Architecture, Arts & Culture, Books & Media, Landscape Architecture, Liveable Cities, Sensory Perception

Voice of Warning…..pictures and drawings of things are not the things they represent .

Leave a comment

A common fallacy of the design professions is that the objects we design such as buildings, parks , chairs etc. can be adequately represented by our drawings and computer renderings of these designs and that these will suffice to create the objects themselves by means of the usual contracting mechanisms. Alberto Perez-Gomez calls attention to the origins and problems of this idea in his recent book. In revue of the book in Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Vol .28 No.1 the following excerpts  from the book review illustrate the authors ” critical  (view) of the two dominant approaches to architectural design today: on one hand, functionalism, including sustainable architecture; on the other hand, a purely aesthetic approach to architecture, including parametric design. He writes that, for the past two centuries, architecture has suffered “from either the banality of functionalism (an architecture that attests to its own process) or from the limitations of potential solipsism and near nonsense, the syndrome of ‘architecture made for archi-tects’.”

The need, Pérez-Gómez concludes, is “for continuing formal exploration in a fluid and changing world” but also returning attention to “the fundamental existential questions to which architecture traditionally answered—the profound necessity for humans to inhabit a resonant world they may call home, even when separated by global technological civ-ilization from an innate sense of place.” The excerpts, below, present two passages from Attunement.

9780262528641

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, 2016. Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

“A dangerous misunderstanding”

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the assumption has been that architectural space (subsuming all aspects of real place) is easily represented through the geometric systems of descriptive geometry and axonometric projection, which translates seamlessly today into the digital space of the computer screen through standard architectural software. Thus, it seems obvious that architectural meanings would have to be created from scratch, through ingenious formal manipulation of the architect-artist, assumed to be relevant merely through their novel, shocking, or seductive character.

Whenever the physical context is invoked as an argument for design decisions, it is mostly through its visual attributes, imagining the site as a picture or objective site plan that merely provides some formal or functional cues.

This is a dangerous misunderstanding. The deep emotional and narrative aspects that articulate places in a particular natural or cultural milieu are usually marginalized by a desire to produce fashionable innovations. These narrative qualities, however, are crucial considerations as we seek the appropriateness of a given project for its intended purpose in a particular culture: framing a “focalized action” (Heidegger) or event that may bring people together and allow for a sense of orientation and belonging….

We can obviously perceive the qualities of places, particularly when cities have deep histories and their layers are present to our experience. Yet these are still obvious if we compare the “spaces” of newer urban centers, such as Toronto and Sydney (both with similar colonial pasts), which, indeed, ultimately appear as qualitatively different; despite their Anglo-Saxon character, the two cities have a different light and a feel, a different aroma, stemming from such features as the lake or the sea and the “air” of their respective climates.

We can also realize that we think different thoughts in different places, necessarily accompanied and enabled by diverse emotions, albeit usually unintended by the generic architecture of modern development; location affects us deeply, as does more generally the geographical environment (pp. 108-09).

“Architecture as attunement”

Architecture is not what appears in a glossy magazine: buildings rendered as two-dimensional or three-dimensional pictures on the computer screen, or comprehensive sets of precise working drawings.

The most significant architecture is not necessarily photogenic. In fact, often the opposite is true. Its meanings are conveyed through sound and eloquent silence, the tactility and poetic resonance of materials, smell and the sense of humidity, among infinite other factors that appear through the motility of embodied perception and are given across the senses.

Furthermore, because good architecture fundamentally offers a possibility of attunement, atmospheres appropriate to focal actions that allow for dwelling in the world, it is very problematic to reduce its effect (and critical import) to the aesthetic experience of an object, as is often customary. Strictly speaking, architecture first conveys its meanings as a situation or event; it partakes of the ephemeral quality of music for example, as it addresses the living body, and only secondly does it become an object for tourist visits or expert critical judgments (pp. 148-149).

About the Author

Alberto Pérez Gómez directs the History and Theory of Architecture Program at McGill University, where he is Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture. He is the author of Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.

“A real tour de force, this is the work of an intellectual craftsman in full possession of the materials and tools of his trade: a broad sweep of historical material, from the present day to remote antiquity, and then back again, sized and shaped with the precision instruments of his art: philology, philosophical hermeneutics, and poetic reformulation. The workplace is contemporary culture; his task, nothing less than reshaping the way architecture is understood today. Architecture is shown to endow experience with attunements that are equally material, spatial, and linguistic, apprehended by both the body and the mind, through emotions and ideas, providing us with the kind of architectural atmospheres we would not only love to inhabit but dream of designing. For that last purpose there will be no better guide than this book”
—David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania

Landscape & Urban Reaserch, Landscape Architecture, Liveable Cities, Participation & Engagement, Urban Design, Urban Facilities Management

It isn’t enough to build parks—even numerous, sizable ones—and hope that health outcomes improve.

