The Meridian Street Foundation is seeking neighborhood input on a new playground for Alice Carter Place Park. Learn more about the project and offer your input on the design.

Imagine miles and miles of peaceful, scenic trail laced with clear county streams and lined with trees and blossoming wild flowers. Envision a place where families, friends and neighbors causally meet to escape the stress and demands of a hetic lifestyle. Ponder a venue where you can stroll, jog, bicycle or horseback ride along a trail free from motorized vehicles. This is the B&O Trail. > learn more here

Featured in World Landscape Architecture Month; Alice Carter Place on historic north Meridian Street, Indianapolis, is a pocket park that strengthens connectivity and placemaking.

On March 3rd, Meg was an invited presenter and panelist in a dialogue with local and national leaders regarding the value of urban parks and greenspace in maintaining a world-class city. The event was the 2017 Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium on Civic Leadership at the University of Indianapolis. The day started with an INconversation between Justin Garrett Moore and Neelay Bhatt.

Storrow Kinsella’s work for the Indianapolis MPO was featured in a groundbreaking Guidebook on Placemaking. The Multi-Modal Corridor and Public Space Design Guidelines emphasize the link between a balanced transportation system and quality of life. This publication from Michigan State University Land Policy Institute promotes placemaking as an economic development tool.

PBS Senior Producer Dan Protess  hosted the Indianapolis premiere of the PBS Special, “10 Parks that Changed America” at Garfield Park Art Center, in Indianapolis. Dan introduced the special show, and moderated a panel discussion regarding the importance of parks to Indianapolis and its region.  Panelists inlcuded Meg Storrow, FASLA, landscape architect and principal of Storrow Kinsella Associates in Indianapolis.

This event is sponsored by the Indiana Chapter American Society of Landscape Architects and Indy Parks in celebration of the State of Indiana Bicentennial and 100th Anniversary of the National Park System.

An exciting development is occurring near the corner of Massachusetts and College Avenues. Indianapolis Professional Firefighters Local Union 416 is expanding its headquarters there and consolidating its campus to better serve both its membership of over 2000 active and retired firefighters, and its neighborhood. 30 years ago, the Firefighters purchased and restored the abandoned 1872 Fire Station No.2, establishing their union hall on a then-struggling Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave is now prospering as a Cultural District, and restored Station No. 2’s Fire Museum, Survive Alive program, and community-shared meeting rooms and green-spaces have been a catalyst towards that revival.

It is great to see cross-discipline collaboration in the placemaking professions.  The Cincinnati Design Awards program, now in its nineteenth year, is a joint program of Cincinnati area architecture,  interior design, experiential graphic design, and landscape architecture professions. Meg Storrow represented the landscape architecture profession on the invited jury, joined by architect Eddie Jones, Principal of the Jones Studio in Phoenix, AZ; Natalie Engels, Design Director of Gensler in Silicon Valley, CA;  Oscar Fernandez, University of Cincinnati School of Design; Cybelle Jones, Principal and Studio Director at Gallagher & Associates, Washington, DC; and Mike Tittei, Executive Creative Director at gyro in Cincinnati.  Once the jurors established award criteria of impact, relevance, and craft, we spent an intense day reviewing some 70 submitted projects to arrive at 19 that exemplified those qualities at a high level of design. Each project elicited lively debate in winnowing down from merely good design to great design, with philosophical fine points sometimes tipping the balance. Design is alive and well in Cincinnati. And refreshing that the awards gala took place in the restored historic Woodward Theater in the revitalized and wonderful Over-the-Rhine District. more> cincinnati design awards home pagemore> cincinnati design awards facebook page 

We revisited the  gateway recently and found Carl Leck’s murals still powerful, the plant material thriving, and tons of walkers and cyclists moving smoothly from the Monon to the Cultural Trail and to and from the Near Eastdside neighborhoods on a beautiful Sunday. We also experienced a new insight. What had been the deafeningly annoying noise of the interstate bridge traffic as it pounded the expansion joints overhead took on a whole new character in the transformed and dynamic space…..it became, to our ears, a rhythmic ‘Bang-on-a-Can” percussion performance! Context as shaper of perception. And as another indicator of how design contributes to place perception and economic development, a recent full page real estate ad featuring Near Eastside properties displayed images of the gateway markers (wayfinding compass pole, and MassAve/East10 marker) as defining identity elements for the Near Eastside.   read more

Fellowship is among the highest honors the ASLA bestows on members and recognizes the contributions of these individuals to their profession and society at large based on their works, leadership and management, knowledge and service. The new class of Fellows will be recognized at the 2015 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO, November 6-9, in Chicago. Congratulations to Meg on being elevated to ASLA Fellowship!

storrow|kinsella developed this plan for managing and developing the 16-mile long Wabash River Scenic Byway through Tippecanoe County Indiana.

Historic Preservation and Cultural Resource consulting is sometimes dismissed as an honorable though not particularly cutting-edge undertaking for a design-based studio such as ours. We think otherwise. Public landscapes and spaces are ephemeral either through inattention, succumbing to competing spatial/economic pressures or mismanagement (and yes, design has a hand in that as well…not everything old is good, and in contemporary terms, much of the new is mediocre if not bad). Public spaces need constant attention and periodic renovation/renewal. And too many design plans either don’t survive the political and funding cycles of public work, or are implemented as cost-constrained phased work that may or may not accrue critical mass impact, in the sense of an intended inter-relatedness of systems. Too visionary on the client or designer side? Maybe, but think Olmsted,  Burnham or Kessler and the lasting values of their visions!But also think of the sometimes wayward/sometimes brilliant  ’60s (now historic) and the current challenge in seeing past the aging trendiness of that period to value the mid-century modern masterpieces it generated and that are being revisited today.  We had the pleasure of guiding the National Register process for modernist work in Columbus, Indiana, and it has been rewarding to see […]