Archinect - News

The 'healing nature' of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects' new land bridge in Houston

2023-02-20T18:59:00-05:00

Named the Land Bridge and Prairie project, the new park was unveiled this weekend, when for the first time since the 1950s, visitors were able to cross over Memorial Drive and enjoy 1,500 acres of uninterrupted parkland at Memorial Park. Swelling like soft green mounds over a six-lane highway, the park is the latest example of how cities can mend the tears caused by disruptive roads without necessarily tearing them down.

Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects' Principal, Thomas Woltz, described his initial visit of the project’s site as a “post-nuclear landscape” when some 66 million trees suffered from a brutal drought in 2011. Since then, his firm has worked with city planners, archivists, and the Memorial Park Conservancy to consolidate the 20 disparate segments that had previously left the 1,500-acre park feeling “subdivided” to Houstonians.

Fast Company reports that "while the civic landscape was designed for people, the gently sloped nature of the mounds allows for small animals to cross over the highway as well (an underground stream allows for aquatic animals to pass under the highway, too.)"

With the addition of the land bridge, Houston joins Los Angeles County and San Francisco as communities aiming to adopt solutions for local wildlife to be able to move about freely. The total costs for the Land Bridge and Prairie project was funded by a $70 million donation from the local Kinder Foundat...

MASS Design Group 'catalyzes conservation and species protection' with The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

2022-06-15T13:52:00-04:00

MASS Design Group is celebrating the completion of the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda.

Named in collaboration with comedian and television host Ellen DeGeneres, the 12-acre campus is located in the country's Musanze District and Kigali. The campus features three new facilities for education, research, and conservation. It is comprised of a selection of native landscaping and materials assembled by a team of over 2,400 local workers in a demonstration of the studio’s “Purpose Built” process developed by Principal Patricia Gruits and overseen by its new construction arm MASS.Build

"The campus will do more than inspire a generation of conservation activists in Rwanda, it will model new ways for global conservationists to bind ecosystems and communities in support of one another." - Michael Murphy, MASS Design Group Founding Principal and Exec. Dir. Image © Iwan Baan.

MASS Design says it worked with the foundation to design everything – from furnishings ...

LA's new 101 Freeway wildlife crossing to break ground on Earth Day

2022-04-21T14:49:00-04:00

The much-anticipated Wallis Annenberg Wildlife crossing will break ground on Friday, which is Earth Day. The bridge will ultimately be 210 feet long and 165 feet wide and will span all 10 lanes of the Ventura Freeway at Liberty Canyon in Agoura Hills. It is meant to promote biodiversity among Southern California mountain lions, which are isolated by the freeway, by connecting them with mountain lions in Northern California.

The groundbreaking ceremony of the much-anticipated, $90 million Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing project will be live-streamed on April 22 from 10 am Pacific Time at savelacougars.org.

Previously on Archinect:

LA's 101 Freeway wildlife crossing now has a groundbreaking set for spring

2022-01-20T11:37:00-05:00

A much-needed piece of infrastructure is about to start taking shape for wildlife in Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Mountains.

Curbed is reporting that construction for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which connects a stretch of protected land along California’s 101 freeway called Liberty Canyon will now officially begin this spring following an increase in the state’s funding for the project recently announced by Governor Gavin Newsom.

The bridge was originally announced in 2015 and has been amongst the most vocally-supported public works projects in Los Angeles in recent years. The county’s mountain lion population has been shown to be increasingly fragmented and diffuse since 2002 and will now be protected along with other groups of animals thanks to the new 210-foot crossing from architect Robert Rock.

Rock was selected by the joint National Wildlife Foundation-Caltrans development team to put an end to the high frequency of animal-related collisions that happen about 300,0...

