The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Autumn Show 2021
Architecture & Historic Urban Environments students at the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Photo: Edward Denison
Contents
4 Introduction Bob Sheil, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange 8 Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA 10 Design 16 History & Theory 22 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72 78 84 86
Landscape Architecture MA/MLA Design Studio 1 Deep Ground – Back Ground Design Studio 2 Experimental Disruptions in the Terrain Vague Design Studio 3 Human: Non-Human Design Studio 4 Ruin Futures Design Studio 5 No Man’s Land? Design Studio 6 Extractive Topographies Design Studio 7 Landscapes of Longing Design Studio 8 To Weather the Weather Design Studio 9 Unstable Ground Design Studio 10 Scripted Landscapes: Hidden logics of an open world Environment & Technology History & Theory
Introduction
It is an honour to introduce the outstanding work of our Architecture & Historic Urban Environments and Landscape Architecture Master’s programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture. Both programmes have grown and flourished significantly this year, each student place awarded amongst stiff competition, demonstrating a crucial international demand for disciplinary and professional expertise in these important areas. At a time of deep concern for both historic urban and landscape environments, where the planetary climate crisis, widespread socioeconomic inequalities and a pandemic intersect, the work of our students inspires. Their projects embrace histories and theories of ecologies informed by discourses in architecture, art, philosophy and scientific and environmental disciplines. Their work evidences serious and committed research, pioneers new design tools, fresh viewpoints and forms of representation engaging with place-based strategies of social and environmental care, repair and renewal. Novel approaches are conveyed through static and moving images, models, marks and sounds, where ideas and propositions are shared between the real and the imaginary, the historic, the contemporary and the future, to address the complex cultural environments of the 21st century.
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These programmes consider what it means to live with, to share with, to give, to sustain and to resist. They present new forms of surveying, recording and mapping that track visible and virtual zones and networks of data; hand-making co-exists with digital-making, artisanal detail with massproduced product, the temporary with the enduring. Projects notice the over-looked and the underrepresented; the non-human is valued with the human, the certain with the uncertain; proposals explore interdependencies, co-dependencies, co-operations and collaborations. They examine facts with fictions, reasons with emotions, the intuitive with the counter-intuitive, all in urgent pursuit of bio and cultural diversities. Time and timing are explored and understood through cycles, seasons, micromoments and millennia, where durations and incubations support regenerative and integrative environments: when to act; when to wait; when to wonder. On behalf of the school, we would like to thank all the students, staff, alumni and industry partners who, together with a huge extended network of family and friends across the world, have enabled this remarkable work to come into being. Bob Sheil Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange Deputy Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture
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Fish and chips on Brighton beach in front of the ruins of the West Pier. Photo: Edward Denison
Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA
Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA Programme Director: Edward Denison
We are living in a time of planetary crisis and transformation. A century of unprecedented population growth, urbanisation and migration has imposed unsustainable pressures on the planet and heralded an entirely new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Whether working in ancient cities or ultra-modern metropolises, the greatest challenge facing built environment professionals in the future will be adapting and improving what already exists, not building anew. Rising to the challenge, this multidisciplinary programme promotes a fresh and rigorous approach to the city in the 21st century. Focusing on the themes of environmental, racial and spatial equity, students are encouraged to engage critically and creatively at any scale and through any media to re-evaluate, rethink and restore historic urban environments, making them more resilient, equitable and sustainable. Working alongside design tutors, historians and researchers with unique global experiences and diverse perspectives, students examine cities from around the world, using London as an outstanding laboratory for learning. The work presented in the Autumn Show is a selection of the final projects, completed between May and September 2021, which build on the knowledge and experience gained throughout the year in a combination of core and elective modules. These include wide-ranging thematic lectures from guest speakers, site visits to a variety of buildings and landscapes, and specific skills workshops, such as 3D scanning and model making. With the worldrenowned Survey of London team, students learn the processes of urban surveying, recording, mapping and analysis, alongside strategies and key issues concerning urban and cultural heritage. In conjunction with developing a robust theoretical and practical understanding of different sites and analytical methods, students are encouraged to become tomorrow’s leaders in the built environment professions, thinking critically and working creatively to cultivate their own mode of practice that seeks to realise a better future built on the past.
Students Kleovoulos Aristarchou, Yue Che, Shuyang Dong, Yuanyuan Dong, Jialei Feng, Laura Marie Froehlich, Yifan Gui, Nadine Waleed Hammad, Sijia Huang, Thale Kangkhao, Qingyu Kong, Yuxin Li, Amanda Spector Liberty, Rouxiu Lin, Xinxin Lyu, Aanal Mukeshkumar Mehta, Fanxi Meng, Spyridon Nikolopoulos, Francisca Elizabeth Pimentel Fuentes, Rasha Ahmad Saffarini, Yiqing Shen, Zhouyu Shi, Zengzhen Wang, Ran Wei, Liwan Xu, Choi Kiu Yeung, Biwen Yu, Jia Qing (Brian) Yue, Haoyun Zhang, Yidan Zhang, Zhi Zheng Tutors Eva Branscome, Ben Campkin, Hannah Corlett, Sarah Dowding, Clare Melhuish, Afra Van’t Land Postgraduate Teaching Assistants Amr Elhusseiny, Ecem Ergin Additional Supervisors Peter Bishop, Peter Guillery, Jonathan Kendall, Guang Yu Ren, Shahed Saleem, Colin Thom Skills Tutors Danielle Purkiss, Hannah Terry
Image: Architecture & Historic Urban Environments students at M Shed, Bristol. Photo: Ecem Ergin 8
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1.1–1.3 Thale Kangkhao ‘No City: A declaration of the city in the digital era’. No City is not a design project, but a provocation into the possibilities of architecture within a city under the era of digital capitalism. No City represents a series of provocative visions of key spaces within London, transformed to serve the new era. The city is no longer a place of leisure, work or residence, but an opportunity to serve the overall interests of the country. 1.4–1.6 Kleovoulos Aristarchou ‘The Poetics of Tangible Simulacrums’. Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic caused an economic and physical exodus within the City of London. The guilds seized the opportunity to reclaim their historic seat of power. New guilds arose. The construction of the Replica Makers Livery Hall is rooted in the poetics of the process. Histories of the Postman’s Park site and London’s Brutalist elements are reinterpreted via the construction. 1.7–1.8 Nadine Hammad ‘Theatricalities of Khayamiya’. Responding to current discussions about how temporary architecture can be a precedent-setting tool for the transient modification of the values, the project questions how a reinterpretation and resuscitation of craft as a living heritage can be employed to revitalise historic buildings. The Khayamiya street tent renders a theatrical environment which swiftly fades in and out, scoring a poetic performance through a time-based architecture that offers a fluid and dynamic stage for sociability. 1.9–1.11 Haoyun Zhang ‘Kuleshov’s Window’. The design tackles the issue of privacy in confined spaces with close neighbours in a live/work environment. Using external window space in the tight urban environment of Neal’s Yard, a series of diverse and dynamic screens constructed from different materials divide the space appropriate to use, season and climate. Using the ideas behind the Kuleshov effect, the parallel lives of the residents are curated to ensure a mix of privacy and collaboration creating a compact, efficient and shared interstitial landscape. 1.12 Liwan Xu ‘Liang and Lin’s House’. In the 21st century, changes in policy, lifestyle and demands for densification have meant that the traditional Siheyuan has become obsolete. Using the threatened Siheyuan as a base, this project explores an adaptable typology to house original and new residents. Continuing the traditions of Siheyuan, the project reconciles the conflict between contemporary demands while protecting the lifestyle and collective memory of the original form. 1.13–1.15 Rasha Saffarini ‘Re(-)covered Sights of Belonging’. By interweaving social, political, religious and ecological reflections in the journey as a tool to redetermine an inclusive design, the elevation of the hill and park is preserved through carving water veins that ripple down to an underground agriculture district, enjoying private-public rainwater harvesting systems below and collective farming above for clean water and healthy produce. The hydro-social design philosophy encourages ways of knowing land and water through charity-run drinking sources, stone gardens of transient communication and mother-driven live/work dwellings. Self-sustenance facilitates autonomous economic gain while nurturing family-based collectivity in what could be a thriving Muslim society. 1.16 Francisca Pimentel Fuentes ‘Decolonising the Modern Wastescape’. Decolonising the Modern Wastescape explores the intersection between modernity and indigenous philosophies in the abandoned and old walled landfill of Alto Hospicio, Chile. The project focuses on decolonising ancestral knowledge and sacred practices, by designing with traditional indigenous structures and contemporary strategies to address problems such as gas emissions, land recovery and water use for the surrounding community. A cooperative garden 10
is envisioned to create a public space that offers relief from extreme urban and desert climate conditions. This includes developing fog-capturing methods that explore the boundary between nature in arid climates and anthropocentric ways of living, resisting current practices of land exploitation and energy waste. 1.1–1.15 Supervised by Hannah Corlett. 1.16 Supervised by Afra Van’t Land.
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Invisible Cities and the Future Heritage of Venice Amanda Liberty Supervisor: Jonathan Kendall Venice is a city of journeys, whether hourly, daily, weekly, yearly or only once in a lifetime. The Venice read in novels, journals and postcards only existed at one point in time, if ever. Individual islands dictate the narration of experiences through landmarks, sounds and paths. Various enclaves have built and shaped the city’s current form. Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, narrates an imagined encounter between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan. The text describes 55 fictional cities that contain elements of Venice, as well as other historic cities from across the globe. Using the text as a framework, the accompanying illustrations combine artistic practices with historic matter, linking the contemporary material with the trades that shaped the city but have since been replaced by tourism industries. This research looks at 11 methods of constructing the city, each generated from a means of production that has shaped and constructed the city’s fabric. Informed by the material and formal properties of creation in Venice, the design explores their architectural legacies. The work examines the various communities that have existed in the city, aiming to bring its functionally obsolescent architectural forms that have existed at multiple scales to new functional purposes. It questions the erasure of these communities 16
and whether Venice can be brought back from ‘death’ through the lenses of ground and water, cultural enclaves, industry, art and religion. The investigation catalogues, dissects, compares and maps the series of conditions that have arisen from the various communities – past and present – that have constructed Venice, exploring the array of historic, geographic and cultural conditions that have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Forms and materials that contain the potential for a future Venice to mitigate flooding concerns within the lagoon are viewed through the lens of reinterpreting artistic and industrial practices that once existed throughout the lagoon. These forms explore the consequences of previous cultural actions and rituals of water, and methods of production and creation. Using 11 historic means of production, these characters reoccupy the urban landscape.
Image: Photographs, 55 models: 11 ways to construct Venice. Image by the author
Anekāntavāda: Outside the Glass Case Heritage Paradoxes, Jain Artefacts and Living Traditions Aanal Mehta Supervisor: Shahed Saleem Anekāntavāda signifies the Jain theory of multiple perspectivism, which states that reality is multifaceted and cannot be perceived by one person. Interviews about Jain artefacts at the Victoria and Albert Museum were conducted with members from the Harrow Digamber Jain Temple in London, revealing a sense of community disconnection from the objects, manuscripts, language and histories in the museum. This project bridges scattered studies — from anthropology, historiography and theology — and provides a deeper understanding of the concept of heritage as an intangible, dynamic and living organism. The work challenges the notion of what is valuable as heritage, and to whom. “Praying is like saying prayers but watching is ... you just look at it”, said a seven-year-old boy from the community. This experiential distinction encapsulates the disparate heritage narratives based on different perspectives and associations with an idol. Observations explain how the artefacts displayed in the museum are successfully exhibited as foreign collectibles but fail to project the hidden meanings associated with the object in its indigenous locale. This dissertation explores themes of multiple texts and translations, while discussing concepts
of watching and praying, consecration and damage. Jains have been a minority religious group in India for centuries, retaining a strong sense of community and heritage even as a diaspora. The movement of an idol from one temple to another follows the movement of community members due to migration and urbanisation, as local groups adhere together in foreign lands through regional identities. Though this project is specific to Jain artefacts, it embraces the complex joy of all minor heritage narratives, encouraging others to pick up objects linked with their communities and to tell their respective oral histories. Museums are viewed as platforms to enable conversations about alternative perspectives and meanings of heritage, transforming their role from static collections of inert objects in glass cases to dynamic opportunities for interaction. What if, instead of material exhibits, we were to repopulate museums with a festival of conversations? The design proposal is a skeletal intervention derived from merging the form of the contemporary Jain temple in Harrow with a site protected by the Archaeological Survey of India in Odisha. The intervention embraces the juxtaposition of multiple heritage narratives, practices and architectural sites, highlighting its current state as observed, in order to accept language barriers, unfamiliar spaces, the absence of mainstream history, disconnection from the past and continuity in the present. Image: Photomontage, Anekāntavāda. Image by the author 17
Post-Socialist China’s Unreal Estate Xinxin Lyu Supervisor: Peter Guillery In the four decades of epic growth since China implemented its policy of ‘reform and opening up’, urbanisation has accelerated exponentially, with rural-urban migrants forming a transient population of around 285 million people. However, this is not the whole story. China’s contemporary architectural landscape has seen a unique strain of building: stadiums without audiences, apartments with no residents and commercial complexes with no customers. These dormant buildings, in limbo between nothingness and perfection, are left unfinished during construction and are reduced to ruins before ever being used. This research project focuses on a characteristic of urban crisis termed ‘unreal estate’: a neglected territory that equals a liability or an unreal value that, from an economic perspective, prevents the circulation of property in the market. While exploring the fantasy of unreal estate, wild design, a provisional and improvised version of a Chinese city, is examined. With no commitment to aesthetics or academia, wild design is dedicated to an informal urbanism that explores the circumstances and actual requirements. Wild design may be invisible in urban spaces or relegated by peers to the status of low art forms in an aesthetic game, but it is a plebeian survivalist strategy that has developed simultaneously with China’s 18
urbanisation process and is rooted in the daily lives of Chinese people. By exploring the potential value of unreal estate and the possibility of using the masses’ wisdom to adapt it to their daily needs, this proposal finds responses to the real-life dilemmas of the marginalised in metropolises, the anxious generation and ordinary citizens. The Hyper Rich unreal estate agency is established with a hypothetical mission to transform the unreal estate and provide sufficient cheap houses for people who struggle to make ends meet. The artist of the unreal estate agency takes inspiration from wild design to regenerate the city, finding rules in the chaos and using an infinitely repetitive output of information to form a functional and efficient landscape.
