Matrix Planting Design
There is a growing trend in landscape architecture when it comes to planting design. More and more, Landscape Architecture Magazine and landscape design social media feeds are filled with sublime, flowing meadows, containing a symphony of softly mounding grasses, interspersed with a wild yet refined mixture of seasonal perennial interest. Yet, more substantive than trends […]
Outdoor Rooms: Four Strategies for Great Spaces
How do you create great outdoor rooms for your home? The biggest mistake people make when creating landscapes from residential gardens to parks and plazas, is to overlook the design. Too often, the landscape is seen as leftover space after a house or building is complete. It then becomes a formless, shapeless blob of visual […]
Perfection v. Progress
I have a confession. We moved into our beautiful Craftsman Bungalow in 2017, and amongst the to-do list of renovation projects, there’s one that is particularly distressing to me: Our garishly BLUE bathroom. Every day for the last 5 years I have walked into this bathroom at least twice a day, only to get punched […]
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 sedge. […]
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 non-native plants; they need their specific native plants to survive. 90% of insect species can only eat the plants that […]
Design Journey: Lessons from ‘Lord of the Rings
At Io LandArch, we believe that the landscape and architecture design process is a journey through cognition and time to create sustainable, vibrant places. It’s an expedition often lined with challenging obstacles and tough decisions. But it’s also filled with anticipation, magic, and a hero-worthy project as your reward. What better archetype to look to […]
Think Twice: Reasons Against ‘Zeroscaping’ Your Yard
With the ongoing water crisis, we’re 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, a rock-only landscape is actually worse for the ecosystem, the climate, and the drought. I know that seems counter-intuitive but here’s […]
Reviving Communities: 5 Lessons 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 and 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 […]
Trial by Fire: My Preservation Journey
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 […]
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 held by the Utah Chapter of the AIA Young Architects’ Forum and Urban Design Committee. Many hours of volunteer […]
The Trackline Project
This week marks another milestone in Ogden City’s bid to become the outdoor recreation capital of the West, with the kickoff of the Ogden Business Exchange Project. Nicknamed “Trackline,” the project is a proposed industrial/business park that will serve as a hub of activity for bike, bike-related, and otherwise outdoor products companies. Over the past […]
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 Landscape Architecture Principal Shalae Larsen outlines the project’s concepts and goals. We extend special thanks to Johnson Media Corp. for putting this together. Shalae also appeared in another featured video by Only […]