Beavers: Nature's landscape architects

2019-07-12T15:54:00-04:00

In California and Oregon, beavers are enhancing wetlands that are critical breeding habitat for salmonids, amphibians, and waterfowl. In Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, environmental groups have partnered with ranchers and farmers to encourage beaver activity on small streams. Watershed advocates in California are leading a campaign to have beavers removed from the state’s non-native species list, so that they can be managed as a keystone species rather than a nuisance.

Writing in Places Journal, landscape designer Stacy Passmore explores the amazing landscapes beavers create when they are allowed to fulfill their natural role as environmental engineers.

More and more, beavers and humans have become partners in reshaping the landscapes of the American west, where, Passmore reports, the aquatic mammals have been deployed to remediate defunct mines, re-wild marginal lands, and boost biodiversity as they restore wetlands and other riparian landscapes.

The beavers, according to Passmore, are "subversive animals are rewriting the landscape, changing its topography, without hardly anybody registering the change."

It's likely that in the future, humans and beavers will work together more and more, as climate change reshapes the world's natural environments. But dont count on them to fix climate change. Passmore writes: "As beavers are 'reintroduced' to more areas, we should remember that we cannot restore historic conditions. We must conceptualize a mes...

Terreform's ONE designs Monarch Butterfly sanctuary tower

2019-06-24T14:15:00-04:00

The visionary team at Terreform ONE in New York City have unveiled designs for an eight-story Monarch Butterfly sanctuary tower that promises to enliven the facade of a forthcoming commercial building with a vertical terrarium.

The diagrid structure will be made out of 3D-printed carbon-sequestering concrete components infilled with a dual-skin facade wrapped with glass and "pillows" of ETFE foil. The design will create a three-foot by 70-foot "vertical meadow" filled with "suspended milkweed vines and flowering plants to nourish the butterflies at each stage of their life cycle," according to a project website.

Rendering depicting the building interior, including butterfly atrium and facade terrarium. Image courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE.

Facade detail. Image courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE.

The performative facade will also be coated with "hydrogel bubbles" and small algae-filled sacs that will serve to purify air and building wastewater, while also mainta...

McGregor Coxall to design “bird airport” wetland park in Tianjin

2017-02-16T21:12:00-05:00

Australian practice McGregor Coxall had the winning scheme to transform a degenerate landfill site into a new migratory-bird wetland sanctuary park in Tianjin, China. The Asian Development Bank and the Port of Tianjin co-launched the park design competition in response to the increasing loss of critical bird habitats and declining shorebird populations in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, which an estimated 50 million migratory shorebirds use every year. The EAAF extends to Alaska and Russia's Taimyr Peninsula in the north, East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand in the south.

As a pilot project in China's national sponge city program, the project in the Lingang region is a 60-hectare masterplan of constructed wetlands, parkland, and urban forest.

Described as a “bird airport” by the architects, the wetland sanctuary will allow weary migratory birds to feed and rest, while human visitors can check out the Water Pavilion education and research center or t...

Kevin Daly's Backyard BI(h)OME provides affordable housing for humans and wildlife

2015-06-18T15:40:00-04:00

Fittingly, Poolside’s version of “Harvest Moon” echoed off the wooden planks of the Broad Arts Center at UCLA on June 10th as a crowd of optimists, architects, and Ira-Glass lookalikes drank their way in and out of the opening reception for BI(h)OME, Kevin Daly Architects’ proposed “granny flat” solution to the L.A. Housing Crisis. The music was fitting because it was a laid-back cover of a much older tune: instead of raw passion, a more pragmatic vision of affordable housing was being unveiled, a 350-square foot, EFTE-enveloped, recyclable component-laden dwelling with wall cavities for bats, birds, and bugs. The students from cityLAB who manually assembled the mock-up of the BI(h)ome formed a lab-coat wearing cluster of “house doctors” as they stood behind Dana Cuff, Frances Anderton of KCRW, and Kevin Daly for a twenty-minute panel-style discussion about the future of housing in Los Angeles.

Part sales-pitch, part design lecture, the discussion encompassed the difficulties that Lo...