Frederick Law Olmsted at 200
Designing an American Landscape Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation’s foremost parkmaker. Olmsted moved his home to suburban Boston in 1883 and established the world’s first full-scale professional office for the practice of landscape design. During the next century, his sons and successors perpetuated Olmsted’s […]
Index to Special Features [2021-present]
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Will World-Class Architecture Bring Civic Pride Back to Memphis?
Spurred by Herzog & de Meuron’s new art museum and a rethought waterfront park by Studio Gang, city leaders turn to design to make a downtown for “everyone.” Tom Lee Park in downtown Memphis is being redesigned by the architect Jeanne Gang with Kate Orff of SCAPE to transform community life along the Mississippi. It […]
![A photo essay on coral reef restoration efforts in Florida](https://www.charactertowns.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Coral-reef-YCC--150x150.jpg)
A photo essay on coral reef restoration efforts in Florida
from Yale’s Climate Connections Over the past 40 years, nearly 90 percent of live corals on reefs in the Florida Keys have been lost. Worldwide, tropical coral reef coverage has declined by 30% to 50% since the 1980s as climate change raises temperatures, sea levels, and ocean acidity. Authors of a recent study predict catastrophic […]
“A Brief History of Earth” by Andrew H. Knoll
How well do you know the ground beneath your feet? Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome […]
Creative Placemaking
from Urban Land Institute Report Summary: Creative placemaking, or leveraging art and culture in tandem with great design, is a proven accelerator for real estate development projects. It creates a distinctive sense of place—culturally rich, engaging, and economically thriving—and attracts people. Creative placemaking can have a meaningful positive impact in low-income neighborhoods, along distressed commercial […]
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller
perating Manual for Spaceship Earth is one of those wonderful books that were written decades ago but still provoke thought, present universal truths, forecast events decades in advance of their occurrence, read like a page-turner and ask why you don’t read it every year… A MUST READ. FacebookTweetLinkedInEmail
The Bloomberg Carbon Clock – February 2022
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A fairly simple breakthrough makes accessing stored hydrogen more efficient.
A new catalyst from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators extracts hydrogen from hydrogen storage materials easily and efficiently. The process occurs at mild temperatures and under normal atmospheric conditions, without using metals or additives. The breakthrough offers a promising new solution that addresses a long-standing challenge to adopting hydrogen fuel for […]
Clean Energy Breakthrough: Making Hydrogen Is Hard, but Researchers Just Solved a Major Hurdle.
For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source — splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at […]