sites Archives - Art of Landscaping

October 29, 2022

animu media library’s concrete curves embrace the site’s existing landscape in porto-vecchio

Animu media library by dominique coulon & associes

Showing up to float previously mentioned its web site in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica, the Animu Media Library by Dominique Coulon & Associés (a lot more in this article) is designed to maintain the present landscape. The library, constructed in collaboration with Amelia Tavella Architectes (additional right here), is described by concrete curves that circumvent the rocks of the web page, as nicely as its several oak and olive trees. Reminiscent of a big sculpture, the task has neither a exact front nor back again, with its elevations going through in all instructions of the town. A light ramp sales opportunities buyers to a distinctive backyard garden, imagined of as a location for reading in the open air.images by Eugeni Pons

EMBRACING porto-vecchio’S Normal LANDSCAPE OF ROCKS AND TREES

With the guiding theory of the project currently being the preservation of the landscape, Dominique Coulon & Associés drew up a exact survey of just about every tree and each individual rock of the proposed web-site in Porto-Vecchio. ‘The shape of the developing is deduced from these attribute things, which we had been nervous to protect,’ describes the french architecture studio. The job embraces the trees and rocks by means of its concrete curves, forming out of doors and indoor areas that greatly enhance the landscape’s natural beauty. To the north, a sweeping curve encloses the open up air backyard garden, accessed by way of a ramp that makes its way by means of the trees, preserving the first topography. This open room characteristics an area for looking through, conviviality, exchanges and development. There, just one can come across a herb and botanical backyard, a sky observatory, an out of doors projection place, and a shaded terrace.

The project is formulated to deliver end users with generous and relaxed areas, linked both to city everyday living and the encompassing landscape. The inside is described by fluidity and transparency, with capabilities next one immediately after the other in a harmonious coexistence. Joyful and stimulating, the library’s areas aspect abundant pure light-weight even though featuring panoramic views of the city. ‘It is the things of the web-site that generate the plasticity of this project, echoing the landscape by revealing its elegance,’ notes Dominique Coulon & Associés.

the animu media library is made to protect the site’s natural elegance

the developing appears to float over the ground

a gentle ramp potential customers customers to a unique back garden

the curves of the construction envelop the landscape

the ramp preserves the unique topography

the undertaking is merged with rocks and trees present on the website

big openings permit ample all-natural gentle in just the library

1/10

curves are also present in the library's interior spaces

curves are also present in the library’s inside spaces

animu media library’s concrete curves embrace the site’s existing landscape in porto-vecchio

the library setting up at nighttime

venture approach

task sections

job elevations

challenge information:

name: Animu media library

architect: Dominique Coulon & Associés

collaborator: Amelia Tavella Architectes
locale: Porto-Vecchio, Corsica, France
customer: Town of Porto-Vecchio [Corsica]
location: 1200 sqm

sofia lekka angelopoulou I designboom

sep 29, 2022

June 3, 2022

How the ‘Queen of Slag’ Is Transforming Industrial Sites

Vintondale Reclamation Park, a 35-acre site in coal country in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, completed in 2002, was pivotal. Why?

It was a perfect, multidisciplinary staff of engineers, hydrogeologists, architects, artists, historians and landscape architects. We discovered every thing about acid mine drainage remedy to style a all-natural filtration procedure that dealt with years of air pollution from mine runoff. Excavators resculpted 19th-century beehive ovens utilised to convert coal to coke to make metal. We brought them out from driving those chain-backlink fences and made the science noticeable, wonderful. Now it’s a neighborhood park together with a historic bicycle path. I indicate, increase. It all came alongside one another. Persons commenced paying consideration. There seriously weren’t any designs at that time in the U.S. From then on I could position to a little something in rural Pennsylvania and say, “This is entirely attainable.”

Chat far more about reusing supplies salvaged at internet sites.

I am obsessed with resourcefulness. It’s possible it is mainly because I’m from a huge family. So when design enterprise as standard sends debris off to Maine mainly because landfills are closed in Massachusetts, I call that out. I still just cannot stand the phrase “sustainability” — it’s just widespread sensibility. I’m primarily in appreciate with concrete. Just one person sees it as debris. I see this great patina. I picture who stood on that, I see the get the job done on that floor and imagine, how lovely is that?

I understand you name your supplies.

I have no thought how to refer to something until finally you name it. On the design web-site of a historic shipyard, now the Urban Outfitters headquarters in Philadelphia, we experienced Barney and Betty Rubble, Wilma and Bamm-Bamm. The crew liked it.

How did you respond to becoming the inaugural Oberlander laureate?

The prize has definitely produced me experience very pleased, very profoundly. It type of mentioned, “Please do this.” I think the jury did a rather amazing position wanting not necessarily at the amount of built will work but the affect that someone’s do the job has had, also in style and design training, and how eager anyone is to just take pitfalls. Cornelia Oberlander [a landscape architect who died in 2021] was a pioneer. She was a risk-taker. It doesn’t happen more than enough in our self-discipline.

Do you at any time listen to personal anecdotes about your perform?

