LA+ Journal - Back Issue

ISSUE 01 – WILD

LA+ WILD explores the concept of WILD and its role in design, large-scale habitat and species conservation, scientific research, the human psyche, and aesthetics.

ISSUE 02 – PLEASURE

We design cities, landscapes and products for many reasons but as much as anything we do so for pleasure. From the new horizons of global tourism to the design of your local park, from the acceptable to the illicit, this issue of LA+ charts the economy, psychology, and spatiality of pleasure.

ISSUE 03 – TYRANNY

From the first utopian impulse of Plato's Republic to today's global border controls and public space surveillance systems, there has always been a tyrannical aspect to the organization of society and the regulation of its spaces. What are these forms and how do they function at different scales, in different cultures, and at different times in history? How are designers and other disciplines complicit in the manifestation of these varying forms of tyranny and how have they been able to subvert such political and ideological structures?

Issue 04 - SIMULATION

Our epoch has been dubbed the Anthropocene Era to mark the significance of human activities as the greatest force of environmental change. This issue of LA+ addresses the theme of SIMULATION in terms of how recent technologies have changed how we understand the nature of nature.

ISSUE 05 - IDENTITY

Ever since the 18th century when Alexander Pope advised his peers to “consult the genius of place,” the idea that designers could interpret and then express the essential identity of a place has been venerated in landscape architecture. This issue of LA+ is devoted to critically exploring the nexus between place and identity with contributions from disciplines as varied as landscape architecture, architecture, philosophy, literature, ethics, marketing, anthropology, history, politics, and visual arts.

ISSUE 06 - RISK

RISK is many things. It can invoke fun, temptation, or danger; it can be laced with uncertainty, fear, or hope. But most importantly for the design professions, risk is the engine of art and innovation. LA+ RISK invited contributors to consider the relationship between design and the evolving landscape of risk to explore the ways in which risk shapes our behavior and impacts our experiences of designed environments.

ISSUE 07 - IMAGINATION

Paradisiacal, utopian, dystopian, heterotopian – islands hold an especially enigmatic and beguiling place in our imagination. Issue 07 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ IMAGINATION open international design ideas competition, in which we asked designers to create a new island. In addition to showcasing the winners and other interesting, unusual, or surprising entries, LA+ IMAGINATION features interviews with jurors James Corner, Richard Weller, Marion Weiss, Javier Arpa, Matthew Gandy, and Mark Kingwell. Edited by Tatum Hands

ISSUE 08 - TIME

TIME is ticking. That's what it does. Or at least that's how we represent what we don't understand. For physics, time is a byproduct of so called space-time, elastic goo created at the very moment that something came from nothing; the moment eternity stopped and the universe began. For geology, time is 4.5 billion years of compression and catastrophe. For biology time is 3.5 billion years of diversification and now the urgency of the sixth extinction. For anthropology time is 150 thousand years since mitochondrial Eve walked out of the rift valley in Ethiopia. For historians, time begins with Herodotus (484 BC) and ends, or rather doesn't, with Fukuyama’s The End of History. For architecture time is ruination. For landscape architecture time is ephemerality, entropy, and growth. For all of us time is running out.

ISSUE 09 - Design

From the stone blade and the fire stick to the latest algorithms of genetic code, we shape our world through the act of design. With its roots in the Renaissance notion disegno, design is the ability not only to make something, but also to conceive of its invention and reflect on its meaning. Whether we valorize it as the democratization of design or critique it as the perversion of the commodity fetish, designed things are now ubiquitous. Not only things but entire systems must now be designed and objects reconceived and redesigned as mere moments in unfathomably complex ecological flows. The planet itself, and even space beyond, is now presented as a design problem.

ISSUE 10 - ICONOCLAST

Issue 10 of the LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ ICONOCLAST open design ideas competition, in which we asked designers to reimagine New York’s Central Park, fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists protesting the loss of the world’s forests. See what designers did when faced with the opportunity to challenge this icon of landscape architecture. LA+ ICONOCLAST also features interviews with jurors Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), Jenny Osuldsen (Snøhetta), Charles Waldheim (Harvard GSD), Beatrice Galilee (The Met), Lola Shepard (Lateral Office), and Richard Weller (PennDesign), as well as a critique of competition entries by Julia Czerniak.

ISSUE 11 - VITALITY

Vitality is liveliness, to be alive. To be alive is to have the ability to harvest energy for movement, growth, and self-replication. But without health, vitality is just mechanistic. In this issue of LA+ we explore the notion of vitality as a proxy for the health of all things. We explore how design can improve the vitality of people, cities, systems, and landscapes.

ISSUE 12 - GEO

GEO—Earth—is a word that simultaneously signifies something vast and elemental. It refers to both the planet on which we live and the soil that sustains us. GEO is the physical and representational bedrock of landscape architecture—the foundation of many disciplines from which we draw our knowledge. Geography, Geology, and Geometry, in particular, are fundamental to our discipline’s intellectual core. And now, we seem ever more entangled in GEO as some scholars across the sciences and humanities argue that humans should be recognized as agents of change at geologic time scales.

ISSUE 13 - COMMUNITY

Almost everything that landscape architects design is ultimately for a community. Community can be the boon or bane of a project, and oftentimes both. LA+ COMMUNITY aims to explore how, over time, each of us moves in and out of multiple communities, shaping them as they shape us, and in turn shaping our landscapes and cities. We ask how different disciplines construct different ideas of community and how those communities are anchored in space and time, whose interests they serve, and what traces they leave. And we examine how—in this pluralistic, fragmented, and fluid world—designers can meaningfully engage with communities.

ISSUE 14 - CREATURE

Brings you the results of the LA+ CREATURE international design ideas competition, which explored how we can use design to achieve a more symbiotic existence with other creatures. The competition brief asked entrants to choose a nonhuman client and design something—a place, a structure, a product, a process, a system—to improve its life and increase human-nonhuman empathy. As well as showcasing the award-winning designs and a comprehensive Salon des Refusés, LA+ CREATURE features an essay by Lori Gruen (author of Critical Terms for Animal Studies) and interviews with jurors Timothy Morton, Kate Orff, Jennifer Wolch, Andrew Grant, Chris Reed, and Farre Nixon.

ISSUE 15 - GREEN

In the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum between the binary extremes of black and white it’s not gray, as you might expect, but green. And within green’s bandwidth there are more tonal variations than any other color can make. Maybe this is why—envy, naivete, and money aside—green is generally synonymous with good. Green is paradise for Islam, luck for the Irish, and a healthy planet for environmentalists. Whereas the industrial past was gray, the future is green. LA+ GREEN explores the green spectrum from plants to politics and from art to science.

ISSUE 16 - SPECULATION

In this moment of seemingly compounding global crises and existential concerns about the future of the planet, this 16th issue of LA+ pauses to consider the values and implications of speculation. LA+ SPECULATION contains contributions from across disciplinary perspectives, which reflect on the divergent forms, values, and cultural resonances of acts and theories of speculation – both contemporary and antecedent. Whether employed as a means of influence, a method of production, a form of practice, a manner of inquiry, a way of seeing, or a motivating ideology, this issue engages speculation and the speculative as world-shaping concepts worthy of deep and critical reflection.