Sommaire pour N. 112 de Topos

How do we plan and design greener, healthier, human-centered, sustainable and resilient urban spaces and architecture? Maybe by means of algae? This image shows the PhotoSynthEtica Tower Linz, by ecoLogicStudio (with Innsbruck University and the Bartlett UCL for the Upper Austria Cultural Institute). (p.24) Dear readers, the topic of the new topos issue is green technologies. The term may come across as an oxymoron at times; yet, coming to think about the current global challenges, it may actually prove to be a highly useful and sensible notion. Let’s remind ourselves: we are faced with a nexus of complex issues – climate change, air and water pollution, digitalization, urbanization, depletion of energy and other raw material sources, poverty, migration, pandemics. These issues need to be solved without further impacting our climate,…

Paolo L. Bürgi is a landscape architect based in Camorino, Switzerland. He is adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, visiting professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and at the Politecnico di Milano. He has participated in many international competitions winning several prizes, such as the “CERN-Route de Meyrin” in Switzerland or the “Helsinki Töölönlathi Parks” in Finland and the “The Rosa Barba International Landscape Architecture Prize” for the Cardada project in Switzerland in 2003. 1 INFLUENCED BY All the arts that left their traces within me. 2 INSPIRED BY Ernst Cramer’s courageous gestures and visions. Later my eyes were opened by Luis Barragan. His work has made me understand the intrinsic force and beauty of essentiality in architecture. 3 WHY LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE? It is extraordinarily difficult…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to think, comprehend, communicate and learn. Learning is essential to progress in life, to adapt to new and evolving situations, to become a thinking, feeling individual and a member of society guided by morality. We see time and again what the results are if lessons are not learned and action is guided by impulse alone, devoid of any moral judgment or consequence. Our societies, our civilization and our world can no longer afford dictatorial whims that undermine free, just, and equitable societies. Against this background, we have reached a technological threshold that has inspired the imagination of many and has real-time consequences for the way we do business, govern cities, and share the planet. AI is more than a buzzword, it hearkens the emergence of…

Every era conjures a dominant vision of the ideal city. The cities that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution made way for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, which promised clean air, green grass, and healthy living. Later the image of a skyscraper in a park made up Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, with high-rise structures standing astride park-like boulevards. Then came Jane Jacobs’ Organic City embodying the aspirations of urban dwellers whose actual use of sidewalks, streets, and buildings gave the city its identity and, in the process, advanced the march of democracy. The rise of the information, media and cultural industries paved the way for Richard Florida’s Creative City where knowledge and the arts led the way. Today, media, urban planners, and government policymakers tell us that, we are in the…

The railway station in Utrecht is the busiest in the Netherlands. A bicycle parking garage by Ector Hoogstad Architects, Rotterdam and landscape architects Buro Sant En Co, Den Haag, was built as part of the redesign and redevelopment of the station district in this fourth-largest city in the country. It holds the world record for bicycle garages with 13,500 parking spaces. Its top ranking is not really a surprise given its location in one of the country’s major traffic hubs along with the Dutch affinity for bicycles. However, the realisation of the project was also remarkable in that it provided a unique design impact to the overall redesign of the station district. Bicycle parking has become an attraction in itself as part of this bright and friendly complex. Whereas multi-storey…

PIERRE-ANDRÉ MARTIN is a french Landscape Architect established in Rio de Janeiro since 2001. He is co-founder of the landscape architecture and environment firm EMBYÁ and also coordinator and teacher of ecological landscape courses and postgraduate courses at PUC-Rio University. When the design process of Flamengo Park started in 1961, the main and initial purpose of this landscape transformation was to solve transport problems between the central and the south area of the city of Rio de Janeiro and secondly to create a big urban park inspired by parkscapes such as Central Park in New York. A dream team of architects, designers, botanists, etc. was created: Lota de Macedo Soares, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Roberto Burle Marx, Ethel Bauzer Medeiros, Luiz Emygdio de Mello Filho, among others. Flamengo Park is a…

Born in 1921 in Mülheim-Ruhr, Germany, Cornelia immigrated 1938 to the US. She earned a diploma from Smith College in 1944 and continued her studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1953 she established her own design firm in Vancouver, British Columbia and became known for her collaborative, socially responsible, and environmentally thoughtful work. In 2019 The Cultural Landscape Foundation established the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (tclf.org/oberlanderprize). 1 INFLUENCED BY My mother Beate Hahn. She wrote gardening books while living in Berlin, was an avid gardener, educator and a good friend of Karl Foerster. But she was strict and when we immigrated to the US, I had to find my own path to landscape architecture. 2 INSPIRED BY Having been painted, with my sister Charlotte,…

Becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 is the objective behind the EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL the most ambitious package of measures intended to enable European citizens and businesses to benefit from sustainable green transition.1 “The use of natural materials like BAMBOO can be a vital instrument to develop ecological alternatives for the cities of the future”, says Austrian architect Chris Precht2 Karl Burkart, Managing Director at One Earth, Rockefeller Philanthropy, defines a GREEN ECONOMY as based on six main sectors. These are renewable energy, green buildings, sustainable transport, water management, waste management, land management.3 Ferdinand Ludwig, German architect and Professor for Green Technologies at the Technical University of Munich uses trees’ natural structural abilities for architectural purposes: This field is called BAUBOTANIK – living plant constructions. He is developing…

