Form follows flux
Sam Clemente
Descend from the air into Los Angeles, and you might think you’re seeing the city at different scales. Particle-sized parks dot dense urban centers. Large, thick sheets of tarmac moat warehouses. Thin water bodies thread through boroughs, while the interstates curve like thick black sharpie gestures. Downtown’s skyscrapers seem tall, until your eyes meet the mountains that rise above and behind them. From this view, you can’t even see people – the individuals who have built all of this.
The city has long lived with the modernist dictum “form fits function.” Outdated infrastructural values have pervaded policy and design; LA county’s roadways total over 22,000 miles–just short of a full trip around the equator, and segregation has been deeply reinforced on a planning and policy level. These systematic moves are unimaginably big, with expressways often the width of neighborhoods, restricting access to economic centers for Black and brown communities. But in recent years the city has faced change at all scales. Globalization has increased and immigrant culture is becoming thoroughly blended with the urban atmosphere. The city is still learning from the 2025 Southern California Wildfires, and the heavy El Niño storms anticipate the risk of landslides. LA faced the largest decline of any other US county last year, yet the 2028 Olympic Games will bring a massive influx of people and an even higher demand on water and road structures (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026). All of these forces are shaping Los Angeles, and its efficiency-oriented systems are at risk of failure. We’re learning today of flux as a North Star, which centers adaptability over rigidity. The dictum was first introduced in Julia Watson’s Lo-TEK Water last year and it suggests design should follow ancestral, living systems (Lo—TEK, 2025). But it also reigns true for urban cities that are between old beliefs and new wisdom, rigid infrastructure and long-term resilience. It has to, for places like Los Angeles.
Landscapes have taught us this logic, and the ASLA 2026 conference has centered it. Across the conference, presenters have taken change as a design principle. Landscape architecture today operates across scales, from master plans to community gardens. The profession balances diverse stakeholders with strained budgets, a place’s history with its potential, and changing seasons with simulated storm events in the far- far-future. With all of these forces operating at different scales, how should designers respond? What are the pathways forward?
“Let’s Talk about Sequestration” slide, showing carbon monoxide abundance across the globe.
This year, crucial to answering this question was how landscape architecture can sequester its carbon emissions. In research from the GSD Office for Urbanization, coastal adaptation projects often exceed the established carbon emission limits for buildings (Waldheim et al., 2025). “Let’s Talk about Sequestration,” presented by Chris Hardy (Sasaki), Jonah Susskind (SWA), and Nicholas Pevzner (University of Pennsylvania) offered a look into why. Most projects carry embodied and operational emissions, but they can also store carbon with soil, trees, and bio-based products like wood (American Society of Landscape Architects [ASLA], 2026). This puts landscape architects in a unique position, compared to its AEC counterparts, to offset its own emissions through sequestration and, this time, with numbers to prove it. Much more research needs to be carried out, but “Landscape Architecture 2040: Guide to Site Carbon Asssessment”-- released just last month– gives us a starting point. Looking at projects through a carbon lens not only influences design, but also its lasting impact on the atmosphere.
The collaboration between civil engineering and landscape architecture is changing and with it, their conventional definitions and roles in society. From “Future Infrastructure Design: Foundations for Collaboration Between Landscape Architects and Engineers.”
Flux as a guiding principle also calls for landscape architecture’s role to redefine itself. Across the conference’s ninety-eight lecture sessions, seventy-two were presented by either affiliate ASLA (those without formal landscape practice or training) or multi-disciplinary ASLA speakers (speakers that have LA backgrounds but also licensure in other fields like architecture, planning, or engineering). This makeup of speakers reflects the wide-range of tensions that landscape architects are absorbing and deliberating. “Future Infrastructure Design: Foundations for Collaboration Between Landscape Architects and Engineers,” presented by Matt Jones (Magnusson Klemencic Associates), Amelia Jensen (Mithun), and Johnny Martin (Moffatt & Nichol) hones in on this synergistic shift. Many designers–with an ability to maintain design principles at many scales– are working at an infrastructural level. These projects have immense returns in long-term investment, but they are not immediately obvious. They necessitate a shared language between landscape architecture and other disciplines to ensure shared values, values that can also offer new frameworks for collaboration.
When environmental and industrial forces shape land in drastic ways, cultural continuity remains a resilient pathway forward. “Embracing Regionalism: Place-specific Design for Public Landscapes” looked at how designers of the West Coast, Mountain West and Middle America are using local materiality, ecology, and community partnerships, to better listen to the forces on a site scale. Presenters Nina Chase (Merritt Chase), Kasey Toomey (TERREMOTO), and Christina Sohn (Superbloom), for example, work with local craftsmen or collaborate with a local landscape architecture firm to gain perspective on a region’s history. Yet, when local ecologies and water management efforts sustain, they can also repair the physicality of the landscape.
At annual forums like ASLA, we have the interrogate how we have designed in response to the industry’s forces. Taking place next year in Chicago, in partnership with the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), is ASLA 2027 – where not only scale will be transcended, but also language, culture, and climate.
Subscribe to Landscape Engineers and receive monthly essays, research, and resources directly in your inbox.