Fieldwork, an Award, and an Urban Forest
-We are pleased to announce that Arsenal Oasis won the Special Jury Prize in the LILA 2021 Landscape Awards. The jury included Marianne Levinsen, Catherine Mosbach, Chloe J. Humphreys, Marti Franch, and Andrew van Egmond.
-Erik Schiller, our teaching fellow, reports on this summer’s fieldwork with the students on Arsenal:
There is a thicket of tree-of-heaven, one of the more successful pioneers in Arsenal’s difficult soil. Elsewhere on the slope, it grows just downhill of surface water, a pattern I am trying to confirm. Long before I reach it, I see a yellow cap push through the leaves, followed by the rest of Iveta. A former student at the State Academy of the Arts, she sought out the training program to keep learning and find new tools to engage with her home. She spends hours making detailed sketches of the sites we visit.
-Investor.ge, a local business journal in Tbilisi, published a feature on the Ruderal’s Mtatsminda Urban Forest Project.
-More on Mtatsminda: Ruderal’s Christian Moore outlines the design process and species selection for the Okrokana South Slope, the first phase of the Mtatsminda afforestation project.
-Connecting with Chicago: Jill Ridell, author of the We Will Chicago, and equity and resilience plan for Chicago, interviewed Sarah on her podcast The Shape of the World. In the episode The Wild Card, Jill and Sarah discuss Ruderal’s formation, her path to landscape architecture, and the power of surplus materials and energy in inventing new landscapes.
-Our travel notes this month include Sarah’s report from the Algeti Valley, a mix of mountain resorts and pastoral lands.
-Next month’s issue will include updates on the massive roadworks in progress on the Rikoti Pass that will cut transit time across Georgia by several hours.