Category Archives: Sustainable design

Eyesorit: I love lawns

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My definition of an eyesorit is  ‘an urban design which makes the eyes sore but tinged with mirth’, rather as Private Eye Magazine does with its brilliant covers. Normally, they are photographs with bubble captions.Print

The architect, the town planner, the highway engineer and the landscape architect responsible for this codge-up, photographed in London’s Isle of Dogs on 19.4.2009 should only venture out wearing shame-guards. It is a stupid waste of some of the world’s prime urban land. The road and the paths are ugly and too wide. The gardens and the balconies are too small. The lawn is but an exercise ground for lawn mowers. The greenspace  has no use and no beauty. Its maintenance wastes fossil fuels. And yet this example is much better than many of the residential blocks the city has shoved up in the past decade, making London what Rasmussen might have called a ‘less-unique city’. It makes one wonder if professional bodies are worth having – and reminds one of Adam Smith’s remark that: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”


Abu Dhabi and sustainable landscape architecture in the Gulf

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abu_dhabi_corniche_eastSince Gulf and Asian landscape architecture are improving, it may be a good time to dwell on past mistakes. The above  photo is of the east corniche in Abu Dhabi. It was designed in conjunction with major traffic routes and exemplifies what goes wrong when landscape architecture work is supervised by firms of engineering consultants. The east corniche ‘park’ lies beside a 12 lane carriageway and flyover. It is a horrible place to be, especially during the rushhour. Pedestrian access just about impossible.  Abu Dhabi is not short of money but this is a terrible way to waste water, space and resources. The ‘park’, better described as a ‘GARK‘, is ‘decorated’ with petunias, lawns and a fountain. Abu Dhabi is developing a grey water mains water supply but many lawns of this type are watered with drinking water. Grassland irrigation is calculated at 12 litres per square meter per day, which is 4,380 litres of water per square metre per year. Since there are about 58,000 sq m of grass, it must require about 250 million litres of water per year. In desert conditions, petunias probably require more water. Desalination plants dump their excess salt back into the Gulf. This will turn the mangroves yellow in perhaps 50 years.  Beyond the gark, to the right, you can see the tops of the mangrove swamps which border the Abu Dhabi Gulf coast. The mangroves grow practically without maintenance in seawater. They are an ecological treasure chest and very beautiful. One wonders if the ‘designer’ of the Corniche east park ever woke up and felt really stupid about what he or she had done. It is not too late to commission a landscape architecture firm to claim the gark for the mangroves.

Parliament House Canberra green roof

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canberra_parliament_green_roof1Seeing Green over new ground cover proposal for Parliament House

One way of promoting green roofs and investigating the question of their  accessibility is to look at some of the excellent examples which now exist.

Parliament House, Canberra is probably one of the world’s earliest and most successful green roofs. The Parliament House building was constructed in 1988 for $1.1 billion. The reason for the design of the green roof at the time was not due to sustainability as an imperative, rather it was conceived of “in order to preserve the shape of the hill on which it was built.” The Parliament building was constructed into the top of the hill and the roof was grassed over.

The issue of the grassed roof’s sustainability has been raised by the prolonged drought conditions of recent years. The architect of the original building, Romaldo Giurgola, is against all proposals to replant the roof with more sustainable hardy, native or drought tolerant plants. He believes that grass turf is an intimate part of the conception of the building and that any change “would completely destroy the form of the building.” http://greenroofs.wordpress.com/category/politics/

I suggest an online design competition to produce and debate alternative forms of cover which would satisfy the perceived need for a more sustainable ground cover and satisfy the demanding eye of the architect who rightly has regard to the heritage value of his work and to its design integrity. 


