Exploring the National Parks

As part of the National Park Service guide to its parks, it has curated topic guides to the websites. For a topic, like Civil Rights, they provide a brief overview of the topic and then give the visitor link to a variety of parks where they could learn more about the topic.

 

Sample Topics

Civil Rights

Industry

Literature and poetry 

Presidential sites

Explorers and Exploration

Sample Features

Homes

Grasslands and Prairies

Waterfalls and Gorges 

Monuments, Memorials and Statues

 

Of course, some topics are too general to have a list associated with them. For instance, there is a fabulous guide to Cultural Landscapes without a list. And the guide to Natural Sounds is unexpected and remarkable.

 

Top 10 Shapers of the American Landscape

Here is the list of Top 10 Shapers that I am presenting in EDA listed in alphabetic order. For comparison purposes I have linked each one to its entry in Wikipedia, but these are not definitive descriptions. And the Top 10 Shapers tag at the end will find you a few other interesting links...

Daniel Burnham

Andrew Jackson Downing

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Herbert Hoover

Thomas Jefferson

William J. Levitt

Robert Moses

 

John Muir

Frederick Law Olmsted

Gifford Pinchot

EDA Notes

Some random notes from today's EDA lecture:

• New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness 
• Tavistock has 5 residents and a gold course, Pine Valley has 12 residents and a gold course, Teterboro has 65 residents and an airport (Top 10 list of NJ small towns)
• "Home Rule's Exclusive, Costly Kingdoms" - NY Times 1994
• The award-winning map of the Stony Brook Watershed 
• CRSSA's landscape change program 
• How to Lie With Maps by Monmonier

Hope you enjoyed it.

Land Use notes from EDA

Some random notes from today's EDA lecture:

• New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness 
• Tavistock has 5 residents and a gold course, Pine Valley has 12 residents and a gold course, Teterboro has 65 residents and an airport (Top 10 list of NJ small towns)
• "Home Rule's Exclusive, Costly Kingdoms" - NY Times 1994
• The award-winning map of the Stony Brook Watershed 
• CRSSA's landscape change program 
• How to Lie With Maps by Monmonier

Hope you enjoyed it.

Land Use in EDA

A quick note to our regular readers, I will be giving my guest lecture on Land Use and Home Rule tomorrow morning in Environmental Design Analysis. Since the class meets in the unusually large Hickman 138, there will probably be plenty of room for guests. Stop by if you can.

Should Princeton merge?

Will Princeton Borough and Princeton Township finally set aside their few remaining differences and become one?  Voters will decide (yet again)on Tuesday.  The Star-Ledger offers a preview that reminds us of some past efforts:

Consolidation can’t move forward unless a majority of voters in both the township and the borough say yes. Residents of the township, which wraps around the borough like a doughnut, approved a merger by a three-to-one margin in 1996, but it died when 55 percent of borough residents voted no. The measure was also rejected in 1953 and 1979.

But the article also includes a list of all 22 of New Jersey's doughnut towns.

EDA's land use images

After talking about some municipal patterns of land use in EDA yesterday, I wanted to share a few of the lists:

• NJ's 10 densest municipalities
• The NE Corridor
• Animation
• All counties

Land Use notes from EDA

Some random notes from today's EDA lecture:

• New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness 
• Teterboro has 18 residents, Pine Valley has 20
• The award-winning map of the Stony Brook Watershed 
• CRSSA's landscape change program 
• How to Lie With Maps by Monmonier

Hope you enjoyed it.

A sad first for Celebration

Not quite like Mayberry.

Clickers are growing in use

The NY Times takes a brief look at the growth of hand-held student response devices.  While I don't use them in my classes, I have to admit that I enjoy seeing the responses when used during my guest lectures in EDA.  Alas, as a quick tech piece, the author doesn't get to dig in very deep into the effectiveness of these tools. 

What do think? Big brother?  Big pain?  Or Classroom 2.0?

EDA notes

Some random notes from today's EDA lecture:

• New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness 
• Teterboro has 18 residents, Pine Valley has 20
• The award-winning map of the Stony Brook Watershed 
• CRSSA's landscape change program 
• How to Lie With Maps by Monmonier

Hope you enjoyed it.

2010 Top 10 Shapers of the American Landscape

Here is the list of Top 10 Shapers that I am presenting in EDA listed in alphabetic order. For comparison purposes I have linked each one to its entry in Wikipedia, but these are not definitive descriptions. And the Top 10 Shapers tag at the end will find you a few other interesting links...

