In Person at Aura, 121 Center Street, Portland

BSLA is proud to be a longtime sponsor of Architalx. This annual Portland, Maine-based April speaker series is dedicated to broadening the awareness and understanding of architecture, landscape architecture, and design.

Info + tickets here.

Today’s speaker:

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.

Beats By Dre HQ

Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealth density” Blackbirds housing, retail and restaurant flagships, dynamic workspaces for Beats By Dre and Snap, award-winning residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context.

Blackbirds

She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied at the Architecture Association in London and received a MARCH at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.

Click here for more info & tickets for Architalx 2023!

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Description

Concluding the fourth annual Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between MICD and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab–the Fellows discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial, social, and environmental injustice in each of their cities.

Read more and find the livestream…

Free. In person in the John Olver Design Building, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The annual lecture series of the UMass Amherst Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning continues with a lecture by University of Washington assistant professor Catherine De Almeida, “Repairing Waste Relations: Landscape Lifecycles + Participatory Action; Research at the Margins.”

See details on this lecture and the entire series.

Online.

This is the monthly meeting of BSLA’s elected Executive Committee (“ExComm”), Section chairs, Student chapter leaders, and Committee leaders. All members from Maine and Massachuetts are welcome to attend.

This typically takes place on the third Thursday of the month.

The regular agenda includes brief updates, questions, and calls-to-action from each of the leaders and the work that they represent, along with longer discussions on special topics. If you have a topic to bring to an ExComm meeting, please email BSLA President, Luisa Oliveira.

It’s our essential moment to connect and coordinate our activities across Mass & Maine, AND our means to collaboratively discuss questions, issues, and other important things.

The 2024 Zoom link is here. Email Gretchen to be added to the calendar invite. Join us!

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Read more and find the livestream…

In Person at Aura, 121 Center Street, Portland

BSLA is proud to be a longtime sponsor of Architalx. This annual Portland, Maine-based April speaker series is dedicated to broadening the awareness and understanding of architecture, landscape architecture, and design.

Info + tickets here.

Today’s speaker:

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.

Beats By Dre HQ

Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealth density” Blackbirds housing, retail and restaurant flagships, dynamic workspaces for Beats By Dre and Snap, award-winning residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context.

Blackbirds

She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied at the Architecture Association in London and received a MARCH at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.

Click here for more info & tickets for Architalx 2023!

Free. In person in the John Olver Design Building, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The annual lecture series of the UMass Amherst Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning continues with a lecture by Pratt Institute professor Rosetta S. Elkin, “Landscapes of Retreat.”

See details on this lecture and the entire series.

In person at Boston Green Academy. Brighton (Boston), MA

Please join us to celebrate World Landscape Architecture Month at Boston Green Academy’s "Earth Day” school-wide event.

• 8am — set up

• 9am - 11am — planting activity with students — round one

• 11am - 12pm — clean up

Whether you can stop by for an hour or the whole morning, you are needed and welcome.

Please Sign Up Here. THANK YOU!

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Speaker

Dan Stubbergaard, who is trained as an architect from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Copenhagen, founded Cobe in 2006. Inspired by the transformation of Copenhagen from an industrial port city to a beacon for livability and sustainability, he is the leading figure in Cobe’s work to create surroundings that actively contribute to extraordinary everyday life. Stubbergaard believes architects have a profound responsibility to create resilient, long-term solutions that improve life–cities, buildings, and landscapes that are made to outlast our generation.

His research focuses on investigating solutions, tools, and methodologies across several topics or themes of interest, including resilient urban development, green mobility, transformation and reuse, new ways of building, social responsibility, urban nature, and longevity. Having received national and international acclaim for his work, including the C.F. Hansen Royal Medal from the Danish Academy Council in 2020, Nykredit’s Architecture Award in 2012, and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006, he has designed and completed award-winning projects globally. Two projects of significant note are the Nordhaven project (Copenhagen, DK) from 2009 onwards that effectively converted a former industrial shipyard into an arguably more sustainable urban district with pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure, and the Paper Island project of 2016 to 2023 (Copenhagen, DK), the conversion of a former industrial site into a vibrant inner-city neighborhood, and with skillful handling of different building scales and elements of the public realm. What is particularly impressive in his projects is the consistency with which he deals with integrating the potential of landscape as an organizing instrument, creating humane environments, privileging reuse and repair as a strategy and developing compelling narratives through systemic thinking.

Read more and find the livestream…

In Person at Aura, 121 Center Street, Portland

BSLA is proud to be a longtime sponsor of Architalx. This annual Portland, Maine-based April speaker series is dedicated to broadening the awareness and understanding of architecture, landscape architecture, and design.

Info + tickets here.

Today’s speaker:

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.

Beats By Dre HQ

Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealth density” Blackbirds housing, retail and restaurant flagships, dynamic workspaces for Beats By Dre and Snap, award-winning residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context.

Blackbirds

She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied at the Architecture Association in London and received a MARCH at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.

Click here for more info & tickets for Architalx 2023!

Online.

This is an informal, monthly drop-in Zoom meeting of landscape architecture firm owners and leaders. 