The landscape architecture of bicycling in China

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526297738_e8cf7e2b9f_bThe BBC broadcast a programme on the Fall and Rise of the Bicycle in China http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/fallandriseofthebicycle/ which was actually about the Rise and Fall of the Bicycle in China. The main point was that the world’s greatest cycling country aims to become the world’s greatest motoring country. In Beijing the cycle lanes are being narrowed and cars are being allowed to obstruct them. I don’t know if the presenter has experience of cycling in Beijing but I can tell him about another problem: many of the cycle lanes are full of near-silent electric motor bikes. To people like me, who are in the habit of using their ears to discover when a motorbike is about to overtake, this can be very dangerous. I would not want any westerners to be in the position of appearing to say ‘you can’t live as we live’. But I am happy to pronounce that ‘most western countries made a terrible mistake when they switched from bikes to cars (eg from 1920-1960) so please think a thousand times before you make the same mistake. Beijing still has some of  the best cycle paths in any capital city (photo courtesy Rich & Cheryl)

A Chinese contributor to the programme explained that riding a bicycle is a working class and driving  a car shows that you are an important person. That is why the Chinese landscape architecture profession needs to become involved. Landscape architects can design such safe and beautiful cycle lanes that using them becomes a mark of what used to be the distinghishing characteristic of China’s scholar-officials: GOOD TASTE. Come my Chinese friends and colleagues: show the world what you can do and we should do.  Cycle planning should be incorporated with greenway planning and design, in China and everywhere.

Sustainable urban design and landscape architecture – definitions

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The Bruntland Commission may have set back sustainable urban design by half a century with an idiotic definition: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” It gives anyone who wants it an excuse for doing nothing and claiming they are acting sustainability. What are my ‘needs’: one bicycle or two cars? And what are ‘needs’ of future generations: no bicycles and three cars?

The reason for Bruntland’s blunder is that sustainability is a relative concept, like ‘near’ and ‘far’, incapable of absolute definition. Is the moon near or far from the earth? It is very near for space travelers but very far for cyclists.   We should boast an inability to design ‘sustainable cities’ but assert a competence in making cities ‘more sustainable’. As urban designers and landscape architects we do this by planning for  fewer inputs and fewer outputs than the International Modern Cities which too many architects and engineers have designed, are designing and will design. Here are some examples:

1.  Cities will require less input of water because we are expert in sustainable urban drainage systems – and they will have less output of waste water because we know how to detain and infiltrate water within urban areas.

2. Cities will require less import of construction materials from distant lands because we believe in respecting the Genius Loci and using the local materials which he provides for our use.

3. City building will involve less transport of excavated subsoil to dumps because we will use it design new landforms.

4. Less energy will be required for heating and cooling because we will orientate buildings correctly and design with microclimate.
5. Planting schemes will require less irrigation, less maintenance and less input of chemicals because we  will make more use of native plant materials and will make lawns only when they have a social use.

6. People will walk more and cycle more because we will design beautiful and convenient paths – and we will do this before any roads or buildings are planned.

7. When people get more exercise they will have better health, so that the resource inputs for healthcare will also be reduced and we will have less medical waste to dispose of.

8. Buildings will be better insulated, because almost all of them will have vegetated roofs, and will therefore require less heating in winter and less cooling in summer.

9. Cities will be more compact because there will be less roadscape, fewer parking lots and  less need for greenspace at street level – because we are going to make such wonderful skyparks and skygardens.

The inputs and outputs exemplified above are all measureable, just as the distance from the earth to the moon is measurable.

See also: Eco-city plans and sustainable design

Landscape architecture as stewardship of the land

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The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) states that “Landscape architecture encompasses the analysis, planning, design, management, and stewardship of the natural and built environments.” For me, there are two problems with this as a definition of landscape architecture: (1) ‘encompasses’ is a weak term – I would prefer a definition of landscape architecture (2) I feel uneasy with the term ‘stewardship’, possibly because my peasant ancestors suffered at the hands of harsh stewards employed by bullying barons.

In an interesting article on Steward Leadership in the Public Sector, Marilyn J. Smith writes that “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines stewardship as, “the conducting, supervising, or managing of something: Especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care” (Merriam-Webster, Inc. 1999). For Christians, stewardship began when God gave Adam dominion over the Garden of Eden. Even prior to the Bible, the ancient Greeks, Buddha, and Lao Tqu articulated the same concept (Spears, 1998: pp. 162-3).”   Her comment is well-intentioned but deepens my uneasiness (1) I do not see landscape architecture as an essentially public sector activity (2) I can’t help remembering Ian McHarg’s  comment on the Book of Genesis that ‘If you want to find one text which if believed and employed literally, or simply accepted implicitly, without the theological origins being known, will explain all of the destruction and all of the despoliation accomplished by Western man for at least these 2,000 years, then you do not have to look any further than this ghastly, calamitous text.’

See also: definitions of landscape architecture