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Read Article About Our Life After Life Project Featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine
At Tannenbaum Design Group, we strive to create enchanting landscapes that seamlessly blend beauty, functionality, and sustainability. Our commitment to excellence and innovative design has recently been recognized in the prestigious pages of Landscape Architecture Magazine, marking a significant milestone in our journey. It is an honor to see how our passion for landscape architecture has garnered attention on a national scale.
When Tannenbaum Design Group received the news that our work was being featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine, our team felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. The publication’s discerning eye for exceptional projects made this recognition a true testament to our dedication and expertise. As we eagerly flipped through the glossy pages, we realized that our story was about to be unveiled to a vast audience of landscape architecture enthusiasts, industry professionals, and potential clients.
At Tannenbaum Design Group, our philosophy revolves around the belief that landscapes have the power to evoke emotions, shape experiences, and connect people with the environment. We have seamlessly integrated elements such as sustainable design, innovative materials, and cutting-edge technology into our projects, all while staying true to the timeless principles of landscape architecture. Our ability to strike a delicate balance between art and science has resonated with clients and experts alike, culminating in our feature in Landscape Architecture Magazine.
A key aspect of our work discussed in the project featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine is our unwavering commitment to urban sustainability and environmental stewardship. With growing concerns about climate change and the depletion of natural resources and biodiversity, Tannenbaum Design Group has embraced eco-friendly practices in every aspect of our designs. Whether it’s incorporating native plant species, utilizing rainwater harvesting systems, xeriscaping, or implementing energy-efficient systems – we are dedicated to not just reducing our ecological footprint but regenerating ecosystems while creating breathtaking landscapes that stand the test of time.
Landscape Architecture Magazine recognized Tannenbaum Design Group’s innovative design approach as a driving force behind our feature. Each project is a unique canvas, waiting to be transformed into an extraordinary work of art. By seamlessly integrating hardscapes, water features, art, and innovative systems for sustainable urban design, we are redefining the boundaries of traditional landscape architecture. Our hope is that our projects not only captivate the eye but also provide enriching spaces that bring joy to the lives of those who experience them.
We continue to our dedication as always to client satisfaction. Landscape architecture done right is a collaborative process, where open communication and shared visions pave the way for remarkable results. By actively involving our clients in every stage of the design process, we ensure that their dreams and aspirations are brought to life. Our ability to create landscapes that exceed expectations has been pivotal in earning the recognition of prestigious publications like Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Having our project featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine has been an exhilarating milestone for Tannenbaum Design Group. It is a testament to our unwavering dedication to excellence, innovative design, and sustainable practices. As we continue to push the boundaries of landscape architecture, we are honored to share our story with a broader audience and inspire others to appreciate the transformative power of landscapes. This recognition has only strengthened our resolve to create awe-inspiring landscapes that leave an indelible mark on both the natural and built environments.
In response to the unsustainable practices and negative externalities of the modern industrial monocrop agriculture complex, there has been growing interest in permaculture and food forests as a sustainable way to produce food. Permaculture is a philosophy and set of practices that aims to create regenerative ecosystems that are self-sufficient and promote biodiversity. Food forests, also known as forest gardens, are an example of a permaculture design that mimics the structure and function of a natural forest ecosystem.
So, what exactly is a food forest? Essentially, it is a type of agroforestry system that combines fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, and perennial vegetables to create a diverse, low-maintenance food production system. The idea is to mimic the layers of a natural forest, with a canopy layer of tall trees, an understory layer of shorter trees and shrubs, a herbaceous layer of groundcovers and herbaceous plants, and a root layer of bulbs, tubers, and other perennial vegetables.
The goal of a food forest is not just to produce food, but to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that benefits both humans and the environment. By using permaculture principles like companion planting, nutrient cycling, and species symbiosis, a food forest can increase productivity and resilience while reducing the need for external inputs like pesticides and fertilizers.
