Monthly Archives: April 2014

Landscape architecture as narrative – for a Dragon Garden in Ladakh


This video was produced to explain the ideas behind the making of a Dragon Garden for a Buddhist-influenced school in Ladakh. The aim was to explain the design to the school’s clients and end-users: the children.
I began studying landscape architecture in 1969 and was introduced to the subject by a garden historian (Frank Clark) and by an admirer and student of Ian McHarg (Michael Laurie). Frank had a keen appreciation of the role of association (with the classical world) in design. Michael, I later appreciated, was a Modernist – as was McHarg. It took me a long time to realise that these approaches have most value when combined.
Landscape Urbanism can, and in my view should, be regarded as a design approach which integrates ecological and cultural approaches to landscape design (‘Michael and Frank’ in my own mind).
‘Why the Dragons want a Garden in Shey’ is a children’s’ story. A great flood almost destroyed the Buddhist school in 2010. So the dragons said they would help make a garden. But only if the children would help too. When the garden was lush with vegetation and buzzing with bees, two of the children decided to become landscape architects.
There is also a more ‘grown-ups’ account of the Dragon Garden’s landscape architecture on Youtube.

Has the Olympic Development Authority designed a new London airport in the QE Olympic Park

First 747 comes in to land on the main runway at London's Olympic Airport

A 747 comes in to land on the main runway at London’s Olympic Airport. The Terminal, designed by Zaha Hadid, was previously an Aquatic Centre

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A 747 pilot mistook a footpath in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for a runway and the Aquatics Centre for an Airport Terminal. The passengers disembarked safely. After a short walk to Stratford International Station many remarked that it was a much easier journey into London than from Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick airports. A journalist on board contacted the Civil Aviation Agency. No one was available for interview but a spokesperson issued a written statement saying that the plane must have ‘come in below the radar’. Another spokesperson, for the Olympic Development Authority, said they wanted to generate revenue from the Park and it was only a trial. One wonders.

London's Olympic Village gardens: an appreciation

QE Park Olympic Village: the charming lane with its rustic cottages

QE Park Olympic Village: the charming lane with its rustic cottages


Making an Olympic Village in the Lea Valley’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was a delightful idea. I love to stroll along a village high street. At dawn one hears the cocks crow and sees the milkmaids setting off for work. The crooked old streets have banks of wild flowers. On a summer’s eve the children play and God, one thinks, must have been in a very good mood when he made this place. Poetry fills one’s heart as one rushes to put down a deposit.
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

[Rupert Brooke]
***
Nestling amid the trees we see the manor-house, the
abode of the squire, an ancient dwelling-place of Tudor or
Jacobean design, surrounded by a moat, with a good terrace-
walk in front, and a formal garden with fountain and sun-
dial and beds in arabesque. It seems to look down upon
the village with a sort of protecting air. Near at hand are
some old farm-houses, nobly built, with no vain pretension
about them. Carefully thatched ricks and barns and stables
and cow-sheds stand around them
.
[Peter Hampson Ditchfield]
***
Sweet Olympic! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delay’d:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loiter’d o’er thy green,
Where humble happiness endear’d each scene!
How often have I paus’d on every charm,
The shelter’d cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whisp’ring lovers made!

[Oliver Goldsmith]
***
The Village Life, and every care that reigns
O’er youthful peasants and declining swains;
What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
What form the real Picture of the Poor,
Demand a song–the Muse can give no more.

[George Crabbe]
Wonderful too that our present Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honourable George Osborne MP, wants to give us our first Garden City for a hundred years at Ebbsfleet in Kent – so long famed as The Garden of England. I expect it will be just as wonderful as the Olympic Village – and maybe even as wonderful as the Ajman Garden City itself.
The British government loves villages so much that it wants to expand them all into towns and then into cities. The reason for this is that ‘expanding existing settlements’ is seen as better than ‘building new towns’.

London's Royal Parks Greenway should have the Lost Garden of Whitehall as a link to the South Bank's Thames Greenway


London has two excellent greenways: one of them was planned by Henry VIII and runs through the Royal Parks. The other was planned by a landscape architect (Sir Patrick Abercrombie) and runs on the South Bank of the River Thames from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge. The video explains the histories of the routes and how the Lost Garden of Whitehall Palace could and should be a link between the two greenways.
London’s geography is confusing for the pedestrian and the cyclist. A 6-mile London Greenway, running from Kensington Palace to Tower Bridge would create a great east-west spatial corridor, ‘green’ in the sense of environmentally wonderful and a ‘way’ in the sense of a traffic-free pedestrian concourse passing near many of London’s best tourist attractions: the Tower of London, the Globe Theatre, Tate Britain, St Paul’s Cathedral, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Lost Garden of Whitehall Palace, St James’s Park, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Kensington Palace and Gardens.

Lost Garden Whitehall Palace

Whitehall Palace’s Lost Garden could link the Royal Parks Greenway to the London Thames Greenway


The Ministry of Defense (the building on the right in the photograph below) occupies the site of the main buildings of Henry VIII’s Whitehall Palace. The architect preserved a fragment of Queen Mary’s Stairs and the Ministry kindly allow public access to what was Queen Mary’s Garden. We could admire them even more if the parterre’s shown on Knyff’s drawing of the garden were to be restored. Sadly but understandably, the Ministry keeps Henry VIII’s Whitehall Palace Wine Cellar for private use.
Queen Mary's lost Whitehall Palace Garden

Queen Mary’s lost Whitehall Palace Garden