Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 165 February 2020 i Landscape Architecture Australia

Roma Street Parkland is a sixteen hectare park located in the centre of Brisbane and listed as an iconic touristic destination. Its “Seasonal Plants” brochure promotes this space as “one of the world’s largest subtropical gardens in a city centre.” This statement immediately opens up an expectation to visitors – they are here to visit a garden, not a park. It also discloses and celebrates the programmatic agenda set by the Queensland government brief, which required that by the end of the twentieth century, Roma Street Parkland provide “a high-level visitor attraction with emphasis on horticulture and the environment.”1 The parkland opened to the public in 2001 and almost two decades later one could argue that the success of its sociocultural reception is expressed in the sheer number of its…

In September 2017, Moscow’s first new park in more than fifty years was opened. A collaboration between Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DSR), Hargreaves Associates and Citymakers, Zaryadye Park introduces Russia’s four ecological zones of tundra, steppe, forest and wetland into the very heart of Moscow. This strategy of “wild urbanism” is somewhat familiar, sharing similarities with DSR’s treatment (with James Corner Field Operations) for the much-celebrated High Line. Both approaches combine a messy ecology with a flexible paving strategy, blurring the delineation of planting and movement. But any references are quickly forgotten when encountering the constructed park in its extraordinary context. Zaryadye Park is located on prime Moscow real estate. Next to the famed Red Square, the Moscow River and Kitay-gorod, a cultural and historical area in the city’s centre,…

RECIPIENT Cheng Xing PROGRAM Master of Landscape Architecture, The University of Melbourne PROJECT STATEMENT Melbourne is facing growing pressure over waste management, with extensive food waste currently being placed in landfill. This proposal explores the potential of this undervalued resource as a source of renewable energy in the urban context. The site is Box Hill. Like many suburban contexts, residents would be hesitant to accept a factory-like energy facility into their immediate environment. This scheme integrates a hybridizing waste-to-energy facility with public open space to produce a new spatial and programmatic typology that produces renewable energy while respecting the suburban context and providing recreational and natural amenity. Put more simply – the project aims to turn NIMBY into IMBY. The scheme embeds a biogas generating system into a grassed landfill…

The sixth AILA International Festival of Landscape Architecture: The Square and the Park was convened in the splendid Deakin Edge theatre, situated in a square (Federation Square), overlooking a park (Birrarung Marr). Across a well-paced two-day program with a mix of presentation formats and topics, international speakers brought global and regional perspectives on contemporary issues of contextualizing, designing, delivering and managing exemplary urban landscape projects. These were balanced with shorter talks from local academics and practitioners. The line-up included comic interludes, a debate, a question and answer session with speakers, along with generous amounts of time for breaks, good food and coffee, chats with sponsors and exchanges with professional colleagues. And in a piece of performance activism, delegates were directed out to Fed Square to express solidarity with the climate…

The Future Park International Design Competition was an unusual competition. Unlike iconic park competitions such as the 1858 competition for New York’s Central Park, the 1982 competition for Paris’s Parc de la Villette, the 1999 competition for Toronto’s Downsview Park and the 2001 competition for New York’s Fresh Kills, Future Park did not have a specific site. And in contrast to ideas competitions that ask for the site to be found or created (as with LA Plus journal’s call to design an island or International Competitions in Architecture’s series of houses for architects), there was a real city (Melbourne) for designers to grapple with. This combination of the unconstrained nature of an “ideas” competition and the limitations of grounding within place, meant that the entries hovered at the brink of…

During his tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard was intent on stimulating discussion to define Australian identity. This culminated in what commentators referred to as the “culture wars” – public debates over interpretations of the British colonization of Australia. Projects for Perth’s waterfront, conceived in the lead-up to this period constitute both responses to Australia’s contested history and identity, as well as “symbolic pointers to what was taking place in the psyche” of European Australian society.1 By virtue of the way they symbolize nature, the projects question how European Australian culture relates to Australia’s landscape and Indigenous culture. Perth waterfront schemes in the 1990s In the 1990s, Perth’s foreshore – a vacuous greenbelt “reclaimed” from the river in the twentieth century – was the site of…

In the 1990s, prior to the ubiquity of the internet and with few built “design” projects in Australia as exemplars, being interested in design was a lonely affair. In drawings and physical collages – literally, a virtual reality – one projected qualities of landscapes that required one to imagine what might be from a re-presentation of what was in the real landscape. Books and magazines that made it to Oz (in boutique bookshops, now long gone) were voraciously sought and shared, then photographed for slides to use in university lectures. Publications from Europe were most sought after. After the Catalan journal Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme and the French journal, Pages Paysages, my most valued book of the time, as both a new studio teacher and landscape architect, was Kienast: Gärten…

RECIPIENT Oshadi Jayasinghe PROGRAM Master of Landscape Architecture, Deakin University PROJECT STATEMENT Revival is a program for the rehabilitation of drug addicts and land. The project aims to create a connection between mind, body and soul, enabling a fresh start for both patients and the site. Revival responds to a government-identified need for a rehabilitation centre in the Latrobe Valley due to drug addiction issues in the region. The project aims to fulfil that need and engage the existing conditions of the site at the same time. Located off the Tyers-Walhalla Road in the Latrobe Valley and long-abandoned, the site is surrounded by a natural reserve, rich in biological and topographical diversity. The design aims to rehabilitate the site while the drug rehabilitation program is underway. Using a holistic approach…