Image: Unreal Estate. Image by the author
Cross-Border Reunion: Nanai Settlements in the Amur Basin Fanxi Meng Supervisor: Hannah Corlett This project questions the indigenous crossborder ethnicity of the Nanai. It investigates their material and cultural exchange methods based on the existing Sino-Russian border state and looks to create a community built on the Haru island in the Amur River basin with people as the border. The project also addresses the risk of seasonal floods that occur in spring and summer through an understanding of the existing local materials, architectural language and construction methodology that responds directly to the environment already embedded within the Nanai’s vernacular architecture. The development of the vernacular language looks to embrace contemporary advances in construction and technology, as well as changes to family structures and styles of living, while looking to reconstruct the disappearing national identity in the context of political change. This dynamic border community will be cohesively constructed in three ways: •
The introduction of an autonomous free trade zone for the indigenous peoples in opposition to the development model defined by state propaganda. This is a reinterpretation of the tribute-based material and cultural exchanges between the original and the main ethnic group
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after the re-cohesion of the same ethnic group across the border. The settlements will record and develop the texture of the natural landscape, strategically reproducing the internal network of the community following the imposition of large-scale infrastructure. Through dissemination of architectural language and construction methods via the circulation of an accessible brochure.
Due to the rise of nationalism in the local Nanai community, the creation of forums and the sharing of knowledge about the built environment have become possible. The brochure breaks down the construction of the building components in a graphically simple way, making it easy for the local people to follow. This allows knowledge to be passed on, stimulating curiosity and creating a cohesiveness to the community within this cross-border landscape. Vernacular architecture is constantly changing and developing, as seen through the archives of architecture and ethnic settlement, encouraging and representing the continuous reconstruction of community identity. This project both stimulates change and understands history.
Image: Sketch of the brochure production. Image by the author 19
Fieldwork by students in Sicily. Photo: Design Studio 2
Landscape Architecture MA/MLA
Landscape Architecture MA/MLA Programme Directors: Laura Allen, Mark Smout
Landscape Architecture MA and MLA are new and evolving professionally accredited programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture. They respond to an increasing urgency to contribute to the understanding of ecological and environmental fields, and their relationship with the built environment. In this era of climate emergency, these Master’s programmes – focusing on landscape research, technical knowledge, strategic thinking and imaginative design – give students the unique ability to work with real-world problems at a local and global scale. These challenges include issues of sustainability, biodiversity, environmental justice and landscape inequality, affected by the transformative potential of climate change across rural and urban landscapes. Shown here is work from the ten design studios with distinct agendas, led by landscape practitioners, architects, urban designers and academics. Their interests are broad and varied, addressing numerous speculative grounds for designing a better future. Themes include experimentation with multi-species design; considering humans and non-humans in urban contexts; adaptive strategies for designing with dynamic coastal systems; the study of weather and landscape design under new climate regimes; future strategies for today’s extraction landscapes; and experimentation with scripting as a generative and critical design, to mention just a few. The interests of the ten studios reflect the breadth and depth of Landscape Architecture’s spatial and intellectual focus here at The Bartlett. The design studio provides fundamental and specialised knowledge and a strong identity from which students develop and launch their own approach to the contemporary study of landscape architecture. Design teaching is delivered side-by-side with history and theory, practice, and environmental and technical teaching. Also presented here are excerpts of work from the Landscape Thesis module and Environment and Technology modules. It has been a challenging year and we are profoundly impressed by how swiftly our students adapted to working at home, online teaching, navigating digital whiteboards and contributing to virtual crits. With students scattered around the world, we had the opportunity to learn about and virtually visit countless new sites and landscapes in their local environments, expanding and enriching the scope and scale of many studios’ design work. We say farewell and thank you to our MA students and graduating MLA cohort from a distance. As we say our goodbyes, we are embarking on a new year of Landscape Architecture at The Bartlett. We look forward to building on the lessons, knowledge and experimentation developed over the last year to embrace a greater scope of design, theoretical, technological, cultural, environmental and ecological enquiry. 22
Year Coordinator Aisling O’Carroll Design Studio Tutors Ana Abram, Nico Alexandroff, Kirsty Badenoch, Richard Beckett, Tom Budd, Matt Butcher, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Tiffany Kaewen Dang, Günther Galligioni, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Cannon Ivers, Johanna Just, Kyriaki (Katie) Kasabalis, Ness Lafoy, Katya Larina, CJ Lim, Alex Malaescu, Doug John Miller, Agostino Nickl, Kyrstyn Oberholster, Maj Plemenitas, Danielle Purkiss, Eric Wong, Sandra Youkhana History & Theory Coordinators Tom Keeley, Tim Waterman Thesis Tutors Loretta Bosence, Gillian Darley, Eric Guibert, Will Jennings, Aisling O’Carroll, Ed Wall Environment and Technology Coordinator Ana Abram Practice Tutors Aitor Arconada Ledesma, Simon Colwill, Kelly Doran, Yiota Goutsou, Vladimir Guculak, James MacDonald-Nelson, Claudia Pandasi, Lyn Poon, Natalia Roussou, Mario Santaniello Coordinator of Skills and Workshops Maj Plemenitas
Image: ’Reverse Scripting: Re-imagining the People’s Playground’, Jingwen Ma, Design Studio 10
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Deep Ground – Back Ground
Design Studio 1
Ana Abram, Maj Plemenitas
‘Deep ground’ refers to the understanding of landscape as a multiscale territory, where coexistent dynamic processes of formation, reconfiguration and destruction lead to new cycles of creation. Outputs of these processes are closely linked to the resilience of natural systems, due to their adaptive, developmental and evolutionary capacities. This year, Design Studio One focused on the experimental design investigation of dynamic landscapes, which are under the continuous influence of ever-changing ecosystems. Throughout the year, we continuously challenged the usually perceived notion of landscape as an undulated surface of the Earth and pushed the boundaries of its solely tangible characteristics. With the notion of ‘deep ground’, we challenged visual perceptions of the landscape to understand, read, analyse, visualise and simulate future landscape design proposals with a thick ground, which included thick atmosphere, deep structures and deep water. Our context was geomorphological processes (what is below) and thick atmospheric layers (what is above), which influence anthropogenic and natural landscapes. With that in mind, we understand landscapes as inherently dynamic, and in order to effectively design with and for them, one requires methods and tools that pose the same quality: the ability to change and simulate the ecosystem dynamics as vital design components. These continuous cycles of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic territorial agencies inform and influence the additive, subtractive, metamorphic and substitutive processes that shape and inform the specific character of the landscape, together with its cultural, material and ecological specifics. Territorial processes operate in a range of spatial, temporal and operational scales, and their evolution is being constantly documented in the landscape. The recording of gradual behaviours, acute events and nonlinear changes can be read in the strata that is visible in the organisation of structures, elements and biological agents that inhabit the landscape. Changing our environment, we act as geomorphic agents. With our design decisions we are leaving a trace on the Earth’s surface.
Students MLA Year 1 Qianyuan Chen, Zhuoying Chen, Wei Ding, Irene Carolina D’Sola Alvarado, Weicheng Feng, Dafni Filippa, Huiyu Fu, Qizhi He, Yanli Ma, Zhiqi Tao, Jiarui Wang, Ning Yan, Menglei Zhang MA Year 1 Qiyun Song Practice Tutor Santaniello Mario
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1.1 Dafni Filippa ‘Fluid Strata’. At 9:47 am (GMT) on 16th January of the year 2100, the hydrological overflows, accumulated due to the rise of global sea levels, bring London’s primary flood defence system, the Thames Barrier, out of operation. As a result, London faces a series of catastrophic events directly linked to saltwater intrusion and urban flooding in its central regions. In order to ensure the city’s survival, both above and below ground, the project deploys the existence of London’s hidden rivers as core agents of a flood defence organism. Through a series of membranous landscape tissues, valves and deep channelling systems, the hydrological overflows meander between the strata, before they fuse together to be exhausted into the deep ground. The new tectonic is based on an experimental state of hybrid materiality, focusing on responsive behaviour above and below ground. The proposed landscape exists in a reciprocal relationship with human and non-human territories changing its shape according to the water’s kinetic energy. Following the tidal Thames, the landscape operates in phases, submerging parts of its main body to lift others, which act as the central circulation for vegetation and human experience. 1.2 Qiyun Song ‘Coral Geoscape’. Coral reef ecosystems are the most biodiverse place in the world. Numerous species, including terrestrial and marine, are interconnected with these dynamic reefs. Under the Anthropocene, coral reef ecosystems are severely threatened by climate change and human activity. The coral reef in Bermuda is one such case. ‘Coral Geoscape’ focuses on coral reef ecosystem regeneration, with cooperation from humans and non-humans, and revives and reinforces ecosystem resilience through biodiversity. The project adopts local limestone residues, assembling them together and covering them with concrete. These stone structures have holes of various sizes for multiple species. They change their formation through oceanic erosion and biological growth on their surface, which creates more rugosity and small spaces for reefassociated species. The structures take between 500 and 1,000 years to change, as the coral growth and erosion process occurs very slowly. Anchor stones fasten the structure’s foundation and combine with the underground substrate through biological and non-biological influence, making the structures a part of geology. 1.3 Wei Ding ‘The Way Home’. This project demonstrates the construction of artificial river channels and the process of water erosion, as well as the connection and influence of deep ground. This strategy is universal and can be transplanted to other dams. Here, it interacts with fishways and rebuilds the ecological corridors of the Yangtze River in China. The Yangtze River has abundant hydropower and biological resources; however, in the past few decades, dozens of hydropower stations have been built along it to supply electricity. The establishment of a dam has cut off the ecological corridor and many migratory fish have either died out or are on the verge of extinction. This project builds a fish migration channel on the Three Gorges Dam – the largest hydroelectric power station on the Yangtze River – and reconnects the biological corridors in the river basin. Through analysis of deep ground layers and the land-adaptability evaluation of the Three Gorges, a potential ecological corridor for migratory fish can be found. Manual excavation of river channels around the dam can reconnect upstream and downstream, and dredge the biological corridors of the Yangtze River Basin. 1.4 Weicheng Feng ‘Inflow, Outflow: Beach restoration and surfing destination’. The Hayle Estuary is located in St Ives Bay, Cornwall. The Hayle Beach at the mouth of the estuary is an ideal surfing location. Due to the 26
interaction of tides and waves, the beach system has been eroded and shrunk and the floating sediments from the eroded beach are carried into the inner channel, causing it to silt up. The project focuses on reshaping the dune system and reducing beach erosion by providing surfers with a more stable and diverse surfing experience. The research and simulation of waves and tides are the foundation of the project. The purpose is to form a sustainable beach system and stable surfing conditions through the reconstruction of the internal beach topography and the control of waves in the shallow sea area. 1.5 Qizhi He ‘Oyster Immigration’. The Blackwater Estuary is famous for salt produced in the estuary town of Maldon in Essex. The natural environment is suitable for the reproduction and growth of gigas and mytilus. In the context of global warming and rising sea levels, various degrees of soil erosion has occurred along the estuary. Through time-scale analysis, the main cause of this erosion is the strike of waves and tides across the shore. This project explores how to effectively absorb the energy of the waves, of which the salt marshes are an important part, as well as providing oysters with a more stable environment for growth. After analysing the interaction of multiple factors, a resilient design reduces the energy of the waves, increasing the production of oysters, improving the quality of salt and, finally, forming a flexible and diverse landscape. 1.6 Huiyu Fu ‘Huayuan Dyke Burst Memorial Design’. This project is a memorial design about a devastating historical event, which is also a natural process: downstream river channel migration. The project’s focus is downstream of the Yellow River – the second longest river in China. The memorial is located in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, where a destructive war took place. There are two different styles within the memorial: narrative and morphological. First, the narrative style is for people to learn about the history of war and floods by reading, touching and feeling history by walking along the stone monuments and streams. The water calms, reflecting the stone tablets on the waterfront to create a quiet atmosphere for meditation. Second, the morphological style simulates flooding on the plain area and the natural force of flood flows sculpting the earth. Floods are destructive but they are also creative. The focus of the project is understanding how to deal with this natural power to create a series of resilient and restorative landscapes.
