Landscape Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

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In June this year, the Turenscape Consortium was shortlisted to prepare a design proposal for Zaryadye Park, Moscow. The scheme, titled “The Blue Circle of Moscow,” centered around a circular reflecting pool that would serve as a mirror to the Moscow skyline, while managing urban stormwater. According to Turenscape, “The Blue Circle was envisioned as a new city icon, which links the past with the present and the future, which reconnects man with nature, which reunites the separated urban space, and which gathers individuals of all kinds.”

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Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter has won a competition to design a landmark urban sculpture in Aarhus Harbour, a new district in Denmark's second largest city. The tower, shaped like a "sharp origami cut," is designed to "celebrating vision and social encounters at the edge of the water." Made of welded steel plates, the structure will be manufactured in a shipyard before being sailed to site.

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Water scarcity is a profound challenge for designers of the built environment. Beyond looking for water sources and creating sustainable ecosystems, how can we begin to create cities and buildings that will help us to celebrate and mitigate hydro-logical concerns? Hadley and Peter Arnold, co-directors of the Arid Land Institute (ALI) at Woodbury University, have decided to tackle this problem around Los Angeles. With the support of the World Water Forum and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, they recently developed a high-resolution geospatial model to strategically identify and quantify the potential for improving storm water capture within urban areas.

The RIBA Lubetkin Prize, awarded annually to the architects of the best new building outside the European Union, was won this year by Wilkinson Eyre and Grant Associates for Cooled Conservatories, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. The prize, which was also awarded to Wilkinson Eyre in 2012 for the Guangzhou International Finance Centre, is now in its 13th year.

Upon announcing the news, RIBA President Stephen Hodder stated: 

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Following the news that Studio V Architecture has been commissioned to convert the 19th century Empire Stores, next to Brooklyn Bridge, into 380,000 square-feet of office, restaurant and commercial space, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled designs for "a flowering meadow with seasonal grasses, a sprawling field and a triangular wooden viewing platform" close by.

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WXY Architecture + Urban Design and dlandstudio architecture & landscape have been commissioned to lead a feasibility study and planning for The QueensWay, a 3.5-mile section of abandoned railway tracks in Queens, New York, that will be converted into a High Line-inspired park and recreational pathways. As we reported earlier this year, the elevated railway line has been inactive since 1962 and, if transformed into a public parkway, has the capablitiy of serving more than 250,000 residents that live alongside it.

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