Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 178 May 2023 i Landscape Architecture Australia

Katrina Simon Katrina Simon is associate dean of landscape architecture at RMIT University. Her research focuses on landscape change, explored through cities, maps and cemeteries. Bede Brennan Bede Brennan is a senior landscape architect at Pollen Studio. He is interested in urban ecologies and designing for the non-human world. Katherine Sundermann Katherine Sundermann is a director at MGS Architects and vice president of Urban Design Forum. She is passionate about supporting public-interest urbanism. Bonnie Gordon Bonnie Gordon is a landscape architect, researcher and co-founder of TULA. Her work interrogates power and injustice in the built environment. Lucy Salt Lucy Salt is a writer, editor and landscape architect. She lives in Melbourne with her family. Scott Hawken Scott Hawken is director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Adelaide…

The climate crisis has helped build a sense of urgency toward climateresilient development, particularly around the challenges and consequences of increased global urbanization. Given that the building sector accounts for approximately 40 percent of annual global energy consumption,1 built environment professionals have been confronted with their role in driving resource extraction and perpetuating unsustainable construction practices. Human endeavours are also creating contaminated soils, which, according to American landscape architect Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, are “a byproduct of the human pursuit of greater material wealth and a more convenient and comfortable life.”2 Given that landscape architects are professionally equipped to understand site complexities and naturally tend to systems-based thinking, we are in a prime position to drive the innovation, use and development of new materials and design practices for genuinely…

The signs of a crisis abound. Underwritten by global human population growth and our appetite for land and resources, potentially cataclysmic climate changes are combining to create a human-induced sixth mass extinction1 for global biodiversity, with as many as one million species now threatened with extinction.2 Creating protected areas has been recognized as a key strategy for addressing species decline. These areas offer “land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means”3 and form the backbone of most countries’ conservation systems.4 Protected areas have steadily grown in both number and acreage since their inception.5,6 Globally, these cover approximately 16 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface;7 in Australia, 13,389 recognized protected areas…

National Prize Jury Jury comment The projects in this year’s Landscape Student Prize include a framework for development in fire-prone landscapes that balances ecological sensitivity with bushfire safety; a model for a campus precinct that aims to improve food security and climate resilience; and a project that explores the reconstruction of opal mining landscapes through a critical examination of resource extraction, social memory and colonialism. From within this pool, the jury is pleased to announce joint winners of the Landscape Student Prize this year: Birth from the scar by Haoyang Wang of University of Melbourne and Grassland Tales: braiding care, culture and maintenance by Chloe Walsh of University of Technology Sydney. Birth from the scar engages important concepts of rehabilitation and regeneration of mining sites as Australia transitions towards a…

Back in 1973, in an article entitled “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” the Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling seminally contrasted urban infrastructure’s engineered fail-safe intentions with ecology’s safe-tofail “unpredictability.” Fifty years later, with the planet increasingly in the throes of climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, his prescience is haunting the disciplinarity of landscape architects. If we don’t know what the future holds, the discipline surely has a problem speculating on designed infrastructural “solutions” with certainty. Which creates another dilemma, this one for the academy: how could a new generation of landscape architects be trained by, for and with unpredictability? At about the same time as Holling published his hypothesis, when landscape architecture was a nascent profession in Australia, a calling for formal recognition of the discipline emerged. Practitioners and…

Many of the articles in our May issue of Landscape Architecture Australia consider how technology is being integrated into design practice, both in the built forms and outcomes, and as part of the design process. The Drying Green is a 6,400-square-metre park that forms part of a series of new civic spaces in the Green Square town centre in Sydney’s south. Scott Hawken writes that the project is “a work of cyborg landscape architecture” that blurs the distinction between human and non-human nature. “This is an engine crafted to function like a park, with its metallic fountains and digital aesthetic,” he observes [review on page 10]. Katrina Simon’s visit to Lake Tyrrell in Victoria’s north-west, on the other hand, leads to a reflection on the complex relationship between social media…

Bendigo TAFE Campus Revitalization, Bendigo, Victoria Built on the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Taungurung peoples of the Kulin nation SBLA Studio Landscape Architecture and Urban Design in collaboration with Architectus (principal consultant) and Six Degrees Architects Visit many TAFEs in regional Australia and you will see the impact of sporadic investment in collections of buildings that sometimes amount to campuses. Often built with good bones in the early or mid-twentieth century, these buildings faced decades of underinvestment and misplaced “quick-fix” additions that created maze-like experiences and made the actual activity taking place inside hard to find. This is exactly at odds with the important role that TAFE can play in our communities, supporting people from a range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to access learning and…

Anna Thurmayr and Dietmar Straub are German landscape architects living and working in Manitoba, Canada. Both work at the University of Manitoba, where Thurmayr is head of landscape architecture. Their research, teaching and practice explores strategies for designing with limited resources, experiments with spontaneity and the uncontrolled as design methods, and investigates the potentials of repair and re-use. Alex Breedon – How does your work differ from other landscape architecture practices in relation to time? Anna Thurmayer – We find inspiration in a time-based approach, not through contemporary landscape architecture, but in gardening, where time is key and where the practice is oriented around seeding, waiting, harvesting, hibernating and then starting over again. Additionally, with the privilege of working at a university, we feel like we’re not forced to compete…

Plants: Past, Present and Future is the latest offering in the remarkable First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neale. As the title suggests, the book positions plants in relation to deep time, then further explores them in the context of contemporary Australian spatial, social and cultural relationships. The writers present ways of thinking about plants that will be of great value to those of us in the landscape architecture profession. Moving beyond the framing of plants as constituent elements of either gardens or nature, the book powerfully demonstrates what landscape architects can (and should) learn from First Nations people – and how this knowledge can help us effectively engage in and provide leadership on landscape issues at a national scale. The book’s authors – Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher and Lesley Head…

It’s an honour and a privilege to contribute this issue’s Viewpoint as the newly elected director and company secretary at AILA. In the past couple of years, I have been incredibly curious about the softer aspects of our practices as landscape architects. We are seeing the world stage develop an acute awareness of and focus on social values, particularly in the spaces of equity, diversity and inclusivity. We have seen reams of studies and metrics that report where Australia sits in these spaces, and surprisingly, we are not doing so well compared with other developed countries.1 We can do more. As landscape architects, practitioners of the built environment, we must not overlook the influence we have on improving social issues in Australia, both inside the studio and in practice. It…