Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, will continue on Thursday evenings. This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

Founded in Boston by Chris Reed in 2001, Stoss Landscape Urbanism is a landscape architecture and urban design firm committed to “the power of open space to bind communities to one another and to the environment,” according to its website. At Stoss, landscape is a catalyst for positive change, enhancing both human wellbeing and ecological diversity. The firm’s work focuses on creating active and environmentally sustainable urban realms, socially vibrant public spaces, and diverse, vital neighborhoods in which people can live, work, and play.

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Images of the havoc that natural disasters wreak upon the built environment are part of our cultural consciousness. They have been since the birth of photography. Yet the past decade or so has seen a worrisome convergence: the parallel increases in the ubiquity of media technology and the number and severity of devastating storms, which are arguably linked to climate change. Katrina: drowned New Orleans freeways and neighborhoods (the latter re-created in Beyoncé’s 2016 “Formation” music video). Sandy: a darkened Manhattan shot by Iwan Baan. Harvey: Houston’s graybrown floodwaters captured by drone photography. Irma: cell phone footage of a battered port town in the British Virgin Islands.

The degree to which the two are connected—and the importance of that link—was most acute when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, cutting out power and destroying telecommunications infrastructure. The Washington Post even attributed the Trump administration’s delayed response in part to not seeing the wreckage. Read More …