Landscape: The Latest Architecture and News

During times of isolation, many people have been talking about the importance of greenery in indoor spaces as a way to nourish our vital relationship with nature. These touches of green can contribute to the well-being and emotional comfort of users, whether in homes or commercial spaces.

Besides this psychological connection, a well-designed indoor garden can also help to purify the air and provide thermal comfort to the environment. 

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Successful landscaping is more than just an innate desire to always be in touch with nature. Designing the landscape of public spaces, gardens, or even indoors is an ever-growing concern due to how the arrangement of elements in space can impact not only spatial but also psychological perceptions, contributing to improved comfort and quality for visitors.

The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions. A wide array of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina are joined by James Lord, Landscape Architect & Founder of Surfacedesign, to discuss the homogeneity of our streets and public spaces, his transition from architecture to landscape architecture, stories about Pierre Koenig and saving endangered frogs, the most common struggle Landscape Architects face in projects, storytelling in design, and much more. Enjoy!

Metropolis catches up with the High Line Network, a consortium of North American reuse projects that has been sharing notes and best practices through the pandemic.

Since the pandemic began, the High Line Network—a group of North American infrastructure reuse projects founded in 2017—has been conducting regular teleconference calls among its members, comparing notes on operations and sharing best practices and advice with fellow members. With many open or planning to reopen soon, and as the pandemic continues, many observers expect these projects will become even more popular among the public, since they provide outdoor space where visitors can walk, bicycle, and safely enjoy themselves—usually at an appropriate distance from one another. Especially now, the network believes its constituent projects can deliver tremendous and much-needed social, health, environmental, and economic benefits.

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The City of Montreal had launched a national, multidisciplinary landscape architecture contest, in order to generate an innovative scheme to reinstate natural habitats in the city. A team of four firms, civiliti, LAND Italia, Table Architecture, and Biodiversité Conseil, have won the competition, by creating a corridor that will enable the transition from a mostly asphalted, fragmented territory to a diversified urban landscape, connected to all living beings.

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Moving away from its early exclusive focus on natural disasters, resilient architecture and design tackles the much tougher challenge of helping ecosystems regenerate.

Thirty years ago, as a high school student at the Cranbrook boarding school in suburban Detroit, I wrote a research-based investigative report on the environmental crisis for the student newspaper. I had been encouraged to do so by a faculty adviser, David Watson, who lived a double life as a radical environmentalist writing under the pseudonym George Bradford for the anarchist tabloid Fifth Estate. His diatribe How Deep Is Deep Ecology? questioned a recurring bit of cant from the radical environmental movement: Leaders of groups like Earth First! frequently disparaged the value of human life in favor of protecting nature.

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The landscape around the built environment can make all the difference in a project. Natural elements that are integrated into architecture or designed to compose it make a huge difference in the way we experience space. Therefore, designing landscape projects is no simple task. To bring some references for compositions with nature and other elements that help to configure a place, we have gathered fifteen contemporary Brazilian projects that explore simple solutions and the ones that expose the exuberance of the country's tropical flora.

Layered Landscapes Lofoten — Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change adresses today’s most urgent issues about living together in landscapes and territories under severe pressure and transformation. The landscape holds essential information about our common history, ecology and social behavior — both rational and cognitive experience, and even hidden enigmas. The authors suggest how an open and unbiased approach to the landscape enables us to understand and operationalize knowledge and theory into valid proposals and projects for the future — not primarily through the traditional and habitual idea of the architectural object, but rather in contact with a global, collective and spatial territorial reality.

Videos

The various practices of mankind over the past decades have taken a huge toll on the environment. People of all nationalities, interests, and career backgrounds have been trying to find means to heal the wounded landscapes and shed light on the environmental crisis. 

Directed by BAFTA-nominated film director Richard John Seymour and produced by Norwegian design firm 3RW arkitekter, Landscape Healing is a cinematic documentary that follows the journey of a diverse group of people who have been setting a paradigm for humanity's greatest challenge: the rewilding of our planet back to a sustainable level.

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The workshop focuses on the living of a direct experience of the participants, showing the territory where the work of RCR Arquitectes is rooted, with the aim of understanding their relationship with the site and the landscape, to share and pass on an attitude to life, architecture, and creativity, putting into practice their working methods.

In this book, Belgian architecture office a2o presents an investigative and connecting approach to architecture through an evocative reading of their latest project, crematorium Statie Stuifduin in Lommel, Belgium. This thoughtful yet radical design blends architecture and landscape in a succession of spaces that reveals a deep understanding of both the fundamental aspects of and changing attitudes towards death, burial and the journey of life. Rather than through explicit religious symbols, the sacral is represented by the universal power of nature and by Romantic notions of finding meaning in rediscovered nature. In doing so, Statie Stuifduin goes beyond the specifics of the building to explore new visions of what contemporary funeral architecture can be.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present the proposal for the UAE Pavilion. Below, the participants describe their contribution in their own words.

The National Pavilion UAE will present “Lifescapes Beyond Bigness,” an exhibition exploring human-scale architectural landscapes, at the 2018 Venice Biennale. The exhibition aims to highlight the role of architecture and urban design in forming the choreography of people’s daily routines. It particularly investigates the role of ‘quotidian’ (every day) landscapes in accommodating, enhancing, and facilitating social activities across different places in the UAE.

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Perkins+Will is creating a whole new world 62 miles northwest of Shanghai for the Suzhou Science & Technology Museum. Inspired by shan sui, the Chinese phrase for "mountain-water,” the complex lies at the foot of Lion Mountain and adjacent to Shishan Lake. The 600,000 square foot museum will be the focal point of a new cultural neighborhood in Shishan Park.

Imagine future cities full of gardens with flower carpets, full of playing children, humming bees and fluttering butterflies. Gardens that help to create a healthy environment, cool cities, collect rainwater and are adapted to the local climate.

Videos

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