Bradford McKee
editor, reporter, writer
Covering design, environments, and the public interest.
Recent Projects
The Year of Doing Less with Less
Landscape Architecture Magazine, May 2026
The Trump Administration’s dramatic cuts to federal agency budgets and staff hit hard at the National Park Service. About 30 percent of the NPS workforce was gone by the end of Trump’s first year, straining visitor services and handicapping the routine management of the 433 sites it holds in trust. Major projects have been disrupted or halted, seasoned specialists have left the agency, and the administration has removed factual intertpretive material from public view in the parks to suit its preferred narratives about the nation’s history.
Read the full story here.
The Land is Full: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
Monacelli/Phaidon, 240 pages, $64.95
Twelve parks and public spaces from the past decade by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects show the practice of making of landscapes, new or renewed, with uncommon patience. “We work to tell the truth about what lies within the land, because sustaining the land is sustaining the truth,” writes Thomas Woltz in his opening essay. “It’s essential to reckoning with legacies of indigeneity, subjugation, hate, injustice, violence.” Design, in this conception, isn’t compositional but constitutional; the generating of physical form is not a beginning but follows long periods of research and discovery into ways design will support conservation, culture, a person’s experience of a site, and the knowledge a site offers.
With essays by Thomas Woltz, Nina-Marie Lister, Brent Leggs, and Robert Pogue Harrison, and the foreword by Andrea Wulf. Chapter essays by me except one, Machicomoco State Park, by Tim Popa, who was instrumental to its production along with Kimberly Huggins at NBW and the editor Elizabeth White at Monacelli.
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You can buy the book here.
The Woods Are Warming
Landscape Architecture Magazine, October 2024
At the Washington National Cathedral, the five acres of the historic Olmsted Woods are showing signs of ecological decline owing to chronic climate stress. The landscape architects of Andropogon Associates are working to implement a rescue strategy for the long term.
In October 2025, this story was awarded the Bradford Williams Medal, presented by the American Society of Landscape Architects for exceptional coverage of landscape architecture.
Read the full story here.