CITY as LANDSCAPE architecture

Veganism is a set of principles, as well as being a diet, and relates to Green Buddhism. The design principles include: - vegetated ground, roofs and walls, - rainwater harvesting, use and infiltration - growing as much of our own food as we can - avoiding industrialised and ultra-processed foods, which help you to die young - planning greenways for commuting and for leisure - both walking and cycling - creating breathing zones with clean fresh air - as advocated by the man who laid the foundations for modern landscape architecture (‘Yes: that’s John Claudius Loudon’)

Claudius Buchanan’s promotion of higher education in India led to the foundation of its first degree-awarding university, at Serampore. He also had a significant influence on the campaigns against wife-burning and self-immolation in India. Yet he saw himself as ‘one of the chief sinners.’ Why? John Claudius Loudon advanced through Europe as Napoleon retreated. As well as being a pioneer of landscape architecture he made important contributions to public parks, greenways, greenbelts, arboreta, urban planning and the glass-and-steel architecture of the 20th century. Loudon also invented a style of planting design that has become dominant: the Gardenesque. It uses exotic plants in naturalistic compositions - as Gertrude Jekyll did and as Piet Oudolf does. Yet Loudon is almost forgotten. Why? Jane Wells Webb, who married Loudon, was a pioneer of science fiction writing, But her interest was not in space travel or intergalactic warfare. She dreamed of a ‘Claudian’ ideal world, in which queens, rather than kings, would rule - and in which rivers would be lined with beautiful gardens, open to the public. The Claudians is the story of the cousins' lives and their work. It explores the ideas which motivated them, the details of their travels, the challenges that left them undaunted, their marriages, their achievements and their untimely deaths. From the Claudians Companion Pages you can find out a great deal more about the cousins and buy the book. It's on offer at a 25% discount on pre-orders before December 1st 2024.

Robert Holden and Tom Turner discus the Landscape Institute's aims and its achievements. Landscape Institute Members for 111 years (half each), they discuss the foundation of the Institute and what it does now. They intend a second video about what the LI and the landscape profession should plan to do in the future, as it approaches its 100th Anniversary in 2029. It was founded as the Institute of Landscape Architects with Thomas Mawson as its first president. There was a focus on garden design in the 1930s. When Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe became president this focus shifted to public projects, including New Towns, roads, forestry, minerals and urban design.

There is a very fully illustrated version of this podcast on YouTube. Edward Hutchison is a London artist, landscape architect, architect and author of a very popular book on Landscape Drawing (published by Thames and Hudson). In this podcast he talks to Tom Turner about his work and about how he sees the relationship between art, painting and landscape architecture. He sees drawing and painting as analytical tools which help the landscape architecture understand the nature of the world and the place which will be designed. Edward also paints what happens below the ground and above the ground - the world of soil and the world of birdsong (which will be the theme of his next exhibition, in London in 2022). The podcast features a project he did, in Nimes, France, with Norman Foster (for whom he worked at one time).

Brodie McAllister gives an outline of land art, environmental art and their relationship to landscape architecture. The debate was organised by LANDSCAPEmatters and held on 15th June 2021. Brodie became the Landscape Institute’s President Elect a few days before the debate.

Landscape architecture is a very good job and a very satisfying career. The work is creative, exciting and a great way to solve environmental problems and contribute to the mitigation of climate change.  See illustrated version of this podcast on YouTube. It was made for people thinking about a career in landscape architecture AND for professionals who would like to expand the scope and work of landscape architects. As an art, landscape design can be traced back 30,000 years. You work with nature, with local communities and with the other environmental design professions, including architects, engineers, horticulturalists, hydrologists and scientists. The documented history of landscape design theory dates back 2000 years, to Vitruvius. It became an organised profession with the work of Frederick Law Olmsted on Central Park in New York City in the 1860s.  As societies become richer the demand for landscape architects goes up. Tom Turner makes these points and sees the design approach known as landscape urbanism as the direction landscape architecture design methods are likely to develop.  More information is available from the Q&A section of the LAA Landscape Architecture website http://www.landscapearchitecture.org.uk/qa-landscape-architecture/ and there is YouTube playlist for the Q&A videos https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0tjuOrn4n20OnXwUS0r1iKHUJqTf0D-S  Websites with information about salaries for landscape architects include:  USA:  https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/landscape-architects.htm UK: https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/landscape-architect

There's an illustrated version of this podcast on Youtube https://youtu.be/qdZIVBRGIec It takes an overview of how and why cities could, and surely will, come to have vegetated rooftops with a profusion of roof gardens. The text is from an online lecture by Tom Turner to the London Branch of the UK Landscape Institute LI on 16th February 2021.