One key aspect of food forests is the use of species symbiosis, or the interdependent relationships between different species in an ecosystem. In a food forest, each plant plays a specific role in the ecosystem, whether it is fixing nitrogen, providing shade, attracting pollinators, or repelling pests. By selecting plants that complement each other and create mutually beneficial relationships, a food forest can become a thriving, diverse ecosystem that supports a wide range of species.
Another key principle of permaculture and food forests is the idea of “stacking functions.” In other words, each element in the ecosystem should serve multiple functions to maximize productivity and efficiency. For example, a fruit tree can provide shade for an understory crop like berries, while also producing food and providing habitat for birds and insects. These species may act as predators to crop destroying pests.
Here are a few examples different species relationships that can be used in a permaculture food forest:
Food forests are also designed to be low-maintenance and require minimal inputs once established. By using perennial plants that come back year after year, a food forest can reduce the need for tillage and other soil-disturbing practices that can damage the ecosystem. And by mimicking the structure of a natural forest, a food forest can take advantage of natural processes like nutrient cycling and water retention.
Food forests are a promising example of how permaculture principles can be applied to agriculture to create sustainable, diverse ecosystems that benefit both humans and the environment. By using species symbiosis, stacking functions, and other permaculture techniques, food forests can increase productivity and resilience while reducing the need for external inputs and minimizing negative impacts on the environment. As we continue to face growing challenges in food production, food forests offer a promising alternative that can help us build a more sustainable future.
If you are interested in developing a food forest on your property, call Tannenbaum Design Group today and let’s start planning your garden and dinner table today!
Jacke, D., & Toensmeier, E. (2008). Edible forest gardens. Chelsea Green.
Tannenbaum Design Group | Landscape Architecture and Outdoor Design | Food Forests
High quality and well-designed landscapes and gardens can significantly increase the value of homes in New York City. According to a study conducted by the National Association of Landscape Professionals, a well-maintained landscape can increase the value of a home by up to 15%. This equates to an average increase of $23,000 in value for a home in New York City.
Additionally, a well-designed landscape can also increase the return on investment for homeowners. Landscaping can have a return on investment of up to 200%, making it a smart investment for homeowners looking to increase the value of their property.
If you have been thinking about making landscape improvements to your backyard, front yard, rooftop or terrace – you won’t just be improving your quality of life, but the value of your asset as well. Well-designed landscapes and gardens are proven to significantly increase the value of homes in New York.
Beautiful landscapes and gardens can also significantly increase the value of homes in Colorado. According to a study by the National Association of Realtors, a well-maintained landscape designed by a Landscape Architect increased the value of a homes sold by an average of 12%. This equates to an average increase of $20,400 in value for properties across Colorado.
Additionally, landscaping can also increase the return on investment for homeowners. The return on investment for landscaping can be up to 200% of the capital invested in the improvements, depending on the type of improvements made and the overall value of the property.
Without question, well designed landscapes and gardens can significantly increase the value of homes in Colorado, with an average increase of $20,400. There is significant value in a high-quality landscape design.
The value spread of a high-quality landscape design vs a poor one is quite significant. Studies put into perspective the impact poorly designed outdoor spaces and curb appeal can have in a home sale. A study by Trees.com shows property values can decrease by up to 30% due to poor landscaping alone. The website surveyed 1,250 real estate professionals for its study.
Contact us to get a quote and start building value and enjoyment into your home and today!
Tannenbaum Design Group | Landscape Architecture and Outdoor Design | The Value of a High-Quality Landscape Design
“We Build Parks.“
Life After Life (LAL) empowers deathcare as a way of bringing new life to distressed communities. LAL is a new model of regenerative development for the future of people and the planet. LAL takes difficult-to-reuse, abandoned properties and transforms them into public park amenities. These parks are supported in perpetuity through conservation easements, public incentives, sustainable celebrations-of-life, and peripheral land development, in order to preserve the public amenities and historic legacy of communities for generations to come.
