http://www.archtracker.com/the-garden-house-takeshi-hosaka-architects/2009/04/
Apart from what looks what looks unfortuneately like artifical turf on the roof - the Garden House by Takeshi Hosaka Architects with its tight triangular plan is a surprise and delight! Definitely a garden for my soul! The living spaces are designed around the edges of an enclosed garden courtyard, cleverly stacked and arranged to take advantage of every square mm of space, create privacy and capture views. In the photographs the garden is very young…it would be fantastic to revisit the house as the tree grows and the potted garden matures.
If you can’t resist viewing more maybe a trip to Japan is in order…
Here is a CGI image of London’s 2012 Olympic ‘Village’ flanked by photos of the Student ‘Village’ it is replacing. One regrets that the Trade Descriptions Act does not apply to the word ‘Village’. The Online Etymological Dictionary entry for Village has: “late 14c., “inhabited place larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town,” from O.Fr. village “houses and other buildings in a group” (usually smaller than a town), from L. villaticum “farmstead” (with outbuildings), noun use of neut. sing. of villaticus “having to do with a farmstead or villa,” from villa “country house” (see villa)” with Villa coming from from PIE *weik- “clan” (cf. Skt. vesah “house,” vit “dwelling, house, settlement;” Avestan vis “house, village, clan;”
So “village” is one of our most ancient words and it should mean a group of dwellings occupied by people who are related to each other and who relate to the surrounding land. The design for the London 2012 Olympic Village looks as though it might be in the valley of the Yellow River, providing modern blocks for groups of workers who no longer have any cultural or horticultural connection to the land on which they live. Where are the sustainable green roofs on the Olympic ‘Village’? Or do they plan to build a new Pruitt-Igoe in London?
The Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis is identified (following Charles Jencks) as the moment when Modernism in architecture died. Architects are the bad guys in this story.[ http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2009/07/big-bad-blocks-part-1-blame-the-architects.html ]
And viewing the following sequence of the Pruitt-Igoe demolition in the film Koyaanisqatsi it is not difficult to follow the popular sentiment.[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZF1e24FPpo ] Music by Philip Glass.
However, the world we sometimes do acknowledge, is a complex place…
Christine Wonoseputro contextualises the ‘moment’ in theoretical terms within the history of architecture as art.
[ http://transmaterialasia.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/hadids-metaphors-reading-her-biography-from-the-way-of-thinking/ ]
Yet the memoirs of a medical student and his wife a nurse “in a 9 story large reddish-tan brick building in the Pruitt-Igoe city housing at 1300 S. 14th” presents quite another picture of the development as it was when first completed and occupied (and imagined). In Urban Design: a typology by Jon T Lang (2005) Pruitt-Igoe is described as the first racially integrated public housing development in St Louis. (p181)
Not the slum - it was to become - usually associated with the legend.[ http://gagronert.com/chapter6.htm ]
It is said that the residential mix of the development “overwhelmingly welfare dependent single mothers” (p182) was not the household mix that had been expected when the complex was designed.
The couple in question occupied their flat for only a year. I assume this was the duration he was working at the St Louis hospital? From a landscape persepctive it is worth asking - what happened to the rivers of trees?
The architect is said to have lamented “I never thought people were that destructive.”
[ http://reference.findtarget.com/search/Pruitt-Igoe/ ]
Witney Hedges entry for the Tiananmen Square competition would be invisible by day and spectacular as dusk turns to dark
The landscape architecture compeition for Tiananmen Square was announced in March 2009 and, seven months later, we are pleased to see the first entries coming in. There are still eight months to go (till June 2010) and we hope for many more. All the competition entries can be seen on Flickr, because it is a Web 2.0 design competition. A Chinese commentator has said, in effect, ‘leave Tiananmen Square as it is: it is a ‘holy place’ belonging to the PRC and foreigners should leave it alone’. I can understand this attitude! - but the conclusion that ‘nothing should ever change’ does not follow and two of the early entries. from Witney Hedges and Henrychung, go for a ’sensitive intervention’ approach which leaves the use and spatial character of the Square very much as they are today. Other entries, perhaps inspired by the famous Chinese architect Ma Yansong, go for a radical greening of the space. My own view is that all options should be considered and that they should be discussed both within China and outside China. Civilization, to which China has made an inestimable contribution, belongs to the whole world, not to a group of people who occupy a small geographical zone for a short period in time: they have the right and the power to decide but they can and should welcome debate.
The Eifel Tower became an adored feature of Paris, but after the Montparnasse Tower (right) was built, Parisians decided there must be no more high buildings within the Boulevard Péripherique. What does this tell us about context-sensitive, and context-insensitive, design?
Context theory is “the theory of how environmental design and planning of new development should relate to its context”. Unless we want the world to become less-and-less diverse, it is a subject which should concern all urban planners, designers, architects and landscape architects. Surely, we all want designs which respond sensitively to the cultural, climatic, ecological, geological, hydrological etc context in which they are built. Cars and moble phones can be everywhere the same but design for the built environment should be sensitive to its context. This requires a theory of how additions to the built environment should relate to their context.
In America, the FHWAFederal Highway Administration” fully supports the concepts and principles that make-up Flexibility in Highway Design, now commonly referred to as “Context Sensitive Design” (CSD)”. Even signage design can be context-sensitive and it is an important aspect of urban street design.
