Times-Herald staff report

Sierra National Forest landscape architect Cesar Sanchez was recently recognized with the 2014 National Accessibility Accomplishment Award by the U.S. Forest Service Regional Office on Mare Island, agency officials said.

Pacific Southwest Regional Forester Randy Moore surprised Sanchez with this honor at a recent visit to the Vallejo Regional Office, they said.

Sanchez ensures that recreation facilities like campgrounds and picnic areas are designed and constructed for maximum accessibility, officials said.

"Cesar is always looking for new solutions, if the first one does not succeed. He never limits his thinking to the status quo. He is a creative resource for the Forest Service," his supervisor Susan Burkindine said in a statement.

Among his many accomplishments, 100 percent of the recreation sites recently handled by Sanchez met accessibility standards, according to the announcement.

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California forest landscape architect honored in Vallejo

AUBURN-

Unauthorized landscaping placed along Highway 49 in Auburn by local businesses may be allowed to stay, pending the approval of an encroachment permit, according to Caltrans.

The owner of Auburn Extreme Powersports installed trees and plants to enhance the busy roadway on what he thought was his land. Later, he said a Caltrans employee told him that it looked nice but, since it was on state property, it would have to be torn out.

I asked him, What can we do? And he said, Nothing, you just have to take it away, Jeff Barbarick said. Seems kind of crazy because all we want to do is make things nicer.

Barbarick said he was tired of the weeds and trash along the road outside his business.

It reflects bad on our community to have it look like this, Barbarick said.

Two doors down, Michael Klemp, the owner of a used car business, said he had a landscape architect design 150 feet of landscaping along Highway 29. His property is apparently overseen by the City of Auburn, but he also ran afoul of Caltrans.

They had said I needed to go to the City of Auburn for a permit and that if the City of Auburn said it was O.K., they would say it was O.K., said Klemp, owner of Automotion.

Residents that FOX40 News spoke with couldnt understand why the landscaping couldnt remain.

I love it, I think its beautiful. Theyve done it voluntarily on their own, they spent their own money, its beautiful. Whats the problem? said Katrina Bilbao, who owns a restaurant on the highway.

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Illegal Highway 49 Landscape May Stay

By Monique Sugimoto and Dennis Piotrowski, Special to the News

Good architecture and attractive neighborhoods, gardens and landscaping are what make a city worthwhile they give life satisfaction. Everything else is secondary.

So said Charles H. Cheney, the first city planner for the city of Palos Verdes Estates, at the 1940 national conference of the American Society of Planning Officials. As PVE celebrates its 75th anniversary, it has much for which to thank Cheney.

Just more than a hundred years ago, city planning was not a full-fledged profession; the term was not well known and even less understood. At what would become the professions first meeting in 1909, participants, ranging from architects and landscape architects, to social welfare and civic interest groups, discussed the pressing housing issues of the day including overcrowding and congestion, poor construction and ventilation, inadequate parks and playgrounds, migration to cities and ugly advertising signs.

After this conference, city planning would sweep the country, forever changing the nations housing landscape.

Cheneys education prepared him well for this burgeoning field. Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1905 with a degree in architecture and engineering, Cheney went on to Paris famous cole des Beaux-Arts where for three years he studied the main cities in France, Italy, Spain and England.

In 1910, Cheney returned to the United States and worked for several years as an architect, before turning his full attention to city planning in California.

Cheney created the first statewide city planning conference in California in 1914. One year later, he was instrumental in persuading the California Legislature to pass the first city planning measure. The City Planning Law of 1915 provided for the creation of city planning commissions in all incorporated cities and towns.

Not long after, Cheney drafted a state zoning enabling act that gave unincorporated areas the right to create zones or districts. Adopted in 1917, the California State Zoning Act, was the start of designated districts for industry, business, and residential areas.

Cheney also played a major role in writing the California Planning Act of 1927, which authorized cities, counties and regions to establish master plans and appoint planning commissions. He was key to getting the language improvement and control of architecture inserted into the act, noting that it was through architectural control that harmonious development and attractiveness in a city could be achieved.