LAL parks support underserved communities and remediate pollution, providing them significant physical and mental health benefits.
LAL parks protect biodiversity, create more resilient communities, and combat climate change.
LAL parks replace defunct property, bringing new life into distressed communities, while offering a sustainable alternative to the notoriously toxic and unaffordable options available for end-of-life care today.
As a nonprofit organization, Life After Life Foundation is working to change the perspectives around end-of-life and the motivations for planning ahead on their head. The fact of the matter is, only 30% of Americans have any plans at all for how they would like their body to be treated in the end. This has perpetuated a very destructive and exorbitantly expensive funeral industry to continue.
Reflected in their Motto, ‘One Last Good Deed’. – Life After Life offers the customer the priceless value that a loved-one’s loss, can be a part of something bigger. They provide the opportunity for a person’s last choice to contribute to healing the planet – leaving things better than they came. Additionally, they hope to bring people together through placemaking, regenerative development and community building activities pre-time-of-need, something completely lacking in the traditional funeral and cemetery industry.
Through the acquisition and transition of abandoned property into a public good, LAL brings new life to distressed communities. Many of our lowest income urban communities suffer from a preponderance of polluted brownfields and a scarcity of greenspace. These brownfields often lie abandoned because the market incentives to remediate them are too low for conventional development. While the public sector may lack the finances to remediate them and build the public amenities that the community and environment needs, Life After Life is able to transition the dilapidated land into healthy and beautiful regenerative development memorial parks.
The greening of vacant urban land has been shown to reduce crime. Domestic violence in particular has been found to be 25% less prevalent in nature rich housing developments. Cleaning and greening vacant lots has led to a 9% reduction in gun assaults. In Baltimore, MD, 10% more tree canopy was found to reduce crime by 12%.
Studies show that outdoor learning delivers many benefits — reducing stress, improving moods, boosting concentration, and increasing a child’s engagement at school. Simply having more tree cover in a neighborhood can account for as much as 13% of variance in student outcomes. Exposure to nature provides the opportunity to teach the natural sciences hands-on, builds empathy for nature and an interest in STEM and regenerative development.
Hospitals with a view of nature recover more quickly and require less painkillers than those without. Tree leaves absorb 95% of all ultraviolet radiation and 75,000 tons of harmful air pollutants annually. Parks induce exercise in communities, particularly for lower income populations. Nearly 80% of Americans report using local recreation services such as parks.
People who have spent at least two recreational hours in nature during the previous week report significantly greater health and well-being. Low levels of green space exposure during childhood increase the risk of developing mental illness by 55% higher than for those who grow up with abundant green space. Women living in the highest percentile of green space around their home have a 12% lower mortality rate than women living in the lowest percentile. Short term memory is improved by 20% from walking in nature.
Neighborhoods in a highly-developed city can experience temperatures 20°F hotter than rural areas. Extreme urban heat is a public health threat. It amplifies air pollution, increases energy consumption, and can cause serious harm to those working outside or without air conditioning. Parks and trees can decrease temperatures up to 45°F, providing cool and safe spaces for residents.
Extreme biodiversity loss looms in our near future. Consequently, one million species are now in threat of extinction. The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, 33% of reef-forming corals, and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. Insect populations have declined by 75% over 3 decades. Three-quarters of all land environments and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. The creation of urban parks allows for the protection of some of our most vulnerable species.
City parks strengthen local economies and create job opportunities. Parks attract residents and businesses, increase revenue for cities, spur private investment, and increase job opportunities. In Denver, $1.2 million in federal park grants resulted in over $2.5 billion in local public and private investments. Riverwalk Park in San Antonio, created for $425,000, is now lined with outdoor cafes, shops, bars, art galleries, and hotels, and has overtaken the Alamo as the most popular attraction for the city’s $3.5-billion tourism industry. Retail revenues generally are found to be 30 percent higher in districts with trees.