Leave a comment

Interesting research that indicates it is not just the quantity of green space that matters, but the quality of its design along with activities and interest that is maintained over time to generate repeat visits and create the desire in making visits and time in it, a regular part of visitors lives. From Atlantic CITYLAB by KIERAN DELAMONT

These research findings from a park within a low income neighborhood of Toronto illustrate the challenges of park design and management  and how  urban designers and landscape architects should possibly be thinking about park and urban green space design beyond the pretty plans and photoshop images that they use to win design bids and elicit money for urban upgrading budgets.

lead_large
Enter a caption

Children play in a large green space in the redeveloped Regent Park neighborhood. (DanielsCorp)

“It’s an oft-repeated maxim—even among planners and designers—that parks are good for mental health. In Toronto, for example, the 2013 Official City Parks Plan reads, “access to green space reduces stress level, decreases negative mood, reduces feelings of depression, and provides other benefits to mental health and well-being.”

City officials often talk about the relationship as if it’s beyond doubt. But academic research is split on the relationship between parks and mental health. “Empirical evidence is much more limited than one would expect for such a straightforward question,” write Roland Sturm and Deborah Cohen in their 2014 paper, “Proximity to Urban Parks and Mental Health.” Their study suggests that moving to an area with more green space tends to improve one’s mental health, while moving to an area with less has the opposite effect. But one year later in a paper titled, “The Relationship between Natural Park Usage and Happiness Does Not Hold in a Tropical City-State,” authors Le Saw, Felix Lim, and Luis Carrasco found “no significant relationship between well-being and use of green space as well as proximity to green spaces. […] This study reveals that without first considering the critical factors that permit this relationship to occur, it will be premature to conclude that an increase in green space provision will lead to a direct increase in well-being.”

Infrastructural Systems, Landscape & Urban Reaserch, Liveable Cities, Socio- Politico Systems, Urban Design, Urban Facilities Management

Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor

Leave a comment

Another  article on planning’s unforeseen consequences  that is very relevant in South `Africa by  of  sandy-ikeda-picture

fee.org.png

People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example.

My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of real estate for the poor. I’d like to share a few of our findings with you.

Zoning

One kind of regulation that was actually intended to harm the poor, and especially poor minorities, was zoning. The ostensible reason for zoning was to address unhealthy conditions in cities by functionally separating land uses, which is called “exclusionary zoning.” But prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, some municipalities had race-based exclusionary land-use regulations. Early in the 20th century, several California cities masked their racist intent by specifically excluding laundry businesses, predominantly Chinese owned, from certain areas of the cities.

Today, of course, explicitly race-based, exclusionary zoning policies are illegal. But some zoning regulations nevertheless price certain demographics out of particular neighborhoods by forbidding multifamily dwellings, which are more affordable to low- or middle-income individuals. When the government artificially separates land uses and forbids building certain kinds of residences in entire districts, it restricts the supply of housing and increases the cost of the land, and the price of housing reflects those restrictions.

Moreover, when cities implement zoning rules that make it difficult to secure permits to build new housing, land that is already developed becomes more valuable because you no longer need a permit. The demand for such developed land is therefore artificially higher, and that again raises its price.

Continue reading Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor →

Economic Systems, Infrastructural Systems, Landscape & Urban Reaserch, Liveable Cities, Urban Facilities Management

Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government

Leave a comment

From

In Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, Robert H. Nelson effectively frames the discussion of what minimal government might look like in terms of personal choices based on local knowledge. He looks at the issue from the ground up rather than the top down.

Nelson argues that while all levels of American government have been expanding since World War II, people have responded with a spontaneous and massive movement toward local governance. This has taken two main forms.

The first is what he calls the “privatization of municipal zoning,” in which city zoning boards grant changes or exemptions to developers in exchange for cash payments or infrastructure improvements. “Zoning has steadily evolved in practice toward a collective private property right. Many municipalities now make zoning a saleable item by imposing large fees for approving zoning changes,” Nelson writes.

