InFill Philadelphia – Soak It Up! Awards from GreenTreks Network on Vimeo
This video, produced by GreenTreks Network, truly captures the spirit and energy of the InFill Philadelphia – Soak It Up! design competition. Congrats again to all of the participants and winners, whose collective expertise, creativity and innovation continue to fuel progress toward a more sustainable Philadelphia.
Image credit from top right: © Instagram user @marq32; © Instagram user @phillyezk; © Instagram user @marq32; © Instagram user @marq32; © Instagram user @marq32; © Instagram user @marq32
Thank you for all who joined OLIN and The Cultural Landscape Foundation for What’s Out There Weekend and the 
Instagram Challenge! Above are a selection of photos taken during the event. Congratulations to Instagram user @marq32, winner of our grand prize of an OLIN monograph and two general admission tickets to the Barnes Foundation!
Image © Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
This weekend OLIN is teaming up with The Cultural Landscape Foundation and dozens of other sponsors and supporters around Philadelphia for What’s Out There Weekend, a celebration of the city’s rich, diverse, and ever-evolving legacy of landscape design. Events include free tours of more than two dozen sites in and around Philadelphia in which experts in landscape architecture, urban design, and city-making explore the stories behind these important civic places in our own backyard.
OLIN and TCLF are also offering the chance to put your eye for cultural landscapes to the test during What’s Out There Weekend with the Instagram™ Challenge. One grand prize winner will win an OLIN monograph and two general admission tickets to the Barnes Foundation! Here’s how it works:
We’ll tally up the correct answers and post photos from each tour’s winner on our blog. The winners of each tour will then be placed into a random drawing from which the grand prize winner will be selected.
Disclaimer: The Instagram™ Challenge uses the Instagram API and is not endorsed or certified by Instagram or Instagram, Inc. All Instagram logos and trademarks displayed are property of Instagram, Inc.
Rendering of Lenfest Plaza at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, created using Rhino, Blender and Photoshop
To get good at something—to become masterful—requires focus. Today it’s easy to try a lot of different tools, mediums, methods…But if you spread your effort among too many interests it will be nearly impossible to find the time and attention to get traction in anything.
The revitalized shoreline of Mill River Park has already become a destination for Stamford residents.
This weekend, OLIN and the Mill River Collaborative will be celebrating the grand opening of Mill River Park in Stamford, Connecticut. Festivities begin on Thursday, May 2nd with a formal ribbon cutting ceremony followed by cocktails and dinner on the Great Lawn. Then on Friday and Saturday, the public is invited to join in on a wide array of activities, including a live DJ, a movie screening, bird and nature tours, entertainment by local dance group Hip Hop Dimensions, a kids’ parade, a circus performance, and evening yoga. Each event is designed to showcase how Mill River Park will serve as a vibrant destination for Stamford residents and visitors throughout the year.
To learn more about the grand opening’s events or to join the celebration in Stamford, visit the Collaborative’s website at www.millriverpark.com. OLIN will also be hosting a live Twitter stream of Thursday’s opening ceremony and reception—tune in by following us at @theOLINstudio or searching the hashtag #millriverpark.
City Branch, the sunken portion of Philadelphia's proposed rail park, will replace miles of abandoned infrastructure with activated public space.
The newly re-branded Friends of the Rail Park (formerly known as VIADUCTgreene), revealed a vision plan for the City Branch of the former Philadelphia and Reading Rail corridor last week in a lecture at the University of the Arts’ Corzo Center for the Creative Economy. Completed in the beginning of this year, the vision plan shows one possible future for half a mile of the three-mile long former rail corridor, focusing on the intersection of the submerged City Branch with Broad Street. The conceptual designs reveal its potential to become a critical part of a connective and continuous space that links many neighborhoods within Philadelphia.
The Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, DC, an online travel guide to the DC’s iconic sites by leading voices in landscape architecture, has been nominated for a Webby Award, an international honor from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) which recognizes excellence on the Internet. The guide, created by the American Society of Landscape Architects, offers insight on 75 historic and contemporary landscapes throughout the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia. Four sites in the guide are covered by OLIN Partners Hallie Boyce and Skip Graffam: the Enid Haupt Garden, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, the Hirshorn Sculpture Garden and Grounds, and the National Museum of the American Indian.
To learn more about the Webby Awards, view other nominees, or vote for the Landscape Architect’s Guide to Washington, DC, visit the Webby Awards website.
From left: Chris Hanley, Partner and Director of Technology, and Skip Graffam, Partner and Director of Research
This upcoming Wednesday, Temple University’s Ambler campus is hosting partners Chris Hanley and Skip Graffam as they present “OLIN Evolution: Thirty Years of Landscape Architecture Practice.” Starting with OLIN’s founding in 1976, Chris and Skip trace the studio’s perpetual evolution of thought and practice in the field of landscape architecture. This ethos of the practice—aesthetic vision, detail and craft, technical innovation, and social, economic and environmental sustainability—has been guided by over 30 years of built work and a continual commitment to academic exploration, and is now supported by the collaboration of the new Departments of Research, Technology and Green Infrastructure. This lecture is free for general admission and $18 for landscape architects seeking CEU credits. For more information and to register, visit Temple Ambler’s Alumni and Friends news and events page.
Want to learn how to draw like Laurie Olin? Watch as Laurie demonstrates the mechanics and methods of drawing using only a stick, a scrap of paper, and a jar of ink. Each semester, he begins the first day of his University of Pennsylvania landscape drawing class with this unconventional yet compelling exercise, explaining how learning to draw is less about the materials and more about seeing and interpreting the word. It’s a skill anyone can learn with practice.
From left: Andy Dawson, Jenny Jones, and Professor Richard Weller
As the sun began to set on a chilly February evening, folks filtered into the studio’s lounge for our presentation titled “The Intersection of Planning, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design,” the latest symposium in OLIN’s Theoretical Basis series. Pencils were put down and wine was poured as we introduced our topic and welcomed our guest speaker Professor Richard Weller, the newly appointed chair of PennDesign’s Department of Landscape Architecture. Our colleagues took in our presentation with quiet attentiveness, and we figured we were in for an easy night. Little did we know that within ten minutes the conversation would be swirling with allegations of surreptitious power, advocacy for subversive design, laments at the depressing experience of APA conferences, and the fact that “we had to kill Ian McHarg in order to resurrect him.”
What had we gotten ourselves into?
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