Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 162 May 2019 i Landscape Architecture Australia

For Aboriginal people, Country differs from the concepts of landscape or space in that it is inseparable from both notions of the human world and the environment. Australian ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose has described Country as “a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, anda will toward life… Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place,” something ‘over there’ to be drawn or operated on. Rather, it is a concept in which the “values of life are pre-given…”1 And in the words of place-based learning scholar Margaret Somerville: “Country is not place, but nor is it nature or environment. There is no separation of human activity and the natural world… Country never loses the sense that the original creation story is still always there,…

Concrete is a visually pleasing and highly versatile construction material that delivers the resilience and durability required for projects in the harsh Australian environment. When combined with well-considered design and construction practices, concrete can be used to create beautiful, highly durable landscapes within our cities. Available in a wide range of treatments, concrete can be coloured, textured and cast to fit a vast array of uses, from small-scale private artworks to much larger-scale public infrastructure. Choosing concrete means to contribute sustainably to urban development – as a material it enjoys an outstanding reputation for durability, efficiency and architectural flexibility. Coast Apartments SJB Architects with artist Mika Utzon Popov designed a concrete art wall for the entryway to the luxury Coast Apartments at North Bondi. The 7.2-metre-long sculpture features six precast…

The residue of both manmade and natural events saturates our landscapes, sometimes this residue is profoundly evident, other times it is more obscure. The recent works of Melbourne-based artist James Geurts register such potent forces – foregrounding river surges, subterranean eruptions and oceanic tidal flows, but also the pillaging, blasting and hewing of space by humans along with our attempts to exploit, understand, modify and represent the environment in which we live. In highlighting the energies and affordances of landscape, Geurts explores our ability to attend and perceive, and the cultural lenses through which we make sense of our surrounds. Through acts of mapping, writing and drawing, Geurts renders the potent yet unseen phenomena of our environment visible and brings the dynamic forces that entangle us to our attention. Geurts’s…

Interview Since founding her Bangkok-based practice Sanitas Studio in 2010, Sanitas Pradittasnee has created works that blur the boundaries between art and landscape, reinterpreting traditional ideas for a rapidly changing urban context. In preparation for her visit to Melbourne to speak at the Landscape Australia Conference on 11 May, Pradittasnee spoke with Landscape Architecture Australia about metaphorical space, material meaning and changing attitudes through design. Landscape Architecture Australia: You studied landscape architecture first, worked for several years and then went to London to study fine arts. What inspired this combination? Sanitas Pradittasnee: After I graduated [in landscape architecture] I started to be interested in art. I didn’t want to be limited only to the functional or the aesthetic [in landscape practice], I wanted to make work that was more meaningful…

Doubleground Melbourne, Victoria Muir and Openwork As you emerge from Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and enter the courtyard, it’s unclear where Doubleground, the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission by Muir and Openwork begins or ends. Its presence is transformative, yet also embedded within the Grollo Equiset Garden – there’s an underlying sense that it could have always been there. A field of yarrow and strawflower sways at eye level, and emerging from a sharp, tilted embankment, kangaroo paw hovers over an understorey of native and exotic species. The blooms serve as a beacon that draws visitors (both human and a variety of birds and insects) toward the work. Henry Moore’s lady (Draped Seated Woman, 1958) has been offered a bouquet of flowers to admire, the shifting tones of yellow…

Much has been written about dogs and cats seeking out human company and the forging of a relationship beneficial to both. But what if there was a plant that was capable of the same thing? A plant that domesticates itself to take advantage of humans, currently the most prolific landscape modifiers in existence, might at the same time offer us a multitude of benefits through its presence. The self-domesticating plant in question is a tree that residents of urban environments on Australia’s eastern coast would see every day, even if it escapes their notice. Every spring this plant’s heady scent fills our suburban streets and passers-by comment on its sweetness, which is often mistaken for jasmine. Instead, its source is Pittosporum undulatum (sweet pittosporum), an Australian native rainforest plant, that…

We often discuss climate change in relation to rising temperatures, storm surges and sea level rise and the impacts these will have on where and how we live. This brings to bear the specific, localized environmental and urban challenges that we face, and gives transparency to issues such as the localized inequities affecting low socioeconomic groups and under-represented communities. Resiliency is a common topic foregrounding many discussions within the government sector, non-profit organizations and university research groups. Many are tackling issues of risk and resiliency through the modelling and simulation of the possible effects of climate change, the adoption of policy changes across various sectors and levels of government, and the staging of design competitions that open a dialogue around issues at play while catalysing the development of new and…

