Category Archives: Landscape Architecture

The snowball effect

2 Replies


Tom once the winter is over you will be free of snowball throwing teenagers! Then perhaps, given your recent acquisition of expertise in the art of dodging snowballs through firsthand experience, you can give lessons on snowball etiquette in urban and rural areas and advice for the unwary…

I found this description of teenage snowball warfare that might be of assistance in compiling the necessary advice.

Here are several scenerios with which to contextualise your advice:

Scenerio One: A seventy year-old was arrested for allegedly pointing a gun at snowball throwing teenagers.

Scenerio Two: The police and hoodies engage in snowball fight.

Scenerio Three: A man kidnaps a teenager for throwing a snowball.

Scenerio Four: Girl throws a snowball at a boy.

Scenerio Five: Police hunt teenagers throwing snowballs at traffic.

Here is some helpful opinions from the general snowball fight interested public. Overzealous teenagers, snowballs and transportation seem to be a particularly potent mix.

The sublime – in garden and landscape design

5 Replies

Sublime and beautiful in garden and landscape design

The sublime is a neglected quality in garden and landscape design. Edmund Burke  associated the sublime with terror, astonishment, admiration, wonder, and respect ” hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.” In today’s terms, the view is also beautiful.

I have visited many designed landscapes and gardens without seeing anything as sublime as this photograph – of fog and sagebush in the Rocky Mountains.

Image courtesty Josh

Kerb – is landscape architecture dead? – a magazine review

11 Replies

RMIT University in Australia publish the annual publication Kerb and Vol 17 asks the question ‘Is landscape architecture dead?’. It is a good question and a handsome volume with interesting illustrations. But most of the articles in Kerb led me to think that ‘if this is the future of landscape architecture, then it deserves to die’. The images do not have either captions or any discernable relationship with the text. Most of the 26 articles are inconsequential: significant questions are asked; random assertions are made; obscure paragraphs abound eg1 ‘Contemporary landscape architecture has not produced an aesthetic paradigm that describes the vicissitudes surrounding the idea of nature today’ (p 10),  eg2 ‘landscape is not an object. yet this image of landscape is projected upon the world with each project you undertake’ (p.73)  eg3 ‘interpret ‘scape as meaning ‘pretty dress up’. Dig up a Chinese creek bed, polish the booty, and dress up my ‘scape outside the screen door’ (p.92). But I must be wrong: many young Australian landscape architects come to work in London and they have earned a good reputation for Australia’s landscape schools.


Comment on the landscape aspects of the Mayor’s London Plan 2009

5 Replies

 

Thames Area Strategy zones from the 2009-10 Mayor's London Plan

Thames Area Strategy zones from the 2009-10 Mayor’s London Plan

 

 

 

 

You can download the .pdf and comment the draft of Mayor Boris Johnson’s London Plan 2009.  The most interesting chapters, for me, are Chapter 6 on Transport and  Chapter 7 on London’s Living Spaces and Places. The Gardenvisit website has a historical analysis of previous Open Space Plans for London and I have a special interest in Boris’s plan because he is the only politician I have ever voted for who has been elected. Briefly, my comments on the 2009 draft of the London Plan are as follows.

  • The section on Cycling is very welcome – and Boris won my vote by supporting this cause. I hope I live  long enough to ride into the capital on a Cycle Super Highway, but since Ken Livingstone promised something similar when he was first elected I am maintaining a healthy skepticism. The policy that ‘to bring about a significant increase in cycling in London, so that it accounts for at least 5 per cent of modal share by 2026’ is insufficiently ambitious. ‘In 2003 fully 36% cycled to workplaces in Copenhagen whereas only 27% drove to work’.
  • The Blue Ribbon Strategy, also introduced by Livingstone, is very wise and very welcome. But it needs some tough political muscle behind it.
  • The Walking Strategy, based on my 1992 Green Strategy for London, is supported by Boris as it was by Ken, with thanks to them both.
  • The plan for a Hierarchy of Open Space in London is as irrelevant today as when it was first advanced by the GLC in 1969. I can only think that it survives because there is standard textbook a Town and Country Planning which supports this kind of absurdity.
  • The Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land ideas are supported for the very good reason that there would be a public outcry if they were not supported. The fact that they have no obvious affect on planning decisions scarcely matters.
  • The Biodiversity Strategy is welcome. But there should also be a strategy for the diversification of open space types. London has far too much generalized public open space and not nearly enough specialized public open space. See blog comment on Urban parks, POS and landscape architecture.
  • The introduction of Thames Policy Areas, based on Thames landscape strategy, is welcome but does not go far enough. The Thames needs a Scenic Quality Appraisal and then zoning to show (1) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of conserving the existing character (2) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of changing the existing character – because the scenic quality is low. See blog comment on the Millennium London Eye.
  • An All London Green Grid became a supplement to the plan in 2011-2012

CONCLUSIONS ON THE LANDSCAPE SECTIONS OF THE MAYOR’S LONDON PLAN

1) The 2009 London Plan is qualitatively inferior to the 1943 Open Space Chapter of the Abercrombie Plan for London. The latter is obsolete in most respects but it had the great merit of taking a simple, clear and idealistic view of the problems and the opportunities. Abercrombie was a member of the Institute of Landscape Architects and had a deep understanding of the subject.