Sebastian Bernardy is an architect and researcher based in Rotterdam and co-founder of Eventually Made. He joined AMO after graduating from TU Delft, collaborated with Something Fantastic in Berlin, and tutored the studio abroad program at Harvard GSD. sebastian@eventuallymade.com Yves Cabannes is an urban planner and Emeritus Professor of Development Planning at Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. He was lecturer in Urban Planning at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. y.cabannes@ucl.ac.uk Lenora Ditzler is an agricultural systems scientist working on a PhD in Farming Systems Ecology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. Lenora contributed to the exhibition Countryside, the Future, put on by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal/AMO. lenora1.ditzler@wur.nl Mitchell Joachim is architect, urban designer and co-Founder of Terreform ONE, an architecture and urban design research group. He is a leading…

Styrian, but international: Caylend https://caylend.at Hotel Weitzer https://hotelweitzer.com/en Granada – Eh Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzDsH6nD7q0 SUSANNAH LEOPOLD is a freelancer based in Graz, where she translates, writes, and edits English texts about architecture and art. In term time, she also works as an editorial assistant at GAM Lab, which is responsible for the annual publication Graz Architecture Magazine (GAM) as well as academic communication at Graz University of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture. Security is another point. Flamengo Park is so huge and the presence of the road systems make it host to people experiencing homelessness. This has required implementation of additional security patrols. This is not a problem that is exclusive to Flamengo Park, but some of its structures and its massive scale promote these undesired uses more than other spaces of…

Marc Miller Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at The Pennsylvania State University There are implicit and explicit relationships between landscape, power, and race; and designers need to identify visions that are more inclusive. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota requires us to reflect on how we can create diverse and equitable spaces, and these are questions with international implications. The impact of the events of 25 May 2020 reached well past the American Midwest and triggered moves to make public spaces more accessible to Black people and those who experience racial inequality globally. Is it possible to imagine Black people in public spaces without derivative stereotypes? Can open spaces be transformed to reflect the needs and visions of Black people? Are there different ways to bring this idea…

One of the globe's largest emerging conurbations stretches along the south-facing coast of West Africa, reaching from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to Lagos, Nigeria. Accra and its sister city Tema are located roughly in the middle between these two end points and make up a 50-kilometer stretch of urbanized area on the Trans-West African Coastal Highway, which connects the urban nodes of the region. Accra is the political capital, commercial center and largest city of Ghana, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. As such, it brings together people from multiple backgrounds including the northern regions of the country that border the Sahel. Openness and tolerance for different cultures, value systems and lifestyles can be sensed throughout the city. Virtually all neighborhoods of Accra are diverse as tenants with links…

Amidst the many short-lived shopping crazes in New York City during the national lockdown in the Spring of 2020, gardening tools looked like an unlikely one. The appeal, it seems, was the benefit of a new pastime to hold over the isolation, learning a new craft that connects to the dearly missed outside, and the prospect to reap the fruits of one’s own labour. Should the planted vegetables help comb over any insecurity in food supply, all the better. This form of widespread hyper-local farming was famous first in the midst of World War II, when the country urged families to plant victory gardens as an initiative to support the need for food rations in wartimes. Now, without a government campaign, many city dwellers turn to growing a garden simply…

What does Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City, which came to life in the beginning of the 20th century in England, share in common with Águas de São Pedro in Brazil, a tropicalized Garden City from the 1940s, and Magarpatta City, one of India’s greenest townships, which rose from the ground in the 2000s, 100 years after Letchworth? Each achieved impressive results: More than half of Letchworth Estate is still rural and largely productive, despite London pressure on land; Águas de S.P. ranks 1st or 2nd for its Human Development Index out of 5,570 Brazilian municipalities, and Magarpatta in India has become one of the very few carbon-positive townships in the world. It’s important to examine some of their uniqueness, but also to look at the reasons why innovative green…

Where there is light, there is life. And cities need public life; this has become clearer than ever before in recent months. People meet, communicate and feel comfortable whenever a square, a park or a street is illuminated in the evening. That’s what makes a city liveable. Whether in-ground spotlight, mast luminaire, bollard light or spot: There is a very diverse range of luminaires. The choice of light source must be carefully considered – this is the only way to provide atmosphere, safety and orientation and to ideally design open spaces. This is how a city becomes alive and how it stays liveable – even in these times dominated by the coronavirus. Column lighting New column luminaires, RENO ELEMENTS from Hess, employ a clear and minimalist design that lends character…

Los Angeles hosts an array of buildings representing what is new in the world. One of my favorites is the Theme Building at LAX, a Googie architectural gem conveying the optimism that prevailed in the Western world for a long time. Designed by a team around William Pereira and Charles Luckman, it was an icon of a world in which international travel was part of an increasingly open lifestyle. This lifestyle then became more generally available, which caused a new cultural richness as well as social and environmental concerns. And yet, the idea came to prominence that by looking at what is happening at airports, we can understand what is taking place to society in general. This thinking could be extended to other spatial concepts – such as the “airport…