Landscape design
Open source landscapes
There’s an exciting movement that appears to be gaining critical mass: open source is changing architecture. Using parametric design, a CNC and an open mind, it’s so exciting to see what what groups like Architecture 00 are doing. Whilst open source has been a powerful movement for years, with organisations like Opendesk publishing designs for practical furniture that anyone can take to a workshop and build, projects like the Wikihouse are the next logical step. Lots of designers, builders and users coming together to share ideas and skills and approach challenges we come across every day from new perspectives.
The language of landscape
A discussion with James Hitchmough today reminded me of an interesting article in the New Statesman a while ago which asked if we need a better term for ‘tree’. The author writes that our collective use of language to describe the natural world is so impoverished that this prevents us from connecting with it and thus appreciating its richness and our relation to it. The limits of our knowledge define our reality: if we only know one word for tree, the argument goes, we are only likely to see one type of tree, and so a cycle of environmental degradation is entrenched.
Research into practice
Whilst researching bat habitat design guidance for Citu’s Climate Innovation District, I came across an interesting observation made at a conference last year. The conference pointed out that in spite of fairly strong evidence that bat gantries don’t work (Altringham, 2012), 4 new gantries were installed as part of the A11 works in 2014.
Borders of inequality
Donald Trump’s Presidency raises questions for all of us, but for landscape architects in the USA, it raises acute issues that range across many disciplines within the profession of landscape architecture. Perhaps the most high profile example is the US-Mexico wall and sooner or later, designers will be asked to make it a reality.