In one sense, of course, this is simply developers openly buying back property rights that government had previously taken from the free market, and “privatization” may be the wrong word for it. For Nelson, however, it is superior to rigid land-use controls that would prevent investors from using property in the most productive way. Following Ronald Coase, Nelson evidently believes it is more important that a tradable property right exists than who owns it initially.

The second spontaneous force toward local governance has been the expansion of private neighborhood associations and the like. According to the author, “By 2004, 18 percent—about 52 million Americans—lived in housing within a homeowner’s association, a condominium, or a cooperative, and very often these private communities were of neighborhood size.”

Nelson views both as positive developments on the whole. They are, he argues, a manifestation of a growing disenchantment with the “scientific management” of the Progressive Era. He thinks the devolution of governance below the municipal level to the neighborhood should be supported through statutory and state constitutional changes.

Although about one-third of all new housing since 1970 has been built within some form of neighborhood association, the majority of older neighborhoods fall outside this trend. Establishing neighborhood associations in these areas is difficult because the requirement for a homeowner to join is typically written into the deed, and this would be extremely costly to do for every home in an older neighborhood.

Nelson proposes a six-step solution that involves (1) a petition by property owners in a neighborhood to form an association, (2) state review of the proposal, (3) negotiations between the city and the neighborhood, (4) a neighborhood vote on the proposal, (5) a required supermajority, perhaps 70 percent, for passage, and (6) a transfer from the municipality of legal responsibility for regulating land use in the neighborhood to the unit owners of the association.

Read More

 

Architecture, Environmental Science, Infrastructural Systems, Landscape & Urban Reaserch, Landscape Architecture, Liveable Cities, Participation & Engagement, Uncategorized, Urban Design

Architects, Freeways, Rivers, Landscapes / Plantscaping & Politics

Leave a comment

A current proposal by architect Michael Maltzan Michael Maltzan Envisions the Future of LA’s Infrastructure  in Archinect  showing copious planting overlaid on the 134 freeway in Los Angeles illustrates what has been a trend with architects c0-operating with engineers , in this case ARUP, to envision what infrastructural interventions in the urban fabric might become in terms of making more use of them and reducing their ecological footprint through green building, carbon reduction  interventions and by covering them in photoshop planting, led me to these thoughts that are here combined  with excerpts from a recent conference paper I gave at the ILASA Conference 2016 in Pretoria: jgq850aroyn9vzt9

View from above of Michael Maltzan’s proposed Arroyo Seco bridge overlay. Image: Michael Maltzan Architecture

 

aloccnlnj8eg8ggk

Section Perspective. Image: Michael Maltzan Architecture

With impressive design diagrams and pictorial renderings the viewer is challenged to engage with a seeming reality that ignores or subsumes most of the actors emergent realities that these behemoths that they are trying to  camouflage, represent: The unsustainable and incoherent consumerism that underpins the way engineering and architectural solutions generally ignore the real environmental pickle that cities are in:

9k2me7d9w9kyzc1pGreen cruising: the view of the proposed overlay through a vehicle. Image: Michael Maltzan Architecture

In a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Bruno Latour posed the following question:
“When we ponder how the global world could be made habitable – a question especially important for architects and designers – we now mean habitable for billions of humans and trillions of other creatures that no longer form a nature or, of course, a society, but rather, to use my term, a possible collective… But why has the world been made uninhabitable in the first place? More precisely, why has it not been conceived as if the question of its habitability was the only question worth asking? I am more and more convinced that the answer lies in this extremely short formula: lack of space” (Latour, B. 2009. Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization, Harvard Design Magazine Spring/Summer, 30 pp. 138-144, ).
Maybe this lack of space is why we need to rethink how we live together in the world. As human actors that have so dramatically altered the world, it is said that we have entered the Anthropocene. Latour continues by answering the question posed above:
“As is now well known, the notion of environment began to occupy public consciousness precisely when it was realized that no human action could count on an outside environment anymore: There is no reserve outside which the unwanted consequences of our collective actions could be allowed to linger and disappear from view. Literally there is no outside, no décharge where we could discharge the refuse of our activity” (Latour 2009 p.3).
It is now widely accepted that cities are the primary source of this problem.  With more than 50% of the world’s population being urbanised, cities must become resilient in the face of the uncertainties of climate, economy and politics. Various attempts have been made to quantify the resource imbalances of cities’ consumption and waste in the form of: ecological footprints , urban metabolism and urban political ecology . These quantifications are needed so that the extent of the problems become visible. Research may lead to solutions to limit ongoing damage to the environment and may also redress this imbalance by making cities more sustainable and resilient for the survival of all their occupants, human and non-human, both now and in the future.

