Congratulations to Stefano Boerion his Vertical Forest. He proclaims: ‘The first example of a Bosco Verticale composed of two residential towers of 110 and 76 meters height, will be realized in the centre of Milan, on the edge of the Isola neighbourhood, and will host 900 trees (each measuring 3, 6 or 9 m tall) apart from a wide range of shrubs and floral plants. On flat land, each Bosco Verticale equals, in amount of trees, an area equal to 10.000 sqm of forest. In terms of urban densification the equivalent of an area of single family dwellings of nearly 50.000 sqm.’
But will it work? I do not anticipate a horticultural problem with growing the trees. But will the residents want them? I am sceptical. A planted balcony with shrubs, flowers and living space is a delight. But there is a long history of residents not wanting large trees too near the windows of their houses. Trees keep out the sun and block views. The trees on top of the building should be a great success – providing the structural, horticultural and stability issues have been properly addressed.

On my first day in a landscape architecture office the kind lady at the drawing board behind mine asked ‘What have you done before?’. I told her, modestly, ‘degrees in philosophy and landscape architecture’. ‘Ah’, she said, wisely and with a soft Scots accent,’an apprenticeship in the post office would more use – the main thing we do here is tree stamping’. So, in memory of that happy day, I give you a scan of a very high-class set of tree stamps, which belonged to my former colleague Michael Lancaster. A very good designer and draughtsman, I can’t think what he used them for. The largest stamps were unused until I had a go with them recently. Just think how much use they could be for retrospective planning in Chinese cities!

Extremely rapid development is not generally compatible with far-sighted urban planning, but it does offer surprising advantages when it comes to retro-planning. The city of Zhuhai was one of China’s first Special Economic Zones, called into being by Deng Xiao Ping in the 1980’s. These were areas strategically chosen for accelerated development, Zhuhai because of its proximity to the economic hothouses of Hong Kong and Macau.

The result of these economically wildly successful areas has been an enormous urban mass, devoid of nodes, points of focus and green networks. There are now moves afoot to address these deficiencies by revisiting those areas of light industry, warehousing and mass housing that, instead of being outside of the city centre where they would normally and sensibly be sited, now find themselves disfunctionally marooned in the inner city, which has simply grown around them. A combination of selective demolition, change of function and new construction can create not only the missing urban nodes, but also public parks and the beginnings of green networks. Thus can the seeds of a Chinese urban planning renaissance be sown in the context of the economic renaissance that is required to finance these changes to the urban fabric.

The images show the Gongbei District of Zhuhai, how it looks now and how it might look within the next 10 to 20 years.

The CCTV Spring Festival Night Gathering is the most well-known program in China, and I was very glad to see this wonderful view during the whole program. This stage has been decorated by a number of  green elements which related Landscape architecture profession visually: Green Roofs, Green Walls and various Green Spaces. Although I am not keen on modern music and can not understand the female singer’s song, this green stage makes me excited. 
Some Problems caused by  ’not Green’.
The below picture is a map of a Chinese great city-Tianjin ( Central Area). It is well planned and designed but it does not look as nice as the photo above at all. Why?  Thousands of times, when someone has asked me to find my hometown from googlemap I could feel embarrassed at once, One of the reason is that IT IS NOT GREEN ENOUGH. Before the urban planning decision were made, green space planning had not been given enough thought. 

‘I just ‘green it’!

In 2009, I was asked to give a plan for a university in Guangdong Province, China.  The president of the University drove me around their campus and told me that as they spent most of the money on architectures design and build, so far, all the landscape design idea all comes from him for free.  His main idea is : ‘just green it!’  This amused me but I admire his idea. Comparing the two illustrations above, shows he was actually right.

Steve Jobs is the most successful product designer of modern times, bar none. Nobody has built so many fabled products. Nor have they built (what was briefly) the world’s largest coroporation in such a short working life – or such powerful brand loyalty. So if cities, gardens, architectures and landscapes are ‘products’ then what can designers learn from the Steve Jobs approach to design? Here are some of the possibilities:

• classify every design idea as ‘insanely great’ or ‘absolute shit’
• listen to ideas from members of the design team and tell the proposers they are all ‘absolute shit’,
• come in next day claiming the best of their ideas are yours, now seeing them as ‘insanely great’
• earn the undying love of your staff by these means
• ignore public consultation, and market research of all kinds, because ‘people do not know what they want until I have built it for them’
• practice Buddhism, become a vegan and drink bucket-loads of carrot juice
• adopt the purest forms of the Bauhaus and Zen Buddhist approaches to design
• focus, like a laser beam, on the user experience
• find the necessary technology to realise your dreams
• keep on and on and on simplifying and perfecting every detail of your design
• ‘Don’t compromise’
• ‘People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint’

Yes, I have been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and, yes, I think all designers can learn from Jobs’ example. But there is a big problem: I detest the idea of an iCity, an iGarden, an iScraper and an iLandscape – with the ‘i’ standing for ‘international’. I believe, fervently, that the environmental design professions should hold to the principles of context-sensitive design. They should, like our predecessors down the millennia, CONSULT THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE.
Steve was interested in gardens. The ‘stalk and head’ idea for the iMac G4 came from the sunflowers in his wife’s garden and, more to the point, he stated that ‘The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture has produced, and it’s directly from zen Buddhism’. Since the Zen idea (禪) came from China and, before that, from India, perhaps Steve was not as strong on history as on product design.
“But there is one more thing that we want to tell you about…” East Asia is building iCities as if there is no tomorrow. So? “….Tomorrow will never come“.

See also 2012 Chelsea Fringe Flowers Gardens and Gardening Festival.