For those who know him well, there are two Hugh Mains. One is the charming, boyish urban landscape designer with a tattoo of flowering tendrils descending his left arm. A man delighting in subtle gardens and thoughtful clients. The other Hugh Main is a reflection of his country origins: a Hugh in love with the simple indoor/outdoor existence he enjoys on his Gloucester farm, observing the countryside in detail as he rides over the hills or trains for the Australian Stock Horse Society National Show in Tamworth. Main grew up in the Glen Innes district of New South Wales. Tough conditions on the land in the late twentieth century persuaded many country boys to look for employment in the city. Quite a few found they had a natural affinity for…

The walls. Carefully collaged. Carefully traced. Carefully modelled. Carefully cut by the robot. Five hundred and fifteen individual pieces, each with a unique shape and angle cut to a tolerance of one-hundredth of a degree. A system of parts, one utterly reliant on the next. Each hidden face is robot-etched with a sequential number. The walls are a love letter to exactitude written by us and those who installed them. From the truss skeleton to landscape infill, structural solidity. A series of forms, spaces, corridors, rooms, embankments, walls, retaining and defining the edge. A hard edge. What we hadn’t expected from this project [the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission: Doubleground, see review page 20] were the physical responses by children, too short to see up and over the walled balustrade into…

NEW PRECINCT FOR BOTANIC GARDENS The Victorian Government has committed $5 million to begin work on the planning and design of a new nature and science precinct at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The plans include the restoration and expansion of the National Herbarium of Victoria, built in 1934, to include a plant identification service; the expansion of the existing children’s garden; and the return of the Great Melbourne Telescope to the Melbourne Observatory. The funding will be used for a feasibility study that will establish the project’s scope and design. Image: Guilfoyle’s Volcano at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne designed by Andrew Laidlaw. Image: Katie O’Brien rbg.vic.gov.au | premier.vic.gov.au LAND ART GENERATOR 2019 OPENS The 2019 edition of the Land Art Generator Initiative calls for landscape architects, artists and creative…

Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre rooftop spaces Melbourne, Victoria Rush Wright Associates In comparison to their European and North American counterparts, Australian landscape architects have been relatively slow in getting rooftop gardens off the ground. Until the last decade of the twentieth century, Australia’s wide brown lands and sweeping plains had appeared adequate in accommodating the nation’s comparatively small population’s wish to live within the quarter-acre block suburban myth near public parks and gardens. The spike in the new millennium of an increasingly urbanized population, in particularly in Sydney and Melbourne (whose populations each reached 5 million in 2016 and 2018, respectively) necessitated an increase in design responses to ameliorate the deleterious effects of urbanization, not least in readdressing the decline in public open space. Over the past twenty years the…

In the Gumbaynggirr Aboriginal language, Yandaarra means “to shift camp together.” As Yandaarra, we walk together, shift camp together, and live and work in, with and as Country. We are at a point where a radical shift is necessary, to learn how to better live on and with Mother Earth. When this shifting happens, it needs to occur on many different levels: in our lives, our dreams, our work, our homes and our families, and through broader structures that can allow a genuinely respectful coming together. Yandaarra is a collaboration led by Aunty Shaa Smith under the guidance of the Old Fellas and Gumbaynggirr Country with her daughter Neeyan Smith (allowing the knowledge to continue being passed from generation to generation). Yandaarra includes non-Gumbaynggirr academics Sarah Wright, Paul Hodge and…

In 2018 Bangkok was the world’s most visited city for the third year in a row, sitting ahead of London and Paris, which came in at second and third place respectively. Yet in the much-hyped Economist Global Liveability Index, Bangkok scored a glum ninety-eighth place in 2018. It’s this vast disconnect between the city’s high ranking as a global tourist destination and the poor quality of life enjoyed by many citizens that defines the work of Thai landscape architecture practice Shma – a firm that elegantly balances a strong base in high-end commercial work with provocative self-initiated projects that seek to improve the social and ecological conditions of Bangkok. Founded in 2007 by directors Namchai Saensupha, Prapan Napawongdee and Yossapon Boonsom, Shma is part of a cohort of emerging Asian…

To design is to make a proposition about an imagined future. To design environments, as with architecture, engineering and landscape architecture, is to presume that it is possible to predetermine the form and elements of the design – to know not only what those elements are and how they work, but also what their form is or could be, and how they might be made. In his book Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, Julian Raxworthy, a Dubai-based landscape architecture academic well known in his native Australia, explores what could be considered one of the “elephants in the room” for the discipline of landscape architecture – the prediction of the form and performance of plants through time. Can a landscape architect really predict these with confidence and on what…