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Experimental Disruptions in the Terrain Vague
Design Studio 2
Cannon Ivers, Alexandru Malaescu
Critiquing the international Downsview Competition, to design a park on a former airforce base in Toronto, Julia Czerniak, professor of architecture at Syracuse University, asked the simple question, ‘How much design is enough?’.1 This line of enquiry raises important concerns across the numerous strands of the landscape architecture discipline, ranging across the social, cultural, environmental and ecological. According to Anita Berrezbietia, Chair of the Landscape Architecture programme at Harvard (GSD), ‘Landscapes embody at once culture and nature, art and science, the collective and the personal, the natural and artificial, static and dynamic’.2 In addition to these core design tenets, the extant reappropriation of streets and spaces as an urban response to the disruption caused by Covid-19 has become a particular area of focus for designers around the world. Our studio endeavoured to answer Czerniak’s question using ‘Terrain Vague’ sites as platforms for design exploration and experimentation. The term ‘Terrain Vague’ was presented by Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1942–2001) as an attempt to describe seemingly forgotten sites, fragments and leftover areas that exist around the world, most accurately identified as ‘urban voids’: ‘Void implies a space of possibility, of expectation.’ 3 The challenge, as identified by Sergio López-Piñeiro in his book A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020), is how to design these types of spaces: ‘Despite their apparent emptiness, urban voids can have as much presence as built forms. Obviously, then, the question that comes up is: how to design them?’ 4 Design Studio 2 explored sites in the UK and China to develop design strategies for a site of their choosing that fits the description of a terrain vague site, as defined by Karen A. Franck in her essay ‘Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?’ (2013). 5 We are grateful to have received lectures from Sergio LópezPiñeiro, who presented A Glossary of Urban Voids, and Pablo Sendra, who presented his book Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City (2020).
Students MLA Year 1 Farinoosh Hadian Jazy, Han-Tse Lee, Zhounan Lu, Kumphakarn Sasiprapakul, Jinming Wei, Mai Xiong, Yue Zhang MLA Year 2 Zhenni Liao MA Year 1 Anqi Li, Yulan Shen, Kai Lok Wong Practice Tutor Kelly Doran
1. Julia Czerniak (2002), Case: Downsview Park Toronto, (London: Prestel), p14. 2. Czerniak, Case, p117. 3. Sergio López-Piñeiro (2020), A Glossary of Urban Voids, (Berlin: Jovis), p120. 4. López-Piñeiro, A Glossary of Urban Voids, p29. 5. Karen A. Franck (2013) ‘Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?’, in P. Barron and M. Mariani (eds.) Terrain Vague, (New York, Routledge), pp167–84. 31
2.1 Zhenni Liao ‘Future Expedition’. A semi-abandoned quarry site, secluded from urban context, Parco delle Cave is a huge, atypical void that presents a nature of ambiguous spaces and limits of civilised scales. Located near Marsala in Sicily, the site extends across 5.8km and has a number of open pits and concealed caves dug down 35m. This terrain vague site externalises a sense of ‘immobility’ and an ‘illusory inertia’. The proposal is a confined testbed that accommodates a self-sufficient habitat. The project is derived from the events of the Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), which imagines a future civilisation and a reclaimed territory for coexistence, resources, regenerations and legacy preservations. 2.2 Kai Lok Wong ‘The Camouflaged Vineyard’. The proposal transforms the abandoned Bishopsgate Goods Yard into a multifunctional vineyard using a programmatic approach that calls for interactive and attentive exploration. It intends to remind people about its forgotten chronicle by creating a vineyard to celebrate the site as a regionally important fruit bank in the 18th century, as well as to raise awareness about rationing during the Second World War, when there was a shortage of wine, alcohol and grains. Rather than simply being a productive landscape, the proposal is performed as a storm-water garden and a water purification device, contributing to the regional and wider urban context through experimental landscape interventions. The site is intended to encourage different types of users as curators of the ‘museum’, to simultaneously learn and test out unpredictable possibilities or interactions. 2.3 Zhenni Liao ‘Future Expedition’. The project does not just talk about the applications and reinventions of terrain vagues, but also investigates their interactions by traversing a stony landscape, which is one specific void, consisting of 21 ‘indigenous uncertainties’. 2.4 Kumphakarn Sasiprapakul ‘The Sanctuary’. The project combines rich nature with spatial elements for outdoor activities. The existing site is separated into two zones: a derelict area and an active park. It proposes a gradual transformation of the existing abandoned area into a biodiverse field comprised of various human activities. 2.5 Kai Lok Wong ‘The Camouflaged Vineyard’. The proposal sees the site as a ruin. It is intended as an urban museum and a system for people to partake in its rich history, while protecting the existing artefact and spontaneous plants preserving the terrain vague quality, creating an open-ended landscape adaptable to future changes. 2.6 Mai Xiong ‘Roaming in Ages’. The Rabbit Hill is an archaeology site located in Yiyang, China, excavated in 2003. It is comprised of a large number of historical artefacts, which were pieced together as the beginning chapter of the city’s history. The discovery of the Rabbit Hill provides a chance to save the city’s history and cultural identity. The unknown heritage is isolated due to not only the surroundings and the whole city fabric, but also the history. The project becomes not just a sunken museum but also a human-friendly historical urban park. 2.7 Kumphakarn Sasiprapakul ‘The Sanctuary’. The second zone consists of an existing active natural reserve area. This terrain vague is adjacent to the Emirates Stadium and Islington Ecology Centre in London, encouraging the site to become a place for both wildlife and human interaction. This natural richness emerges as a place where animals can live and people can relax and enjoy the surroundings. Each space is comprised of specific elements for people to interact in different ways, allowing plants and wildlife to exist, grow and participate. 32
2.8 Farinoosh Hadian Jazy ‘Here-East Wetland Rehabilitation: Story of a terrain vague’. Roads, highways and buildings are some of the main features of cities, but these hard layers have an impact on our environment. One of the most important issues is the rapid increase in run-off water as the ground is not able to absorb it, causing a high risk of flooding. This project suggests a possible way to absorb the run-off by designing a wetland on a terrain vague site. A linear wetland with pathways and wooden flexible scaffoldings, encourages people to come together and use it, providing endless opportunities for visitors to engage with the site and define its use.
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Human: Non-Human Richard Beckett, Kyrstyn Oberholster
Design Studio 3 looks at new ways to integrate non-human agencies into the built environment by developing landscape proposals that are materially, geometrically and computationally driven towards reestablishing biodiversity in urban environments. 20th-century approaches to nature conservation have been criticised for being too conservative in their efforts to restore ecologies. This is also true within the context of the built environment, where urban greening approaches have had limited success as a response to the rapid nature of anthropogenic land use in cities. Urban anthromes are now predominantly associated with high nitrogen and carbon emissions, and low biodiversity dominated by introduced species. This year Design Studio 3 explored the notion of landscape assemblages within the context of the Symbiocene, exploring new ways in which design can transcend the dualism of decimation and open our cities, landscapes and minds to a more symbiotic existence with the non-human. More than just things, assemblages are constructed from diverse and dynamic sets of forces including bodies, languages and territories but also qualities, actions and emotions. The projects considered multiple scales of assemblages from the urban to the microbial, operating between territories that are constantly de- and re-territorialising, exploring new possibilities for human and non-human strategies of engagement with the land. Students investigated and independently developed real, provocative and speculative design proposals.
Design Studio 3
Students MLA Year 1 Bohan Cheng, Jinhua Hou, Jingni Kong, Ziqi Niu, Alexandra Souvatzi, Patteera Teeraratkul, Yuxi Wang, Zhengyang Wang, Xinyu Yang, Yue Yin, Yue Zhang MA Year 1 Ao Huang, Luting Pan Practice Tutor Aitor Arconada Ledesma
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3.1 Ziqi Niu ‘Reterritorialised Landscape: Silverthorne Island, Bristol’. The project explores the act of reassembling landscape typologies and rethinks the relationship between urban and natural territories. The view depicts a perennial garden with rain ponds as a reintegration of biodiversity, hydrosphere and horticulture into the urban fabric. 3.2 Zhengyang Wang ‘The Dramatic Presentation of Non-human Perspective’. This project masks the ugliness of an industrial area via light and reusing heritage buildings. Light serves as a medium and bridge, connecting humans and non-humans, allowing them to interact and connect with each other, emphasising and focusing on the non-human perspective. 3.3 Bohan Cheng ‘Future Bristol: Pioneer of marijuana cultivation’. This project grows marijuana – and provides a reproducible model for mass marijuana cultivation – in the context of future legalisation and climate change in the city of Bristol, England. 3.4 Alexandra Souvatzi ‘Bristoloniki’. Silverthorne Island hosts Bristol’s industrial activities, raising the need for bioremediation, a slow process that requires decades of care. By its end, Bristol’s climate will be able to host a Mediterranean landscape. A fruit forest and a local market elevate the site, both environmentally and financially. 3.5 Jinhua Hou ‘Calmness’. This project achieves a harmonious coexistence between humans and non-humans through terrain reflection, by reducing noise and introducing the pleasant voices of creatures. 3.6 Xinyu Yang ‘The Texture Path’. The project designs a path in an abandoned industrial area that combines human-factor and non-human-factor textures to connect buildings and areas. The image demonstrates a section of the path: The Rain Garden. 3.7 Ziqi Niu ‘Symbiotic Landscapes: Silverthorne Island, Bristol’. The project questions the existing urban territories that are assembled solely by, and for, humans. It rethinks the possibilities of creating a symbiotic reterritorialisation with human and non-human elements. Landscapes such as lepidopterariums and urban woodlands foster integrated connections. 3.8 Yuxi Wang ‘The Ocean Comb’. The Bristol Channel is connected to many rivers and most of its shores are mud flats. The design combines the trap used for fishing and the recursive fractal concept, to make a marine plastic garbage collector like land art. 3.9 Yue Zhang ‘Waterscape in the Park’. A sensory barrier and auditory shield, where one sound affects the perception of another. 3.10 Jingni Kong ‘Tiny Forest’. A natural wildlife community, hidden in a human residential area. The tree seeds randomly spread local species, just like woodlands. 3.11 Patteera Teeraratkul ‘The Bris Waterfront’. This project uses landscape design to address potential flooding problems. The wooden cellular structure allows flood protection systems to float, absorb and retain water. The wetland and terrain are designed to support the flood protection system. 3.12 Yue Yin ‘Bird’s Eye View of Chemical Remediation Pools’. A bird’s eye view from Feeder Canal, Bristol, looking across the site. The chemical remediation pools, with colourful chemical productions in the water, are built between the woods to realise the soil and underground water remediation.
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Ruin Futures Katya Larina, Doug John Miller
Our collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has challenged long-held assumptions that define much of modern urban and landscape design. One of these is the belief that the expansion of the city will in some way subsume the natural landscape, however, the mass decentralisation of the workplace has led to a recalibration of this. What happens when once intensely populated cities retract, when infrastructure disappears or when disaster tears holes in the fabric of our urban environments? This year, Design Studio 4 investigated the concept of ‘ruin as a medium’, a device for recording and sharing the stories of past and present landscapes. With students scattered across the globe, themes of post-industrial landscapes, long-term remediation and careful cartography guided our first term’s work. We began with precisely drawn maps of ruin landscapes to inspire speculative futures. Our first investigations touched on the minute and the massive across many continents. In Beijing, a vast network of construction waste processing was unearthed. Through carbon sequestration calculations, plant species research and speculation on the future of waste landscapes, a controlled process of natural succession in the face of future development was proposed. Meanwhile, in London, a centuries old gasworks became a breeding ground for a dark ecology. Local plants and miniscule bacteria coexist in the old ruins, slowly feeding and eventually remediating the poisoned soil. Our main projects for the year were located on sites of past or future ruination. Each site was balanced between complex climatic conditions and, in seeking to uproot and critique an existing relationship between people and the landscape, used detailed data modelling, on-site research and speculative drawings to map out long timelines across which proposed future landscapes could manifest. The projects from this year’s studio present an array of agendas chosen by each student, from combating the social and economic distress of food shortages in rural China to addressing the climate emergency on a local scale in the Isle of Portland’s historic mining operations, in Dorset, UK. With each project we learned from ruins to speculate potential futures.