Rising temperatures and rampant habitat destruction threaten species today at unprecedented levels. Evidently, 18 million acres of forest are lost every year. More than 600 species are estimated to start going extinct every century – increasing the need for regenerative development.
According to the FAO, one third of all the world’s soil is now degraded from unsustainable agriculture practices. Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan.
There are likely over half a million ‘brownfields’ in the U.S. alone. Conventional brownfield remediation, or the act of removing debris from a site and moving it to a landfill, is ineffective and inefficient. The nature-based solutions of phytoremediation and bioremediation remove these harmful pollutants from the soil and water with permanence.
Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness today. 7.74% of adults in America reported having a substance use disorder in the past year. In the last 20 years, the prevalence of obesity increased by approximately 40% and severe obesity almost doubled. A growing body of epidemiological evidence indicates that greater exposure to natural environments is associated with better health and well-being in urbanized societies. Living in greener urban areas is associated with lower probabilities of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, asthma hospitalization, mental distress, and ultimately mortality, among adults; and lower risks of obesity and myopia in children. Greater quantities of neighborhood nature are associated with better self-reported health, and subjective well-being in adults, and improved birth outcomes, and cognitive development, in children.
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Your membership with Life After Life Foundation means no less than 30 new square feet of habitat gets built and maintained for generations to enjoy.
Don’t wait to make a good plan. Join an event filled community, immortalize your history, and rest easy knowing you have a beautiful final resting place waiting for you, whenever your time is up.
Let’s make the world a little bit greener!
Life After life. Life After Life. Retrieved November 16, 2022, from https://lifeafter.life/
Tannenbaum Design Group | Landscape Architecture and Outdoor Design | One Last Good Deed – Life After Life Parks
see how your redesigning you outdoor space as a native pollinator garden can play a critical role in the fight for biodiversity in out most endangered urban habitats.READ MORE
In late 1950’s, with the decline of the American automobile giants, began the economic and population decline of Detroit. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, forty-eight percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost. For reference, in 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000 manufacturing jobs. In 1950, the city of Detroit was counted as a population of 1.8 million making it the 5th largest city in America. Today, almost 70 years later, there are 700,000 residents.
Detroit was the first modern major American city to experience such a massive exodus out of the city. As people left, property values fell apart and the city became broke. All over the inner city, properties were abandoned and fell into neglected decay. The dense urban areas became a wasteland of dangerous crumbling infrastructure. In its wake, as these structures were demolished, a city with vast plots of uninhabited space was left.
All this may sound tragic, but on the other side of the coin was an opportunity – an opportunity for a large major American metropolis to reinvent itself from the industrial era urban design of American cities into a new postmodern evolution. An opportunity for a city to learn from all of the mistakes of the last centuries and implement all the environmental, technological, and sociological understandings we have today on a redesigned American city and a new perspective on urban planning.
As we are beginning to see with the resurgence of the Detroit economy, the city is using the opportunity to embrace sustainability and environmentalism in its movement towards a better future. From cars to bicycles and public transportation, from imported agriculture to vast communal urban farms, from infinite planes of impermeable concrete to a network of green spaces – the infrastructure revolution continues.
I mention all this today, because in the wake of the most catastrophic flooding in American history, Houston now has an opportunity. Clearly, a city that floods every single year from non-tropical storms was not going to make it through a category 4 hurricane unscathed. For decades in the field, we have known and discussed the recklessness of building in the flood plains, in any city. We’ve known the macro effects of covering a virtually pancake flat city. Specifically, one that covers a whopping 627 square miles, in 40% impervious surface. Houston was once prairie lands with large plots of open space which slowed and absorbed storm water runoffs. That is the profile of the city for which the city’s archaic bayou drainage infrastructure was actually prepared for. Not what it has become.
