If you want to make the best of your experience on our site, sign-up.
If you want to make the best of your experience on our site, sign-up.
Artist collective Space Saloon recently completed the inaugural Public Art and Ecology Artists-in-Residence in the Okoboji region of Northwest Iowa. Observing local landscapes and diverse ecosystems, the team created a series of temporary installations, site-specific sculptures and multi-species performances. Working in association with Imagine Iowa Great Lakes and the Iowa Lakeside Lab, the process led to a series of public events reimagining how to engage regional ecologies.
.jpg?1628842439&format=webp&width=640&height=580)
The Xiangshan campus of China Academy of Art was designed by the recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Shu Wang and Wenyu Lu from Amateur Architecture Studio. The studio was responsible for the overall project completion from master planning to architectural design and landscape design. On the north side of Xiangshan is the first phase of the campus. It was designed in 2001 and completed in 2004. It is a complex of ten buildings and two bridges, with a construction area of about 70,000 square meters. The second phase of the campus is located on the south side of Xiangshan, and it was designed in 2004 and completed in 2007. It consists of ten large buildings and two small buildings with a construction area of nearly 80,000 square meters.
The construction period of the two phases was 14 months each. A large number of craftmanship during the construction has produced many problems that could only be solved on-site, therefore the site was repeatedly touched and shaped by countless hands. In 2007, the photographer Iwan Baan recorded the campus after completion. In 2021, photographer Sai Zhao used the lens of original focal length to take pictures of the campus at the same location. Over the course of more than ten years, green plants have covered and sheltered the structure, and the building now has its own life.
Álvaro Siza's latest project in Portugal is a 16-meter high watchtower built with a lightweight steel structure featuring photovoltaic panels on the roof. This project is very different from most of Siza's works, both in terms of scale and materials. The watchtower is located in Serra das Talhadas, in the municipality of Proença-a-Nova, and is part of a larger project comprising several structures dedicated to ecotourism in the area, including the still unbuilt Miradouro do Zebro.
Humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature, regardless of the physical or geographical conditions in which we find ourselves. As we become increasingly detached from the wilderness, we develop means and strategies to bring nature back into our daily lives, even if only for a few moments.
There are many ways of domesticating nature, as seen throughout the history of mankind, through fascinating structures that challenge technical limitations, such as vertical indoor gardens.
Juan Miró, co-founder of Miró Rivera Architects reflects in an opinion piece on the value of American cities. Stating that "when we idealize cities like Copenhagen, we risk losing focus of the fundamental historical differences between the urban trajectories of European and American cities", the architect and educator draws a timeline of events and urban transformations, in order to explain why it would be more relevant to look on the inside when planning U.S cities, rather than taking examples from the outside.
Designed by Heatherwick Studio, together with landscape architecture firm MNLA, the long-awaited Little Island project is New York’s newest major public space, showcasing a richly-planted piece of topography above the Hudson River. The design featuring a public park and performance venues reinvents the pier typology into an undulating artificial landscape. After surpassing many hurdles, the eight years in the making project is now open to the public, and the bold design is set to become an icon in New York.
The Kuwait Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 tackles notions of discovery, interpretation, and projection of the hinterland, contextualizing the nation’s imminent growth. The exhibition titled Space Wars and curated by curators Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, and Yousef Awaad brings the hinterland within the architectural discourse, highlighting the nation’s functional staging ground.
Israel’s Pavilion for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale highlights the impact of intensive mechanized agriculture on landscapes and ecosystems, as well as the disruption caused to local communities. Titled Land. Milk. Honey and curated by an interdisciplinary team comprising Dan Hasson, Iddo Ginat, Rachel Gottesman, Yonatan Cohen and Tamar Novick, the exhibition portrays the fundamental changes experienced by the region through the stories of local animals, constructing a history of the 20th-century development.