Design Studio 4
Students MLA Year 1 Ziwen Cao, Chong Guan, Huicong Han, Lifeng Lin, Wanyi Pan, Rasika Patil, Siyu Tong, Yutong Wang, Chenran Xu MLA Year 2 Sheetal Muralidhara, Yuan Tao MA Year 1 Peng Guo, Yimeidu Tu Practice Tutor Yiota Goutsou
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4.1–4.2 Sheetal Muralidhara ‘Orchestrating a New Material Reserve’. On the Isle of Portland, a new quarry is being proposed. The displacement and creation of voids in the landscape has been witnessed by the isles for centuries across various scales: microbes create boreholes, groundwater leads to sinkholes and humans mine Portland stone. An alternative process is devised to excavate materials more sensitively, resulting in a carefully managed post-extraction landscape. The value of the local land and the extractive processes is called into question as the project interweaves various timelines – that of humanity, biodiversity and geological deep time. 4.3 Lifeng Lin ‘The Living Landscape of Feijung River’. In presenting an alternative future for the border of the industrialised and polluted Feijung River, China, a complex living landscape is proposed. Inspired by the local communities’ ad-hoc farmlands downstream, the design comprises of wetland and arable land. Rather than being rapidly developed into commercial space, the riverbank is carefully shaped over time to create green space and a natural soft flood barrier for the city. 4.4 Ziwen Cao ‘Greening the Tracks’. Located in Tangshan City, China, this project transforms an abandoned railway into a green corridor. Using existing resources present on the site the rail is transformed into a carefully zoned and productive forest. Taking advantage of the residents’ interest in their local environment nurseries and agricultural zones slowly grow alongside a series of free growing forests. 4.5 Siyu Tong ‘Symbiose with Ruins, The Migrating C&D Treatment Plant’. The natural decay of architecture and the romance of ruins in Beijing has been replaced by the modern demolition industry that, instead of generating ruins, removes entire buildings. The construction and demolition process results in a series of polluted sites and is environmentally unsustainable. Each of these factors impacts the local communities and ecology. Inspired by the practice of crop rotation, the project proposes a migrating treatment plant landscape located on the future outer edge of Beijing. As the city expands, the remediation landscape grows to match and every building demolished expands the parkland. Eventually, the landscape forms a physical green barrier between the local mountains and the future city’s new high-rise buildings. 4.6 Chong Guan ‘Productive Future: Public Facing Agriculture’. In many Chinese cities we can observe thousands of community-based initiatives that produce food from empty and underused city corners to achieve small-scale self-sufficiency. This project proposes a public realm within a highly populated urban area, allowing residents to increase their level of independence and self-sufficiency in order to be better prepared for the potential future food crisis. 4.7 Wanyi Pan ‘Goodbye Viaduct’. As modes of transport change in cities, interchanges, overpasses and traffic viaducts become sites for radical design propositions as they are abandoned to nature. This project asks what happens if we treat these manmade structures as novel topographies for landscape design. Through deconstruction, reuse and deliberate management sustainable ecologies take hold of the concrete monoliths. 4.8 Peng Guo ‘Walking with Rain’. Ji County is spread across a mountainous area of China. The valleys in between the extreme topography suffer from severe soil erosion, caused in recent years by wind and rain. This project reconnects an abandoned village at the top of the valley to the town at the bottom through a carefully planned walkable rainwater environment. Planting design stabilises the soil at strategic points allowing for rainwater guiding excavations to be made down the valley. 44
4.9 Yuan Tao ‘Snow and Water in New Kiruna’. A mining town in Kiruna, Sweden has had to relocate as vast subsidence creeps under its buildings – as the climate crisis intensifies conditions in the Arctic Circle new challenges await. This project is focused on how the new Kiruna can cope with the climate crisis through embedding landscape strategies into its future urban plan. Snow storage wells become remediation gardens in old, poisoned mining pits while windbreaks filter snow away from main circulation routes. Most importantly, the design is reactive to seasonal changes: melting snow is used to water gardens and storage pools become centres for wildlife in the city. 4.10 Rasika Patil ‘Beckton Gasworks: Remediating a Post-Industrial Ruin’. A ruin of its old self, Beckton Gaswork’s towering gas holders in London have given way to mounds of toxic soil and the earth remains polluted by historical industrial processes. A remediation programme spanning several decades is proposed, with a cyclic process of growing and burning taking place as the wetlands, formed by natural flood zones of the River Thames, are allowed to take hold of the old brownfield site. 4.11 Yimeidu Tu ‘Break the Walls’. Xinbu Island in China has been subjected to extreme land reclamation at its northern edge with the goal of increasing future city growth space. The new land has changed an ecologically diverse coastline into a hard artificial breakwater. Repeated damage from typhoons has put building projects on hold, leaving time for a thorough reexamination of the flood prevention methodologies of the future city. This project finds a way to repair the damaged marine and river environment of a city that is built up to the coastline. 4.12 Yutong Wang ‘The Changgou Village Testbeds’. Subsidence, aquifer mismanagement and fertility loss caused by historical coal mining in the area surrounding Changgou village, China have caused people to leave their original villages in favour of the nearby city. However, an alternative future to this ruined landscape exists. An agricultural test site is proposed using a combination of companion planting, water reclamation, vertical farming and carefully designed topography. Over time, the site will invite people back to the area as it develops, providing much needed nutrients and geological stability to the land. 4.13 Huicong Han ‘Scents and Seedlings: Radstock Nursery Reborn’. Located in the town of Radstock in Somerset, UK this project proposes the rehabilitation of an abandoned nursery site. The local villages surrounding the town lack healthcare provision and the community lacks easy access to green space. Transforming the old nursery grounds into a sensory garden, the old school becomes a hub for residents and visitors bringing back function and life to the site and its surroundings. A complex and self-sustaining ecology is established, spreading out into the town through scents and seedlings.
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No Man’s Land? Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Johanna Just, Agostino Nickl
The climate and biodiversity crises require us to re-evaluate traditional notions of progress, include more and diverse voices in dialogues surrounding change and collectively interrogate what it means to share our world. Under the theme ‘Onwards!’ Design Studio 5 encourages participants to take a radical and speculative approach to the lived environment: seeking new design approaches towards sustainability, carbon sequestration and multispecies coexistence. This year’s brief, ‘No Man’s Land?’, explored the potential of so-called ‘wastelands’ as incubators for regenerative and integrative landscapes for human as well as non-human users. The year was structured in phases: first, we studied microhabitats on our doorsteps. After identifying wastelands in their wider neighbourhood, each member of the studio developed a temporary pilot project for responding to the needs of human ‘neighbours’ and non-human ‘strangers’. Finally, we developed ambitious schemes for symbiotic landscapes to foster inter-species coexistence. Dispersed across the globe, the proposals form a network of spearheading testbeds, grounded in the needs of hyperlocal, interspecies communities and leading the way towards regenerative landscape futures. We approached this complex journey in a creative and playful manner using methodologies from strategic and speculative design, but also borrowing from scientific research.
Design Studio 5
Students MLA Year 1 Yilun Cao, Tongqi Cui, Ying Fu, Xinwei He, Zhe Ji, Yu Tian, Huiran Wang, Dingming Xiang, Yaozhou Zhang, Xiangyi Zhu MLA Year 2 Zhengkun Xu MA Year 1 Xiaoqing Liu, Ziyi Liu, Mengdi Wu Practice Tutor Simon Colwill Thank you to those who have been guest lecturers and critics this year Gabriel Adams (HEFT), Miraj Ahmed (Architectural Association), Felicity Barbur (Jan Kattein Architects), Nitin Bathla (ETH Zürich), Josh Broomer (Asif Khan), Emma Colthurst (University of Greenwich), Simon Colwill (TU Berlin), Monia De Marchi (Architectural Association), Luke Harris (Office of Living Things), Hans Hortig (ETH Zürich), Madeleine Kessler (Unscene Architecture) Metaxia Markaki (ETH Zürich), Ciro Miguel (ETH Zürich), Thomas Parker (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), George Proud (Omni Visual), Ellie Sampson (Haworth Tompkins), Sarem Sunderland (ETH Zürich), Cara Turett (Office of Living Things), Bonnie-Kate Walker (Office of Living Things), Tim Waterman (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)
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5.1 Zhe Ji ‘Daylighting River Effra’. The River Effra, running as a combined sewer in London’s underground, is one of many long lost waterways – this project brings it partially back to the surface. After separating the sewer from the river, the scheme plans to daylight the water body in parks and green spaces along its course towards the River Thames. Where the river resurfaces, a new bed seamed by natural banks, vegetation and wetland fauna, attracts both biodiversity as well as Londoners wanting to reconnect with nature. A particular focus is the redesign of Brockwell Park. 5.2 Xinwei He ‘Liuzhou Eucalyptus Forest Park’. The project explores the future of a eucalyptus monoculture near Liuzhou City, China. Once planted as a fast-growing commodity, eucalyptus plantations became a global problem, degrading the soil and diminishing local biodiversity. Instead of completely removing the existing trees, this scheme explores how this plantation can be carefully transformed into a thriving forest, and gradually lower the proportion of eucalyptus trees. This is achieved by using its wood to build a series of amenities for nearby communities, while adopting an agroforestry approach to restoring soil and a biodiverse undergrowth. 5.3 Yaozhou Zhang ‘New Routes over Huangpu River’. Steel factories have long dominated a stretch of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China, creating a boundary between its industrial and residential areas. Now that many plants have closed down, the project explores possibilities to reconnect the city while creating new wetland habitats. A series of green pocket parks, on both sides of the river, act as flood plains, attracting wildlife – like the little egret – and increasing flood resilience. A pedestrian ferry service connects new active transport routes, inviting the local community to explore their city in new ways. 5.4 Zhengkun Xu ‘Jiaoyi Bay Resiliance Reef’. Shenzhen, China, has a long history of oyster farming – a cultural heritage still visible in the walls of the old villages near Jiaoyi Bay. Here, older people still remember how to raise oysters and miss customs of the past. Due to the climate crisis and industrial pollution, Jiaoyi Bay is now barren, making the city face flood risk and coastal erosion. The project explores strategies to achieve coastal resilience for humans and non-humans, including the reintroduction of an oyster reef ecosystem and the creation of sustainable oyster farming zones. 5.5 Yu Tian ‘Cangkou Thermal Gecko Highway’. The project imagines turning a disused train track in Cangkou, China, into a corridor for human and non-human inhabitants of the city. Cangkou is home to a threatened gecko species, which spends winters along the warm façades of human dwellings. As buildings become more sealed and insulated, this survival strategy becomes increasingly difficult. Using geothermal heat, the scheme creates a microclimate along the railway, safely connecting old village habitats and creating a new urban programme for human residents. 5.6 Ziyi Liu ‘Guangzhou Green Peacock Sanctuary’. The project is inspired by traditional Edo-period Cantonese embroidery motifs depicting Asian flora and fauna. It recaptures aspects of human and non-human relationships by restoring and transforming an abandoned fruit orchard to create a new public garden designed specifically for the endangered green peacock. The garden provides a setting for local people to continue their unique communal art and the cultural traditions of Cantonese embroidery. 5.7 Dingming Xiang ‘Changsha Brown Shrike Sanctuary’. The project reimagines the typology of the zoo as an ecological habitat for the brown shrike, a local migratory bird found in Changsha, China, threatened by pesticide use and poaching. Regenerating the soil of the former 50
animal compounds into ideal habitats for insects, frogs and small mammals that form part of the brown shrike’s food chain, the zoo becomes a sanctuary for a web of life. Sometimes buried in the ground, sometimes rising over abandoned structures high up into the tree canopies, a steel path allows people to visit and experience this new ecological take on their local zoo. 5.8 Ying Fu ‘Guangzhou White Crane Wetland’. The project explores a future in which the white crane comes back to Guangzhou, China. The bird lends the site – an imposing derelict steel mill – its name, but is rarely seen as natural wetland habitats vanish. The scheme re-routes an existing channel through the site, allowing it to carve its bed while keeping it away from polluted sections. As remnants of the steel mill corrode and eventually collapse, the site becomes a dynamic industrial monument for residents of all ages. With generations passing, the site becomes a lush wetland, attracting the white cranes migrating south from Siberia. 5.9 Xiangyi Zhu ‘Communal Dream Land’. The project proposes to bring the long derelict American Dream Land amusement park near Shanghai, China, into the 21st century. Where Wild West reenactments took place 30 years ago, cattle will graze based on a rotational system to regenerate the soil and sequester carbon. The regeneratively farmed pastures will offer a rich habitat for local wildlife and provide a stark contrast to the rapid urbanisation surrounding it. Visitors will be able to revisit the park and immerse themselves in a carefully managed green oasis while learning about regenerative farming techniques. 5.10 Tongqi Cui ‘Regenerating Xiaoqing River’. The project explores linking existing and planned wetlands in Jinan, China, along the Xiaoqing River, with a purifying riverbank infrastructure. Heavy metals from adjacent land use threaten the health of the river’s ecosystem, including the local crucian carp population. By filtering contaminated surface water run-off from former industrial sites with a series of phytoremediation channels, fewer heavy metals find their way into the river. The redesigned riverbank benefits local human communities, offering new walking and cycling infrastructure along the river and spaces to dwell and relax. 5.11 Xiaoqing Liu ‘Loudi Farming Commons’. The project focuses on community farmland along a deserted railway in Loudi, China, in order to renegotiate relationships between humans, agriculture and the environment. While serving as a green corridor for relaxation, the site also shows effects of soil erosion and pollution. By exploring the application of regenerative farming strategies on the site, the project addresses the role of urban agriculture for the city’s future resilience and social and environmental sustainability. 5.12 Mengdi Wu ‘Jingzhou City Wall Regeneration’. The project explores the restoration process and reactivation of an ancient Chinese city wall and history of 3,000 years in Jingzhou, Hubei. The strategies of preservation and conservation address both material components of the city wall: brick and earth. The project reintegrates an ancient giant into a modernising city. 5.13 Yilun Cao ‘Rewilding Beijing by Rail’. The project reimagines a barren railway factory as a testbed to catalyse urban rewilding in Beijing, China. Broken up by a set of demolition tools on track-mounted excavators, sealed concrete surfaces give way to pioneer vegetation that attract pollinators. The scheme speeds up natural reclamation processes and invites city dwellers to evaluate different strategies from a raised walkway. The most successful techniques can then be rolled out across Beijing’s railway network, creating further close-knit green spaces for people and pollinators.