This is called urban agriculture - but the food is not grown in a field (agri in Latin)
Cities can, should and will, I believe, become much more productive of food. A friend whose paved ‘garden’ measures about 20 sq meters is self-sufficnent herbs and in summer fruits. He has 16 fruit trees, all grown in pots, and produces strawberries and other fruits with a flavour far superior to supermarket food. He does not have to worry about chemical sprays. He contributes to the balance of payments. NO energy is required to transport the produce. His plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The vitamens do not have time to decay in storage. There is no need for a refrigerator or deep freeze to store the food. Tending the plants is good exercise. He provides ‘visual policing’ for the community while doing the work.
Why don’t more people grow their own food? Because most cities are not planned for urban agriculture, unless they are in Cuba.
The Skateboard park on London's South Bank is a specialised POS, created by and for its users - in defiance of the authorities. It involved no capital cost and nor is there any maintenance cost.
Too many park managers have a horticultural training. To few park managers are trained in landscape architecture, garden design, event management, community leadership, economics, public accountancy or social entrepreneurship. The consequence of the imbalance is that too much public open space is managed as ‘parkland’: ‘green deserts with lollipops’, shrubberies, flowerbeds and a few facilities for young mums, sporty youths and old age pensioners. We have too much generalized public open space and too little specialized public open space.
Hundertwasser's design for Spa Blumeau increases the urban area while allowing a vegetated landscape to develop
The most popular urban design policy is NIMBY Not In My Back Yard: lets keep on building but lets do it somewhere else. This may change when we all come to see the Earth as our Back Yard. Meanwhile, how can we make urbanization more popular? There are about three times as many humans on earth today as on the day I was born. If this trend continues, as is projected, we need a lot of space for urban sprawl or we need to intensify the use of each square meter which is already urbanized. How can either policy be popular? My suggestion is asking landscape architects to study plots of land and find ways of simultaneously (1) creating more indoor space (2) creating more greenspace which is both useful and accessible to the public. This can be done in lots of ways and one of the best examples comes from the work of the Austrian artist-designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser. At Spa Blumeau, illustrated above, he took some tired farmland and made a popular spa with, I guess, more wildlife and vegetation than before the development took place.
See the Landscape Urbanism Blog and Wiki on Landscape Urbanism Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism which argues that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.
- The Saana Pavilion would be EVEN more beautiful with water and bamboos, instead of white chippings and trad flower pots
The Saana Pavilion is the most beautiful, so far, in the Serpentine Galleries series of Summer Pavilions, but it is a disappointment for no fault of the architects. Obviously, it should have been integrated with an equally brilliant garden design.
The Online Etymology Dictionary has this for Pavilion: 1297, “large, stately tent,” from O.Fr. paveillun (12c.), from L. papilionem (nom. papilio) “tent,” lit. “butterfly,” on resemblance of wings. Of unknown origin. Meaning “open building in a park, etc., used for shelter or entertainment” is attested from 1687. Saana have done the butterfly idea to perfection and it integrates with the plane trees better than any of its predecessors. But it could have been so much beautiful if integrated with, for example, water and bamboos. I hear the pavilion has been sold, so perhaps I will visit a garden some day and find this has been done. I hope so.
My suggestion to the Director and Trustees of the Serpentine Gallery is that they move heaven and earth, in their customary style, to raise additional funding for a combined pavillion+garden and then invite entries from integrated professional teams. This would:
- easily outdoo the best designs at the Chelsea Flower Show, which are often architecturally disappointing (see design reviews of Chelsea Flower Shows and Haruko Seki’s 2008 Silver Moonlight Garden)
- attract many extra visitors and far more media coverage, because gardens get far more media attention than buildings
- match the etymology of ‘pavilion’ as a building integrated with its setting
- achieve the wondrous goal of encouraging indoor and outdoor designers to work together on every possible occasion
- in all probability, make a series of contributions to the cause of sustainable green design
The Serpentine Gallery has a better opportunity to promote garden and landscape design than any other gallery in London: the Serpentine itself was once a leading-edge design. I think it is one of those occasions when an opportunity becomes a duty.
Robbie Williams bought this garden, with the adjacent house, for £8.5m in 2009
As a solo artist Robbie Williams has “sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history and has won more BRIT Awards than any other artist to date”. But I don’t think much of his taste in gardens or architecture. Compton Bassett once belonged to Lord Norman Foster of Thames Bank and was re-worked by the architect Michael Phillips, who specializes in chic hotels. Maybe the interior is comfortable, but what on earth could one use the walled garden for? The landform is amphitheatre-ish but it is designed sort-of-like a renaissance parterre, without the hedges and with wonky geometry. Then one wonders why there is a penguin pool in the bottom left corner and a rotunda overlooking the tennis court. Its a mad world and, as usual, I advise anyone who wants a good garden design to employ a good garden designer. You might ask them to knock-up a quick scheme for the house but I doubt if this will work out very well.
Gardens being made today, for the likes of Robbie Williams, will be open to the public one day and I would like to offer two words of assistance to those garden historians who will doubtless try to classify the styles in which they were designed: “Good Luck”.
Useful info for Robbie Williams:
