Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 156 November 2017 i Landscape Architecture Australia

Australians sense a natural accord with the landscapes of California and their essentially Mediterranean characteristics. The geographical and botanical parallels were understood in the nineteenth century and openly discussed a hundred years ago.1 Much of south-eastern Australia and the central coastal region of California has an austere beauty, with relatively untouched landscapes where mountains meet the sea. The beautiful Californian coast and its hinterland – known to many through visiting the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, the Sea Ranch or the Napa Valley – are characterized by a rugged Pacific edge backed by folded hillsides covered in golden, grassy meadows or forests of native oaks. Warm days and cold ocean currents can produce misty fogs that mysteriously shroud the terrain, yet may suddenly disperse. In California after World War II,…

I ’m in my garden in the warmth of the winter sun, listening to the chatter of birds and the buzz of rosemary shrouded in bees. I’m reading Gardens of the High Line, drawn in by the sumptuous photography that seeks to convey as much about the High Line’s meaning as its beauty. Rick Darke is a landscape designer, lecturer and photographer who blends art, ecology and cultural geography. He has been photographing the project since 2002, capturing these immersive, intimate and tactile landscapes through hundreds of evocative photographs. Founded in 1999 by Robert Hammond and Joshua David, and designed by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf, the High Line transforms an elevated railway into extraordinary public space in Manhattan’s West Side. The park is…

It’s hard to picture Melbourne in 1983, when Professor Rob Adams first arrived to join the project team tasked with writing the City of Melbourne Strategy Plan (1985). Thirty- four years on, Melbourne has flourished and the City Design team that he leads at the City of Melbourne has accumulated 160 awards and delivered a suite of key policies and built projects, including the Postcode 3000 planning policy, Birrarung Marr, the Urban Forest Strategy, Swanston Street and the Places for People study. Adams had arrived in Melbourne with a growing sense of disquiet about the types of places being built. A study tour of Europe taken in 1969 for a fourth-year architectural research project called “Town Planning in Scandinavia and the Hill Towns of Italy: a comparative study” catalysed his…

Ecological succession can be defined as any landscape’s evolution from disturbance. These disturbances can range from extreme events, such as fire or deforestation, to more subtle activities like grazing or mowing. Many Australian bush landscapes are successional ecologies in different stages. The use of firestick farming by Indigenous peoples for more than sixty thousand years had privileged open canopy plant communities with monocot- dominated understoreys in many parts of Australia. Historic accounts of the landscapes around Melbourne, western Sydney and Tasmania show how quickly succession from grassland to forest occurred without the regular disturbance of fire. Australia has many colonizing species – these are the first to germinate after a disturbance, particularly fire (the germination of many species is triggered by the chemicals in smoke). An interesting case study is…

Anarrative of suffering is inseparable from the natural beauty Port Arthur, from the European invasion of Tasmania and Port Arthur’s days as a notorious penal colony, to its more recent history as the site of Australia’s worst massacre. In something of a historical inversion, this sheltered bay has become a departure point for an awe-inspiring hiking trail called the Three Capes Track, guiding a forty-six- kilometre journey along the rugged south-eastern coast. While a mood of excitement and intrigue can be felt as we depart the port, it is impossible to escape the weight of history at this place, where previously thousands arrived in dread and defeat. On board the small ferry, calm waters give no hint of the wild Southern Ocean beyond the headlands. You can just make out…

LANDSCAPE AUSTRALIA CONFERENCE, SYDNEY, 5 MAY 2018 The 2018 Landscape Australia Conference will explore Australia’s emerging position in the Asia-Pacific region and reveal insights into Asian landscape design cultures. The conference features an impressive line-up of keynote speakers from New Zealand, India, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and China. A lively series of panel discussions will complement the presentations, which will help identify tools and methods for Australian landscape architects and designers, architects, planners and urbanists. Discounted student tickets are available and a fringe program will be announced closer to the event. Stay up to date via the below link. Image: CJ Blossom Park by PARKKIM landscapeaustralia.com/conference AUSTRALIAN PAVILION AT THE 2018 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE TO FOCUS ON ECOLOGICAL REPAIR Australia’s pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will be an…

Wootten Road Reserve Tarneit, Victoria Glas Landscape Architecture Prior to the European settlement of Victoria, expansive native grasslands dominated the mostly flat, volcanic plains to the north and east of Melbourne. Despite their incredible ecological biodiversity, until recently Victoria’s native temperate grasslands were not, however, regarded as having any conservation value. As a result, most of these fragile ecosystems have been seriously degraded or destroyed by grazing and development. Alarmingly, only 1 percent of Victoria’s largest grassland, the natural temperate grassland of the Victorian Volcanic Plains, remains intact today, much of it lying within Melbourne’s urban growth area.1 A major factor in the demise of Australia’s grassland ecologies is a widely held belief that grassland is unattractive and unremarkable and should be used for “productive” purposes, like farming or housing.…

I n a mid-1900 address to the Oak Park Fellowship Club in Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright discussed many of the central preoccupations of his work; these are outlined in a polemic he wrote, entitled “Concerning Landscape Architecture.”1 Ostensibly a lecture to a local community group, it is filled with opinion about approaches to landscape design. Then just a few decades old, the design discipline of landscape architecture grappled with the legacy of the “styles,” the doctrines of the beaux arts and other imported traditions. Most came from Europe and modernism had yet to be seen on bookshelves or in magazines. Debts to history were stock-in-trade. Wright’s words reveal much about the sources of his early thinking and attitudes to landscape design, citing Gertrude Jekyll and her then fresh-published book Home…

Google Maps sent me on an interesting route to Wootten Road Reserve, which I was photographing for Landscape Architecture Australia [see review page 50]. One minute I was driving on empty, brand new roads through new industrial estates, the next on a bumpy dirt road bordered by paddocks littered with rubbish and scotch thistle, before finally arriving in suburbia on Melbourne’s ever-expanding western fringe. It possibly wasn’t the most direct route, but it made my destination seem all the more remarkable – the grasslands at Wootten Road Reserve are a magical place. Serpentine pathways invite exploration of the grasses, which sway gently in the breeze and glow evermore golden as the sun sinks lower. I stayed longer than I needed to and took far too many photos. The light kept…