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Extractive Topographies Matthew Butcher, Tiffany Kaewen Dang
The focus of Design Studio 6 this year was the investigation of how the discipline of landscape design can raise awareness of the ongoing effects that the extraction of natural resources and fossil fuels are having on the rural, urban and suburban landscapes in which we live. We directed these explorations to examine how processes of mining have influenced, and continue to influence, the ecological systems, social life and actions of political institutions. Through in-depth spatial and temporal analyses, students examined how landscapes of mining relate to and impact the complex and layered systems that define economies of extraction and the politics of land use. We have focused our analyses and design work on three sites impacted by mining situated in the Scandinavian Arctic: 1.
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Design Studio 6
Students MLA Year 1 Pin Chu Chen, Zheng Gao, Danyang Huo, Enxi Pan, Hai Qin, Pooja Sanjay Wagh, Bingrui Zhou MLA Year 2 Junyi Liang MA Year 1 Yaqi Gu, Leyao Luo, Mengyang Sun, Yiyao Tong, Tianheng Xiong Practice Tutor Claudia Pandasi
Kiruna: Located in Norrland in Northern Sweden, the mine surrounding the town of Kiruna produces 90% of Europe’s iron ore. Intensive mining has led to the impending collapse of land near central Kiruna and has threatened the stability of the ground below the town. In response, the mining company has begun to relocate large parts of the town to the neighbouring city of Quartz. Kirkenes: Sydvaranger Mine is a historic Soviet mine located near the Norwegian-Russian border town of Kirkenes. Although located within the sovereign territory of Norway, the town is freely accessible to residents living in neighbouring Russia. The town played a key role in the Soviet liberation of Norway from the Nazis. Svalbard Archipelago: Located at the halfway point between northern Norway and the North Pole, Svalbard presents an interesting terrain for extractive industry. The archipelago is geopolitically charged as Russian and Norwegian governments have considered it to be a strategic outpost, using mining and tourism as justification for their occupation, and thus asserting their historic and contemporary claims to sovereignty in the high Arctic.
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6.1 Pin Chu Chen ‘Border Dynamics: Park as Parliament’. Situated on the border between Norway and Russia, this project reconsiders the autonomy of the town of Kirkenes. The region has a complex history of territorial dispute and mineral extraction, attracting global actors to invest, extract and occupy. As a result, this area has become a semi-peripheral place of Norway. Mining extraction also raises an important debate over Sámi land rights. This complex geopolitical context leads the project to focus on a border area where multiple actors can meet: Norwegians, Russians, and Sámi. A series of endangered plant gardens serve as meeting spaces where actors can debate geopolitical and sociopolitical issues. 6.2 Zheng Gao ‘Living with Sinkholes’. This project introduces a new industry to replace mining in Kiruna, Sweden. Following the local tradition of mushroom foraging, this project proposes to farm shiitake mushrooms aboveground and underground. The mushrooms also function to remediate soils on a former mine site, while the aboveground farm makes the distribution of pollution and contamination clear. 6.3 Yiyao Tong ‘A Memorial Grave Park for People Cremated as Water,’ On the Arctic archipelago Svalbard, human burials are forbidden due to the unique conditions of the ground. This project proposes a memorial landscape for bodies turned into water through alkaline hydrolysis. Death is recognised with a memorial garden featuring a central waterscape, where loved ones’ remains can be returned to the river. 6.4 Leyao Luo ‘From Farm to Track: Designing for Nordic Pastoralism’. This design seeks to support traditional Sámi culture and activities, such as reindeer racing and lichen dye production. To do this, the project proposes a series of camps that provide facilities and activities to both educate Sámi children in traditional cultural practices, and raise public awareness of Sámi culture. The project is focused on two different sites in the tundra adjacent to the city of Kiruna. These sites were chosen through research of Sámi reindeer herding patterns, herding conditions, and the existing environment of the lichen forests which the reindeers feed on. 6.5 Bingrui Zhou ‘Diatom Park: Design for Diatoms and Humans’. This project focuses on a frontier of climate change – Svalbard. Carrying sediment, glacial meltwater streams serve as an important source of nutrients for life in the Arctic Ocean. Glacier fronts are important feeding areas for seabirds and marine mammals. As the glaciers retreat, this important ecosystem is at risk. This project proposes to increase the number of diatoms – a major group of microalgae – in the Westby meltstream near the research town of Ny-Ålesund to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on the local ecosystem. This is achieved through a series of landscape interventions and installations. The landscape is also designed for a small number of visitors, bringing attention to the importance of diatoms, a seemingly inconspicuous species that plays a massive role in this environment. 6.6 Pooja Sanjay Wagh ‘Experimental Landscapes’. Long before the establishment of Kiruna, this area has been inhabited by indigenous Sámi people. Warming temperatures have affected local vegetation and reindeer ecologies. Traditional Sámi reindeer herding practices are also impacted. This project brings together experiments on shrubification and reindeer grazing. Through the design of a public research landscape, this project links landscape and policymaking; dialoguing between researchers, the Sámi and policy-makers. 6.7 Qin Hai ‘The Revival of Mining Brownfields’. Excessive mining has contaminated the landscape of Kiruna. This project proposes to use mycoremediation to remediate the Kiruna mining area. The participatory 56
mushroom farm landscape acts to remediate the soils while also considering mycelium as an organic material for landscape and architectural construction. 6.8 Danyang Huo ‘Stitching: Landscape Design for Kiruna’. The concept of ‘stitching’ reconnects the broken urban fabric and people of Kiruna. Due to ground deformation caused by mining, plans are underway to demolish and relocate the town. Migrant workers in Kiruna have a schedule of seven days of work followed by seven days off, when many return home to nearby cities. On a site which will become isolated from the new city, a new community garden promotes connections between local residents and migrant workers, creating a new inclusive social system. Residential areas slated for demolition are renewed as urban farmland. In the future, agriculture will become an alternative economy in Kiruna. Finally, a complete agricultural industry chain can reconnect the broken urban space. 6.9 Yaqi Gu ‘Soil Purification Test Site in Kiruna, Sweden’. The city of Kiruna is positioned in direct proximity to one of Europe’s largest iron ore mines. Although the mine is integral to the city’s economic survival, it has also caused the land around it to deform, initiating a process to relocate the town. The mine has also seriously polluted the soil and water in the region. This project is located in a zone recently abandoned by the town and proposes a landscape to help rescue and reuse the site, using a variety of plants and organisms to instigate a process of bioremediation. In addition to soil restoration, the new landscape hopes to become a destination for national and international tourists. It will provide areas to walk within the landscape as well as a berry farm for foraging. 6.10, 6.12 Tienheng Xiong ‘Transboundary Scars’. The Kirkenes-Nikel area is composed of two border towns: Kirkenes in north-eastern Norway and Nikel in Russia, both famous for their mining industries. Over time, wars, mining and invasions have left many marks on the environment. These marks reflect the nature and extent of human impacts. History, politics, culture, economics and ecology can all be expressed in the landscape as scars. The mining industry has a long history, affecting the environment, people’s lives and geopolitical relations in the area. Recently, geopolitical conflicts have prompted a reflection on the landscape changes that human actions can cause. This project observes the historical landscape scars of Kirkenes-Nikel and combines them with the geopolitical characteristics of the cross-border area, revealing various possible mitigation strategies for the geopolitical contradictions and environmental problems in this scarred region. 6.11 Enxi Pan ‘Hidden Plan: From Ghost Town to Sustainable Town’. Mining is the economic lifeline of the town of Kirkenes; it is futile to call for an end to industrial damage to the environment. Rather than openly opposing development, this project is designed as a covert plan to hide rewilding processes within a new development while introducing a sustainable seaweed industry. When the mining industry is eliminated, the hidden wilderness will be exposed. 6.13 Junyi Liang ‘Re-Wilding Mining Landscape’. This project focuses on the Sydvaranger iron mine in northern Norway. While this mine has caused severe pollution to the local environment, a native plant – Myricaria germanica – still grows in the mining area. This plant has the ability to remove polluted elements from soil. It is also a traditional medicinal herb. Following on from Norway’s 18 Scenic Routes programme, this project proposes a walking trail on the edge of the iron mine, connecting it to the port city of Kirkenes. The trail takes advantage the features of Myricaria germanica to attend to this project’s main purpose: to cope with severe environmental problems and to rewild the open cast mine.
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Landscapes of Longing Günther Galligioni, Ness Lafoy
With most city dwellers confined to small spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic, many began to dream of experiencing and inhabiting more expansive landscapes. This form of escapism has been taken to the extreme by the global lockdown, prompting a rediscovery of a Romantic vision of nature. This longing for the natural environment has manifested itself in many ways, from crowded public parks and weekend trips to landscapes less tamed, to the uptake of new hobbies like gardening, foraging, camping, hiking and wild swimming – activities not typically associated with urban landscapes. New global remote-working patterns, and an abandonment of the commute for some, has led to an informal wilding, as new ecosystems start to take hold in previously manicured, dense urban areas. Our investigations respond to the questions: where are citydwellers escaping to? What type of urban landscape is left behind for those who cannot leave or who choose to stay? Do we need to leave the city to escape it? Can we imagine urban landscapes that promote nature as a human right for all rather than as a weekend pursuit for the privileged? How can we ensure a universal right to access nature? The city ‘left behind’ provides opportunities to introduce natural landscapes into the urban fabric. Perhaps you would walk home from work through a patch of dense forest or take your lunch break in a meadow. New speculative scenarios start to emerge. Successive lockdowns have seen a growth in ‘new rural satellites’ – former city-dwellers living at a physical distance from urban centres while remaining digitally and socially connected. How can we protect and enhance existing rural landscapes for future generations? What lies beyond the romanticised notion of living in the countryside? Each student explored their own Landscape of Longing and shared glimpses of these distant worlds with each other, offering a moment of collective escapism from the confines of our homes. These investigations morphed into larger scale scenarios: resurrecting lost landscapes, seeding memoryscapes, exploring landscapes as educational environments or proposing uncanny rewilded landscapes in the centre of the city.
