the landscape urbanism blog

KA-Connect 2012: The story of landscape urbanism

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in Communication, Definitions, Opinion, Social Media

Last month I gave talks at the University of Virginia School of Architecture alongside Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Cassim Shephard of Urban Omnibus; and the following week I headed to the Knowledge Architecture conference in San Francisco (KA-Connect) to tell the story of building this website. In creating the landscape urbanism website, we focused on building a community and encouraging collaboration and engagement by understanding the social aspect of sharing. One of my underlying beliefs is that landscape architects, planners, architects and designers need to continually improve our ability to talk about what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. Continue reading →

2012 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in News

Stoss’ CityDeck, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum announced winners of the 13th annual National Design Awards, a program established to promote excellence and innovation in design. The National Design Awards program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” First launched in 2000, this marks the 12th year of the awards. Continue reading →

Firms encouraging innovation and universities creating process-based landscapes: Two San Francisco Events, May 1-2

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in Events, San Francisco

If you’re in San Francisco this week, join us for a few noteworthy upcoming events:

Not Business As Usual

“Not Business As Usual,” looks at how creative firms encourage innovation by advocating for creative experiences beyond the working environment. It’s easy to work more than 40 hours a week, but research suggests that this is neither sane nor productive for the individual or the business. Thus, creative professionals are experimenting with new ways to encourage exploration and idea generation — often by telling employees to get outside, wander, and take a break from the routine.

Risky? Yes. Worth the payoff? Several firms are starting to think so. In an upcoming event with SPUR in San Francisco, architects and landscape architects will investigate the value of experiences outside of daily office- and client-based routines. Amirah Shahid (SWA Group), Mark Schatz (Field Paoli); Nicholas May (Tom Eliot Fisch) and Lilian Asperin-Clyman (NBBJ) will share an experience that helped “shape their outlook, their designs, and even their careers.” Find out more about this event or join in while it’s happening Tuesday, May 1, 2012.

Processcapes Exhibition

Processcapes, a new exhibition also at SPUR, opens the following day on Wednesday, May 2, 2012. Curated by UC Berkeley’s Judith Stilgenbauer, the exhibition will feature design work by graduate students in Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture program and their explorations of “program-specific ways of combining time, process, ecology, and placemaking — ideas oftentimes considered to be divergent in the urban landscape.” It’s not enough for landscapes to be beautiful or memorable: they need to be performative and useful as well.

Image courtesy of Judith Stilgenbauer and UC Berkeley.

Idea exchange: joining a twitter chat hosted by #AECSM

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in Communication, Practice, Social Media, Technology

I decided to join in on the AECSM (Architecture, Engineering and Construction in Social Media) twitter chat today after seeing a tweet go by in my morning check-in on the twitter stream. Curious, I wanted to know more. A “twitter chat” is a place where firms, individuals, and bloggers can join in for a curated conversation about specific topics.

In this case, Amanda Walter of Walter Communications hosted a six-part question and answer session looking at how to combine online and offline media, marketing, and communications efforts within the AEC industries. By tagging each of the responses with a hashtag (in this case, #AECSM), the event can be tracked by entering the hashtag into your search bar on twitter.

By listening in–watching what others had to say, seeing who showed up, and clicking through on relevant links–and also by commenting myself, I found myself surprised by how much I learned so quickly. Here is a recap of the questions we chatted about–and some of the best responses:

Q1: How are you using offline marketing and communications to drive your online presence?  Continue reading →

A great divide? Progress + equitable futures

| posted by Eliza Shaw Valk in Ecology, Economics, Energy, Environment, Events

 Images from here and here.

Last night I caught Surviving Progress as part of the Environmental Film Festival at Yale running this week until April 15. The documentary is by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks with interviews with geneticists, economists, primatologists, financial analysts, and scientists regarding “business as usual” and if our conceived and applied economic systems are sustainable. The premise of the film is that our brain circuitry, as a species, hasn’t evolved for over 50,000 years, and that our genetic make-up is based on short-term, “fight or flight” gratification, gain, and survival tactics that don’t take into account, say, living beyond the age of thirty-five and together in enormous, high-consumption communities with increasingly scarce resources—whether these are land, clean water and air, food, or fuel.

