Nature by design

This is an article I originally drafted for Sylvan Communities magazine, but I thought I’d share it here as well.
It’s easy to forget when taking a walk through the lush woodlands in our regional parks that these natural wonders are actually designed landscapes.  When Frick, Highland, Riverview, and Schenley Parks were being developed from the [...]

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Oasis in the City: Mellon Square is an Icon of Modernism

Here’s the second in our series of full-length articles whose abridged versions appear in the Winter 2009 Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy newsletter.  We apologize once again for the incorrect links in the print version!
Among Pittsburgh’s many “firsts” is Mellon Square–the first modern garden plaza built over a parking garage, and a forerunner of today’s green roof [...]

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Board Spotlight: Illah Nourbakhsh Mixes Technology and Nature

The Winter 2009 issue of the Parks Conservancy newsletter, “The Voice,” features an interview with one of our board members, Illah Nourbakhsh, Assistant Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.  For this and upcoming issues, we’ll be posting longer versions of some of the articles here on the blog.  (I also apologize for [...]

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