Design Studio 7
Students MLA Year 1 Huiyu Chen, Haomiao Jiang, Junda Ma, Paloma Martínez Solares Callejas, Yue Qian, Yumeng Sun, Georgia Tranter, Binghui Wu, Na Zhang, Minzheng Zhou MLA Year 2 Zuoyang Liu MA Year 1 Yileng Deng, Theodore William Juriansz Practice Tutor Vladimir Guculak Thank you to those who have been guest lecturers and critics this year Raul Bielsa, Harry Bix, Laurence Blackwell-Thale, Alberto Campagnoli, Malina Dabrowska, Camille Delègue, Giulio Gabrielli, Madeleine Kessler, Haowen Li, Pei Chin Lin, Aisling O’Carroll, Eleni Ourelidou, Giulio Pellizzon, Guang Yu Ren
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7.1, 7.5 Na Zhang ‘Floating Ecologies’. The project restores habitats and improves water quality in the Fenhe River in Taiyuan, China. Floating islands are built by means of waste recovery and reuse, forming an ephemeral transition zone between the existing islands and the riverbanks. The design provides a relaxing escape from the city for local residents and offers opportunities for wildlife establishment, while paying tribute to the role the river has played in the development of Shanxi as the cradle of the Chinese civilisation. 7.2 Georgia Tranter ‘Cold Ash Forest School’. The village of Cold Ash in Berkshire, England, is located near a small patch of forest. Intensive logging has created a monoculture of Pinus sylvestris and a dense tree canopy, preventing the evolution of a biodiverse forest floor ecology. A forest school is proposed as a means to uncover its layered narratives, from the ecology to the memory of a buried fort. A forest thinning process creates a series of clearings in the woods, providing outdoor ‘classrooms’ with new interventions constructed from felled trees. 7.3 Yiling Deng ‘Heath Hiking’. The project revives a traditional British landscape: the heathland. Sheep grazing is adopted, not only as a form of traditional landscape maintenance, but to soften the boundaries between human and non-human residents, offering opportunities for an uncanny shared space. Clitterhouse Playing Fields in Brent Cross, London, is envisaged as a future expansion of Hampstead Heath, linked by a new hiking route. Here, humans can learn through direct experience, interacting with free-to-roam sheep and surrounded by the flora of the heathland. 7.4 Junda Ma ‘Memory-scapes.’ Shanwei is a city in China that closely relates to Taoism and Buddhism. Temples of various gods can be found everywhere and still form part of people’s everyday life. In a constantly developing urban environment, temples become vestiges of a landscape that has gradually become a memory. The project proposes a pilgrimage route, that transforms the temples’ urban settings, bringing back memories of a city that once held stronger bonds with its surrounding natural environment. 7.6 Binghui Wu ‘Five Ways Uphill’. The project is located in Yu Yuan, one of the most famous ancient villages in China. The settlement is an example of the Shuikou landscape theory and is known as the ‘astrological village’ as its urban form was shaped after the Big Dipper when rearranged to avoid flooding. ‘Five Ways Uphill’ proposes five hiking routes into the mountains surrounding the villages. These routes provide destinations to support local festivals, connect with astrology and challenge the current trend of a declining and ageing local population. 7.7 Yue Qian ‘Resurrection of the Lost Lake’. Guangde Lake emerged in Ningbo, China, in the early Tang Dynasty (618—907) and disappeared in the late Song Dynasty (960—1279) as a result of the gradual reclamation of the area into farmland. The project traces the outline of the lost lake, providing a new protective green and blue buffer zone for the expanding city. The landscape is transformed into paddy and lotus fields. It is an ecological wetland, where the irrigation system contributes to water recycling and sewage purification, restoring the ecosystem and mitigating the effects of extreme climatic events in the region. 7.8 Minzheng Zhou ‘Baguazhou Ponds’. Bagua is an agricultural island in Nanjing, China, lying in the middle of the Yangtze River. While the mainland was developing rapidly, Bagua remained unchanged, but its unique landscape is now threatened by new infrastructure projects. The project repurposes an abandoned resort and a series of existing ponds to form an ecological 62
conservation area that includes fishing ponds, natural swimming pools and water fields. The new landscape protects and reinforces the character of the island. 7.9 Haomiao Jiang ‘Tianjin Steelwork Gardens’. The project saves the abandoned steelworks in Tianjin, China, from demolition and commercial development by transforming it into a much-needed public park and historical monument to the city’s industrial past. After years of abandonment, a rich ecosystem has developed on the site, all of which will be retained and encouraged in the reimagining of the factory. The project is a case study, imagining how similar ex-industrial sites in Tianjin could be retained for future generations to enjoy. 7.10 Yumeng Sun ‘Healing Landscape and Horticultural Therapy’. The project explores the role that landscape can play in the physical and psychological healing process, using Yantai Yeda Hospital in China, and its surrounding area, as a site to test various methodologies. The hospital sits on the coastline, within walking distance of the Bohai Sea. Connections to the surrounding natural landscape are disrupted by construction sites and a busy highway. A series of new linear landscapes are proposed, linking the hospital and surrounding residential area to the sea front. 7.11 Paloma Martínez Solares Callejas ‘Wilding Kentish Town’. Seizing the opportunity offered by a partially underused, large, industrial estate in the heart of London in Kentish Town, the proposal bridges an existing railway line to Hampstead Heath, creating a new 3km-long green corridor across North London. The design of this post-pandemic park is conceived as a participatory process, investigating the needs of local residents and shops, fostering inclusivity and paying tribute to Kentish Town’s history. 7.12 Theodore William Juriansz ‘Designing the Post Picturesque’. The project proposes a series of ‘spoilscapes’ along the banks of the River Thames in London, using excavated soil and debris from the Tideway Tunnel. An unexpected landscape starts to emerge in the centre of the city, consisting of a series of bays, wetlands and a large mound. The project promotes a less formal relationship with the river, creating new habitats, a wild swimming pool, nature reserves and educational and sporting landscapes. 7.13 Huiyu Chen ‘Reimagining Gourd Island’. Gourd Island is one of the numerous abandoned land-reclamation initiatives on Hainan Island, China. The project proposes scenarios of environmental restoration and a more sustainable model for tourism. The island is envisaged as a testbed for design strategies that could be applied to other reclaimed sites. The creation of new mangrove habitats for egret breeding provides opportunities to closely observe the wildlife in its natural environment.
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To Weather the Weather Kirsty Badenoch, Tom Budd
‘Weather’ refers both to an action and to the impact of this action beyond its own agency. The weather is an atmospheric moment that exists in a particular place and time. To weather evidences the long-term effect of accumulated moments upon a material body. Considering weather as a fleeting occurrence, as well as an ongoing process, allows us to simultaneously inhabit the now through our everyday lived experience, while being conscious of imperceptibly slow states of change operating far beyond our own lifetimes. As a studio remotely scattered across the megacities of the globe, we are conscious of the fragility of our immediate environments and of the long-term strains our cities put on the planet. This year, Design Studio 8 sought to expand and contract our operations at two simultaneous scales, of both distance and time. As local creatures in the here-and-now, we consider the momentary city-at-speed outside our window, and how we personally and physically interact with it. As members of a greater evolutionary species, we broach slow ecological systems that transform our land and cityscapes across multiple generations. By considering the relational ecologies of both our human and non-human environments, we position ourselves as part of the diversity of animal, plant, mineral and atmospheric inhabitants with whom we share our cities, and for whom our cities profoundly affect. In Design Studio 8 we seek to develop individual practices of experimentation, designing through being and doing, and learning from natural, complex and unpredictable processes. Through this working method we encourage projects to become active participants within their contexts, forming wider discussions and directly engaging with the communities they are connected to. We approach the land and city with open minds, embracing accidents and flexing to unexpected results. We work materially, obsessively and expressively. We allow ourselves to weather in the weather.
Design Studio 8
Students MLA Year 1 Pinyi Liu, Xueying Ren, Yu Wang, Ying Ching Yuen MLA Year 2 Xinyu He, Zichao Lin, Xiyao Mo, Jingren Wang MA Year 1 Sushan Hou, Haolun Huang, Xuyue Pan, Yiwei Wu, Hongpei Xiang Practice Tutor Lyn Poon
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8.1 Xiyao Mo ‘Plan E: Escape to Eden’. The project looks to cultivate a new Eden from the forgotten ruins of the hyper-urbanised city of Changde, China. A 100-year plan sees the slow reinstigation of nature in the city, towards a new and more mutually shared habitat between human and non-human creatures. 8.2 Haolun Huang ‘City as Herbscape’. The project develops a conversational approach to health and knowledge sharing, learning from traditional Chinese medicine through the wisdom of the elderly. A kit of citywide acupunctural landscape interventions (a herbscape) is driven by conversations and personal recipes, and developed across the ageing city of Mianyang, China. 8.3 Pinyi Liu ‘Moon-Scape of Reconciliation’. The project focuses on the currents of history and how the tides of rancour, enmity and despair can be succeeded by tides of friendship, peace and reconciliation. The project seeks to celebrate and strengthen the growing bonds of peaceful trade between Japan and China, while also exploring the role of the moon and tides in a region where the sea is such an important cultural element. Leveraging tidal energy, wind energy and solar energy, island moon houses communicate a message of sustainable conservation. They also provide a living beacon of hope for historical reconciliation and peaceful coexistence between Japan and China by constructing a landscape that can help ‘evaporate’ the hatred that previously existed between the two. 8.4 Jingren Wang ‘The Water Garden in the Disappearing Village’. In reaction to the eradication of the historic urban villages in Guangzhou, China, the project looks to preserve a disappearing culture through a responsive ecological water, wetland and agricultural landscape. 8.5 Xuyue Pan ‘Food Waste Paradise’. The project explores the street as a local circular ecology of food selling, cooking, recycling and renewal. Food waste is recycled and processed through traditional papermaking and dyeing methods, reinstating lost crafts. A transitional community streetscape develops around a weekly, monthly and yearly calendar of technicoloured celebrations. 8.6 Yiwei Wu ‘Wellness in the Garden’. The Chinese 996 work system represents an extreme overtime culture, leading to serious long-term physical and mental health conditions. Drawing on horticulture therapy and healing gardens, the project proposes a system of floating gardens in and around Xinsha Island, creating everyday places within the city for community engagement, cultivation, making, rest and relaxation. 8.7 Xinyu He ‘The Sound of the Frog on a Summer Night’. Through the voice of a frog, the project reinstates the lost memory of a fragile nature in the face of overdevelopment. An urban-scale soundscape creates an auditory oasis, nurturing a sensory connection to nature and revitalisation of endangered ecologies within the city. 8.8 Zichao Lin ‘Beastly Ark’. This is a rewilding project that explores patience and the embrace of the unpredictable. Demolishing the embankments around the Thames Estuary allows the re-entry of the river into the flood plane. Slowly aligning to the tides and reforesting, the ultimate vision is to reintroduce the beaver as the architect of London’s future shores.
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Unstable Ground Nico Alexandroff, Elise Misao Hunchuck
Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people.1 Constant Nieuwenhuys The earthquake in L’Aquila is the lesson we still haven’t learnt.2 Massimo Cialente, mayor of L’Aquila, Italy, 2007–17 Confronted by the seismicity of the Apennine mountain range in Italy and the fallibility of forecasting, Design Studio 9 saw an opportunity to question assumptions about what it means to engage design in practices of forecasting and responding to disaster, for there is ‘an intense relationship between the necessity of forecasting and the need to understand the earth itself. But more than this, nature forecasting in these circumstances is also a way of building cosmologies into the world, making them material and giving them form.’ 3 Design Studio 9 is about the future: ‘how the future is lived and imagined in the present, how it is a fullness in the present, appears and disappears, is unevenly distributed, and how there is always, everywhere, more than one future.’ 4 In the first term, the studio examined the region of Abruzzo in Southern Italy, developing a collaborative research practice through familiar and unfamiliar tools of measurement, representation and communication. We worked closely with primary and secondary source materials, including cartographic datasets and historical textual and photographic documentation. Together we sited, mapped and situated soft and hard infrastructures of human and non-human life in Abruzzo. Individual design projects built upon this work and local interventions were developed where everyday life meets hard or soft infrastructures. The studio’s first cohort captured the complexity of the systems and relations present on site while exploring the role of landscape architecture in understanding, mapping and communicating risk. The landscapes of Abruzzo tell much broader stories about today: how we form knowledge of the past and the present, how we forecast the future, and how the present shapes the future. Abruzzo is also our site because although we know another earthquake is inevitable, we do not know the specifics; it is an uncertain certainty. Thus, landscapes of risk – and, we contend, the escalating climate crisis – can be considered landscape architecture problems in that they are as much a crisis of communication as they are of representation.
