Educational Landscapes
The new generation of design for school landscapes and adventure playgrounds play a vital role in the learning process and cultivating the minds of young children. Including or restoring natural areas as part of school landscapes provide opportunities for nature education, but more importantly engage children in self directed play that inspire creativity and cultivates individual imagination that is essential to developing young minds.
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, recognizes that integrating nature with our schools must become a central theme in the design of our society’s educational campuses if we are to benefit from the wonders of nature.
This presentation explores many of the educational landscapes designed by SED Design and other distinguished designers that are creating landscapes that will best serve the needs of future generation.
Inspired by Nature
Native Landscapes of the Mid Atlantic Coast
The Delaware River’s diverse native landscapes provide inspiration for designing the landscape and preserving our natural heritage.
The Delaware River flows across a broad region of diverse landscapes shaped by hundreds of millions of years of geologic processes. Time has given this region many of the most beautiful and unique native landscapes. This presentation explores the origin and character of our extraordinary native landscapes from the Atlantic Coastal Plain to the Pocono Plateau, and reviews how these special places are inspiration for designing the land and integrating people and nature.
Art and Science of Landscape Architecture
Landscapes and Gardens that integrate Best Management Practices to reduce the footprint of our built landscapes protect our natural systems and begin a process of healing the earth.
This presentation explores the practice of landscape architecture and design on the land which represents the beginning a new revolution. Today a new paradigm for the design of landscapes and gardens is beginning to emerge from a need to find harmony with the processes that sustain life on earth. Gardens and landscapes will begin to restore the forests of the earth, thus rebuilding the carbon sinks of the past while restoring the most productive means of photosynthesis and evapo-transpiration. The gardens of the future will cleanse the earth’s waters that fall on them through the use of bio-filtration in vegetated swales and wetlands. The gardens of the future will promote infiltration of rainwater to replenish the earth’s diminishing groundwater. These qualities will be achieved in the context of making outdoor spaces and garden rooms that have the intrinsic quality of being beautiful and enjoyable spaces.
In this way brown fields will be turned into green fields, one step at a time, on a long but essential journey of healing the land and water that sustain life. We are merely at the beginning of this journey. The ideas and initiatives that will transform our future are just beginning to be recognized. As in the past when, a new need has been defined, a design revolution rises to transform the face of the land. This revolution will define the quality of our life and that of future generations on this great planet we call home.
Green Roof for Sustainable Living
From Design to Construction
Green roofs represent the dawning of a new age for America. This presentation explores how this green technology will integrate our buildings with the landscape and help solve many environmental problems associated with traditional buildings. Learn about the many benefits of this low impact technology and how it will make rooftops more usable for outdoor living and transform our urban world. Case studies will explore the techniques used to construct green roofs and roof top gardens including extensive and intensive systems
