Architecture in Northern Landscapes

2008

Early sketch iteration. Ghosts of the lost houses are echoed in the Retreating Village. Houses begin to withdraw from the edge into a tight cluster via a framework of sliding skids, guide rails and winch systems. The exquisite drawings and models of Smout Allen have become the trademark of this research-led practice. Here Mark Smout and Laura Allen describe, with particular reference to their Retreating Village project, how visual representation is fundamental to their design enquiries, liberating them to embrace the 'spontaneous' and 'serendipitous'. and Landscape Ballistic device 1: net instrument. A weighted cap is released to allow a woven net of reflective nodes to be released into the air. Flight is stabilised and speed controlled by fins and drogue parachutes. Ballistic device 2: glint instrument. Mirrored fins are attached to a central stabilising rod and a vacuum cylinder which pressurereleases and tilts the fins in flight. Ballistic device 3: dynamic line instrument. A weighted cap detaches the Perspex outer casing and releases three sprung-steel tapes to deploy as lines in the sky. A canopy parachute brings the mechanism safely back to earth.

Urbanization is everywhere and it is this omnipresence that has triggered a debate on the future role of urbanism in this ever-changing society. Practicing urbanism implies that, as an acting office, you have to develop a certain attitude. LOLA Landscape Architects puts itself forward as an office with spot-on ideas and actions based on a combination of research and design. Their particular interest goes out to forgotten, wornout and changing landscapes. 1 Most of their design proposals are thus dealing with reviving forlorn urban landscapes. This ambitious mission statement can be regarded as a well thought-out answer to the current urban environment, which is the result of decades of abstraction and repetition.

2009

Researcher and PhD Candidate TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture, Chair of Landscape Architecture Prof. Dr. Ing. C.M.Steenbergen Contemporary architecture has been strongly influenced by the concept of landscape in recent times. The landscape analogy that accompanied architecture for a long time in tectonics or ornament is now transforming the concepts of form and space. The landscape analogy has moved from marginal subjects to the core of the discipline. We are looking for principals of architectural theory, which can not be derived anymore from an big predominant ideology. What framework for architecture do we still need in the more or less lucky freedom of our time? We might want to use the proposed exercise of knowledge transfer to rediscover some basic principles. A study of landscape as a means of architecture could lead to such a basic theory, not derived from any ideology nor adopting philosophical terms to a practical field. We prefer looking in our own backyard, enjoying the freedom of thoughts about our own subject matter.

Architects in Exile. Stories of New Spatial Experiences. Convenors: Boris Chukhovich (visiting scholar in DAStU Politecnico di Milano), Andrea Gritti (DAStU Politecnico di Milano), 2023

Architects in Exile. Stories of New Spatial Experiences 29 and 30 May 2023 Politecnico di Milano. Collective imagination has traditionally associated architecture with political and economic power. As a result, when quoting Edward Said: «Modern Western culture is, in large part, the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees», the last people we typically consider are exiled architects. But is the heritage left by exiled architects truly insignificant? Can we find expressions of their spiritual quest, new life experiences, nostalgic feelings, and aesthetic shocks in their works? When does Modernism cease to be a uni- versal language and instead becomes an existential language of the exile – and can they both coexist? The international conference Architects in Exile. Stories of New Spatial Experciences aims to address these questions.

ATHENS JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE, 2015

The link between architecture and nature, from the standpoint of the relation of architecture with its place and, in a broader sense, with the landscape it integrates, is one of the main concerns explicit in Alvar Aalto's and Álvaro Siza's design processes, works and writings. We propose to explore it as an existing parallelism between both architects' practices and as a problem whose understanding has a constancy in each one's career related both to their methodological approach and to their continuous postponement of the theoretical systematization of their convictions. Aalto and Siza seek a cohesive balance between man's interventions and pre-existing nature. For both, architecture is something that contrasts with nature by alterity, but that also adapts and complements it. The relation with place and landscape has a propellant role in their design processes, enhanced by their distrust of an a priori theory. Their projects are born from the place they simultaneously define by a pondered search, developed case by case, for naturalness, for the same sense of evidence, proportion and simplicity they find in nature. Therefore, we explore the use they make of conceptual analogies with nature's formative processes, and even of formal analogies with the surrounding nature, which Bruno Zevi considered the naturalist misconception of organic architecture. To better understand and relate Aalto's and Siza's approaches to the problems outlined, a comparison was made with other architects whenever relevant, like Le Corbusier and Aldo Rossi, whose practices and positions towards project theory are thought to be distinctive.