My brother Joe not long ago told me about assembly a grandmother at the Urban Outfitters internet site. She was looking at her grandchildren enjoy, and Joe questioned her what her marriage was, if anything, to the decommissioned U.S. Navy Garden. “I was a cook dinner around in that making,” she mentioned, smiling. “I’m so pleased to see it alive.”

February 26, 2022

These African heritage sites are under threat from rising seas, but there’s still time to save them

(CNN) — On the shores of North Africa, ancient cities have stood for millennia. The columns of Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, are a reminder of the once bustling Phoenician and Roman port, and along the coast in what’s now Libya, lie the majestic ruins of Sabratha’s Roman amphitheater close — perhaps too close — to the sea.

Africa’s iconic natural sites date back even further, such as the ancient coral reef of the Seychelles’ Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean, thought to be around 125,000 years old.

But extreme weather events and rising sea levels mean that all three — and around 190 other spectacular heritage sites that line Africa’s coasts — will be at risk of severe flooding and erosion in the next 30 years, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Sea levels have been rising at a faster rate over the past three decades compared to the 20th century, the research says, and climate change hazards such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires are becoming more common.

The ancient Roman theater of Sabratha, in modern-day Libya, is one of the sites expected to be in danger by 2050.

PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images

It found that 56 sites are currently in danger if a “once in a century” flood struck, and that by 2050 — if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory — this number could more than triple to 198 sites.

“There is a local value, an international value, an economic value … and an intrinsic value (to these heritage sites),” Nicholas Simpson, an author of the study and postdoctoral research fellow at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town, tells CNN. “There are some monuments and sites and spaces that we don’t want lost for the next generation.”

Simpson believes the findings serve as an important wake-up call to increase climate adaptation measures and funding across the continent. “There’s an important message of loss and damage from climate change to heritage, which we hope will mobilize greater intent (and) action,” he says.

A first for Africa

This is particularly pertinent in Africa, where the links between climate risk and heritage have been mostly ignored, says Simpson. Past scientific research has identified cultural sites endangered by climate change in the Mediterranean, Europe and North America, but this is the first continent-wide assessment of Africa.

“(The link between) climate change and heritage in Africa is gravely under-researched, and compared to other continents, we know very little,” he says, adding that a 2021 study found that between 1990 and 2019, research on Africa received just 3.8{6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} of climate-related global research funding.

In this latest study, Simpson and his colleagues mapped out a total of 284 heritage sites that are recognized or under consideration by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, in the 39 countries that comprise the African coast.

They overlaid this geographic data with a highly intricate model projecting sea level rise and global warming levels under both a moderate and high emission scenario. The moderate scenario assumes global greenhouse gas emissions will stabilize before the end of the century, while in the high emission scenario — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” — they continue to rise, consistent with the current global pace, until 2100.

From there, the researchers calculated the likely percentage area of the site exposed to a “once-in-a-century” extreme coastal flooding event.

Simpson explains that such an event is an important indicator in understanding future climate risk, because it is these extreme events that are likely to cause severe damage, and climate change is increasing their likelihood and frequency.

“In the 1970s, what used to be a once-in-a-100-year event happened once in 100 years,” he says, “but what we are seeing when climate hazards are amplified … is that a one-in-a-100-year event might be happening once in 10 years going forward.”

According to the research, North Africa has the largest number of threatened sites — from the ancient ruins of North Sinai that stretch between the Suez canal and Gaza and were once well-traveled by Egyptian pharaohs on their way to Canaan, to Tipasa, an ancient Phoenician trading post in present-day Algeria that was conquered by Rome and turned into a strategic base by Emperor Claudius during the conquest of Mauritania.

Many of North Africa’s ancient cities lie dangerously close to the sea, such as Tipasa in modern-day Algeria.

HOCINE ZAOURAR/AFP via Getty Images

Simpson caveats this, noting that while North Africa has a high number of globally recognized world heritage sites, other parts of Africa may have key sites that are not listed by UNESCO or the Ramsar convention. But he hopes that identifying these world-famous sites might “raise alarm bells for climate risk for heritage in Africa.”

Protecting cultural heritage

The study notes that its findings will help to prioritize at-risk sites and highlight the need for immediate protective action. This could include engineering solutions, such as sea walls and breakwaters, but Simpson warns that flood mitigation measures like these are “incredibly expensive” and there’s no guarantee they can withstand future sea levels.

A much better solution, he says, is to restore, plant and manage ecological infrastructure, such as salt marshes, seagrass meadows and mangroves, which provide natural protection and act as carbon sinks, sucking up carbon dioxide from the air.

He adds that in Africa especially, it is crucial to improve local and indigenous governance around the sites and to recognize that the lives of indigenous peoples “are part of the landscape and intimately intertwined with the seasons.”

“Raising awareness about climate risk to heritage speaks to the broader need for greater urgency about [tackling] climate risk to societies,” says Simpson.

October 15, 2021

Julie Bargmann turns Superfund sites into must-see destinations.