The smart cities and engineered solutions of architects and engineers fall far short of this goal in their version of “greenscaping” with aesthetically beautiful structures in verdant “nature” with scattered people looking on in wonder at their grand creations.

elijj3frik4jv5nrRendering for the new Sixth Street Bridge. Image: Michael Maltzan Architecture

Maltzan describes his proposal

“Well, the proposal for the 134 freeway, the reason I got extremely excited about the 134 is the piece of infrastructure that we would take on, it could carry so many different pieces of the larger puzzle—not only in how you change infrastructure’s role in the city but how you change all of the pieces of the environmental portfolio of benefit. In our proposal, we’re dealing with sounds, lessening the negative acoustic impacts that extend way beyond the freeway. We’re talking about miles of effect that any piece of the freeway has because of how far sound travels. We were looking at a collection of water because It’s a little like a menu: you can pick and choose which pieces you useyou have a significant amount of acreage that the top of the bridge or any piece of the highway creates. We were looking at solar and electricity generation for exactly the same reason: it’s very difficult to find large places to put solar farms in a dense urban environment. And one of the most underutilized pieces of land literally are the air rights over any of the highways, whether they’re elevated or sunken or a bridge. And then the greening of the sides of the bridge to work from an environmental standpoint, and just aesthetically for the visual environment of where that bridge goes through. And then finally the catalytic roof that we’re proposing, that takes the emissions from the cars and converts it, because of the way UV reacts to these titanium dioxide crates, and that acts as a catalytic converter.”

e7ubxanbx510ot5h
Section Detail. Image: Michael Maltzan Architecture

While I am sure that their intentions are laudable and their goal is to stimulate large scale public works to counter the past and present environmental and social crisis, it is unlikely that the results of their visions will improve anyone except a select fews lives into city.

Maltzan continues:

“All of these pieces don’t have to be in play for every mile of the highway all combined. It’s a little like a menu: you can pick and choose which pieces you use or you employ depending on what the different characteristics of the freeway are, and if it’s elevated or sunken down or at grade. I think that if you begin to take this and other ideas that could be added to the laundry list, and started to look at the highway network as a real positive and begin to retrofit pieces of it (especially when it goes through and affects different neighborhoods), I think it could be one of the largest transformative urban projects of any city, for any place on the planet.

CalTrans used to dream at that scale. The highways, when they were being built, coming out of post-World War II, were seen as one of the most progressive civic governmental projects that was being done any place on the planet. There were all these positive things that were meant to come from that. And I think it’s possible for an agency like CalTrans to reinvigorate the benefit of the highways. I think they’re going to be under more and more pressure to do that, especially as you start looking at the realities of autonomous cars and other means of transportation. That’s going to start to minimize or reduce traffic on the freeways, or at least the traffic footprint. I think it’s going to open up more and more space for the highways to perform in a very different way.”

The proposal, although on grand scale and while attacking many problems of the inefficient metabolism of cites, largely ignores the underlying causes of this problem: the unsustainable  consumerism that architects, engineers and city planners are dependent on for their livelihood – yes folks we have created the problem, through our designs, but designs alone, however smart they are, will not be enough to solve these problems

Overcoming these limitations requires a rethinking of the current development design process both by the relevant authorities, bureaucracies and by the design professions, the two entities who appear to be in cahoots in this process and who benefit the most by the exclusion of significant others from participating in the development agenda. They, the authorities and design professionals, have in, Latour’s terminology, “black-boxed” this process i.e. hidden its working from view  and any attempts by politicians or others to disentangle it or make its workings transparent seem doomed to failure . Some local examples of how this process results in urban “white elephants” in our local South African context are the Cape Town Stadium and Green Point Urban Park, built for the Soccer World Cup 2010, the Cape Town BRT system and the Gautrain, all of which are in my opinion examples of vested interests gaining control of huge public budgets to facilitate their own economic or political agendas. While admitting that the large-scale improvements in public spaces related to the stadiums generated an awareness of the importance of public space improvement and management, Edgar Pieterse  head of the African Centre for Cities criticises the results of these public space enhancements that were carried out in this process, as not having achieved the potential they might have. He writes;

“It [the design of the public spaces] remains predominately an imaginary infused with middle class café culture expectations, replete with Lavazza cappuccinos and generous pedestrian orientated pavements. To be sure these are elements that greatly enhance the public realm but at the same time reinforce the dramatic bifurcation of public life for the rich and poor.” (Pieterse 2012 ).

