6 June, 2017
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has switched off the public life support to London’s embattled Garden Bridge, a tempestuous, contested, and deeply symbolic idea that will die tightly clutching a sheaf of contemporary perversions of the civic good, a cautionary portfolio of design’s worst addictions. Its life charts a course through the sordid world […]
21 December, 2016
“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Autumn 2016 issue I talk about the importance of telling a good story. The Autumn issue contains an extensive section featuring the winners of the Landscape Institute Awards. This year’s Serpentine pavilion, by Bjarke Ingels Group, was welcomed with descriptions in […]
26 August, 2016
This is published in the new journal Testing-Ground, by the Advanced Landscape and Urbanism research group in the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London. Detail of Old London Bridge on 1632 oil painting “View of London Bridge” by Claude de Jongh. Image from Wikimedia Nearly sixty years ago, J.B. Jackson wrote one of the most […]
5 June, 2016
The work of EMF – Estudi Martí Franch – in Girona, combines techniques of landscape management and architecture with garden design, maintenance, and planning, illustrating the need to conceive of a more ecological relationship between landscape disciplines, urban and rural, in the future. See my upcoming article this summer on EMF’s work in Landscape Architecture […]
31 March, 2016
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Big Fish Eat Little Fish’. In an increasingly predatory political world, we need professions more than ever. “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Spring 2016 issue I address the importance of professions and institutions. In the middle of the 17th century, […]
7 December, 2015
“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Winter 2015 issue I talk about how nurturing plants and creative and community interests are essential for both children and for the future of our landscapes. Seedlings growing in my North Sheen allotment greenhouse – sadly I had […]
20 September, 2015
“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Autumn 2015 issue I warn against the use of the word ‘decant’ to describe the forcible ejection of people from their homes Wine is symbolic in a host of ways. A silver chalice of it can represent the […]
28 July, 2015
This article appeared in the July 2015 edition of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), with the subheading “The Milan Expo raises unsought emotions about food, cities, the world.” The text and photos are both mine. The ‘Tree of Life’ is a sound and light spectacle every evening that includes dancing waters and a techno soundtrack. A […]
9 July, 2015
A strange tug-of-war between a gentrifying private world and the need for a public life and public space are being played out in tiny micro-aggressions on doorsteps in Fitzrovia. At our recent meeting of residents at the late-Victorian mansion block where I live, the other tenants expressed worries about the large numbers of people, especially at […]
11 June, 2015
“The four horsemen of the apocalypse are always saddled up and ready to ride roughshod over population growth” – scene from Mad Max: Fury Road found at http://www.rygestop.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-Mad-Max-Fury-Road-Hi-Res-Wallpaper-up8cq-Free.jpeg “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Summer 2015 issue I call for more hope, idealism, and striving […]