RMIT Landscape Architecture_Lecture Series_2009
Monday May 11 @ 6.30 pm
BMW Edge Theatre @ Federation Square
Entry fee: $5 (students), $10 (professionals)
ALL WELCOME!
Postscript 2009 event qualifies for AILA Continuing Professional Development credit
Where Does Design Begin?
Anuradha Mathur & Dilip da Cunha
The practice of landscape architecture is divided in its concern between the first and last acts of settlement, between the necessity of configuring the infrastructure of habitation and the luxury of articulating its ‘third’ nature. There is an urge in the profession to bridge this divide, to argue the necessity of the latter and the possibilities of the former. While this effort is ongoing, it is worth calling attention to a common ground that is already shared by these ‘ends’ of practice, viz., the primordial act of singling things out from flux, whether these things are objects, processes, schemes, or phenomena. This shared act of ‘visualizing’ is often taken for granted by designers but also by the larger milieu of design practice, particularly the disciplines of history, geography and ecology that are becoming increasingly central to arguing design interventions. In this talk we present our engagement with the act of visualizing, the challenges that it presents with regard to reading the past, present, and future of ‘site’, the possibilities that it opens for design, and the ‘new’ practices that it demands. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha have focused their artistic and design expertise for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes. Their investigations have taken them to diverse terrains including the Lower Mississippi, New York, Sundarbans, Rio Grande, and Bangalore. They believe that landscapes are shifting, living, material phenomena that demand an attitude of negotiation rather than control. Their mission is to create through innovative modes of visual representation the ground for this attitude in design.
Anuradha is an architect and landscape architect. She is Associate Professor, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Dilip is an architect and planner. He is visiting faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York, and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. While Mathur and da Cunha’s drawings and projects have been part of a number of exhibitions in the US and India, they have used the format of public exhibitions as a means of initiating and encouraging discourse on design and planning in contentious landscapes. They are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001) and Deccan Traverses:The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Rupa & Co., 2006).
Sustaining Beauty
Elizabeth Meyer
Sustainable landscape design is generally understood in relation to three principles – ecological health, social justice and economic prosperity. Rarely do aesthetics factor into sustainability discourse outside of negative asides conflating the visible with the aesthetic and rendering both superfluous. The paper examines the role of beauty and aesthetics in a sustainability agenda. It argues that for culture to be sustainable it will take more than ecologically regenerative designs. What is needed are designed landscapes that provoke those who experience them to become more aware of how their actions affect the environment, and to care enough to make changes. This requires considering the role of aesthetic environmental experiences, such as beauty, in recentering human consciousness from an egocentric to a more bio-centric perspective. This argument takes the form of a manifest, and is inspired by landscape architects whose work is not usually understood as contributing to mainstream sustainable design.
Elizabeth Meyer is an associate professor and former Landscape Architecture Department Chair at the University of Virginia. Previously, Meyer taught at Harvard and Cornell. She is nationally recognized as an outstanding scholar and teacher, with honors and awards from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the University of Virginia. Ms. Meyer is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a registered landscape architect who worked for EDAW and Hanna/Olin in the 1980s. Since then, she has consulted with several landscape architecture firms including Michael Vergason, Alexandria, Virginia, and Van Valkenburgh Associates, Cambridge.
postscript 