The choices of the past are what they are. Undoubtedly, now is the time to reevaluate what needs to be done or this will happen again. We have vast plots of urban land that have been simultaneously destroyed and will likely be rebuilt, but the truth is that majorities of them should not be. That is not to say Harvey, a one in 500 years storm should be the indicator, but rather use the last 10+ years of regular flooding to indicate the unsustainable developments. Areas that have been flooding every other year should not be rebuilt and should become public green space – an environmentally healing, psychologically beneficial, and economically stimulating public good. There needs to be an understanding that this will get worse before it gets better because it will take years to update the drainage infrastructure needed to get Houston through the next storms.
Houston, throughout the storm, brought pride to people across the world as they watched acts of heroism and humanity. Today, Houston can make the choice to be the pride of the nation with a city that uses a disaster to reinvent itself into a new sustainable city. The opportunity to learn from our fellow Michiganders is there, it’s our choice to take it.
Tannenbaum Design Group | Landscape Architecture and Outdoor Design | Houston Strong, a New Detroit, and the Future of Bayou City’s Urban Planning
Post World Wars Central Europe might not have a lot a lot of positives you can say were taken away from the devastation of war. However, when everything is bombed to rubble you certainly have a clean slate to start over from when it comes to design. Many cities like Frankfurt, Bonn, and Berlin that suffered the highest amount of city destruction took the opportunity to rise from the literal ashes with a new era of urban design and architecture.
In Frankfurt, for instance, over 50% of the infrastructure was destroyed by 1945. Today, 52 percent of the city area is green space, consisting of parks, woodland, farmland, orchard meadows, grassland, allotments and hobby gardens, cemeteries, roadside grass verges and bodies of water. And as of 2019, Frankfurt has been ranked the most sustainable in the world.
Sustainable communities can arise naturally over time as well, through the reclamation and re-purposing of infrastructure. When a large industrial site or landfill, that used to be on the outskirts of town, finds itself decommissioned and eventually absorbed into the growing city, it can present a multitude of challenges (i.e. contaminated soils, eye sores, wasted space, etc). Europe’s ancient cities can serve as great examples of how to cope and even benefit from these challenges.
For industrial sites, Landschaftspark in Duisburg, Germany is a patent example of how a derelict site can be reclaimed without disturbing the polluted soils through deconstruction and wasting materials and energy in mass deconstruction. Through this they achieve the addition benefit of preserving a bit of history. Landschaftspark was transformed from a disused old industrial ironworks into facilities with multiple uses into a one of a kind park space. The huge buildings of the former ironworks have been modified to provide patrons with a multitude of new functions such as alpine climbing gardens created in ore storage bunkers and a viewing tower made from a decommissioned blast furnace. Landschaftspark represents how an area can celebrate its industrial past by integrating vegetation and industry, promoting sustainable development and maintaining the spirit of the site without morning it as an eyesore.
Metabolon in Bickenbach, Germany serves as an interesting example of landfill reuse. Metabolon is a multi-purpose site built upon a decommissioned landfill. The site today takes advantage of the artificial topography to serve as serves as a lookout point, bike track, public park, playground, and research center and more. Converting waste to energy is the most significant goal in the research center. What was a disaster for the town has become an attraction and public benefit.
The benefits of recycling and reclaiming are shared among citizens, tourists, developers, customers, and the environment alike. Firstly, an industrial reclamation project produces ecological benefits to the environment and its inhabitants through the growth of plant materials that harbor ecology that break down pollutants in the soils and filter water runoff. Secondly, by transforming dilapidated space into functional and aesthetic pieces, a city brings economic revitalization to the surrounding area. And thirdly, when site is transformed into a useful and attractive space the area becomes more attractive to potential businesses and tourists.
This mindset of design applies to projects large and small. When we think about renovating our residential spaces we have two options. Tear everything out and start anew, or integrate and recycle. Many people in the industry will take the easy road- remove it all and put in new. I urge more of you to consider the value in preserving and recycling the old. Keep more structures out of the landfill. Integrate those priceless 30 year old shrubs into the plans if you can with a nice pruning. Reuse materials where you can. New is not always better, it’s just cleaner for a few years.
