24 January, 2018
The following is an excerpt from my essay, ‘Making Meaning: Utopian Method for Minds, Bodies, and Media in Architectural Design’ published by the Open Library of Humanities. The full essay is available to all, delightfully, as a completely free and open access publication here: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.109/ The imaginative ‘play’ that we call design has a special space—the […]
30 July, 2017
Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays is forthcoming from Routledge in October 2017 This is an excerpt from my chapter in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, due out this October, which I co-edited with Ed Wall. My writing is in superb company in our book: Ross Exo Adams, Camillo Boano, Paul Cureton, Jill Desimini, Murray Fraser, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
24 October, 2017
This October 10th, the London office of WATG released this image of a ‘greener future’ for London’s Fleet Street in support of the ongoing proposal to make London a ‘National Park City’. Dan Raven-Ellison, the proposal’s key protagonist, has a flair for PR and has effectively repackaged the worthy, but duller-sounding project to improve London’s […]
9 June, 2017
This article first appeared in the January 2017 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine “I really want to make the whole city like this,” says Martí Franch of Estudi Martí Franch (EMF), speaking of his vision of designing the green infrastructure of Girona, Spain, through a process of enlightened and engaged landscape management. We are sitting […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]