Design Studio 9
Students MLA Year 1 Tanya Agarwal, Sirapat Ajkarn, Yixiao Duan, Chuyun Gui, Linlin Jiang, Fanzhangyang Jin, Zhouxin Tu, Xiao Wang, Dengcheng Xie, Dongqi Xu MA Year 1 Liuyin Chen, Yao Wang, Zhuorui Zhou Practice Tutor James MacDonald-Nelson
1. Constant Nieuwenhuys (1963), ‘Preamble to a New World’, New Babylon, Galerie d’Eendt. 2. Swiss Re (18 April 2019), ‘L’Aquila 12 Years On: It’s time to change!’ YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch? v=tSRvSMu8VSg&ab_ channel=SwissRe. 3&4. Adam Bobbette (2018), Cultures of Forecasting: Volatile and Vulnerable Nature, Knowledge, and the Future of Uncertainty, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, <https://doi.org/10.17863 /CAM.24591>. 73
9.1 Zhuorui Zhou ‘Curtain Call From the Adriatic Sea: Collision Boundary of Landscapes’. This project proposes a series of strategic interventions along the Trabocchi Coast, in Abruzzo documenting long term landscape changes beyond the lifespan of humans. ‘The Collision’ boundary where the sea and land meet undergoes constant flux. After millions of years, the sea will be no more due to large scale seismic shifts, but in 100 years, the sea will have risen significantly due to planetary heating. The sand, stone, fauna and flora create an image of sea and land, changing through time. Whether we intervene or not, nature is recording the Earth’s changes in a language we cannot yet fully decipher. 9.2 Dongqi Xu ‘The Art of Memorial in L’Aquila’. The town of L’Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy is prone to seismic activities – at times becoming destructive earthquakes. Research was carried out to explore how landscape design could be effective as careful memorialisation. Through a considered iterative drawing process, this project came to focus on events to come. The project proposes creating a green open space inside the city by reconstructing an old park into a memorial, bringing new life to residents by building a monument that doubles as a seismic sensor in the centre of the park. Unlike traditional memorials that talk directly to past events, this monument not only commemorates those lost and their histories, but also serves as a warning for earthquakes to come. The park and its monument become a mediator between the past and the future. 9.3 Linlin Jiang ‘How to Live with Bears: Encouraging Bear Inhabitation of Abruzzo National Park’. In the heart of Abruzzo National Park, in central Italy, is the town of Pescasseroli. It is home to the Marsican brown bear, also known as the Apennine brown bear (Orso bruno marsicano in Italian) – a critically endangered subspecies of the Eurasian brown bear. This project asks how bears and people might feasibly live together, possibly even supporting each other through the mundane everyday tasks they perform. The design improves the local plant community and biodiversity, providing not only fruits for consumption, but strategically hidden, defensive living environments for the bears of Abruzzo as well. Artificial depressions, small reservoirs and lakes are built to provide bears with water to sustain them through the difficult winter and summer months. The project asks: how do we design with and for species beyond tokenistic gestures? And how do we design in such a way that we share landscapes or make space for species other than our own? 9.4 Liuyin Chen ‘Landscape Migration’. In the southern reaches of Abruzzo, Italy, the Sangro Basin includes complex water systems – big dams, cemented channels, weirs and power stations – that can provide an evidentiary reading of human history in the region. Rivers are a complex migration landscape, where almost everything moves constantly and on different time scales. A series of engineering projects on the Sangro River were transformative and pivotal events in its history – but infrastructural limitations do not stop time. Environmental conditions are always changing. A landscape migrates when, over time, a series of components change – ground, air, water and organisms – and a new assembly forms. The project is not about how to conduct a restoration of the cemented channel, but instead, about how to carefully retreat and make space for other-than-human forces and lives in the future. 9.5 Tanya Agarwal ‘Interrupted Landscapes: An Ecological Park’. The research deals with the postearthquake revitalisation of open green spaces in L’ Aquila, Abruzzo: what influence it had on the soil structure and how the functionality and need for spaces were affected. The design challenge is to propose a 74
space that will regenerate the ecology, bringing the people of L’Aquila together, rekindling their connection to the land and reviving the lost culture while working as a catalyst for the future development of the L’Aquila area. The selected site, Piazza d’Armi, is in fact strategically located for the future development of the city of L’Aquila and the project, therefore, stands as a new emblem of a landscape, urban and social development. 9.6 Sirapat Ajkarn ‘Gran Sass for All’. This project examines why certain summits or views are limited to persons of physical or material means, asking how landscape architecture can respond to the political and material histories of the Appennines through a deceptively simple prompt: a hiking trail. Gran Sasso, a part of the Apennines mountain range, is situated in the northern part of Abruzzo. How can these mountain sceneries be made accessible to anyone who can move? The design proposal responds to the need for accessibility and introduces the beautiful scenery of Gran Sasso to both local and international visitors. By developing an understanding of existing infrastructure and ecology, this proposal responds to both current and future challenges in the form of planting, pathways and signage. 9.7 Jin Fanzhangyang ‘Seismic Response: The Trail Design of an Unpredictable Landscape in Campotosto Basin’. This project is based on the geography, landscape and infrastructure conditions of the Campotosto basin in Abruzzo. The project highlights and makes connections between various cultural phenomena that have been embedded through time into the site; these include hydrological infrastructure, geological significance, agricultural activity and touristic experience. The influence of the site’s geological structure and history was explored through exhaustive iterative drawings of views, sights and sections, allowing for deceptively simple-looking compositions to outline the remarkable complexity of the site’s history – and its future.
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Scripted Landscapes: Hidden logics of an open world Kyriaki (Katie) Kasabalis, Danielle Purkiss, Sandra Youkhana
When landscapes appear to have evolved naturally, they have often been subject to a vast network of rules, logics and systems that defined their construction. Environmental cycles enact numerous changes, with their effects fleeting or long-lasting. Physical boundaries and man-made interventions act as obstacles to guide our movement. In Design Studio 10 we interrogate the ‘scripting of a landscape’ as a subjective process, a series of predefined logics that are applied over time. This unique language of control – a constant flow of monitoring, checking and processing – is broken down and analysed in response to its effect on the physical landscape. We familiarised ourselves with landscapes that employ scripting for smartness, efficiency and greening. We investigated the virtual networks that encapsulate our surroundings, unseen data, mapped uses and zones. We created vast new vocabularies for what can be classified as a ‘script’, containing new elements and spatial symbols to be deployed across the landscape. Design Studio 10 responds to challenges by creating new definitions of ‘scripted landscapes’, evaluating the landscape not only in terms of its aesthetic appearance or its technical performance, but also in relation to its ethico-political interactions with the environment. The interplay between nature, cultural norms, social relations and human subjectivity set the basis for our collective investigation. In term one, students responded to this agenda by selecting sites that were unique and local to them. We then migrated our focus to propose new possibilities within the territories of the River Lea in East London. The studio promotes the communication of landscape architecture through the telling of stories, narratives and experiences using multiple media types, which can include but are not limited to drawing, physical modelling and virtual experimentation. Students develop unique cartographic approaches and visual languages that challenge conventional tools, engaging with new media as realms for experimentation. Through design research, Design Studio 10 focuses on landscape architecture not as ‘total design of the territory’ but as a framework that allows for transformation over time, interrogating how ‘scripting’ can generate new forms of collective and user-driven experience.
Design Studio 10 Students MLA Year 1 Yan Gong, Chuan Liu, Yu Liu, Jingwen Ma, Qinrong Zhang MLA Year 2 Shuqi Jiao, Junkai Lan, Lian Liu MA Year 1 Maria Frantzeskaki, Zhiyi Liang, Shengyang Liu, Jia Teng Practice Tutor Natalia Roussou
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10.1 Jingwen Ma ‘Reverse Scripting: Re-imagining the People’s Playground’. Situated next to Three Mills Island, London, on a patch of land previously designated for Cedric Price’s unrealised Fun Palace, this project seeks to reignite the playful spirit of the site as a ‘laboratory of fun’, a playground for local people, that celebrates Lea Valley’s industrial heritage. By selecting nine historical buildings, all relating to the manipulation of the river, their characteristic features have been rescaled and assembled onto the site as a showcase of curious and playful landscape possibilities. Planting techniques such as topiary further communicate key forms extracted from the local buildings, appearing as bold ‘low-poli’ versions of the fragments alongside the colourful and enigmatic follies. 10.2 Junkai Lan ‘Magnetic Fields: Landscapes of Attraction’. This project is an inquiry into the different ways a landscape can influence us to experience it in a particular way, through the placement of key features. By taking a territory covered by a person on their daily run, the landscape is assessed through its ability to influence our movements and actions within it, even if we intend on taking a prescribed route. This unique methodology is used to identify ‘gaps’ in the landscape where biodiversity can be increased, habitats enriched, connections formed and interest sparked to maximise the full potential of the territory. 10.3 Chuying Chen ‘Discovering Dreamscapes’. The project grounds itself in reality yet uses the characteristics of dynamic and site-specific environmental conditions, such as fluctuating water levels, to create opportunities for dream-like landscape conditions to occur. Located at Bow Locks in East London, the raising and lowering of water is used to anchor the narrative of transformation to the site. By manipulating the landscape in different ways to heat, mist, filter, channel and pool water around the experience of the user, an elevated version of reality is offered to inhabitants passing through. 10.4 Zhiyi Liang ‘Fed from the River: Re-instating a productive landscape in the Lea Valley’. The project provides a local solution to the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, where people are less able to travel, purchase freely and consume unlimited supplies of food. The Lea Valley was once a main site of production for food supply in the capital, with large areas of market gardens, farmland and greenhouses. The project seeks to reinstate this by creating a productive landscape in the locality. The site is interconnected by a wild garden and green corridor to promote biodiversity and enrich local habitats, as well as the lifestyles of community residents, by giving them access to nature. 10.5 Shengyang Liu ‘Leven Road Regeneration: A monument to waste’. The project responds to the extensive construction activity taking place within the Lower Lea Valley, as part of numerous new developments and rapid urbanisation, by creating a recreational park constructed from demolition waste. It imagines an alternative system of demolition waste collection, curation and storage to create an experiential and educational public park and landscape, which facilitates public engagement with, and reappraisal of, the meaning and value of waste. 10.6 Jia Teng ‘A Palimpsest of Succession in a Hidden Reservoir’. The project seeks to reclaim the historical reservoirs of Hackney Marshes in London by integrating them back into nature through careful phasing. In its current form, part of the reservoir network has been concreted over to facilitate a construction site. Through this process of transformation, some stages are accelerated to demonstrate to the public the process of naturalisation. Making use of the divisions of the reservoir 80
structure, each ‘slice’ has a different strategy applied to it, as a showcase of various landscape prototypes. 10.7 Lian Liu ‘Patterned Landscapes’. This project is an investigation into how new landscapes can be generated through traces of their historical past. This methodology uses ‘patterns’ from a site’s past and present, including shifting boundaries, flood plains, altered routes and modes of occupation. By overlaying this information, a generative design methodology is proposed to physically expose information to the user through bold, spatial and opportunistic ways. Aesthetically, different landscape typologies are inserted into these new zones as a patchwork of approaches. 10.8 Yan Gong ‘On/Off Script’. The project activates under-utilised urban sites by introducing ‘on and off’ script design interventions. This is defined as a design strategy that allows some elements to have fixed uses (on) while others can be more flexible and interpretative (off). The project is located in the Lea Valley, an area with a significant amount of residual land, caused by leftovers between infrastructure corridors. The proposal seeks to provide solutions for these spaces, as a system of facilities suitable for small and medium urban sites. With flexibility as a key design driver, these sites become activated and adapted in relation to the public’s needs alongside the changing seasons. 10.9 Maria Frantzeskaki ‘Imaginary Landscapes’. A series of renderings portraying inaccessible landscapes from people’s imaginations. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, many people were unable to travel further than their localities. This project uses Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, London, as its physical starting point and superimposes a series of imaginary landscapes onto the site. Whether users of the park are reading a book, scrolling through social media or recalling a fond memory, the project brings these spaces to life as an overlay to reality. 10.10 Yu Liu ‘Island Systems: A model for habitat creation on the River Lea’. The project is located within the East India Dock Basin, in London. As a significant habitat location, it forms an isolated area of ecological value amongst its surroundings, where high-density development is increasing. The project seeks to enhance and diversify its current habitat to attract animals, as well as visitors for educational opportunities. A system of islands with different types and scales of riparian habitats is proposed as ecological stepping stones to the Leamouth and the tidal section of the River Lea, assisting with bird migration towards the Special Protection Area in the Upper Lea Valley. 10.11 Yiqi Gu ‘Eco Valley: Green tourism for the River Lea’. This project focuses on the concept of eco-tourism to create educational and environmental experiences in the landscape, while also making efforts to remediate it and increase its biodiversity. Showcasing how natural ecosystems can be reintroduced in the dense urban environment, the project looks to embed unique human experiences alongside natural systems by introducing a mosaic of wetlands in order to restore riparian ecology, enhance biodiversity, improve water quality, alleviate flooding and create an educational experiential landscape for the public. 10.12 Shuqi Jiao ‘A Collaborative Landscape for a Floating Community’. This project is located on the River Lea and proposes an alternative collaborative landscape and water remediation strategy for a canal boat community. The design strategy proposes a new modular canal-side landscape, consisting of playful and interactive public amenities and a water purification strategy, to promote social community interaction and help restore canal water quality. Design elements include adaptable modules for a range of user activities.
