Category Archives: Urban Design

Urban food production and urban agriculture

8 Replies
This is called urban agriculture - but the food is not grown in a field (agri in Latin)

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.

Urban parks, POS and landscape architecture

22 Replies


The Skateboard park on London's South Bank is a specialised POS, created by and for its users - in defiance of the authorities

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.

NIMBY Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism

6 Replies
Hundertwasser's design for Spa Blumeau increases the urban area while allowing a vegetated landscape to develop

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.

Saana Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery

3 Replies
The Saana Pavilion would be EVEN more beautiful with water and bamboos, instead of white chippings and trad flower pots
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:

  1. 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)
  2. attract many extra visitors and far more media coverage, because gardens get far more media attention than buildings
  3. match the etymology of ‘pavilion’ as a building integrated with its setting
  4. achieve the wondrous goal of encouraging indoor and outdoor designers to work together on every possible occasion
  5. 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 and the Compton Bassett garden design

Leave a Reply
Robbie Williams bought this garden, with the adjacent house, for £8.5m in 2009

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:

From little things big things grow

2 Replies

las_vegas-strip

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown first released their text Learning From Las Vegas in 1972 the idea of the importance of  unity or disunity of vision created within the visual environment by urban patterning and built form had been greatly neglected.

Perhaps, the shock of the everyday assisted in alerting the design professions to the importance of the prosaic nature (common v heroic) of the constructed urban environment even where hyper-reality is the norm.

The text is credited with re-humanising the built environment through its influence in promoting and disseminating the tenets of the emerging Postmodern movement.

Learning from Las Vegas continues to  influence in surprising and controversial ways the thinking of designers including landscape designers and multi-media designers through its insightful analysis of the visual environment.

Viewing the original photographs of Denise Scott Brown is a revelation in perception and an eye for beauty in the ordinary.

Source: http://www.stuffintheair.com/weather-underground-vegas.html

Scott Brown Photographs [http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/1996064.article]

Landscape [http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2009/08/reading-list-learning-from-las-vegas.html]