"The Hive" by Dale Lamphere being placed in the roundabout of Jackson Boulevard. Five years in the making, the utility and streetscape project is winding down to its close. As Dale says - this is the icing on the cake!
Rural Placemaking Advocates
Placemaking. . . . you do it every day you make change in your home town! What do we want from our hometowns? We want them to THRIVE!
Practice Not Knowing
In this year of virtual meetings we've gotten lots of questions about what we have written on the chalkboard next to Tanya's desk . . . .
Landscape Architecture Magazine Reviews The Custer Beacon
What? The Custer Beacon in Landscape Architecture Magazine?
Awards + Speaker
Tallgrass attended the AIA Wyoming conference in Casper in 2020, where an AIA Wyoming Excellence award for David Street Station was awarded to Stateline No. 7 Architects.....and the jury had some pretty nice things to say about the site design too! Stateline also received a Citation Award for Art321, another Stateline-Tallgrass collaboration.
Tanya was honored to speak at that conference about Placemaking. And then she was especially excited to be followed by architect Jack Smith who was a protégé of Dan Kiley in the late 60's and early 70's. It was a joy and inspiration to hear him talk about modernism and the inexorable relationship between architecture and landscape architecture.
Seeds
Landscape Architect by day, economic and community development proponent...well, also by day and sometimes by night.
We have both been thinking about rural communities since moving to rural Custer in 2001 (well, Matt moved back to his hometown) and have been mulling this question; Why do some rural towns thrive and other languish? We're not the only ones wondering. Dakota Resources has been working to ensure that communities and entrepreneurs thrive for almost 25 years!
At Tallgrass, we've been putting together our observations about rural communities in our area and we think that the answer might be found by looking at parallels in nature. Tanya drops some hints at our thinking in this article about Custer. What do YOU think the difference is between towns that thrive or die?
From Dakota Resources
“I look at it like building a garden. You have to start with building healthy “soil” first to support a very large variety of businesses and that’s how you build a thriving community. Right now, Custer is the most vibrant it’s been in 20 years, but all that early effort laid the groundwork for younger people to come in and start these new businesses.” - Tanya Olson, Tallgrass Landscape Architecture
Read the first part of our two part series about the work Custer Area Economic Development Corporation is doing in their community.
Rural Communities: Clues to Surviving and Thriving
At Tallgrass we live and work in rural communities across the west-midwest and have been doing some research and thinking about what rural communities want and need to survive this era of urbanization and the institutionalization of urban policy. When an economic disruption occurs, what are the keys to small town survival?
Skyline Wilderness Trail Heads
We had a blast working on this project with AE2S Engineering, Architecture International and Rapid City Parks and Recreation. How cool is it to have a project that needs a crane?!
South Rim Parks Master Plan
In collaboration with the City of Lead, we created a Master Plan to be used to identify future community-supported projects and to guide project funding and development of Prospect Park, Manuel Brothers Park and the Lead Dog Park as well as important adjacent community properties.