No surprise if half of you hate Jordan Peterson and the other half love him. That's how it goes. But I guess we all love Geoffrey Jellicoe. The theme of the podcast is that just as Modernism and Postmodernism were cultural trends with a powerful influence on 20th century design, whatever comes after them (which was called post-postmodernism in the title of my 1996 book on City as landscape) is sure to be a big influence on twenty-first century design including, of course, landscape architecture and landscape urbanism. Geoffrey Jellicoe was, I believe, 'postmodern' (rather than 'modern') but only in the sense Bernard Iddings Bell used the term (ie for an approach which rested on science and belief). He was not 'postmodern' in the current sense of 'skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism'.  I hope the subject isn't too dense for a 25 minute podcast. You might find the Youtube version easier (because it's illustrated) and if you want the notes and bibliographic references they can be found in this blogpost. The list of alternative names for the emerging cultural trend include  altermodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digital, post-humanism, aftermodernism and the new sincerity. In place of cynical postmodern irony, they stress 'faith, trust, dialogue, performance, and truth'. Does Jordan Peterson have these characteristics? Yes.  People referred to in the podcast include: Jordan B Peterson, John Ruskin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Jeffrey Nealon, Alison Gibbons,  Robin van den Akker, Timotheus Vermeulen,   Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Roland Barthes, Ninian Smart, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, Sir James George Frazer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vladimir Propp,  and Canon Bernard Iddings Bell.   The ideas mentioned in the video include: Modernism, Postmodernism, Post-Postmodernism, Metamodernism, Arts and Crafts Style, Abstract Style, Post-Abstract Style,  God, Religion, Faith, Belief Style, Renaissance, Baroque, The Ten Commandments, Structuralism, Myth, Symbolism, Narrative, Collective Unconscious, Genius Loci, Maps of Meaning, Landscape Urbanism, Landscape Architecture, Garden Design. Tom

Ideas lie at the heart of landscape architecture and should have the same place in  the design process. This includes ideas about the natural world, about society, about culture and about the traditions of making cities, gardens and landscapes. To integrate these ideas they can be represented with words and images. The words should be as concise as captions The images should be diagrammatic and photographic Christopher Alexander used the terms 'pattern' and  'archetype' in his 1977 book: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and the Alexander patterns are archetypes for making good places. They need to be integrated with the patterns of the natural environment. Other structural patterns can be identified with the help of psychology, ecology, geomorphology, art, design, geometry, planning and other subjects too. This gives us a structuralist approach to landscape architecture, drawing on aspects of philosophical structuralism. Note: the three parts of this podcast have were published from July 5th,  July 19th and August 2nd 2020. This podcast contains all three parts, together with an introduction and a conclusion. A fully illustrated version of this podcast is available on Youtube.

This is the first part of a  podcast, based on Chapter 3 of Tom Turner's book on City as landscape. It's about the importance of ideas in the landscape architectural design process and supports the case for Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language being incorporated into the landscape design process. There is an illustrated version of this podcast on Youtube.

Far too many buildings are covered with dead skin. Concrete, steel, wood, metal, brick, bitumen, rubber and vinyl are lifeless materials which can and should have a vegetated outer cladding.  Here's an illustrated version of the podcast. The exteriors of buildings should be planned, designed and managed for multiple objectives including: 1. Habitat creation 2. Horticulture for growing food 3. Horticulture for aesthetics 4. Apiculture (bee keeping) 5. Surface water management 6. Energy capture 7. Carbon capture 8. Dust capture 9. Noise attenuation 10. Thermal insulation 11. Natural lighting and ventilation 12. Relaxation and wellbeing Green cladding materials are also beautiful sustainable.  For an illustrated version of this podcast please see  https://youtu.be/S9R2bXDsY2Y on the Landscape Architecture YouTube channel.

This podcast is based on the first chapter of a book by Tom Turner published in 1996: City as landscape.  The chapter's title was post-Postmodernism but  if the term Landscape Urbanism had had its present use in 1995 it would have been included.  The ‘layering’ aspect of Landscape Urbanism derives from Ian McHarg and his use of reason was certainly affected by his beliefs. McHarg was anti-Christian, sympathetic to Buddhism and a great believer in the importance of conserving nature. Me too. Conservation wasn’t an aspect of either Modernism or Postmodernism.  But it’s built-in to Landscape Urbanism, which we should therefore classify as post-Postmodern. If revising  this chapter, I’d change most occurrences of the word ‘religion’ to ‘beliefs’, for the reasons explained in my book on Asian Gardens: History, Beliefs and Design  (Routledge, 2011).

Tom Turner takes an overview of landscape architecture, urban design and garden design - their history, theory, position and prospects.  As an art, landscape architecture dates back over 12,000 years and the earliest written record over 4000 years. It was practised in Europe, South Asia and East Asia, including China and Japan. The oldest treatise containing a set of principles was written, by Vitruvius, in the first century BC. His book, re-discovered during the Renaissance, influenced the planning of cities and gardens. The art then spread to North Europe and the Americas. The name 'landscape architecture' dates from 1828 and was given a new meaning by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s. Landscape architecture, in Olmsted's sense, became a worldwide profession in the twentieth century and the International Federation of Landscape Architects was founded by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1948. Jellicoe explained it as 'the most comprehensive of the arts'.  Further information can be found on the Gardenvisit.com Youtube Channel and the Landscape Architecture Youtube Channel.