Our goal is to create a space where New England landscape architecture firm owners and leaders can connect, commiserate, compare notes, and hopefully laugh a little with your peers in this community.

There is no fixed agenda, but we will start with a few discussion prompts each time, and then you can take the conversation wherever you want to go. 

Questions or topics to discuss? contact BSLA President-Elect & Crowley Cottrell firm owner, Michelle Crowley.

We're starting 2024 by alternating between first Friday mornings and first Wednesday evenings. We'll see how that works for folks and will modify as we go.

Do you want to receive the monthly calendar invite? email Gretchen.

This Zoom link is good for all of 2024.

Free. In person in the John Olver Design Building, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The annual lecture series of the UMass Amherst Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning continues with a lecture by John Taylor of the Kota Kita Foundation, “A Role for All Seasons.”

See details on this lecture and the entire series.

In person.

Celebrate spring with fellow Emerging Professionals at the BSLA EP Spring Social!

Come join us Tuesday, April 2 at 6pm for an evening of arcade games, food, drink, and fun company at Roxy’s Arcade in Central Square, Cambridge.

Get tickets here.

This event is FREE for BSLA members and students, only $10 for non-members. All ticket holders will receive game tokens, two drinks + snacks. Please note that Roxy’s Arcade is 21+. Thank you Landscape Forms for sponsoring.

If you're in the early stage of your career, a current student or recent graduate, this is for you. Landscape Architects, designers, planners and friends, all are welcome.

Spots are limited; Sign up today.

We look forward to seeing you there!

In Person at Aura, 121 Center Street, Portland

BSLA is proud to be a longtime sponsor of Architalx. This annual Portland, Maine-based April speaker series is dedicated to broadening the awareness and understanding of architecture, landscape architecture, and design.

Info + tickets here.

Today’s speaker:

Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.

Beats By Dre HQ

Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealth density” Blackbirds housing, retail and restaurant flagships, dynamic workspaces for Beats By Dre and Snap, award-winning residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context.

Blackbirds

She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied at the Architecture Association in London and received a MARCH at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.

Click here for more info & tickets for Architalx 2023!

We are pleased to share the 2024 BSLA Design Awards Call for Entries!

Download the Call and find the link to Submit, as well as FAQ and other details.

Entries are accepted on a rolling basis from now through Friday, March 29, 2024. Enjoy early bird rates through Friday, March 15.

Thanks for helping to celebrate design excellence in our region.

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Description

Generative AI does not create new images out of thin air; it generates images that have a “certain something” in common with a selection of images we have fed into it.  This selection, often called a “dataset,” can be generic or custom-made; either way, Generative AI automates the imitation and replication of some of its common visual features, often known in the past as styles.  Imitation was for centuries the backbone of the classical tradition in European art, and it was de facto banned by 20th-century modernism for many good reasons.  As the rise of Generative AI is bringing the practice of imitation back to our design schools and to the design professions, we urgently need to learn again what imitation is, how it works, what it does, and how we can deal with it today, in critical and creative terms.  Every dataset is a canon, but every reference to precedent is based on preference, and we know all too well that preference is often a proxy for prejudice.

Read more and find the livestream…

Free. In person in the John Olver Design Building, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The annual lecture series of the UMass Amherst Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning continues with a lecture by artist and designer Chat Travieso, “A Nation of Walls.”

See details on this lecture and the entire series.

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Description

Rather than slowly immersing in the subject of the ecological emergency, if one suddenly dives into its depths, the experience can be irreversibly transformative. Based on a personal trajectory of exhibitions, books and projects, this talk dwells on how such a radical reversal can alter not only one’s worldview, but also what kind of action and practice one accepts to pursue after their priorities have undergone a radical change.

Speaker

Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator and author. A 2020 Loeb Fellow from Harvard University, Gadanho holds an MA in art and architecture, and is a PhD in architecture and mass media. From 2012 to 2016, he was the curator of contemporary architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he coordinated the Young Architects Program and curated exhibitions such as 9+1 Ways of Being Political, Uneven Growth, and A Japanese Constellation. Between 2015 and 2019, he was the founding Director of MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon, where he initiated more than 50 exhibition projects, including shows and publications such as Utopia/Dystopia, Tension & Conflict, and Eco-Visionaries. During 2020-21, he led a bid for European Capital of Culture 2027 by a coalition of 17 cities in Portugal’s interior, and became a Guest Professor at the University of Beira Interior. He has edited the BEYOND bookazine, the ShrapnelContemporary blog, and contributes regularly to international publications. He wrote Arquitetura em Público, a recipient of the FAD Prize for Thought and Criticism in 2012. In 2022, he launched Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (ACTAR Publishers: New York/Barcelona).

Read more and find the livestream…

Online.

Maine landscape architects, designers, coworkers and collaborators: there's a lot happening in our state, landscape architecture-wise! From our second year of the summer design program to statewide climate action; from advocacy next steps to potential sites to visit to whatever might be on your mind, join us in a Zoom meeting to discuss events, activities, and what we want to do this year.

