A reminder as we enter peak bloom: The Tidal Basin’s beloved cherry blossoms are drowning.
The Tidal Basin’s beloved cherry blossoms are drowning. Twice a day at high tide, brackish water from the Potomac River floods the banks, plunging the walkway and the roots of its 3,800 cherry trees into standing, salty water. The culprit: climate change. As sea level in the Washington area continues to rise faster than anywhere else on the East Coast, the land itself is sinking, the byproduct of a prehistoric ice sheet melting and causing nearby ground to settle.
Two years ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Trust for the National Mall, and the National Park Service launched a design challenge called the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, inviting five US landscape-architecture firms to pitch proposals to save the historic site, or completely reimagine it. The idea was to initiate a conversation and jump-start options for the Park Service to consider, as well as generate excitement among donors who could help fund the future.
—Roger Courtenay, who was lead landscape architect for the Eisenhower Memorial and the National Museum of the American Indian and who participated in more than a dozen design projects and studies around the MallHeaded by Walter Hood, a Black architect who edited an essay anthology calledthis studio suggests different scenarios in graphic-novella form, each embedded with educational experiences about Black history and African Americans’ intimate connections to “hush harbors”: wetland havens...
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