of landscape stewardship can a presidential museum and library offer? To be located in Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson Park, the project already has a heap of canonical landscape history to contend with. So can the Obama library make a great park greater?

"So this new landscape has the potential to improve upon the already very good. But for whom?," Zach Mortice asks in his piece for Landscape Architecture Magazine. "Will these grounds remain public and accessible for all South Siders and Chicagoans, free of charge?"

MVVA-designed Dallas Trinity River Park to become America's largest urban nature park

2016-11-29T15:16:00-05:00

The Trinity River Park, which will be 10 times the size of Central Park in New York, will be made up of 7,000 acres of the Great Trinity Forest, 2,000 acres of space between the Trinity River levees and 1,000 acres of already developed space. MVVA’s design will build on municipal efforts to connect the river with the city. It envisions the space as a “beautiful and naturalistic network of trails, meadows and lakes living in harmony with the river”.

The National Park Project Aiming to Change the Landscape of St. Louis

2014-03-24T20:24:00-04:00

During a lecture given at Kansas City Design Week earlier in the year, Gullivar Shepard of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) called the St. Louis Arch Ground project, known as CityArchRiver 2015, one of the most challenging projects he has been involved in.

Previously: The "Park Over the Highway" is now underway

Menil Collection hires Michael Van Valkenburgh to enhance Houston campus

2013-06-12T18:51:00-04:00

The appointment signals the start of implementing the Menil’s master plan for its “neighborhood of art,” which consists of six buildings devoted to art spread across several blocks, as well as outdoor sculptures, green spaces and bungalows.

Winner of Austin’s Waller Creek Design Competition

2012-11-30T18:39:00-05:00

The multidisciplinary design team led by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Thomas Phifer & Associates was recently named winner of Design Waller Creek: A Competition. Organized by the Austin, TX-based Waller Creek Conservancy, this international design competition called for ideas to revitalize a 7-mile stretch of Waller Creek, a neglected Austin urban ecosystem, and thus turning a "currently fragmented and undervalued section of the city into a vibrant, livable, and workable district."