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Charles H. Cheney: The first city planner of PVE

Alex Skolnick rehearsing with Yacouba Sissoko - Planetary Coalition
Planetary Coalition is a world music project started in New York City by jazz, metal, any-style guitarist and writer Alex Skolnick and his artistic collaborator - architect landscape architect...

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Alex Skolnick rehearsing with Yacouba Sissoko - Planetary Coalition - Video

Strolling through Maggie Daley Park, stubble on his face and a yellow hard hat covering his graying red hair, Michael Van Valkenburgh paused before the contours of an undulating ice skating loop that will weave through a stand of evergreens.

"I see little Olympians in production here," said Van Valkenburgh, the park's chief designer, as his brown eyes settled on the concrete path for the "skating ribbon" in the emerging park. "That's gonna be, like, crazy popular."

You could say the same for Van Valkenburgh, 62, except he already is crazy popular, at least by the standards of his under-recognized profession. Revered for turning marginal pieces of urban land into magnets for people, the Brooklyn-based landscape architect is on a tear in Chicago.

Besides Maggie Daley Park, parts of which will open this fall, Van Valkenburgh and his firm have designed the 606 bike and pedestrian trail on the Northwest Side; a science quadrangle at the University of Chicago; and a just-announced park that will sit alongside a proposed 67-story Streeterville residential tower. The trail and the quad are expected to open next year. The park is sure to come up Monday at a public meeting on the skyscraper.

Van Valkenburgh, who got his master's in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a key player in the explosion of new parks that's transforming cities from New York to Seattle. It's been called America's second great wave of park building. The first came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shaped by such giants of landscape design as Frederick Law Olmsted.

"No one will have ever experienced anything like (Maggie Daley Park) in Chicago," said Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt, Van Valkenburgh's former student at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. "He makes growth one of his design elements. He doesn't put trees in a static composition and just wait 20 years. He likes to use plant material as an organic growth material that changes constantly."

Named for the Chicago first lady who died at 68 in 2011 of breast cancer, the 27-acre, $60 million Maggie Daley Park replaces Daley Bicentennial Plaza, a banal 1979 park built atop a parking garage in Grant Park's northeast corner. In 2012, the old park was torn off like a bad toupee, a move necessitated by the need to redo a failing rubberized membrane that protected the garage from groundwater. In Daley Bi's place is Van Valkenburgh's design, which incorporates the Cancer Survivors Garden and Peanut Park to the east. The piano-shaped park also offers some pointed contrasts with Millennium Park to its west.

Instead of straight paths and noisy throngs, the new park will have meandering walkways and quiet places for picnicking nestled in gently sloping "lawn valleys." Yet it will also harbor state-of-the-art play areas, including the skating ribbon, jagged climbing structures that will rise as high as 40 feet and a 3-acre play garden brimming with wood towers and other equipment you won't find in your local park.

Can Van Valkenburgh resolve these potentially conflicting identities one pastoral, the other almost carnivalesque?

Schaudt thinks so. Maggie Daley Park is "what Grant Park needs. It gets relentless after a while," he said, referring to a Versailles-inspired, Beaux Arts landscape that, while impressive from the air, can be intimidating on the ground.

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Architect brings fresh spin to Maggie Daley Park

Justin Rausch - Gold Coast landscape architect
Landscaping Construction Design Service Australia. Justin and his team are dedicated to complete each individual project to that of the highest quality, with...

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Justin Rausch - Gold Coast landscape architect - Video

A sampling of the pairs collaborative work, photo courtesy of the Moyers.

By Genevieve Kotz

Susan Moyer, a landscape designer, and her architect husband, Douglas Moyer, dont always work together on projects, but when they do, its beneficial for both them and the client.

Its really great because we communicate so easily, Mrs. Moyer, who works from her Sag Harbor home, explained. Her husband keeps his office in a separate building on their property, making the two easily accessible for clients.