Continue reading →

Landscape and the Moving Image: An Interview with Silvia Benedito

| posted by Carolyn Deuschle in Communication, Interview, Opinion

Silvia Benedito, lecturer of landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and principal at Oficinaa, has a long interest in the relationship between video and design. As a master’s student in urban design at Harvard, she cross-enrolled in film-making courses and submitted a video-based thesis. This semester Benedito is teaching a course at the GSD titled Landscape as Moving Image, which focuses on not only situating historically the relationship between cinema and landscape, but also speculating how, as landscape architects, we can use video as both a catalyst and as a communication device for our projects. I sat down with her recently to talk about the impact of and potentials for video on the profession and the complex relationship between landscape and sensory media.

Why landscape as “moving image”? Continue reading →

Site Explorations in North Sydney: BP Park

| posted by Charly Nelson in Design, Ecology, Landscape Architecture, Travel

On Sydney’s Waverton Peninsula, BP Park, formerly the home to oil barrels and industrial capacity for the BP Corporation, was transformed into an urban park in 2005. The site welcomes the public to meander through an industrial history and the underlying geology and native plant life. With impressive views of downtown Sydney across the bay, including the iconic Sydney Opera House, this park creates an entre to the water culture for the neighborhood.

The park was created after a 1997 NSW Government decision to transform former industrial sites into public open spaces. From the 1920’s through 1993, the site had been used by BP Australia for fuel storage and distribution. (Take a look at what the park location looked like before). Continue reading →

Landscape Infrastructure Symposium: Systems & Strategies for Contemporary Urbanism

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in Communication, Events

“Urban life is sustained by technological infrastructure. Highways, harbours, airports, power lines, landfills and mines largely figure as the dominant effigies of contemporary urbanization. The sheer size of these elements renders their understanding as a single system practically impossible, yet their operations depend precisely on their continuity to support the flow of capital and cultural mobility.”

Poster Series Image from Harvard; click to enlarge.

This weekend, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design is hosting a 2-day symposium on Landscape Infrastructure: Systems & Strategies for Contemporary Urbanization. From the website:  Continue reading →

Landscapes of Uncertainty: Panel at Berkeley, March 21st

| posted by Sarah Kathleen Peck in Events, Opinion, Student

As part of the launch of the inaugural publication by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, the students and team behind GROUND UP are hosting a panel discussion investigating landscapes of uncertainty.

Featuring Ila Berman, the Director of Architecture at CCA, Douglas Burnham, Principal of envelope AD, Scott Cataffa, Principal at CMG, and Sha Hwang, Design Technologist, Movity-Trulia; the panel and conversation will look at new innovations and trends in landscape architecture, design, and design practice, as well as the influence of technology and data on the current shape of design.

I’m excited to be moderating the panel discussion with these talented practitioners, and our conversation will look at several themes emerging in landscape today: what does it mean to design in uncertain economic and environmental conditions? Do we ever have complete information? How is our practice changing, and how can we continue to design for innovation, both within our walls and outside in our work?

The presentations and panel conversation begins at 7 PM in Wurster Hall, 112 Auditorium, Wednesday, March 21, 2012. The GROUND UP journal launches later this Spring.

slouching towards “infrastructural optimism”

| posted by Peter Chomko in Infrastructure, Opinion, Theory

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the I-10 in New Orleans became a symbol of collective failure – a long fall from the heady days when America’s interstate system was perceived as a national triumph. UCLA’s Linda Samuels asks how infrastructure can once again come to “represent our collective optimism.”

Infrastructural Optimism?

A good portion of what’s taught in basic planning history courses has nothing to do with when CIAM published La Charte d’Athenes or Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department issued the Standard Zoning Enabling Act. Instead, the earlier days of such courses are largely occupied by learning to put up with other people’s expression of strong feelings on the subject of “Daniel Burnham: Yes or No?” About a month into my own planning education, I’d heard the one about make-no-little-plans more times than I care to remember. Continue reading →