cape-town-stadium-original-15283

Cape Town Stadium  Source Wikipedia

I believe that a political engagement is required to ignite a renewed interest in re-imaging the roles of the built environments’ participants, ecological environmentalists, social activists and those seeking a future for themselves and their offspring. It seems we should change from thinking about ourselves alone and think rather, for everyone as a whole, thereby supporting this process of change to more equitable and liveable settlements and cities. This applies especially to the “have-nots” who, if not catered for, will topple the entire structure with their neediness, frightening the “haves” with their greediness.
Pieterse suggests that in order to realise more dynamic and original public spaces, we need a more inclusive approach, one that encompasses and incorporates more of who we really are as a South African public:

“….such sensibility calls for a [landscape?] architectural agenda, design approach, urban aesthetic and built fabric that opens up opportunities for frank engagements across lines of difference and privilege in order to induce the necessary discomfort and untidiness that can lead to the thorny conversations about who we are, and how we represent ourselves in space and where we may be going as cities and distinctive cultures” (Pieterse 2012 p.87).

The situation that ~Pieterse criticizes in the context of the South Africa is equally relevant to LA as was highlighted at the ILASA conference by landscape architect Astrid Sykes from Mia Lehrer Associates who are based in LA right next toto the river, in presenting their work of the last 20 years on the LA River  and a 2007 study done by a large multidisciplinary team for the city of Los Angeles on the future of the river that MLA were part of. While very positive in achieving consultation and buy-in from residents and the Mayor, it seems that this has been subverted by the City now 8 years later in appointing Frank Gehry’s  office to do a project on the future of the river that teemingly ignores the previous work and as yet shows no signs of the public participation and co-design the earlier project was tasked with. It remains to be seen if this is an extension earlier work or more “green sky” City Brand building that Gehry is famous for with his Bilboa Effect.

la-river

ARMY CORPS APPROVES $1.3-BILLION LOS ANGELES RIVER RESTORATION PROPOSAL

In the same newsletter of Archinect that the Michael Maltzan project featured above comes from is a post Archinect presents Next Up: The L.A. River, at the A+D Museum on Saturday, October 29!  Quoting from the newsletter

“For the latest installment of Archinect’s live podcasting series, Next Up, we’re focusing on the L.A. River, and the wide swath of urbanist concerns within its ongoing master planning efforts.

y4zi21zdfj0jr6a8

It could be the project that makes, or breaks, Los Angeles. With a complex historical legacy and an often-misunderstood ecology, the L.A. River’s 51-mile stretch is at once a huge urban opportunity, and to many, an even bigger eyesore. Thirty years ago, nonprofit Friends of the Los Angeles River was founded to protect and advocate for the river, and shortly after, the City of L.A. began looking at ways to take better advantage of the immense resource. Since then, many more communities and stakeholders have joined the conversation, raising concerns of ecology, sustainability, gentrification, public space, affordable housing, social equity—a wealth of complexities that testifies to what a lightning rod of urbanist discourse the River has become.

While conversations about the L.A. River’s future have been percolating for decades, not until only a few years ago did the plans become a divisive topic for the general public—in no small part due to the appointment of Frank Gehry’s office as a leader in the city’s master planning initiative. Reporting on the public’s first peek at the firm’s plans, Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “as the river takes on new shades of economic and political meaning—becoming a magnet for attention and investment after decades of near invisibility—the race to reimagine it is growing more crowded.”

This engagement with the physical infrastructure, social dynamics and politics of the city  might seem far from Landscape Architectures usual verdant concerns. To paraphrase the words of Brenner, Latour, Pieterse and Swyngedouw, “everything is political now” and if we wish our discipline to survive in this sea of change, we must become political and design and proselytize our own future place in this new cyborg or assemblage. Research is needed on how to create a transdisciplinary environment that can facilitate higher levels of engagement, participation and co-learning by politicians, publics, professionals and authorities alike, and is something that seems to be lacking in much of the current design process.

From the examples quoted above, it seems that large scale infrastructure is the very place to focus this engagement and to get out of the office, away from the computer and to get involved in a river, freeway proposal or  public space project near you now!

With my apologies to Michael Maltzan Architecture, Frank Gehry and ARUP .

