Designing with plants beyond the superficial is something we constantly explore at Assemblage. Plants are unique from all other materials in the design palette because they are alive. How can we as landscape architects capture the dynamic qualities of plants more insightfully, and how do we better educate ourselves to design successfully with and for plants in urban spaces?

Climate change is a global phenomenon impacting all landscapes. As designers working within the intersection of water bodies and public space, how we choose to address the effects of climate related conditions is criticall. Climate impacts are a combination of sudden, extreme, and chronic issues. Think storm surges and heavy flooding in combination with steady sea level rise and consistently higher temperatures. These conditions currently threaten valued public spaces within our urban communities. In New York City alone, parks make up almost 30 percent of the coastline.

New Yorkers have the good fortune of living amongst a powerful network of 7 million trees. This wide-spread tree population lines streets and roadways and is found clustered within parks and greenways. Using the New York Parks interactive forest maps a close-in view of where exactly trees can be found. What we find is that the City’s trees appear unequally distributed across City neighborhoods. From this spatial vantage point we can speculate that as tree density changes, so do the benefits associated with trees.

On-site re-use of materials in landscape design emerges as a solution under a myriad of typical design-related challenges and conditions. Increasingly, the disposal and removal of construction debris is viewed as a critical financial and ethical issue. Deemed as “waste” implies no value or use as a site undergoes transformation with new design. The question arises: what is to be done with discarded materials left on site? And furthermore, what is behind our answer to this question?

We invite you to consider the visible and the invisible reach of a single tree over a year. The figures associated with the tree quantify the processes quietly at work by the network of roots and branches, processes through which the tree engages in its surroundings, absorbing, transforming, and producing.