How to Plant Meadow Grasses
Native meadow grasses are rapidly gaining popularity as both an alternative to traditional turf-grass, or a low-maintenance shrub-border. These grasses are easy to grow, have beautiful ornamental seed-heads, and are very drought-tolerant! A few of our favorite varieties include Grama Grass, Sheep Fescue, Atlas Fescue, or for shady areas, Blue Zinger sedge or Pennsylvania […]
How to Create a Butterfly Garden
Butterflies evolved into specific species by eating only a few different plants. As human development has expanded, these plants got ripped down or dispersed. Butterflies thrive on large groupings of plants. Many butterflies can’t eat nonnative plants, they need their specific native plant to survive. 90% of insect species can only eat the plants that […]
An Epic Design Quest
Photo of Sheep Bridge Nature Preserve, courtesy of Stuart Ruckman. Featured from Io LandArch’s trailhead project with The Nature Conservancy. At Io LandArch, we believe that the landscape + architecture planning and design process is a journey through thought and time to create sustainable and vibrant places, communities, and landscapes. It is an expedition lined […]
Paved with Good Intentions: 5 Reasons not to ‘Zeroscape’ your yard
With the ongoing water crisis, we are starting to see a lot of formerly lush landscapes suddenly transformed into barren rock-scapes under the guise of water conservation. While these newfound converts to environmentalism are well intentioned, doing a rock-only landscape is actually worse for the ecosystem, the climate, and the drought. I know that seems […]
Five Lessons for Community Revitalization from Historic Home Restoration
As a Historic Home Restoration survivor, veteran community organizer, Landscape Architect/Architect, and Urban Designer, it has occurred to me numerous times over the past 2 decades just how much restoring a historic home is a microcosm of community revitalization. Historic structures are an essential building block of successful community revitalization, but the parallels go much […]
Washington Square – Site of the Salt Lake City and County Building
Washington Square is the entire 10-acre block surrounding the Salt Lake City and County Building located between State Street and 200 East, and 400 South and 500 South in Salt Lake City, Utah. Washington Square is significant for its historical uses including the original 1847 Mormon pioneer camp. In 1894 the City and County Building […]
Designing for TV: A Crash Course with Extreme Makeover
We recently had the opportunity to volunteer, by providing Landscape Architectural services for two very deserving families, on the hit TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”! The episodes are 1002 and 1003 and we are looking forward to seeing them air in January 2020 on HGTV! In case you haven’t seen the show (seriously, who […]
Io & Athena: Inspiring Women
As a women-owned business, whose mission is to create sustainable, vibrant communities while mentoring the next generation of female landscape architects, Io Landscape Architecture is pleased to congratulate Shalae Larsen, Io Principal, on her nomination for the prestigious ATHENA Award . The award recognizes women who have achieved personal and professional success, and who are leaders […]
Trial by Fire: How I Became a Historic Preservation & Community Revitalization Advocate
It was a crisp, late winter evening. We were just settling in to watch a movie at our condo in Logan when the phone rang. It was one of those calls that you don’t ever want to receive. It was the Ogden Fire Department. The house that we had purchased just 2 weeks earlier was […]
Reinventing Community Engagement
Over the course of 20 years of professional and individual community engagement, we’ve been to a LOT of different types of public meetings. The best ones are creative and fun with active involvement of participants. They actually work to make a project better. The worst ones are boring, limit community feedback, or worse–collect feedback and […]
Back to Our Roots
We’re proud to unveil our new logo! The name Io stems from Greek mythology. Io was a demi-goddess represented by a white heifer. As a woman-founded design practice we deliberately chose the name based on its strong female archetype and also its agricultural symbolism. We have both personal ties to small-scale community agriculture and a […]
The Four Types of Historic Landscapes
The documentation and preservation of Historical Landscapes represents a relatively new and frequently misunderstood branch of the preservation movement. Many historic landscapes are being lost before their significance is recognized. Historic landscapes are important because often they provide context for historic buildings and structures. But historic landscapes can also exist without historic buildings, or can […]
Lester Park Design Competition
The results of the Lester Park design competition have been announced, and the winner is… “Community Tapestry” by Io Design Collaborative’s own Shalae Larsen with team members Jake Alex McIntire and James Argo! The competition was put on by the Utah Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Young Architects’ Forum and Urban Design Committee. […]
Stilwell’s Sentinel Trees Bear Witness
This article by Io principal Susan Crook was published in the June 2014 Union Vedette, the newsletter of the Fort Douglas Military Museum. Stilwell Field has played an essential role at Fort Douglas from the founding of the post on October 20, 1862 to the present stewardship of the Fort Douglas National Historic Landmark (NHL) […]
(re)PARK on Historic 25th
Io Landscape Architecture, in conjunction with Carbon Architects, hosted the first ever PARK(ing) Day in Ogden on September 20, 2013. Watch the brief video below, where our Principal, Shalae Larsen outlines the project concepts and goals. Special thanks to Johnson Media Corp. for putting this together. Shalae also appeared in another featured video by Only in Ogden! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSDokLo_gEk […]