Decoding landscape urbanism. Michael Mayer of OLIN Studio seeks to find out what is landscape urbanism at OLIN’s Theoretical Symposium.
While the book The Landscape Urbanism Reader defines the term as “a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism,” the symposium explored four definitions of landscape urbanism as the framework for the studio’s theories to clarify the term.
- Landscape urbanism as diagnosis
- Landscape urbanism as framework and process
- Landscape urbanism as green infrastructure
- Landscape urbanism as landscape + urbanism
Via OLIN Studio Blog
Community building through arts education. Because of the increase of financial inaccessibility to higher education and city center exhibition and production space, creative practitioners have had to find alternative strategies to sustain creative knowledge exchange.
Sustainable Cities Collective looks at five very different and innovative London-based engagement projects that offer individual insights into alternative arts education and their positive effect on connecting the local community.
- Trade School Croydon
- Zeitgeist Arts Projects, New Cross
- National Portrait Gallery, Late-Shift
- Wide Open School, Hayward Gallery
- Q-Art London
Via Sustainable Cities Collective
Embarking on adaptive reuse. Tom Ito, a principal in Gensler's Los Angeles office and a leader of the firm's global hospitality practice, explores the use of adaptive reuse -- the art and design science of reinventing buildings -- in hotels.
Many important urban centers in the U.S. don’t have much buildable, open space but offer a nice supply of underperforming buildings, which could be a golden opportunity for hotel owners and developers looking to bring their brand to those sought-after cities.
Retail serenity. The new Alchemist store, a 2,500 square-foot oasis of calm designed by Rene Gonzalez Architect, was designed to offer refuge from the frantic pace of Lincoln Road’s bars, banks, shops, theaters and restaurants.
Tucked into the ground level of an award-winning concrete parking structure at 1111 Lincoln Road (designed by the Swiss firm Herzog and DeMeuron), the new retail space will complement the original Alchemist on the fifth floor.
Landscape architects vs. architects. A reader responds to an article in The Atlantic Cities about the transformation of Youngstown, Ohio, in which the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted is referred to as a ‘famed architect.’
The Atlantic Cities clarifies the distinction between architect and landscape architect, pointing out that licensed landscape architects study a quite different curriculum than architecture and typically have a choice between completing a four or five-year bachelor's degree or a two-year master's degree.