Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 147 August i Landscape Architecture Australia

CHRISTIE STEWART WINS HASSELL TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP Christie Stewart has won the 2015 Hassell Travelling Scholarship – Robin Edmond Award. The annual award recognizes outstanding graduating landscape architects providing them the opportunity to expand their studies through travel. Stewart’s project Ameliorating Agriculture: Cultivating Biodiversity was conducted during her honours year at the University of Western Australia. It explores the integration of environmental and ecological system design with emerging precision agriculture technology to address the sustainability challenges facing broadacre farmers in Western Australia’s wheatbelt. “We commend Christie for applying her studies to a challenge of great importance, one that is vital to an industry providing for the wider population, and to the custodians of such significant parcels of the Australian landscape,” said Hassell principal Angus Bruce. HASSELLSTUDIO.COM WAL SMITH HONOURED Wal Smith,…

Unused and vacant lands occur in all cities as part of ongoing cycles of urbanization. Often shunned or ignored, these feral spaces present opportunities to foster landscape regeneration through self-initiated and proactive design techniques. The Belmont Goats project is a telling example. It illustrates how engaged and embodied forms of practice within our own habitual environment can generate desirable activity and build local and networked communities. Specifically, it speaks to the ability of landscape architects to skilfully “read” the urban landscape, and from those readings engage with the medium directly. This mode of practice offers possibilities beyond our profession’s normative modes of chasing after pre-packaged client-based contracts and top-down capital-intensive projects. Rather, this work speaks to the underutilized potential of in-the-field approaches and to the proactive design of unsolicited works.…

A fundamental part of capital “D” design culture is the design competition. More often than not these are positioned to create an open debate focused on a specific public building or place. Many designers use the competition process as an opportunity to sharpen their approach to design and produce a beautiful and compelling response to the given brief. The assembly of a high-quality jury is an event in itself. The exchange of ideas and contact between peers to discuss the latest offerings of their profession is a critical part of the culture of design. Competitions can be an effective method of openly negotiating the future of a prominent public site, uncovering new talent and bringing together influencers of city form to articulate the philosophy behind the making of better places…

Nowhere is it more important for landscape and architecture to raise the bar than in the public domain. As populations continue to grow, and cities both expand and become more dense, housing and landscapes will need to work harder to meet the needs of the people. There will still be a need for houses to provide a dwelling space but landscapes will become more and more important for day-to-day activities. The reliance on and diverse uses of the public domain can be seen especially in our denser cities, where people tend to use the public space as an extension of home – that is, an extension of private activities into the public sphere. The adage “she’ll be right” (a “near enough is close enough” attitude) is linked to the Australian…

Communities and cultures “grow” from places and in places. Improving the environment in which we live requires an earnest dialogue with both people and their landscape, and an acknowledgement of the relationship between the health of a community and the quality of its context. Community wellbeing or social capital distils down to how members of a community engage with each other and their environment, and whether they have a say in changing their existing condition into a preferred one. The question is, who then is taking responsibility for “growing” society? We deploy the term “grow” in the qualitative sense (such as “personal growth”), building “social capacity,” implying improvement, nurturing, coordinating community efforts and connecting the threads that develop a holistic society. To make the place we live in into a…

Hīkoi is a Māori word for walking and talking. But its meaning is deeper than that: it harbours something about movement, something about community and something about a world view that links land to life to ancestry; we might call it holistic, maybe situationist. Languages often have words that tell secrets about the culture and give suggestions of its landscape. Hīkoi is one of these words. The landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand has this sort of effect. It is not just present, it is ever-present: moving, haunting, alive. Janet Frame, a local author, contrives characters that are forever running away from, and back to, the landscape’s “undermass” – the place beneath the surface of an apparent reality (Living in the Maniototo, 1979). Vincent Ward, a local filmmaker, portrays the unsettling…

Of all the built environment professions, landscape architecture is most concerned with “site” – with the nuances and constant variability of external spaces of indefinite limit. This article is not primarily about the challenges that a particular site proposes for a particular project, or about the lessons that this might provide for similar sites. It is rather about the challenges that the very notion of site poses for all projects and for any attempt to reconceive a site as something other than what it is. If landscape architecture wishes to identify, let alone continue to push the boundaries of practice, it must not cede its strongest and hardest won skills – skills in working as directly, as painfully and as joyously as possible with actual sites in all their intractability,…

We’ve been thinking a lot about “dangerous” landscape architecture in regional areas recently. Does a smart new entry sign on the highway promise more than the town can deliver? Can the traders in the main street actually withstand the disruption to their businesses that is inevitably caused by redoing the footpath outside their shops? In other words, is the beautifully illustrated new streetscape plan that was commissioned to “revitalize” the town centre likely to be the end of the very businesses that the plan was designed to support? While the landscape architecture profession is focused on creating great cities, there’s an insidious, and largely silent, transformation underway in our country towns. The dominant political and economic narrative has gradually, but determinedly, shifted to an acceptance that regional cities provide the…