2) If the Greater London Authority is unable to afford the cost of expert landscape consultants, I modestly point them to the  Green Strategy I prepared for the London Planning Advisory Committee in 1992. The Mayor’s London Plan is over halfway to adopting the principle of a series of overlapping green networks (for Rivers, Walks, Cycling, and Habitats). These layers should now be INTEGRATED  on a Londonwide basis.

3) Town planners should not have responsibility for landscape and open space planning unless they also hold professional qualifications in landscape architecture. I do not know who wrote the landscape sections of the 2009 Draft but they do not read like the work of imaginative, well-educated and influential landscape planners.

 

The landscape architecture of sacred groves in Ancient Greece and modern London

5 Replies
Nemea has the only sacred grove found by archaeologists

Nemea has the only sacred grove proven by archaeology

Western cities are full of  echos Greek architecture, almost all inspired by surviving Greek temples which were built in sanctuaries and sacred groves as houses for gods. Greek temples were not buildings in which people congregated to pray, as Christians and Muslims congregate. As Vincent Scully argues, temples were located in landscapes which were  sacred long before the temples were built. Often, these places also had sacred groves, comprising either wild or planted trees, before the temples were built. I therefore suggest that all those cities with echos of Greek architecture should also have sacred groves. They would be  wonderful gestures to the origins of western landscape architecture. London’s Waterloo Quarter has commissioned a Christmas Forest for 2009, thankfully turning its back on all those centuries in which the Christians felled sacred groves. See  Waterloo Forest designed by landscape architects naganJohnson.

Pierre Bonnechere writes that ‘At present the sacred grove of Nemea is the only one archaeology can claim to have discovered with certainty. Called an alsos from the first literary evidence, the site was landscaped [ie planted] in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and perhaps earlier: twenty-three planting pits, carved into the crushed rock at the south of Zeus’s temple, were uncovered and found to contain carbonized roots of cypress (or perhaps fir) trees. The excavators have now replanted the site, restoring its former appearance (Fig 1: they have followed Pausanias, who mentioned cypress trees in the second century AD)’ (Conan, M., Sacred gardens and landscapes: ritual and agency 2007 p.18).  See also Sacred Groves: Sacrifice and the Order of Nature in Ancient Greek Landscapes 2007 Barnett R. Landscape Journal, 26:2. University of Wisconsin Press, 252-269 (kindly made available by Rod Barnett at http://www.rodbarnett.co.nz/texts/)

Image courtesy Miriam Mollerus

Is the Millennium London Eye a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

23 Replies

The The Merlin Entertainments London Eye makes Central London resemble a Fun Fair

Following in the footsteps of Britain’s most quoted historians (W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman) we should ask: is the London Eye is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

  • 30m people have ridden in the Eye (@ £17.5 each =£525m) and the owners pay the South Bank Centre £2.5m/year to rent a tiny strip of land. It thus enriches London and Londoners. This is a Good Thing.
  • The London Eye makes Central London resemble a Theme Park: County Hall and the Palace of Westminster have lost their dignity and now resemble toys in a model village. This is a Bad Thing.
  • The London Eye was originally given planning permission for 5 years but was then made permanent, thus enriching the owners at the expense of the public good. This was a Bad Thing.

On balance the London Eye is therefore a Bad Thing and Lord Rogers was  wrong. He declared “The Eye has done for London what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris”. Lord Rogers is a decent architect but has little understanding or urban design and no understandisng of landscape architecture or geography. The Eiffel Tower does  not dominate the historic core of Paris.
The London Eye should be moved downstream of Tower Bridge, to a site which would not be dwarfed by its scale (eg Chamber’s Wharf). It should also be hoisted by 30m (from 135 metres to 165 metres so that it is higher than the Star of Nanchang (160 m). This would be a Very Good Thing.


Seen from St James Park, the London Eye makes Whitehall resemble a themed hotel in Disneyland

Seen from St James Park, the London Eye makes Whitehall resemble a themed hotel in Disneyland