merricks farmhouse ~ michael lumby architecture + nielsen jenkins | photos © tom ross

” Behold the fingerprint of the land,” Guizhou, China.

Nestled in the rolling hills of Guizhou, a remarkable tea plantation bears witness to the astounding beauty of nature's patterns. Photo by: @youknowcyc

Hong Kong Park, commissioned by the Urban Council. Designed by Wong Tung & Partners, Ltd. Project commenced in 1984 and was completed in 1991. It contains European elements, like a Greek amphitheater, ruins, colonnades and avairy.

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MHA House, 1947, A Quincy Jones, Jim Charlton

MHA: SITE OFFICE (2019)

Four friends, returning from WWII, pooled their money and bought an acre of land. They hired a pre-Eichler A Quincy Jones, along with Whitney R. Smith, and engineer Edgardo Contin, and built four homes. The group formed the non profit Mutual Housing Association, and through this many more homes were then built in the area, several by renowned mid century architects.

This video takes us on a short tour of MHA's site office and studio, which was converted to a residence in 1956, and more recently restored by architect-owner Cory Buckner. The site was planned so that the houses sat on its corners, at angles to the street and each other, with a central communal pool and play area, which diminishes the sense of internal boundaries, and allows uninterrupted views of the greenery.

Peak solarpunk aesthetic isn't just massively incorporating plants into urban cities, it's making ART with it.

I want to turn New York into Rivendell from lord of the rings.

Utamo events space,  Gulf of Aqaba, Saudi Arabia,

Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura,

Image courtesy of Neom.

e360: You’ve been quoted as saying: “There’s no more natural nature. Now it’s a matter of design.” What did you mean by that? Orff: We humans are profoundly impacting the planet. There is no “pure nature” that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere. We’ve “made” the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. It is a matter of design in the sense that it requires work, intention, design, funding, political skills. It’s not a naive or nostalgic attempt to restore the past. Instead, it’s layering up natural systems to reduce risk, building this hybrid future of stewarded nature. e360: In Staten Island you are building a breakwater offshore, but in other places you have advocated tearing down some built structures to allow water a place to go during floods. Orff: We have to soften our shorelines, we need to remove roadways from critical migration paths. Otherwise, flash flooding will get worse, and our biodiversity will continue to plummet. So a big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built. Rather than thinking of design as something merely additive or “beautifying,” we need to think about undoing our environmental mistakes, like damming rivers, bulkheading our shorelines, and concretizing streams. We need to start making room for rivers and floods. e360: We’ve tried to control nature with big infrastructure projects. But that can backfire, can’t it? Orff: For decades, infrastructure has been constructed as “single-purpose,” often designed by engineers to isolate one element of a system and to solve one problem. For example, on Staten Island, during Superstorm Sandy, a levee designed to keep water out was overtopped, resulting in a “bathtub effect” that trapped water inside a neighborhood rather than keeping it out and resulted in several deaths. We try to lock natural systems in place. But, of course, that is not the way that natural systems respond, and it is wholly insufficient for a climate-changed environment where we’re experiencing more intense rain in many regions, where we are facing more extreme heat, where sea levels are rising. The old rules, frankly, no longer apply.

Grove Estates gatehouse, Coconut Grove, Miami, Florida, USA,

Rene Gonzalez Architect,

Landscaping: Raymond Jungles, Inc.

Photographs by Michael Stavaridis

Spring Meadow - May 6th 2023

Karlova Studánka

longbranch ~ mw works | photo credit: andrew pogue

20.04

It's been difficult attending classes again, finding it easier to stay home and work on my assessments with upcoming deadlines, rather than working on them and discussing them with my tutor in the classroom. Public transport really eats up most of my day and I find my campus and classroom incredibly unmotivating and uninspiring to work and focus in (and it doesn't help that there is limited space to properly work on).

But today I was able to get out of the house and go to my fiance's university with him. Although I've only been a handful of times to his campus, it's always such a pleasure to visit and study there whenever I have the chance. If only my campus was surrounded by so much greenery like at this campus, rather than grey concrete, and have cosy study spaces like above. Maybe that would motivate me to attend my classes and inspire my landscape architecture designs.

Master post: The interior landscape design in the Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Spitallamm dam, Grimselsee, Switzerland, 1932 VS Ancient Theatre, Epidaurus, Greece, 4th century BC

Martha Schwartz, The Splice Garden, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986