**Julie Bargmann**, 2021 Oberlander Prize laureate [Photo: ©Barrett Doherty/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

Bargmann has specialized in get the job done on overlooked, environmentally challenged, and deeply polluted web-sites, bringing an ethos of recycling, remediation, and restore to destinations other individuals could see as much too much gone. In tasks like the Vintondale Reclamation Park, created on a former coal mine’s dumping floor, and the retrofit of the Philadelphia Navy Lawn into the headquarters of Urban Outfitters, Bargmann turns design and style initiatives into environmental interventions, and vice versa.

City Outfitters, Philadelphia Julie Bargmann, landscape architect [Photo: ©Charles A. Birnbaum/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

Started in 1992, D.I.R.T.—which stands for Dump It Proper There—has normally reworked elements of a site’s past existence into the new layout, working with rubble and chunks of former properties to attract connections to the earlier. Bargmann’s get the job done also emphasizes the relevance of working with landscape layout and ecological procedures to filter and take out pollutants from greatly impacted postindustrial landscapes, which includes Superfund sites—areas of land that have been designated by the Environmental Security Agency as hazardous to human overall health and/or the setting.

[Image: courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

“To function with these toxic and degraded web sites, you should look thoroughly, and treatment about, the processes of their past—industrial, social, environmental, and cultural,” Bargmann tells Rapid Organization via e mail. “It’s only when you understand the flows and the stories that you can picture their future everyday living. And the sites’ landscape narratives are the only way to have interaction the neighbors’ story.”

**Cornelia Hahn Oberlander** in 2007 [Photo: Susan Cohen/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

The Oberlander Prize is becoming awarded by the Washington, D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation as a landscape-concentrated counterpart to the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, regarded as architecture’s major honor. To be offered each individual two a long time, the $100,000 Oberlander Prize will also consist of two a long time of public engagement targeted on the laureate’s work. Named for the pioneering environmentalist and landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who died before this year at age 99, the prize was developed to shine a spotlight on a design occupation that is often disregarded as simply filling in the spaces about architecture tasks.

In truth, the historical past of landscape architecture has performed into that notion, with its roots in ornamental backyard style that was much more about aesthetics than effectiveness. This, about time, has progressed into a a lot more broadly thought of practice, with landscape architects doing the job on weather adaptation, regional water setting up, and environmental justice, in addition to coming up with gardens and parks.

“Where the earth is right now in conditions of weather change, fairness, and what we know, in a post-COVID environment, the role that the general public realm plays in our day-to-day life, it is far more important than ever that we need to make noticeable the usually invisible hand of the landscape architect,” suggests Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “With the prize we’re hoping to genuinely elevate its visibility and a broader general public knowledge of what landscape architecture is and what landscape architects do.”

Bargmann was selected by a jury of designers, which include landscape architect and professor Dorothée Imbert, architect Tatiana Bilbao, landscape architect Gina Ford, and landscape architect Walter Hood.

Main Metropolis Park, Detroit [Photo: Prince Concepts/the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

Hood claims Bargmann was selected for her radical influence on the apply of landscape architecture and her persistence in working with design and style to deal with broader issues than pure aesthetics. “It’s not about obtaining the subsequent significant venture, but still investigating those people concepts and concerns in excess of a 25-yr time period and staying capable to stay with it,” he states. “We really don’t get rewarded a good deal of the times for being reliable.”

Bargmann’s get the job done, Hood claims, has pressured persons “to see landscape and the medium in a diverse way. I use the phrase messy in my perform. Julie afforded me that see that the function could be messy and could still be superb.”

Turtle Creek H2o Performs, Dallas [Photo: ©Charles A. Birnbaum/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

In advocating for the reclamation and remediation of seriously polluted internet sites, Bargmann has extensive been a provocateur, but she can also be playful. Her City Outfitters venture at the Philadelphia Navy Property incorporated the notable placement of two huge chunks of concrete from the web-site, which she nicknamed Betty and Barney Rubble, right after cartoon people from The Flintstones. Hood states that go encouraged one of his individual projects, Solar Strand in Buffalo, New York, a number of many years in the past. “I acquired a customer to allow us to do some major Barney Rubble, far too,” he says.

Bargmann’s strategy to landscape architecture has pushed the industry past its ornamental roots. Hood claims that whilst the profession continue to has a long way to go, Bargmann’s impact has pushed other designers to consider a much more holistic watch of what their initiatives can do. “She’s often been that voice out there in the wilderness doing the operate, and I believe she is an inspiration for the long run,” Hood states.

Core Metropolis Park, Detroit [Photo: Prince Concepts/the Cultural Landscape Foundation]

Bargmann seems gratified by the award, and is hopeful that the interest might assist inspire much more designers to have interaction with the social and environmental issues embedded in just the designed natural environment. “Out there are 25 years’ worth of my previous students who have ventured into this derelict territory with me and now they, together with other colleagues, are poised to nurture unpleasant duckling landscapes,” Bargmann says. “If I paraphrase Cornelia Oberlander, the award is a agency tug to pull your head out of the sand and to regenerate, with pleasure and optimism, these fallow landscapes.”