Landscape Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

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With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through the world's urban centers, governments worldwide are urging citizens to hunker down at home in a bid to quell the virus' spread. For apartment dwellers under quarantine, balconies have become the new platforms for entertainment and social interaction, making now an opportune moment in rethinking how we design and build these outdoor urban spaces.

While public parks and gardens have closed down their doors around the world, in fear of the COVID-19 spread, Studio Precht has proposed a green space designed around the rules of physical distancing. Entitled “Parc de la Distance”, the project introduces an outdoor space that encourages social distancing and short-term solitude.

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This article was originally published by Project for Public Spaces as "What makes a successful place?", a brief guideline about how to develop great public spaces by following four qualities: Sociability, Uses & Activities, Access & Linkages, and Comfort & Image.

Great public spaces are those places where celebrations are held, social and economic exchanges occur, friends run into each other, and cultures mix. They are the “front porches” of our public institutions – libraries, field houses, schools – where we interact with each other and government. When these spaces work well, they serve as the stage for our public lives, but what makes some places succeed while others fail?

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Today's designers have inherited unprecedented global challenges, a legacy which will require radically new ways of fashioning the buildings, places, and landscapes that harbor our diverse ways of life. The College of Environmental Design offers several introductory and advanced programs for those interested in confronting these challenges in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and environmental planning, urban design, and sustainable city planning. Please visit UC Berkeley's Summer Programs website to view images of student work and learn more about the CED Summer experience.

We are pleased to announce the launch of an annual international design competition: Low-cost House Design Competition. The competition is designed to challenge and seek creativity with ideas and concepts in architectural design, as well as landscape design or site planning. This competition aims to promote alternative solutions to housing, coming up with affordable and sustainable units with limited size and budget to the urgent demands for a house of urban poor.

Costing less than glitzier parks in Moscow, the Tatarstan initiative is revivifying the local design and manufacturing bases with a "teach a man to fish" approach.

In places without an established design force, there have historically been two opposing approaches at play: hire experts from abroad or nurture a local design community, a la “give a man a fish or teach him how to fish.” In the Russian republic of Tatarstan, located at the intersection between Europe and Asia, a recent Public Spaces Development Program has created over 350 parks in five years—by choosing the latter approach.

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Research-related design and design-related research in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture are generated, supported and structured by intentions as conscious purpose and position as well as intended content of perception, thought and action. The symposium will examine modes of action and meanings of intentions. How do they have an orienting, clarifying and dynamic effect within the processes of design and research, and how do they contribute to design and knowledge? What tensions arise between imprint, orientation and the projective, between research, imagination and realization, and how can these be evaluated, communicated and conveyed in a transferable way? To question characteristics of intentions in the creative contexts of action and their impact is particularly connected with dimensions of 'Reflexive Design'.

AZURE announces the opening of submissions to the 2020 AZ Awards!

Now entering its 10th year, the AZ Awards celebrates the best in architecture and design from around the world. Each winner will receive the AZ Awards trophy, get international exposure through our media partners, and have their achievements recognized by AZURE in print, online and at the AZ Awards gala in June 2020.

The NCC’s Urban Design Challenge 2020: Student Ideas Competition for Canada’s Capital is now on.

Urban Design Challenge 2020 is a competition that invites students from across the country to come up with design concepts for important sites in Canada’s Capital Region. The competition is organized by the National Capital Commission (NCC), the federal Crown corporation dedicated to ensuring that Canada’s Capital is a dynamic and inspiring source of pride for all Canadians, and building a legacy for generations to come.

The Grand Canal Museum Complex in Hangzhou, China designed by Herzog & de Meuron reflects on the importance of this area in Chinese cultural and natural landscapes. The project illustrates the story of the Grand Canal, through a continuous dialogue between the water and the museum.

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This year showcased how landscape architecture is shaping public life in the built environment. In the first two decades of the 21st century, landscape architects created vibrant resiliency plans, rehabilitation projects, and new urban parks. As these twenty years come to a close, 2019 embodied many larger ideas and trends that will continue to influence the next decade of landscape design.

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MVRDV has won the competition to redesign the Tancheon Valley and Seoul’s waterfront. Called “The Weaves”, the design was made to knit together pedestrian and bicycle paths, the natural landscapes, and public amenities. Commissioned by the government of Seoul, the design introduces a combination of natural and human activity in the midst of the city.

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On 15 November, the International Competition for the Architectural Landscape Design Concept for the Tuchkov Buyan Park in Saint Petersburg will begin accepting applications from participants. Interested parties can submit their application at park-spb.ru/eng

The second issue of Room will reconvene in the Kitchen; a space that savors the possibilities of both cultural appreciation and cross contamination, serving basic sustenance and special occasions. Taste here is significant though subjective, with its stainless steel tongue wiped perpetually in an attempt to cleanse the palate. Nuanced residues of gender, class, labour, race, and climate cling to the cloth among germs and grains of salt.

Soil is the foundation of the Earth in which we all inhabit. We grow from it, prosper from it, build upon it, pollute it, and dichotomize it. Soil is an organic material providing a sustainable base for life. Yet, polarized as degrading and dirty. How is it that soil can unite nations, yet divide people? What power does it have in cultivating the built environment and defining its boundaries?

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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.