Daniel Burnham

Andrew Jackson Downing

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Herbert Hoover

Thomas Jefferson

William J. Levitt

Robert Moses

John Muir

Frederick Law Olmsted

Gifford Pinchot

The big mover this year is William J. Levitt.  Among other things, there have been 2 notable Levittown books in the last 18 months, one a collection of essays on the Bucks County Levittown while the other is linked to a notable moment in race relations. A Levittown ad was also featured this year in Lapham's Quarterly.

2009 Top 10 Shapers of the American Landscape

Here is the list of Top 10 Shapers that I am presenting in EDA listed in alphabetic order. For comparison purposes I have linked each one to its entry in Wikipedia, but these are not definitive descriptions. And the Top 10 Shapers tag at the end will find you a few other interesting links...

Daniel Burnham

Andrew Jackson Downing

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Herbert Hoover

Thomas Jefferson

William J. Levitt

Robert Moses

John Muir

Frederick Law Olmsted

Gifford Pinchot

EDA Memorials

For today's EDA lecture on Memorials in Environmental Design Analysis, I am talking about a pretty diverse set of memorials. Follow these links and you can find more about memorials or more about Washington DC or more things that I have posted for past EDA classes. Maybe you'll want to read Landscape Architecture Magazine's retiring editor Bill Thompson's initial comments about his first visit to the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon. I have my own photos online from the Pentagon, Flight 93, and Katrina in NOLA.

PlaNetizen's Top 100 Urban Thinkers

PlaNetizen went all Web 2.0 and had readers vote on the top 100 urban thinkers. For each one they have a separate brief web page that gives a bio. While it is nice to see oldie but goodies like John Nolen, Vitruvius and Patrick Geddes still getting their props, it is certainly interesting to see how contemporaries like Prince Charles, Andres Duany, or Christopher B. Leinberger stack up. (the Brooks Institute is well represented) All in all, it says as much about the readers as it does the people on the list.

I was particularlyhapp to see that the readers were moderately International in the voting including some early German and Australian thinkers as well as a personal favorite, Ildefonso Cerdá Suñer.

Public Land Survey System

When I described Thomas Jefferson's Public Land Survey System in EDA on Friday, I was reminded how new this is to New Jersey students who've spent very little time in the Midwest.

Not only did I find a link to the official-sounding description of the PLSS from the National Atlas, but I also found a few images that highlight the degree to which Jefferson's system really does continue to shape a significant portion of the American landscape today.

Olmsted's Buffalo

The Sunday NY Times Arts Section included an examination of the historic architecture of Buffalo, NY and how it is both underappreciated and threatened. While Frank Lloyd Wright gets the most play in the piece, Frederick Law Olmsted is featured too:

In Buffalo he realized an even grander ambition, creating a vast network of parks and parkways that he hoped would have “a civilizing effect” on the “dangerous classes” populating the American city. Flanked by rows of elm trees, the parkways were broken up by a series of gorgeous landscaped roundabouts, slowing the city’s rhythms of movement into something more majestic yet distinctly democratic.

The online version includes a slideshow that begins with an Olmsted parkway but leads on to include a great building by Burnham. It is almost as if the NY Times is endorsing my list.

The 2008 Top Ten Shapers of the American Landscape

Here is the list of Top 10 Shapers that I am presenting in EDA listed in alphabetic order. For comparison purposes I have linked each one to its entry in Wikipedia, but these are not definitive descriptions. And the Top 10 Shapers tag at the end will find you a few other interesting links...

Daniel Burnham

Andrew Jackson Downing

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Herbert Hoover

Thomas Jefferson

William J. Levitt

Robert Moses

John Muir

Frederick Law Olmsted

Gifford Pinchot

John Muir c.1900

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can read John Muir's 1900 essay on The Forests of the Yosemite Park in Atlantic Monthly. Much of it is timeless, although the mention of "the lately established system of parks and reservations" sets you back a little. And he writes about a visit from Mr. Emerson, which would have been quite the experience. He eventually visited Emerson's home turf:

But there remained many a forest to wander through, many a mountain and glacier to cross, before I was to see his Wachusett and Monadnock, Boston and Concord. It was seventeen years after our parting on the Wawona ridge that I stood beside his grave under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly recognition.

A time for memorials

As we reach the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we'll probably hear a bit more about memorials in the press today. But after my recent EDA guest lecture on memorials, I saw this nice article revisiting Helms Roberts' Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It talks about the labor intensive work that was required by the architect as well as his continuing commitment to giving tours of the memorial.