“No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?" Questioning the notion of home and house, Nomadland tells the story of a sixty-year-old woman who loses everything during the great recession, leaving her hometown after the collapse of the sole industry that supported the rural settlement and the death of her husband. She decides consequently to embark on a journey and experience life as a modern-day nomad, setting off in her van through the vast landscape of the American West.
Chilean architects Ricardo Azócar and Carolina Catrón founded their architectural and urban planning firm in Concepción, Chile in 2015. In a short time afterward, their project “Two Towers and a Trail” was awarded the Obra Revelación del CA-CCP Prize in 2016 and was recognized in the Young Architects of Latin America Collateral Event at the Bienal of Venice in 2018; their monographic text “Catalejo” won first place out of the Publications category at the 2018 Biennale of Costa Rica. In November 2020, ArchDaily recognized them among the best emerging architectural practices of the year.
We sat down with Azócar and Catrón to discuss their current interests and motivations, their collaborative processes, their career trajectory, their upcoming projects, and their predictions about the future of architecture in their native Chile.
American 19th-century sanitation engineer George E. Waring, Jr. was a miasmaist. He believed in the miasma theory, which holds that toxic vapors traveled through damp soil, rotted vegetation, and pools of standing water. These toxic vapors were understood to emanate from the Earth and interact with the atmosphere and cause disease in American cities.
According to Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, ASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, Waring was a “marginal figure,” but he had interesting ideas about how to “modify the climate to improve health.” In a virtual lecture hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Seavitt Nordenson said Waring was incorrect about the mechanisms for spreading disease —he didn’t understand the concept of vectors, like mosquitoes— but his drainage and sanitation solutions were “surprisingly successful.” A year into the coronavirus pandemic, it’s worth revisiting Waring’s ideas about the connections between the Earth, atmosphere, disease — and the maintenance of public spaces.
In 1968, the small town of Gibellina in Sicily was flattened by the colossal Belice earthquake, a magnitude 5.5 quake that killed hundreds and left 100,000 homeless. Planners were unable to rebuild Gibellina at its original site, so the new city—Gibellina Nuova—was constructed 11 kilometers (7 miles) away instead. In anticipation of the design and construction of Gibellina Nuova, and in the wake of the Belice earthquake tragedy, the mayor of Gibellina called on several artists to submit proposals for projects to decorate the new city. One of the artists was the prolific “polymaterialist” Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Burri (1915-1995).
When we were forced to be confined at home due to the self-quarantine policy of the COVID-19 global pandemic, everyone must have spent a tremendous amount of time looking out from their window. Sometimes when we are so exhausted with everyday work and life, we just wish to have a quick getaway to oceans and forests, somewhere close to the natural green.
In 2019 CMG Landscape Architecture principal Pamela Conrad launched Climate Positive Design in an effort to help landscape architects design and build projects that can become climate positive. In this interview originally published on The Dirt, Jared Green talks with Conrad about how this approach can make a big difference.
"It’s my hope that things like this can give the next generation hope that there are solutions out there," states Conrad, a recipient of the 2018 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for the development of the award-winning Pathfinder landscape carbon calculator app and the Climate Positive Design Challenge.
A “floodscape” could be seen as a contradiction in terms: Flood spreads wherever gravity leads it, covering the familiar topography with a dark, gray, and uniform blanket. In that regard, flood is amorphous, as it can distort and temporarily erase forms and features from the visible landscape—nothing that could be described as a “scape” in the sense of articulated and meaningful scenery.
But when the boundaries of a flood are not just defined by the quantity or the velocity of water but also by landforms and structures carefully designed and placed to influence and shape the “disaster,” the result can be considered as a landscape, physically and culturally defined by flood.
The Initiatives for Development of Armenia (IDeA) Foundation has announced the winners of the Friendship Park competition for Gyumri, Armenia. Based on results of the second round, the jury selected 19 finalists in three categories. Located in the northern part of the city, the renovated park aims to become the first modern green area for locals and tourists alike through a series of design interventions.
.jpg?1572496110 "© Jomar Brangança")