RECIPIENT Rainie Zhang PROGRAM Master of Landscape Architecture, RMIT University PROJECT STATEMENT Nomadic Mechanism addresses desertification in Chad, in north-central Africa. Here, the spread of the desert has contracted the water supply and exacerbated conflict between the farmers who need land to cultivate crops and the pastoralists who need land to raise animals. These tensions, and the social and ecological relationships that underpin them, play out across a calendar defined by hydrological systems, cropping schedules, migratory herding and other processes. This project includes the development of a “strategic atlas” to understand the complexity of these processes. The atlas maps the retreat of Lake Chad over the past several decades and identifies the impact of water scarcity in terms of how the area’s groups relate to each other and to the…

RECIPIENT Emma Lacoste PROGRAM Bachelor of Landscape Architecture (Honours), UNSW Sydney PROJECT STATEMENT Can our urban freshwater creeks still be considered nature if they are no longer able to sustain our native wildlife? Returning Toongabbie is a hybrid creekfront strategy that builds resilience to climate change and the stresses of urbanization. The creekfront of Toongabbie Creek in Northmead, NSW becomes an integrated and activated urban parkland corridor. Northmead and its surrounding suburbs will experience rapid urban growth as the population doubles over the next twenty years. Toongabbie Creek is an important tributary waterway that feeds fresh water into Parramatta River and is identified in the Sydney Green grid strategy as a potential east–west green-linkage, connecting Blacktown and Parramatta. Toongabbie Creek is one of many degraded freshwater creeks in the Parramatta…

2020 ASIA PACIFIC ARCHITECTURE FESTIVAL PROGRAM Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom of Bangkok-based practice Landprocess will be speaking at The Architecture Symposium 2020 to be held in Brisbane on 13 March. The symposium forms part of the Asia Pacific Architecture Festival which will engage with the theme of “Water.” Voraakhom is known for her work that focuses on urban resilience and porous cities, including her recent design for a flood-absorbing park at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. asiapacificarchitecturefestival.com ASPECT TO DESIGN KALGOORLIE CITY CENTRE Aspect Studios has been appointed to design the redevelopment of the city centre of regional Western Australian town Kalgoorlie-Boulder. The project will involve “the development of a project delivery strategy as well as cultural engagement and development of an Aboriginal procurement and employment plan to drive local…

As Australia’s first fully-realized linear park, comprehensively integrating environmental, recreational and economic objectives, Adelaide’s River Torrens Linear Park was groundbreaking. Concept designs for the more-than-500-hectare park that winds through Adelaide city and its suburbs were prepared in the 1970s, offering a coordinated vision for a park that embraced and connected the varying ecologies, functions and character of the river’s landscape. The project’s ambition was to provide a flexible framework, governed by a central authority, that would guide the development and maintenance of a future park. The Karrawirra pari (“Red Gum Forest River”) has been revered by the Kaurna people, the Traditional Custodians of the Adelaide Plains, from time immemorial – its rhythms shape their social, economic and spiritual world1. Within a few years of European occupation however, the natural river…

In light of the recent addition of Melbourne’s Federation Square to the Victorian Heritage Register, the Victorian state government has announced a review of the square’s governance, finances and built form, in consultation with the community1. In undertaking this review, the Victorian state government has recognized that the people of Victoria feel passionately about their public square and that the proposal, announced in December 2017, to demolish the square’s existing Yarra Building to make way for an Apple flagship store was a symptom of, not a solution to, a broader range of issues. What are the challenges facing today’s contemporary town square – and how might Fed Square meet these challenges in the years to come? Traditionally the town square was physically defined at the confluence of governance, faith and…

Philanthrocapitalism has come to public parks. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a local billionaire is making a $465 million park in an effort to give the city a green heart, like other great cities do. The billionaire is doing it in a way the state or city never could, crippled as they are by the public’s ingrained avoidance of providing any tax base. The park’s dollar amount is staggering. Half a billion. The democratic ideal of social integration is a key goal of Gathering Place. The project currently consists of 27 hectares of sports and wetland and lake and towering rockscapes and planned skateboard park and dining strip, all assured with a $100 million endowment for maintenance and programming. Two massive land bridges span a highway to bring the park to the…

RECIPIENT Rebecca Lee PROGRAM Bachelor of Design (Landscape Architecture), Queensland University of Technology PROJECT STATEMENT Apotheosis explores drought as a socially constructed hazard and interrogates the privatization of water and the cold and calculated valuation of communities and people based on their purchasing power. This speculative project brings to the forefront the position of many political and economic documents which state that drought-proofing regional and rural Queensland is not financially viable. Why? Because primary production industries can never generate the revenue needed to justify such a scheme. Using the radical imagery of Roma as Central [The Drought City] and Brisbane as District 1 [The Drought Production Centre], Apotheosis spatially inverts the existing power dynamic in Queensland. The project asks viewers to read the accompanying images and ask themselves: What determines…

RECIPIENT Shan Huang PROGRAM Master of Landscape Architecture, The University of Adelaide PROJECT STATEMENT Humans have a long history of dominating animals and nowhere is this more evident than in the history of zoos. While animal welfare standards and guidelines have greatly improved, the relationship between tourists and animals remains unbalanced. Adelaide Sense City Zoo aims to shift this balance by allocating space back to animals in the zoo. More space will be returned to the animals with visitors navigating the environment through tunnels in the landscape that rise and fall and move through different terrains. The tunnels allow visitors to have a unique experience in each animal’s environment; to feel and experience how animals sense in different ways. The proposal features pipes comprised of block colours that allow visitors…