Donovan Gillman

19 October 2016

Business Systems, Environmental Science, Uncategorized

This Onsite Pop-up Plant Turns Excavation Waste into Building Material

Leave a comment
A promising new applications technology and innovative thinking reblogged from ARCHDAILY  
This Onsite Pop-up Plant Turns Excavation Waste into Building Material, Courtesy of Watershed Materials
Courtesy of Watershed Materials
 

Excavation is usually a bane for real estate developers. To make way for new buildings, truckloads of excavated waste are removed from site in a noisy, time-consuming and gas-guzzling process. Exploring a more sustainable solution, the California-based company Watershed Materials have developed an onsite pop-up plant which repurposes excavated material right at the job site to create concrete masonry units (CMUs) used in the development. By eliminating truck traffic, reusing waste and reducing imported materials, the result is a win for the environment.

The machine is shown here at Watershed Materials’ pilot block factory and research lab in Napa, California. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

The machine is shown here at Watershed Materials’ pilot block factory and research lab in Napa, California. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

The pop-up plant itself works by applying ultra-high compression to loose excavation spoils, transforming it into a sustainable CMU. The pressure turns the mineral grains into a sort of sedimentary rock, mimicking the natural geological process of lithification. This unique manufacturing technology is the brainchild of Watershed Materials, who previously developed the compression technique in order to reduce the amount of cement used in concrete blocks by 50%.

Sample structural masonry block produced by Watershed Materials using excavated soil samples from the Kirkham site. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

Sample structural masonry block produced by Watershed Materials using excavated soil samples from the Kirkham site. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

As the founder of the sustainable building materials startup David Easton points out: “There’s absolutely nothing new about building masonry structures from local materials. Some of the oldest and best-known architecture in the world has been constructed from stone and clay sourced directly on site.” But according to Easton, “what is new and absolutely groundbreaking is that with upgraded technology and improved material science, a construction waste product the developer had to pay to dispose of can now become an asset and provides environmental benefits as well.”

The Kirkham Project Community Plaza, a one-quarter acre accessible open space in the center of the development, provides excellent opportunities for installation of Watershed Materials blocks as pavers and landscaping features. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

The Kirkham Project Community Plaza, a one-quarter acre accessible open space in the center of the development, provides excellent opportunities for installation of Watershed Materials blocks as pavers and landscaping features. Image Courtesy of Watershed Materials

The pop-up plant was born when Naomi Porat, development manager of Alpha Group and part of the team working on the Kirkham Project, approached the startup to bring their technology straight to the construction site. The Kirkham Project is an urban infill redevelopment in San Francisco spanning across 445 new housing units, community plazas and gardens. While addressing the city’s need for additional housing, neighbors expressed concern over construction traffic, making it the perfect place to explore this onsite approach.

Read More

Uncategorized

#WLAM2016: This Is Landscape Architecture Campaign Reaches 4 Million

Leave a comment

Making a difference and letting people know what landscape architecture is

THE DIRT

Landscape sketch / Studio1619 Landscape sketch / Studio1619

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) just celebrated World Landscape Architecture Month (WLAM). In an effort to help the public better understand what landscape architecture is this past month, ASLA launched a social media campaign: #WLAM2016. The goal of campaign was to connect the term “landscape architecture” with the actual work of landscape architects in communities. We asked our members, colleagues, and friends to take pictures with cards that read “This Is Landscape Architecture” in front of their favorite designed spaces and post them on social media with #WLAM2016.

In total, 5,000 posts using #WLAM2016 reached nearly 4.25 million people around the world. People posted images that showed all phases of design and illustrated the breadth of the profession.

Pictures included preliminary sketches and project plans (see image above and below).

Project Plan - Louis Johnson Project plan / Louis Johnson

While some featured iconic designed spaces.

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C. Martin…

View original post 95 more words

Uncategorized

HOW THE GARDEN MOVES

Leave a comment

The role of landscape architects ad planetary environmental engineers proposed by many landscape architects and urbanists is examined in the writing of these authors – is their view realistic in the face o of global capitialism ?

