Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Got a sketchy blueprint for a greywater purifier lying around? An unfinished section drawing for the next drought-friendly Californian front yard? Some e-commerce market for exchanging water rights? Designs for a better reservoir? Gussy up those plans and submit them to Archinect's Dry Futures... View full entry
Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite are the co-founders of “nomadic landscape architecture studio” GRNASFCK, based in New York City. The two began collaborating as graduate students at RISD in 2011, bringing Quate’s knowledge of botany and landscape architecture together with Tuite’s art practice... View full entry
I want to see the relationship between architecture and other infrastructure and landscape architecture strengthened, so that we’re building good infrastructure that relates well to the landscape and is sustainable.” — Charles Anderson
Charles Anderson FSLA is the president/principal of WERK, a landscape architecture firm based in what he calls “the heart of LA in a lot of ways, at least for the strange people,” Venice Beach. Living and working next to the Pacific, Anderson has seen firsthand the power and presence of the... View full entry
There’s no such thing as the drought being over. There are only going to be cycles and our cycles, most models tell us, are only going to continue to be extreme. Wet will be wetter and dry will by drier." — Hadley Arnold
Peter and Hadley Arnold are the founding co-directors of the Arid Lands Institute, a design-centered research platform devoted to making drylands "water-smart" the world over. Based in Los Angeles out of Woodbury University, ALI uses the American West as a case study for developing adaptive... View full entry
Allison Arieff is the editorial director of SPUR, an urban planning advocacy non-profit based in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Known in full as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, SPUR is primarily focused on improving urban planning efforts and policy in the San Francisco Bay... View full entry
Dublin is building a water park — in the middle of the worst drought in California’s modern history. [...]
“It just looks bad, frankly ... It looks like we are out there thinking, ‘Let’s just go out there and build a water park,’ when the rest of the state is suffering.” [...]
“Even if the drought weren’t to end,” said Lori Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, “there will be a need for places where kids need to learn how to swim.”
— nytimes.com
More on California's drought:Will California's drought turn the state into something like the Australian outback?Coating the LA reservoir in "shade balls" will save 300M gallons of waterCalifornia drought sucks San Jose's Guadalupe river dryArchinect's "Dry Futures" competition featured by MSNBC... View full entry
Slapped in the face is exactly how many Venetians are feeling by the tidal wave of new money. And the local tech boom, prompting 'Silicon Beach' references around town, is just one source of it — The Washington Post
More on Archinect:The rise and spectacular fall of Venice Beach's Pacific Ocean ParkAre apps the virtual gateway to physical gentrification?Oren Safdie's play "False Solution" finishes up its 3-week run this weekend in Santa MonicaThose hipster millennials might not be the true gentrifiers of U.S... View full entry
Gehry insists that he isn't interested in the river as the site for new landmarks. He says he told the Revitalization Corp. board members who first visited his office last year that he would take on the job only if he could look at the river primarily in terms of hydrology. [...]
"I told them I'm not a landscape guy. I said I would only do it on the condition that they approached it as a water-reclamation project, to deal with all the water issues first."
— latimes.com
Following up on last week's news that Gehry had been attached to the LA River redevelopment strategy, a few more details have surfaced – no distinct plans yet, but an overall approach has emerged. Summed up by Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times' architecture critic, the plan is: "Gehry thinks... View full entry
The river that runs through America's 10th-largest city has dried up, shriveling a source of civic pride that had welcomed back trout, salmon, beavers and other wildlife after years of restoration efforts. Over the past two months, large sections of the Guadalupe have become miles of cracked, arid gray riverbed. Fish and other wildlife are either missing or dead, casualties of California's relentless drought. — mercurynews.com
The Guadalupe River had undergone a massive revitalization effort in 2005, when the Army Corps of Engineers and the Santa Clara Valley Water District spent $350 million on a huge park and garden by the river, as part of a larger flood control project. Despite this very recent improvement in the... View full entry
Despite recent successes in water conservancy and summer rainfall in the state, the California drought is still “probably worse than most people recognize,” according to Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and juror on Archinect’s Dry Futures... View full entry
These days, while the almond orchards are kept a perfect green, the surrounding landscape is a dull brown, and the yards in front of most of the houses are little more than dirt and weeds. At least 25 families have seen their wells go dry in recent months. Many others are rationing what little water remains. Those lucky enough to be on the city’s system still have to strictly conserve to keep the town’s only well from going dry. — thenation.com
The Nation paints Fairmead – an agricultural town where many personal wells have dried up, pitting indigent residents further into poverty – as a cautionary tale for all those living in historic drought conditions.More on California's historic drought:Fog catchers: squeezing water out of... View full entry
Santa Barbara City Council members on Tuesday unanimously approved spending $55 million to reactivate a mothballed desalination plant that could provide the city with nearly a third of its drinking water. [...]
“Desalination has been a last resort,” Mayor Helene Schneider told The Times Tuesday night after the vote. “The way the drought has continued these last four years, we are really getting at that last resort.”
More on the historic drought in the U.S. southwest:Gov. Brown issues order to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissionsCalifornia has about one year of water left30% of the US in DroughtRelocation or Adaptation: "We may have to migrate people out of California"Drought may force California to... View full entry
The California Water Commission, responding to a fourth year of drought, approved sharp new limits on the amount of water that can be used on landscapes surrounding newly constructed buildings, such as houses, businesses and schools.
The revised ordinance will limit grass to about 25% of a home's combined front, back and side yards in all new construction. [...]
Additionally, grass will be all but banned in landscapes of new commercial, industrial and institutional buildings.
— latimes.com
More on California's historic drought:The sudden drought gold rush for California landscapers may be overThe best lawn for California's drought may still be greenAs Californians let their lawns turn golden, water conservation targets were exceeded in MayCalifornia's desert resorts struggle to... View full entry
Balconies in Berkeley must now pass a safety inspection every three years, and new ones must be built of rot-proof wood or steel, under measures passed Tuesday as the campus community addresses the deaths last month of six young people and grave injury of seven more. [...]
With pressure from one council member and the lawyer for one of those killed in the June 16 tragedy, the City Council agreed to shorten the time between mandatory inspections [from five] to three years.
— latimes.com
The deadly balcony collapse that took place almost exactly a month ago today prompted an investigation into Berkeley's building codes and safety inspections, culminating in this new inspection practice. Primary in the discussion of safe and best building practices here on Archinect was the use of... View full entry
Sometimes, the inspiration for a single design element can be hard to pin down. Other times, it’s coming straight out of your hammy fourteen year-old kid. This is something of a regular occurrence for Hector M. Perez, a San Diego-based architect who often collaborates with his son Adrian on... View full entry
