In LandDesign’s podcast Pragmatic Visions, Episode 24: Measuring the Impact of a Landscape, LandDesign’s Allison Peckett and Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Program Manager Megan Barnes discuss the importance of landscape performance for practitioners and the Case Study Investigation (CSI) program as a way to test landscape performance evaluation methods and buil
Each year, SWA Group awards the firm’s Patrick T. Curran Fellowship to employees who look to challenge thinking in the landscape architecture profession and provide tools and resources for the firm and industry. Landscape designer and 2021 Curran Fellow Kelly Mathiesen took a landscape performance approach, looking at which elements are important in creating successful urban trails for runners and cyclists and how the rise of these recreational communities will affect the future of trail design.
The Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Case Study Investigation (CSI) program is a unique research collaboration and training program. LAF-funded faculty-student research teams work with design firms to assess and document the environmental, social, and economic benefits of exemplary high-performing landscape projects. They produce Case Study Briefs for LAF’s Landscape Performance Series.
NOTE: As of June 2024, PlanIt Impact is no longer available.
Architect Dominique Davison AIA, LEED AP, principal of DRAW Architecture + Urban Design, knows the value of landscape performance in achieving a sustainable, carbon-neutral built environment. That is why her collaborative performance assessment tool, PlanIT Impact, takes a holistic approach that models performance for both buildings and sites – unlike many of the building-centric modelling platforms available in today’s market.
The Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Case Study Investigation (CSI) program is a unique research collaboration and training program. LAF-funded faculty-student research teams work with design firms to assess and document the environmental, social, and economic benefits of exemplary high-performing landscape projects. They produce Case Study Briefs for LAF’s Landscape Performance Series.
In September 2010, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) launched its Landscape Performance Series as a new long-term strategic research initiative. This online portal and set of initiatives was developed to build capacity to achieve sustainability and transform the way landscape is considered in the design and development process.
In 2010, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) debuted our Landscape Performance Series to catalyze a discipline-wide movement toward integration of landscape performance planning, evaluation, and reporting in practice and education.
As the focus on performance metrics continues to grow within landscape architecture research and practice, tools emerge to help designers evaluate design alternatives. A new paper by Dr. Jon Bryan Burley, FASLA, of Michigan State University and Dr. Xiaoying Li and Dr.
Decades of research show that urban forests improve health and quality of life and deliver measurable economic benefits. Yet trees are often an afterthought because many decision makers aren’t aware of these multiple benefits.
The recently published Case Study Briefs include two premier riverfront parks, a SITES-certified heritage site, and – a first for our case study library – a pop-up park and restaurant. The projects demonstrate the transformative power of public spaces as well as innovative design strategies related to adaptive reuse, temporariness, and resilient stormwater management and flood protection. In fact, both Hunter’s Point South and Tom Hanafan River’s Edge Park were tested by extreme events that occurred during their construction.
