Earlier this week, we featured the urban square design GENK C-m!ne by Dutch landscape and urban design firm HOSPER. Here's another project by them we really enjoyed: an almost 8,000 square foot ornamental pond on top of an underground parking garage which rivals any James Bond supervillan lair. The fascinating garage entrance, which has won multiple design awards, is part of the larger urban and landscape master plan HOSPER drew up for the land of the historic Hageveld Estate, near Amsterdam. — bustler.net

This week, after a $56-million renovation, that 12-acre rectangle from the top of Bunker Hill to the base of City Hall will be christened as L.A.'s Grand Park, providing downtown with its first sizable amount of open space. — latimes.com

Another bigger picture repercussion of the Act is the cognitive and cartographic dissonance that occurs in Los Angeles where the Jeffersonian city grid abuts a pre-existing Spanish or French grid. — KCET/Departures

Viennese architecture practice AllesWirdGut has just won the prestigious Luxembourg Bauhaereprais (builders award) in the category 'Space and Landscape Design.' At a festive gala this week, the firm was presented the award for its project LUX - Place de l'Académie, the architectural design on a former steel mill in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. — bustler.net

As contemporary governments and citizens increasingly demand that reclaimed landfills be many things to many people — energy producers, social nodes, memorials — and also that they interface with local infrastructure, we would do well to study the historical precedent of Monte Testaccio... [whose] longevity and vitality make it an ideal model of what a landfill can become: an agent of civic engagement and an urban catalyst. This is the promise of landfill reclamation. — Places Journal

This week, the Trust for the National Mall opened the exhibition featuring the twelve final design concepts of the National Mall Design Competition in Washington, D.C. [...]

The submissions, created by ten of the country’s design heavy hitters, re-envision three prominent National Mall locations: Union Square, Sylvan Theater on the Washington Monument Grounds, and Constitution Gardens. — bustler.net

When she was Growing up in Scotland, Lily Jencks's parents would hold weekend seminars for their circle of academic friends. "At age 5, I had to define my generations' attitudes on topics such as 'feminist spirituality,'" said Ms. Jencks, who, at 31, runs two London-based landscape design firms: LJA + Land, which she founded in 2008, and JencksSquared, a new company through which she collaborates with her father, the architectural theorist and designer Charles Jencks. — online.wsj.com

Kathryn Gustafson, director of Seattle landscape architecture practice Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and partner of London design firm Gustafson Porter, is the recipient of the annual Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This honor is given to a preeminent architect from any country who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art. Gustafson is only the third landscape architect in 57 years to be awarded the prize. — bustler.net