But the factor that makes them a great team is their ability to put the needs of a client before their own personal style, she said.

I may have my own personal preferences aesthetically, but I work for a client, Mrs. Moyer explained, Im able to switch in and out and give my client what they want as opposed to having such a strict style that only certain people would come to me.

I like all of the different possibilities just like there are different people out there, Mr. Moyer explained, noting that while he finds traditional houses that look more historic more interesting, he also has enjoyed working on more modern houses with a little bit of a twist to them. The two most recently worked on a 1710 farmhouse renovation together.

Mr. Moyer mainly does residential architecture, but he has also had experience working on institutional projects, like the recently completed Parrish Art Museum, where he served as project manager, and commercial ones, like his current project, Harbor Market, which will replace Espressos in Sag Harbor Village.

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Teaming Up for Designs Sake

By Ivan Nechepurenko

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: July 25, 2014 (Issue # 1821)

'Lazy Ziggurat' by Pole-Design Project Team. Photo: Arch.stoyanie.ru

When painter Nikolai Polissky and architect Vasily Schetinin moved to the village of Nikola-Lenivets, a four-hour drive south of Moscow, in 1989, they did not know that 15 years later, thousands would head to Russia's largest land art festival, Archstoyanie, which runs Friday to Sunday this week.

"Most of all, I was struck by the primordial, untouched natural beauty around Nikola-Lenivets," Polissky once told The St. Petersburg Times, "When you walk out onto the high bank of the [river] Ugra, it takes your breath away, and you understand what it was like 1,000, or 3,000 years ago."

The verdant landscape is now dotted with weird and wonderful wooden sculptures from past festivals and new ones set up for this year's event.

Visitors get to wander round the huge area checking out new objects. One of the most eagerly awaited is "Lazy Ziggurat" built from bark beetle infected timber, apparently a message to dying forests, and art performances such as Jean-Luc Brisson's degustation of clouds in the Cucumber-Compost area. The festival winds down with an eclectic music program, featuring Kira Lao, a Novgorod musician who has been compared to Beth Gibbons, which runs till early Sunday morning. This year there is also a kids camp at the festival.

Detailed instructions on how to get to the festival can be found at arch.stoyanie.ru. Tickets cost 1,000 rubles ($29).

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Landscape Art Fest Transforms Russian Countryside

Latrobe-Unity Parks and Recreation Commission received three proposals for the Lincoln Avenue Trail and chose landscape architect Rich Rauso of Trafford to begin working on plans for the 1.6-mile project.

He's worked with us over the years, said Executive Director Jeanne Ashley at the commission's meeting last week, citing other projects Rauso has completed, including work with Adelphoi USA, the city of Latrobe and local churches.

The trail, which will run along the former Ligonier Valley Rail Road path, is funded by a $250,000 grant from the Westmoreland County Community Conservation Partnership Program through the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Ashley said she has walked the route with a representative from DCNR and will do so with Rauso to begin planning work on the trail, which should take through the end of the year before construction begins in 2015.

The project, matched with $250,000 in funds, began when the Latrobe Foundation bought the right of way from Norfolk Southern Corp. in 2012. Two trailheads, stamped concrete crossings, erosion control and asphalt paving are all part of the plan for the path, as well as landscaping, benches and dog stations.

Ashley announced that a $5,000 grant was received from Coca-Cola for recycling bins.

The money will pay for 25 bins that will be installed throughout parks, she said.

It's time we tried to do our share of caring for our environment, she said.

A date has not been set for a kick-off celebration, but the event with local officials is in the works for Legion-Keener Park featuring free Coca-Cola from the sponsor, Ashley said.

The commission approved the hiring of two lifeguards for the remainder of the summer to replace those who quit.

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Landscape architect hired for Ligonier Valley Rail Road trail project

Peter Daniel - Architect Landscape Architect
A short film made in the early 1960 #39;s by John Paterson about how Peter Daniel set about creating the master plan for Livingston New Town in Central Scotland.

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Peter Daniel - Architect & Landscape Architect - Video