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Environment & Technology Coordinator: Ana Abram
Environment and Landscape Technology teaching at The Bartlett School of Architecture equips students with knowledge, tools and techniques to be able to analyse, preserve, design and construct landscapes of the future. Through two lecture series, delivered by a network of practitioners and specialist consultants who teach a broad range of subjects, and modules, students are introduced to the professional world of being a landscape architect. Subjects such as natural systems, earth sciences, planting design, ecology, climate change adaptation, planning, urban design and construction technologies, amongst many others, are taught and reviewed throughout the year concurrently with design-based modules. Year One students receive an overview and learn about the fundamentals of the subject. Year Two and Master’s students cover topics such as climate change, environmental design, landscape planning, conservation and advanced principles in landscape construction.
Landscape, Inhabitation and Environmental Systems This module sets out the discipline of landscape architecture in relation to physical and natural processes and anthropogenic impacts, and environmental systems – geology, climate and hydrology – are examined. Landscape architecture detailing and the fundamentals of landscape construction are addressed, relating to hard material selection and soil science with planting design. Across three lecture sequences students developed an understanding of why environmental systems matter in contemporary landscape architecture, what those systems mean for built environments and, finally, how to assess and realise landscape projects using contemporary building technologies.
Landscape, Ecology and Urban Environments This module focuses on topics of climate change adaptation, environmental sustainability, resources crises, environmental assessment and new technologies in landscape architecture. There is a particular focus on the different models of design processes that span from idea to construction. Lectures are supported by extensive seminars, site visits and cross-crits. Modules are enriched by the extensive support of practice tutors, who bring professionalism and critical view on the buildability of design ideas.
Image: Chen Huiyu, Mangrove conservation area. Research and redesign of the abandoned Gourd island after reclamation and targeted analysis 84
Lecturers Paola Blasi (ARUP), Blanche Cameron (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Andy Cunningham (Studio Kyoryu), Neil Davidson (J & L Gibbons), Chris Fannin (InSite), Gary Grant (Green Infrastructure Consultancy), Philip Griffiths (Verdant Horticulture), Steve Johnson (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Fred Labbe (Expedition Engineering), John Little (Grass Roof Company), Mary O’Connor (WYG), Donncha O’Shea (Gustafson Porter + Bowman), Anna Rose (Space Syntax), Alexandra Steed (Alexandra Steed URBAN), Oliver Wilton (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) Practice Tutors Studio 1 Mario Santaniello (Gensler) Studio 2 Kelly Doran (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) Studio 3 Aitor Arconada Ledesma (Foster + Parters) Studio 4 Yiota Goutsou (AECOM) Studio 5 Simon Colwill (Berlin Institute of Technology) Studio 6 Claudia Pandasi (Uncommon Land) Studio 7 Vladimir Guculak (Bradley-Hole Schoenaich Landscape) Studio 8 Lyn Poon (Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios) Studio 9 James MacDonald-Nelson (Topotek 1) Studio 10 Natalia Roussou (HTA Design)
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History & Theory Coordinators: Tom Keeley, Tim Waterman
The history and theory strand of The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Landscape Architecture programme provides a robust foundation, tying together the ideas behind the built landscape and the resulting forms across time, from the scale of the garden to the continent. Building upon this foundation, students explore philosophy alongside patterns and methods of historic and contemporary practice. They develop their critical and research skills across the programme, in coordination with their studio work. In the first year of the MLA, students undertake a comprehensive survey of landscape history that is both chronological and thematic. In the first year of the MA – the second year of the MLA – students develop essays from research seminars conducted in small groups led by specialist scholars. Topics include such subjects as real estate speculation along the Thames, extractivism and colonialism, and ruins and ruination. The range of seminars will expand in the coming year to include research on housing, 20th-century parks and landscape practices in the Welsh uplands. History and theory culminates in the creation of the landscape thesis, completed with the guidance of dedicated supervisors, who this year included Loretta Bosence, Emma Colthurst, Gillian Darley, Paul Dobraszczyk, Jon Goodbun, Eric Guibert, Danielle Hewitt, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Will Jennings, Tom Keeley, Patrick Lynch, Guang Yu Ren, Diana Salazar and Harry Watkins. In this, students research a specific individual area of interest that informs and supports their design research. In professional landscape architectural practice, there is much emphasis upon communicating sophisticated understandings and complex strategies through documents that thoughtfully combine text and image. The thesis supports such integrative and synthetic work, and is itself a work of design, engaging students in the creation of a thesis book. The thesis supports the development of individual ideas and philosophies within the larger framework of landscape architecture history; current practice, politics and dwelling; and speculative features near and far. This year, the range of thesis topics was rich and fascinating, and many focused upon the topics addressed in a diverse set of studios. Three theses are included for inspection here, their subjects all closely linked to the studio work. A representative excerpt of each has been provided. All these theses, as with so many others submitted, are rich both visually and textually, and designed with élan.
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Seminar leaders Eric Guibert, Danielle Hewitt, Will Jennings, Anthony Powis, Diana Salazar Thesis supervisors Loretta Bosence, Emma Colthurst, Gillian Darley, Paul Dobraszczyk, Jon Goodbun, Eric Guibert, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Will Jennings, Tom Keeley, Patrick Lynch, Guang Yu Ren, Diana Salazar, Harry Watkins
Listening to Landscapes: Explorations in Soundscapes Xinyu He Supervisor: Elise Misao Hunchuck Winner of the 2021 Landscape Thesis Prize The Function of Soundscape According to soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause,1 the three sounding object categories, biophony, geophony and anthrophony, constitute a complete sound environment, while R. Murray Schafer,2 following soundscape ecology, proposes that any soundscape, as a medium, may foster relationships between nature and humans. However, as is commonly accepted, human beings have long interfered with existing modes of nature through, broadly speaking, a wide range of political and economic activities, affecting – sometimes significantly – natural species’ distribution and interactions, alongside climatological phenomena including, but not limited to, rain and wind (that produce sound alongside other environmental factors). The movement patterns of humans can also be altered, encouraged, or restricted by these sounds.3 In The Great Animal Orchestra, Bernie Krause convincingly proposes that it is sounds from nature that can allow us to, more than any other factor, intuitively evaluate the relationship between humans and other life on Earth.4 Therefore, in landscape design, a discipline whose focus is on the management and design of relationships between humans and nature, designers can utilise these three types of sounds as a way to begin to develop an additional – or perhaps another – way to establish the needs of different landscapes.
The Associativity of Soundscape Sound does not exist in isolation and is a dynamic attribute of all landscapes.5 On the one hand, the physical characteristics of sound, such as transmission, absorption and reflection, change depending on the physical parameters of different environments. On the other hand, people’s subjective perception of the sound landscape will be different due to the difference in their immediate environment and their position in relation to the source of the sound itself. For example, the same sound sounds different in the city versus in the countryside, different on a mountainside, or contained in a valley. The effects and impressions can and will be diverse. The same voice in different environments can produce different effects. So when we are analysing and considering sound, although generalities may be of use, we must acknowledge the need to understand the specificities of the environments in which the sound is resonating.
1. Bernie Krause (2020), The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places, (London: Thames & Hudson), pp27–35. 2. R. Murray Schafer (1994), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books), p7. 3. Bryan C. Pijanowski, L. Villanueva- Rivera, S. Dumyahn, A. Farina, B. Krause, B. Napoletano, S. Gage and N. Pieretti (2011), ‘Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape’, BioScience, 61(3), pp203–16. 4. Krause (2020), The Great Animal Orchestra, pp27–35. 5. Jesse R. Barber, K. Crooks and K. Fristrup (2010), ‘The Costs of Chronic Noise Exposure for Terrestrial Organisms’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25(3), pp180–9. Image: The song of the frog on a summer night. The landscape is designed for frogs to live in the city and provide a soundscape for people to hear them. 87
Ruderals – A Love Affair: The Less-Told Story of Plant-Material Relationships Sheetal Muralidhara Supervisor: Loretta Bosence The past year or more has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant closed doors and routinised walks to the grocery store. To pull away from the routinised thoughts, one looks to observing the even more mundane surroundings. We notice the constructed everyday bricks and street trees versus the ‘random’ plants that have situated themselves amongst these human-made elements, and we wonder – how did it land up there? How does it manage to hoist itself up on the brick walls carefully avoiding us? My initial inspiration for my research started off by walking with these spontaneous plant species that announced the arrival of spring in my neighbourhood, in North East London. These plants seem to ‘roam’ around with me too, appearing, disappearing and changing at voids and cracks along my way. These hidden gems providing a contrast to the hard, urban surfaces are often dismissed as weeds.1 I see them as a sign of hope and beauty that are so willing to survive in our highly urbanised cities built from low nutrient substrates. They are hope in the midst of ruination. Industrial progress has created more catastrophes in this world than what was imagined in the 19th and 20th centuries. Matthew Gandy’s film Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin (2017) calls these types of unplanned plants ‘adventitious’, simply 88
meaning ‘plants that have arrived’ in postindustrial times. The essay will look into how and why the plants arrived in our neighbourhood cracks, by examining their intermingled relationships across geographical and geological contexts. […] The luxury of adventitious plants is their visibility to anyone (especially landscape architects) along their everyday route, which enables them to observe the plants’ dynamics. This already gives us an everyday relationship with the plant system that is often wasted due to being dismissed as ‘alien or invasive’. It is not only these plants that are ‘alien’ but our designs can be considered foreign too. In recent years, landscape architecture offices tend to take on projects that take place outside of their geographical regions. They are not fully aware of the ‘foreign landscape’ that they need to design for. The intermingled relationships of the ruderal environmental systems connect ‘local landscapes’ where design originates (designers’ familiar locality) with a ‘foreign landscape’. I argue that the designer here is the ‘invasive’ element rather than the ruderals.
1. Noel Kingsbury (2021), ‘Olivier Filippi and the Mediterranean Garden of the Future’, Noel Kingsbury, (accessed 1 June 2021), www.noelkingsbury.com/ noelsgarden-blog/2019/1/11/olivier-filippi-and-themediterranean-garden-of-the-future. Image: For the Oxford Ragwort, a roadside pavement in the city resembles a volcano in Sicily. Left: top and bottom, author’s own photographs, July 2021. Right: top and bottom, photographs by artist Ellie Heo for the project ‘Ragwort’, available at: https://www.a-n.co.uk/ blogs/the-ragwort-2/ (Accessed July 2021)
Seeking Utopia: Re-Politicising ‘Green Utopia’ Discourse Kai Lok Wong Supervisor: Will Jennings Utopia and Democratic Landscape The word utopia was originally coined by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia of 1516. The Greek οὐ (not) and τόπος (place), which translates as a ‘non-place’, literally refers to a non-existing imaginary perfect place. The word has now been widely used to describe an imaginary vision of ideal society, or as an alternative to the existing social order that guides people’s action and aspirations.1 Different utopian visions reflect the different conceptualisations of the social, political and communal life in our urban space. The ‘green utopia’ discourses I have identified are romanticised expressions of neoliberal ideology, in which the monolithic and top-down regimes foreclose the possibilities of deconstructing hegemonic representations and discourses, and prevent any potential resistance from public participation and engagement through the repression of difference.2 It is recognised that social and political potentials of such a pre-given and fixed set of urban landscape imposed by the existing closed bureaucratic system are inherently taken as ontologically static, bounded and predetermined. The closed system preserves the social order created by the regime and avoids the occurrence of any new alternative utopian visions that might subvert the neoliberal power relations. While an alternative utopia
world may currently seem unknown, impossible, or out of our reach under the existing manipulations of this closed system, it is essential to offer everyone the opportunity ‘to dream the impossible to carry out the possible’,3 through interacting with our landscape, to rebalance the existing imbalanced power geometries in society. As Peter Marcuse emphasised, ‘it’s not the right to existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city.’ 4 A genuine utopia should not be a fixed masterplan but rather a set of dynamic visions for people to act as urban imaginers to turn today’s impossibility into tomorrow’s possibility through their efforts. Paul Chatterton asserts that such ‘urban impossible’ is a desire for new political imaginaries, whereas participation and democracy are the issues at the heart of the imagination.5
1. Giuseppe Grossi and Daniela Pianezzi (2017), ‘Smart Cities: Utopia or Neoliberal Ideology?’ Cities, 69, pp79–85. 2. Beth Diamond (2004), ‘Awakening the Public Realm: Instigating Democratic Space’, Landscape Journal, 23(1), pp22–39. 3. Joseph Gable (1974), Idéologies, tome 1: Recueil de textes partiellement extraits de diverses revues et publications, 1948–1972 (Paris: Anthropos), p27. 4. Peter Marcuse (2009), ‘From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City’, City, 13(2–3), p193. 5. Paul Chatterton (2010), ‘The Urban Impossible: A Eulogy for the Unfinished City’, City, 14(3), pp234–44. Image: Utopia’s Landscape: from today’s impossible to tomorrow’s possible. Bishopsgate Goodsyard, London, United Kingdom 89
Fieldwork by students at the Cretto di Burri, Gibellina. Photo: Design Studio 2
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Editors Phoebe Adler, Srijana Gurung
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