Over the past few months, there have been bushfires (wildfires) that have burnt in many states of Australia. These fires have burnt through over 8.4Â million hectares (21Â million acres; 84,000 square kilometres; 32,000 square miles) including over 2,500 buildings with over 25 people perishing along with an estimated 500 million animals. These fires have come during […]
Square or Park?
This week, the International Landscape Architecture Festival kicks off in Melbourne, Australia. The conference theme is The Square and The Park. The festival curators see a contentious issue between these two landscape typologies, which dominate our cities and haven’t changed in the past hundred years. Many cities across the world are grappling with the decision of […]
How to collaborate with Landscape Contractors?
As landscape architects, we work with contractors to achieve our design vision for our projects and how we collaborate can impact greatly on the project outcome. There are various approaches that we can use to achieve the best outcome. Start EarlyWhen we work with contractors it can start at different stages of the project, it […]
Can a new form of landscape architectural practice be achieved?
Recently, I reviewed Overgrown by Julian Raxworthy, in which he calls on landscape architects to create a new form of practice that learns from gardening and “optimizes the exciting properties of plants through changing the way landscape architects work†which he is calling “the viridicâ€. Raxworthy provides a series of positions “for reformulation of landscape-architectural practice […]
Improving quality through independent reviews
Independent reviews (peer reviews) are important for projects as they provide an assessment and feedback from an expert who is impartial and not involved with the project to critically review and evaluate the content. The quality of a project can improve with successive reviews at various milestones (end of stages) to ensure that issues are […]