Email Maine BSLA co-chairs Johanna Cairns or Steven Mansfield for the calendar invite and Zoom.

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Description

Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us is also a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. Lauret Savoy’s Trace interweaves journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time to explore how this country’s still unfolding history has marked the land, this society, and her. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds to names on the land, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often-unvoiced presence of the past. Lauret will offer elements from this book and introduce her current project on the Chesapeake region. The new work braids histories of the land and of “race” using as a lens her search for ancestors, lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa, Indigenous America, and the Indian Ocean basin with immigrants from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their stories are entangled with the rise and fall of tobacco agriculture and the origin and growth of the capital city along the Potomac River. Lauret delves through fragmented histories—geological, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. She asks, what is your relationship with history, told and untold, on this land?

Read more and find the livestream…

We are pleased to share the 2024 BSLA Design Awards Call for Entries!

Download the Call and find the link to Submit, as well as FAQ and other details.

Entries are accepted on a rolling basis from now through Friday, March 29, 2024. Enjoy early bird rates through Friday, March 15.

Thanks for helping to celebrate design excellence in our region.

Hybrid: Online and In person at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Free.

Description

For over three decades, Dr. Margot Kushel has both cared for people who experience homelessness and studied the causes, consequences, and solutions to homelessness, particularly in California, which is home to 30 percent of the people experiencing homelessness in the US. Kushel, who recently led the largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s, will discuss insights that have emerged from her work as a physician and researcher. Her research has shown that California’s homelessness crisis is primarily due to the lack of housing that low-income households can afford. Moreover, contrary to popular beliefs, the majority of people experiencing homelessness in the state were born in California. She will draw on the findings to discuss policies, programs, and practices that would help people experiencing homelessness and those who are at risk of becoming homeless.

Read more and find the livestream…

Online.

This is the monthly meeting of BSLA’s elected Executive Committee (“ExComm”), Section chairs, Student chapter leaders, and Committee leaders. All members from Maine and Massachuetts are welcome to attend.

This typically takes place on the third Thursday of the month.

The regular agenda includes brief updates, questions, and calls-to-action from each of the leaders and the work that they represent, along with longer discussions on special topics. If you have a topic to bring to an ExComm meeting, please email BSLA President, Luisa Oliveira.

It’s an essential moment to connect and coordinate our activities across Mass & Maine, AND our means to collaboratively discuss questions, issues, and other important things.

The 2024 Zoom link is here. Email Gretchen to be added to the calendar invite. Join us!

In person. Free. At Cambridge Public Library.

BSLA is pleased to share an invitation to the public premier of OPEN SPACE; Life at Cambridge’s Danehy Park.

From the director:

Filmed over several months, OPEN SPACE is about Danehy Park and the people who frequent it. The park’s uses are as varied as the folks that come here; a welcome reminder of our city’s astonishing multi-culturalism.

Open spaces bring us together. Differences disappear. People are more accepting of each other. There’s a feeling of safety. Nature provides what we need and helps us become a better version of ourselves.

Watch the trailer and learn more about this documentary film project…

Click here for tickets to the Sunday screening. (This is also screening on Saturday.)

In person. Free. At Cambridge Public Library.

BSLA is pleased to share an invitation to the public premier of OPEN SPACE; Life at Cambridge’s Danehy Park.

From the director:

Filmed over several months, OPEN SPACE is about Danehy Park and the people who frequent it. The park’s uses are as varied as the folks that come here; a welcome reminder of our city’s astonishing multi-culturalism.

Open spaces bring us together. Differences disappear. People are more accepting of each other. There’s a feeling of safety. Nature provides what we need and helps us become a better version of ourselves.

Watch the trailer and learn more about this documentary film project…

Click here for tickets to the Saturday screening. (This is also screening on Sunday.)

We are pleased to share the 2024 BSLA Design Awards Call for Entries!

Download the Call and find the link to Submit, as well as FAQ and other details.

Entries are accepted on a rolling basis from now through Friday, March 29, 2024. Enjoy early bird rates through Friday, March 15.

Thanks for helping to celebrate design excellence in our region.

Hybrid: Online or In person

You are invited to attend the first Forum of 2024, Climate Adaptation at the Regional Scale: From Planning to Implementation.

Flooding, sea level rise, storm surge, heat, and other climate change challenges cross-cut political boundaries. Facing a crisis without set boundaries, how can communities, agencies, and non-profit organizations plan for climate change at the regional scale?

 On March 15, join experts from across the country to learn about different regional approaches to building climate change resilience for people and nature.

Find out more about the Climate Adaptation Forum and our speakers.

Register to attend either in-person at Foley Hoag, LLP in the Boston Seaport or to participate virtually.

BSLA is pleased to be a supporter of the Climate Adaptation Forum.

In person at Bissell Brothers, 38 Resurgam Pl, Portland

This casual meetup is open to all landscape designers and friends! Come hang out with us while we chat, sip and sketch.  We may even play our own version of exquisite corpse (a drawing game.) Feel free to bring you favorite drawing media and paper, or use ours.

We’ll cover the first round of drinks. See you there —