Faraday House
48 Old Gloucester St
London WC1N 3AE
LANDSCAPES in LANDSCAPES gathers urbanists, architects, landscape architects, planners and policy makers to discuss and speculate on the role that the ‘discrete’ landscape project—parks, recreational facilities, landfills, quarries, and airfields—can play in the larger, more comprehensive, green systems of cities.
Of focus here will be to both uncover and project ways that the designed landscape reinforces, challenges, or expands the logics, limits or possibilities of the larger ecologic, cultural and economic one in which they participate, referred to variously as green Belts, Bands, Rings, Wedges and Corridors.
At stake, then, are questions about and preoccupations with two scales of landscape.
First, at a time when our cities can only be described as on the verge of environmental crisis, do these green systems live up to their long stated promise of, among other things, mediating growth, providing space for recreation, acting as carbon sinks, and providing habitat for more than humans, as well as supporting selective development within them, especially housing? Or must their scale and configurations be rethought to deliver on these (and other) promises to update our urban imaginaries for the 21st century?
Second, how do designers produce projects within these systems to further their larger ambitions, uses and misuses, promises and conflicts? Using Rectory Farm, Borough of Hounslow, in London’s Green Belt, the reuse of Maurice Rose Airfield in Frankfurt’s Greenbelt, and the Madrid Rio Park in Madrid’s Green Infrastructure system as case studies, the participants will speculate and debate on these and other preoccupations.
Participants
Sara Favargiotti
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Trento
Dr. David Knight
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Director, DK-CM
Martijn Slob
Head of London Office, Vogt Landscape Ltd
Juan Tur McGlone
Senior Architect and Project Manager, West 8
Julia Czerniak
Professor and Associate Dean, Syracuse Architecture
Dr. Troy Gordon
Director, Syracuse London
Davide Sacconi
Director of Syracuse Architecture, London
Free and open to the public.