2012

his EAP starts 23 years. We thank readers renewing subscriptions and include a reminder for "delinquents." We are grateful to subscribers who contributed more than the base subscription. Thank you! This issue includes three feature essays. First, management and systems consultant Robert Fabian overviews his growing awareness of the importance of human dimensions of urban design, and Norwegian architect Akkelies van Nes considers architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz's contribution to a phenomenology of place and architecture. Last, retired educator John Cameron sends another "letter" from his rural home on Tasmania"s Bruny Island. Accompanying his account of place as "gift" is art work by his life partner, artist . Tentatively, EAP plans to sponsor at least one special session relating to environmental and architectural phenomenology. Conference website: www.ihsrc2012.uqam.ca/.

A+BE: Architecture and the Built Environment, 2019

While nature is an important component of architectural theory, we must reevaluate how architecture deals with nature in theory in order to place landscape in this thesis in the disciplinary context of architecture. While revisiting 17 of architecture's crucial exponents throughout twenty centuries, I explore their dealings with landscape or nature and the concepts thereof. The beginning of this chapter (3.1) will touch on some crucial problems that lead to the polarity of 'wild' nature and human architecture, or more precisely, the divide between nature and humanity through architecture. Part of the theoretical problem elaborated in the beginning of the chapter is, that landscape and nature are oftentimes conflated if not confused, in particular by architects. Out of my critique of a thematic selection of common architectural theories and within the methodological differentiation (3.2), I will argue for the necessity of research through analyses of landscape spatial com...

IAEME PUBLICATION, 2016

The paper tries to investigate the processes through which landscape Design Thinking evolves through the medium of few case studies/studio exercises. These are our experiments to help discuss the long standing creative engagement & the most aspired Integration of Architecture & Landscape. The understanding of these processes is with an objective that will help critically appraise & justify landscape design beyond face value appreciation. Thus it will help establish the validity of a given or created Environment in response to the built. As a discipline, conventionally landscape has always been thought as an interdependent on Architecture. The paper also tries to outreach this aspect where in landscape distills itself from architecture & attempts to gain identity for itself.

Landscape Architecture is a uniquely positioned profession in that the very sphere it operates in allows for the overlapping influence of various other professions. The landscape can be experienced, perceived, read, interpreted, documented, measured, catalogued, designed or conserved through a myriad of different lenses, whether it be highly individual or professional. In my career, I’ve often positioned myself in the liminal spaces – those spaces between disciplines or at the threshold of the senses. Anthropologists, usually doing fieldwork in socio cultural contexts different from their own, are characteristically in liminal spaces. The core character of anthropology allows practitioners and researchers to establish the role of contexts and connections, and to convey their resultant meanings to individuals or groups. As a result, there are no set boundaries defining where the scope of anthropology starts and where it ends: it overlaps regularly with archaeology and sociology, cultural geography and landscape architecture. As a landscape architect and anthropologist, I believe that in dealing with something as multi-dimensional as landscape, the distinction between disciplines becomes blurred and that transdisciplinarity is essential for understanding. A recent project highlighted this in a most profound way. In 2010 – 2013, fieldwork for the recording of the rock engravings at Biesje Poort farm in the Northern Cape culminated in the publication Engraved Landscape : Biesje Poort : Many Voices. Interdisciplinary research involved an archaeological team from McGregor Museum, landscape architects from Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town, representatives of an arts-for-peace non-profit organisation ARROWSA, Centre for Communication and Media Studies students from the University of KwaZulu Natal and Kalahari crafters and organic intellectuals from the ≠Khomani San Bushman community. Transdisciplinarity underpinned a variety of research and recording techniques including: cultural mapping via GPS and scientific methods of recording heritage sites, tracing rock art, open-ended interviews, demonstrations of the use of found material culture and participant observation. Landscapes, in their essence, is the physical manifestation of the relationship between people and the environment. Centuries of human engagement with Biesje Poort have imbued the landscape with a multitude of meanings. Signs, or representations of these meanings have been left for others to discover and read in conjunction, to understand the landscape as a whole. This paper attempts to demonstrate various strategies for engagement in order to read the landscape – the psycho-motorial (physio-spacial), the affective (emotional-aesthetic [poetry, writing]) and the visio-analytical (intellectual) – each with its own validity but leading to a particular reading – though not necessarily excluding the validity of the other. We were privileged in being able to engage and share each, affirm our resonance and elide meanings into a single richer understanding than each might be in isolation. We were privileged by having access to these multiple readings in order to enrich and assist our own, as well as being able to learn other skills for other readings, once we have been exposed to these. What our engagement with this landscape has specifically demonstrated is that sharing – both through the acts of physical exertion, language (speech and written) and drawing enriches that of the ‘other’ – individual perception, observation and interpretation leads to a more holistic understanding of the subject. This understanding is what I believe should characterise not only contemporary landscape architectural practice, but also underpin the education of future professionals.