Landscape Architecture Magazine

BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

BEDIT_LAMjun16_Books152

From the June 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Several conditions of the contemporary world present serious challenges to traditional or conventional ways of thinking and making in landscape architecture. Some of these, such as the continuing analog versus digital debates, are tiresome, rarely well-argued (by at least one side if not both), and counterproductive to an advance in the cultural efficacy of the discipline. Others are more complex and unwieldy, but also likely have much greater capacity to expand the scale and scope of landscape architecture in the future. In this category I would place the interrelated questions of “planetary urbanization,” “Nature,” and the effects of the Anthropocene among the most perplexing and fecund for the future of the discipline. As Jedediah Purdy writes in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, “As climate change shifts ecological boundaries, problems like habitat preservation come to resemble…

View original post 1,927 more words

Uncategorized

Landscape Architecture and Political Action

Leave a comment

Two recent articles I posted comments on, one from Land8 and the other from The Dirt , on the need for landscape architects to engage with the political process in order to further the goals of a small profession that sees itself as stewards of the environment, makers of urban places and guardians of cultural heritage, reflect the hubris that the many built environment professionals, not just landscape architects, are prone to indulge in. The unstated belief behind these ideas is that we as educated and trained professionals know what’s best for the design of the public places that all of us inhabit together, including the uneducated poor and needy, the educated and avaricious rich and greedy as well as all the rest of us enmeshed in the consumerist world we find ourselves part of.

land8cover

This bias on the part of landscape architects is again clear in many of the statements by the keynote speakers at the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)‘s New Landscape Declaration: Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future in Philadelphia on June 10-11, 2016, which was attended by over 700 landscape architects, here are some extracts form a post on The Dirt. Many of these speakers held out lofty environmental goals and ideals: Nina-Marie Lister, Hon. ASLA, professor at Ryerson University argued that “A central part of achieving that just landscape planning and design approach is to better respect the other 2.5 million known species on the planet, “We must think of the quality of being for them, too.” To protect their homes, landscape architects must lead the charge in “re-establishing the role of the wild.” There are also some social goals: Kate Orff, ASLA, founder of SCAPE, explained how her community-centric approach “creates a scaffolding for meaningful participation that is an active generator of social life.” For her, it’s all about “linking the social to the ecological and scaling that up for communities.” On the apparent need for many more landscape architects Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, Mexico’s leading landscape architect, said that the existing numbers may not be enough and more numbers are needed. For example, while there are more than 150,000 architects in Mexico, there are only 1,000 landscape architects.

He said: “There are not enough landscape architects in the developing world. And we need a global perspective. The U.S. and Euro-centric perspective must change. More landscape architects from the developing world studying in the U.S. and Europe need to return to their countries and help.” Political engagement and advocacy: Kongjian Yu, FASLA, founder of Turenscape, may be the epitome of the political landscape architect. His work spans planning and design across mainland China, but he spends a good amount of his time and energy on persuading thousands of local mayors and senior governmental leaders alike on the value of “planning for ecological security.” He called for landscape architects to “think big — at the local, regional, and national scales” — and to influence decision-makers. and of course the role of design: Marc Treib, professor of architecture emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, added that “the sustainable is not antithetical to the beautiful. We can elevate the pragmatic to the level of poetry.”

My enthusiasm for these ideals and goals was seriously tempered by a response to the post by RANTING LANDSCAPE PHILOSOPHER

“I am calling Bull-shit (please excuse my language), what we need is planners and policy makers to have a design education.Do we need to train more Landscape architects or students in public policy? It seems that Landscape needs policy to stay relevant (though policy would benefit from an influx of design thinking) Do we really need more landscape architects? Most won’t go into the political system? Is it really fair to draw students in with promises of “changing the world” when the reality of these EXPENSIVE programs turns out to be a debt ridden individual that works horrible hours for scraps (usually under an emotionally abusive boss).Don’t you think it’s a bad sign that it is always is the same 10 names on repeat? James, Laurie, Martha, Kongjian….etc If we want new ideas then we need to start hearing from other voices and get out of this annoyingly incestuous family.”

This is not to say that these articles are wrong, I do believe that as a design profession we need to engage politically, without political engagement very little is possible, especially here in Africa where there are very few landscape architects and we are continually sidelined by economic and social pressures that undermine our ability to perform real service to those who need it most. As we see in the landscape and architectural design press, the big projects are mostly for the rich or for the reinstatement of large environmental disasters funded by governments who are ill-equipped to manage the implementation of these grand schemes or unable to stop similar resource extraction disasters in the future. Many of the projects of this kind, outside of a few rich countries, become hamstrung by the time-scales of their implementation, bureaucracy, corruption and are seldom able to become a reality.