Buddha image courtesy Miheco.

London Transport need not worry about these girls obstructing the flow of communters from their suburban pads to the Canary Wharf money factory. They are a holographic projection into a thin cloud of disco fog, intended to give the salarymen and salarygirls a reminder of their next escape to Ibiza. [Nor do London Transport need to sue me for not having had a license to take the photograph: it is a simulation.] The troupe have decided to call themselfes the Flowers of Canary Wharf and are planning a performance for the 2012 Chelsea Fringe Garden Festival.

Thank you to Tamzin Baker for her article Streams of the subconscious, in today’s Financial Times, which lends support to the campaign for Dacorum District Council to restore the Water Garden which Geoffrey Jellicoe designed for Hemel Hempstead New Town. See also:

Jellicoe’s Subconscious Approach to Landscape Design
Could Hemel Hempsted’s Jellicoe Water Gardens be managed by volunteers?
Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens are a National Disgrace
Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens are getting worse and worse and worse.

 

Landscape architecture: Keynote of Kongjian Yu from hayal oezkan on Vimeo.

Kongjian Yu has a good claim to the title of China’s leading landscape architect. He is an author, a professor and the employer of 600 landscape architects. In 2011 he gave an IFLA keynote lecture at the World Congress in Zurich.
So who, in the history of landscape architecture, should we compare Kongjian Yu to? Senenmut? Le Notre? Humphry Repton? Frederick Law Olmsted? Lawrence Halprin? Ian McHarg? Peter Walker? From this list, my answer is ‘Beyond a doubt, Ian McHarg’. Kongjian Yu has strength in planning, design and theory but, beyond all these, he is a publicist and popularizer.
Yu’s Bigfoot idea is that modern cities are akin to the ancient Chinese art of foot-binding 缠足. Bound feet may conceivably be beautiful in some warped eyes but the practice was cruel, un-natural and done for the gratification of men with warped minds. This is not why international modern cities are made the way they are made. Prof. Yu equates urbanisation with gentrification, which is also inaccurate (gentrification is the process of converting low-income urban areas into high-income urban areas). In the longer term, good design is mostly likely to result from good theory. But his two strategies are surely correct: (1) Provide a natural infrastructure to integrate hydrology, biodiversity and the cultural heritage, thus creating an ‘Ecological Infrastructure (2) establish a New Aesthetics, deriving from the ecological infrastructure.
But this is nit-picking. China is very lucky to have Kongjian Yu and I would like to see him appointed Chief Technical Officer to the The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development 住房和城乡建设部.
Comments in the video:

• Peach trees become flowers without fruits
• Fish, when they are urbanised, become goldfish
• Beijing has a population of 20m and its water table is falling by 1m/year
• We should minimise interventions and maximise returns
• We should learn from nature
• The Red Ribbon Park was made in 3 months.
• Use nature to transform, make useful, and make beautiful
• 75% of China’s surface water is heavily polluted
• We need a big foot revolution
• We need a new Chinese garden to survive
• Tiananmen Square is “Too big, too big”. We should turn it into a productive sunflower field.

The last comment reminds me that I wrote and invited Kongjian Yu to enter the Gardenvisit.com Tiananmen Square Design Competition. He did not take part and I doubt if his wonky design for filling the square with sunflowers would have been commended. Perhaps he guessed this and decided not to send in the entry!
One other comment: like China, Kongjian Yu is trying to do too much too quickly (eg the Red River Park). Much better to take some more time and do some superb work.
Does anyone know if Kongjian Yu is a member of the Chinese Communist Party CCP?

Reading about London’s Roman archaeology, I was deligted to find that the site of the Provincial Governor’s Palace is open to the public. It is now the foyer of Cannon Street Station (ie the foyer is above the garden site). So I went to take a photograph. My camera went ‘click’ at 09.52.15 on 05.1.2012 and 57 seconds later a shifty looking man approached me with an ID card and we had the following exchange.
‘I am the station manager. Did you know that this is a private place and you are not allowed to take photographs?????’.
‘No. I thought it was a public place. Please can you show me the sign which says “No Photography”‘
‘There isn’t one. Do you have a sign in your house saying “No Photography”?????’
‘No but there is a difference between a private house and a ………..’
I could not finish the sentence because he interrupted me to say ‘I could call the police’. I asked him not to interrupt and made 3 more attempts to complete my sentence. It could not be done, so I ended the conversation with the remark that that ‘If this is how “station managers” waste their time it is no surprise that National Rail has operating costs way above the European average. It also has lower standards – and the staff are often impolite’.
No doubt he could have given me the Nuremberg defence ‘I was just following orders’ and to show I bear no personal grudge I have decided not to bill Network Rail for the imaginative proposal, above, for using his blank wall as a place on which to project illustrations of Roman Palace gardens. He should also install a Triclinum and train for the more rewarding job of serving Roman delicacies to customers suffering psychological damage from their experiences with London’s rail system.
. Let us hope National Rail ‘read the writing on the wall’ and put on the Roman Palace Garden Projection as a contribution to the 2012 Chelsea Fringe Garden Festival.

London has been experiencing a very heavy rain and wind from last midnight, fortunately, it turned to sunny later today. I had a long walked in Greenwich Park this afternoon and came across a extremely sad thing which is that a historical tree on the most lovely top view in Greenwich Park was totally flown off and lost its life. After a conversation with the Royal Park administrator, I knew that this big chestnut has been standing facing the Royal Greenwich Observatory for over two hundred years, but it has gone. We lost a friend today!

Except tears, I have nothing more to say, but remember a poem appreciated by my supervisor:

Trees

(Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918)

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.