To my way of thinking landscape architecture and the other design professions need to be able to show its worth by real projects that make a difference to people and the environment and by their success in generating community or local scale interventions that have a broader impact, as John Thakera is quoted in a recent interview in Domus “Thackara is one of those rare people who can open up huge intellectual vistas, but who can also give a very practical idea of the tools to use to realise them. To do that, he points to projects from around the world that interweave design, urban and rural planning, energy efficiency, and new ways of sharing resources, and in which communication technologies play a key role, but always in the service of the real needs of the people who live in a specific place with well-defined – and resolvable – problems. It is through these myriad small solutions, conceptualised and then put into practice, that the world will change. Thackara mentions here the theory of complexity: tiny changes can accumulate over time until one final alteration, apparently irrelevant in itself, provokes a radical transformation across the whole system”

 For the landscape profession to make the difference it believes is needed, will require more than the limited advocacy landscape architects on their own can achieve, I believe it is way past bedtime now and we will need to put aside academic and professional egos, get out of the silos that we have built so arduously and actively solicit and engage with the professions that have the greatest numbers, budgets and political clout i.e. Engineering, Quantity Surveying and Architecture. Many practitioners and firms in these professions have rapidly moved to embrace new technologies and have made sustainability, albeit in the limited versions of LEED and Greenstar, central to their practices, engineering has literally taken over the entire sustainable water systems and energy fields and most acknowledge the need for landscape architects to make their projects “fit or be more natural.”

Most  landscape architects have experienced varying difficulty with multidisciplinary teams that are dominated by project mangers, architects, urban designers or engineers that dominate the show and expect landscape architecture to decorate the spaces left over after design, frustrations with the public participation process and its relative ineffectiveness, true co-design is still long way from becoming a reality, but it is my belief that it is only by engaging side by side with these professions and showing them what we have to offer as discipline and as individuals that we will be able to make the difference we desire and combined with them as a reasonably convergent group, be able to have our say in the planning, and political policy of our towns, cities and countries and from that on the places and people who we profess to serve.

A recent visit to the Venice Architecture Biennial “REPORTING FROM THE FRONT” highlights a proposed realignment of architecture with people’s needs, environmental concerns and grass-roots research and action.

Quoting its organizer Paulo Barrata “We are not interested in architecture as the manifestation of a formal style, but rather as an instrument of self-government, of humanist civilisation, and how it demonstrates the ability of humans to become masters of their own destinies. Architecture in action as an instrument of social and political life, challenges us to assess the public consequences of private actions at a more fundamental level. We need to engage with the public and with all possible stakeholders in the decisions and actions whereby our living spaces are created, both as individuals and as communities. As Architecture is the most political of all the arts, the Architecture Biennale must recognize this.”

And Alejandro Aravena, the curator of this years Biennale , has this to say “REPORTING FROM THE FRONT will be about listening to those that were able to gain some perspective and consequently are in the position to share some knowledge and experiences with those of us standing on the ground. We believe that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life. Given life ranges from very basic physical needs to the most intangible dimensions of the human condition, consequently, improving the quality of the built environment is an endeavor that has to tackle many fronts: from guaranteeing very concrete, down-to-earth living standards to interpreting and fulfilling human desires, from respecting the single individual to taking care of the common good, from efficiently hosting daily activities to expanding the frontiers of civilization. Our curatorial proposal is twofold: on the one hand we would like to widen the range of issues to which architecture is expected to respond, adding explicitly to the cultural and artistic dimensions that already belong to our scope, those that are on the social, political, economical and environmental end of the spectrum. On the other hand, we would like to highlight the fact that architecture is called to respond to more than one dimension at the time, integrating a variety of fields instead of choosing one or another.

 

pyklweuamw58629pyklweuamw58629

REPORTING FROM THE FRONT will be about sharing with a broader audience, the work of people that are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortage, migration, informality, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and participation of communities. And simultaneously will be about presenting examples where different dimensions are synthesized, integrating the pragmatic with the existential, pertinence and boldness, creativity and common sense.

 Such expansion and synthesis are not easy to achieve; they are battles that need to be fought. The always menacing scarcity of means, the ruthless constraints, the lack of time and urgencies of all kinds are a constant threat that explain why we so often fall short in delivering quality. The forces that shape the built environment are not necessarily amicable either: the greed and impatience of capital or the single mindedness and conservatism of the bureaucracy tend to produce banal, mediocre and dull built environments. These are the frontlines from which we would like different practitioners to report from, sharing success stories and exemplary cases where architecture did, is and will make a difference “

I suggest that it is worthwhile endeavour that is being sought and we as landscape architects would be more able to achieve the ends of stewardship and advocacy for all the causes we believe in, if we are able to combine our skills and insights in the way Aravena is suggesting.

Exploring how we create an enhanced user experience in leisure, retail, urban and landscape environments and collaborate together to build our common future

%d bloggers like this: