Tonight: Catherine Mosbach AILA Fresh - Drinks & Discussion

Wednesday October 6th
6:00 - 8:00pm @ The University of Melbourne
Wunderlich Gallery, Ground Floor, Building 133

The Highline

The Highline, New York is a successful example of reclaiming disused industrial land for recreational purposes...especially iconic because it reclaims redundant rail tracks formerly used to transport freight above Manhattan's busy streets. Claiming this elevated land for recreational use has provided the surrounding urban area with a green strip of open space, where the development within the high density ground plane below can not be easily achieved.

Designed by Landscape Architects James Corner Field Operations and Architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The Highline will form a 1 & 1/2 mile linear public park when completed.

Photo from: New York Times Style Magazine

Tell me a story...

The ability for surfaces to tell a narrative is often used as a strong feature in landscape designs - there are endless effects to be created by inlaying or embedding objects or other materials, etching, honing or sand blasting surfaces or stenciling designs.

I have recently become interested in the potential of typographic pavements to create interpretive landscape experiences - such as Language of the Birds, located in the historical literary district of North Beach San Francisco, where literature and language forms the focus of a site specific narrative through a striking landscape intervention and art installation. Sculpted books (illuminated at night by solar power) hang suspended like a flock of birds above a concrete surface patterned by a jumble of sand blasted words and phrases from local authors. These words and phrases are inscribed and preserved in the fonts used in their original print media and are in a variety of languages.

There is no definitive message that is preached by this installation, but rather a range of thought provoking experiences and a series of clues that the individual can interpret to create their own understanding of the space and its story.

It is this potential to develop the multi-layering of information, symbolism, site narrative and interpretive elements that can create a site specific design, which is anchored to a unique sense of place, history and environment. Such commonly used surfaces as concrete should be experimented with and more often custom designed with added graphic treatments or unique textures - they shouldn't continue to be generic or unimaginative blanket ground plane treatments.

Image: Language of the Birds, San Francisco by Dorka Kheen & Brian Goggin.

See also: A Flock of Words, Morecambe, England by Why Not Associates and artist Gordon Young

Go Play Competition entries...

We had some great entries submitted to our recent competition - the winners are to be announced shortly! We were impressed by the creativity and range of ideas that everyone came up with!

Thanks to everyone who entered.

Thanks also to Kate Hudson for the playful lego inspired image (above).

Go Play! Playground Design - Philippa Dunstan

Go Play and Beyond!! - Alvin Lin

Lucerne to Play - Fawn Goodall

Willow Playground - Anna Komorowska and Michal Rokita of Krakow, Poland

Ephemeral landscapes

Some of the most successful elements within landscapes are often found by chance - ephemeral phenomenon such as light and shade. This ephemeral layer was recorded by artist Sophie Whettnall in her landscape installation / intervention 'Recording the Light' in Barcelona in 2002. Ephemeral shadows created by on site pavilions informed the marking of the ground plane to form a record of transient time. The resulting patterns created an intricate dialogue with the built forms on site and informed us of the passage of time and the impermanent elements that impact on landscapes everyday.

I believe there are opportunities for Landscape Architects to draw attention to these transient forces more often in our landscape designs - to develop more sensory and experiential landscape immersion. Can this be achieved without destroying the joy of the chance discovery or fleeting moment in time?

Image from 'Recording the Light' by Sophie Whettnall

You've got to be in it...to win it

At the last AILA Fresh Event our playground competition was launched and the closing date for entry submissions was extended until 12th July. Please see the new flyer above for more information on entry conditions - including a few extra guidelines to clarify the design brief for you all.

There is a very attractive prize on offer for the winner of the competition - a $150 voucher for Architext bookstore!

We would love to see your ideas, sketches and artistic visions submitted, so start getting creative!

Playground competition extended!

The submission deadline for our Fresh Like To...Go Play! competition has now been extended until 12th July!

We would love to receive your entries - imaginings, sketches, ideas...further details to follow shortly.

In the meantime take a look at this Picasa photo album by playgroundideas for some inspiration for your entries and some images of example playgrounds featuring recycled materials.

Competition launch Photos!

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Playground entries due today!

Entries for the AILA Fresh 'Fresh Like To...Go Play' competition are due today, so put the finishing touches to your submissions and email them through to fresh.aila@gmail.com

An exhibition of the competition entries will be held this Thursday 10th June. See the flyer above for more information on submitting competition entries and the event details.

Built by kids for kids

The Kolle 37 adventure playground in Berlin offers an opportunity for children to take a hands-on approach to learning and play, by building their own structures (multi level cubbies, shelters and towers), cooking over campfires, playing with sand, dirt and water as well as tending to their own gardens. There is some limited supervision by staff on-site, but the children are ultimately able to test and explore their own creations - assessing for risks and safety. The children are able to learn valuable skills within an environment that they may not have access to otherwise - teamwork, trust, responsibility and respect for one another.

Kolle 37 is a rare example of a space where children are permitted to construct their own play spaces - constantly adjusting and changing their creations until they feel safe. Not only does this break down the fundamental ideas behind formal playground designs by adult professionals, but it allows the children to develop their own realm of adventure and discovery.

It makes me wonder if we are, as design professionals, 'over designing' children's play spaces and the role that children can potentially play in shaping landscapes - an involvement that I believe would reinforce their ownership of play spaces to create richer and more appropriate opportunities for play and discovery.

Photo from Public Workshop.

Just a quick update...

The Fresh Like To...Go Play event details have been re-posted due to some 'technical errors' and the links to the flyer are working now.

We hope you're busy designing some innovative playground concepts for the competition! Check back here soon for more playground inspiration.

Fresh Like To...Go Play!

The next upcoming AILA Fresh Event is an exciting collaboration with[co]design studio and Go Play!

We invite students and professionals to submit entries for a playground design competition focusing on providing play opportunities for children in developing countries. The playground designs should incorporate recycled scrap & junkyard elements and all access play - read the flyer above for more information and entry conditions.

Get creative and submit your playground designs before Tuesday 8th June (revised date) to: fresh.aila@gmail.com

The actual AILA Fresh event is on Thursday 10th June and will be an exhibition of the competition entries with a prize for the winning entry and door prizes on the night.

Recycled / junkyard playgrounds

Now about a week into the design timeframe for our Fresh Like To...Go Play! playground competition, here's some inspiration and encouragement from a local Melbourne playground.

I was recently lucky to visit Skinners Adventure Playground, a supervised community backyard play-space, specifically created for families living in public housing in South Melbourne. The playground is only open in the afternoons and weekends and has a supervised after-school care program on-site. Skinners Adventure Playground has evolved over the years to become a sprawling and imaginative space. Many of the play elements have been constructed by the local community from recycled or salvaged material - old tractor tyres, slides, gates, fence pailings etc. There is a bounty of challenging equipment, cubbies, boardwalks and tower structures offering opportunities for children to take some risks during play - creating a wonderful learning experience through exploration, trial and error and discovery.

Many modern playground designs seem to be cocooning children with unchallenging and mass produced plastic equipment, so it is refreshing to see a community build haphazard playground with plenty of personality and individuality on offer. The use of recycled materials / equipment throughout the playground adds to the unique environment and the welcoming local backyard atmosphere.

Stay tuned for more playground inspiration to come!

Photo: of a sign at Skinners Adventure Playground in South Melbourne on my site visit, showing photos of the evolution of the playground over the years through community efforts.

Guerilla Art, using the public.


Berlin as a city is known as one of those places that things happen. Parties in the street, in the U-Bahn, graffiti everywhere, protests. One of the latest things that I found browsing the internet, with my Post Berlin Depression, is this:


This is Rosenthaler Platz in Mitte, Berlin. One of the first chic and designery/artisty areas within Berlin. Those colorful paint tracks aren't normally there, what happened here is one of those guerilla art attacks that happen every now and then. Some people with some bicycles with some large amount of paint poured out said paint when the lights were red. Car drivers had no choice but to drive straight through, painting this work of art. It brings a whole new level to mapping, a 1:1 mapping of an intersection. If they had also done something like this:

This here happened in China. Quite the opposite place to Berlin, not so lenient Gov't, artists having less of a voice. However this was not done by a few people on some bikes, this was done by DBB Group which seems to be a fairly large design house. No matter, it is another great way of playing with street art, mapping, and the idea of greening the world.

Okay, back to work for me.

Some more links for Rosenthaler Platz: Video on archimag.de, Photos on Urbanshit.de, and Article in the Tages Spiegel (in German).

Designorama, 1st Fresh Event of 2010

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Guilfoyle's Volcano

A long dormant reservoir, constructed in 1876 to store water for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne now forms the focal point of an inspiring new landscape design. The design of the crater-like reservoir was originally undertaken by William Guilfoyle, as a method of irrigating the gardens through a gravity fed system along with the vision of providing a landmark landscape folly for the gardens.

After being hidden from the public for over sixty years, the reservoir has now been resurrected by Landscape Architect, Andrew Laidlaw, as the dramatic centre piece of volcano-themed garden. Rocks and red lava erupt from the crater, created by a mixture of broken terracotta tiles and fluid concrete shapes. The steep sides of the volcano are planted with a unique botanic collection of succulents and cacti species. Within the crater itself are several floating circular islands, which naturally move about the water-filled crater in the breeze. These islands are planted with native and indigenous species to form water filtration systems - an innovative and intriguing idea, which is dissapointingly more successful on functional rather than aesthetic levels.

Guilfoyle's Volcano is dramatic, powerful and symbolically playful - a unique contemporary landscape design with echoes of the original historical concepts envisaged for the landscape at the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Photo taken onsite.

A message in a bottle

These beautiful living sculptures are the creation of Paula Hayes a New York artist / Landscape designer who creates terrariums within delicate glass vessels. They remind me of specimen jars for rare plants or test tubes where young seedlings might be nurtured into a blossoming life. I'm especially fond of the oversize pendulous terrariums in the image above, where layers of soil and other growing media can be clearly seen by the viewer like a section through the landscape. Not only are these terrariums a living artwork, but they are also an intriguing way of transporting landscapes (although small in size only) to where ever we might want them to be - indoors, inside a courtyard or in a spare nook somewhere. Beautiful and fragile miniature landscapes can be nurtured and appreciated even in a seemingly inhospitable location.

The image above is from Paula Hayes' exhibition 'Excepts from the Story of Planet Thear' at the Marlanne Boesky Gallery, New York.

Blue Sticks

Following the garden festival theme of my last post: the Blue Stick Garden (Jardin de Batons Bleus) designed by Claude Cormier is intriguing and joyously simple (something which I believe is extremely challenging to 'design'). Blue Sticks was exhibited at the Jardin de Metis International Garden Festival in Quebec in 2000.

I find it refreshing to view designs, such as Blue Sticks, which approach the creation of landscapes from a different perspective. After time spent focusing on the nuances of planting designs and configurations it is uplifting to be presented with a landscape where plant species are not physically dominant, but where they inform the design expression. Blue Sticks evolved as a concept directly related to its site of exhibtion at the Jardin de Metis. The initial concept for the installation arose from the blue poppies adapted to the site's microclimate and featured extensively in the heritage mixed flower borders at the Jardin de Metis. It is wonderful to see a design in direct relation to the site itself - too many modern landscape designs seem to be shallow layered concepts that have no connection with the site they occupy or with the broader urban fabric they are a part of.

What intrigued me most about Blue Sticks however, was the simple visual trick employed by painting the long sticks blue on three sides, leaving one remaining side to be painted a vivid contrasting orange. To vistors surpise, the labyrinth-like layout of the design revealed this dramatic colour change only once they had turned around to view the path they had just walked through the garden. This chameleon-like transformation is deliciously simple and uncomplicated. It is this simplicity (almost child-like in its effortlessness) that is something we need to see alot more of in contemporay (usually over-complex) landscapes.

Garden festivals

I've recently been reading about garden festivals around the world, where designers and Landscape Architects come together to exhibit innovative design installations and landscape interventions that challenge the traditional and conventional expectations of garden design. The designs often blur the boundaries of landscape design and land art. In particular, I've been researching the Festival International des Jardins held at Chaumont sur Loire in France and the Jardin de Metis held at the Redford Gardens in Quebec. The photo above is from Claude Cormier's Blue Sticks installation at the Jardin de Metis in 2000.

In contrast, a visit to the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show on Friday was, like always, an extreme disappointment. The extremely limited number of designs on show (the number seems to diminish each year) were boring and were overshadowed by the growing crowd of retail focused stalls. The garden designs exhibited the same characteristics and features that appear year after year in residential design - the boring continuing obsession with 'outdoor rooms' (including outdoor fireplaces and bathtubs) and cubic frames that rise like malnourished pergolas from the landscapes below. As a city with a strong design culture, it is disheartening to see a broadening chasm opening up between the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show and the renowned international festivals.

Shouldn't this event be challenging people's perceptions of what gardens are and inspiring people through innovative and unique designs, instead of exhibiting the same stale formula year after year?

Forgive me if I'm ranting, but Melbourne deserves better.

Pop-up gardening

We have been noticing some pop-up gardening emerging on the streets of Melbourne recently - local communities have been cultivating veggie plots in some delightfully unexpected places within the city.

This example has appropriated part of the streetscape on the corner of King William and Napier Street in Fitzroy. The attached sign encourages people to plant and nurture the garden at will or simply sit by and enjoy its presence.

There are numerous examples of thriving community gardens in Melbourne's suburbs that we have all seen - in St Kilda, Clifton Hill, Collingwood, Brunswick etc. but this is the first example I have seen which has reclaimed actual road space. It has produced a valuable piece of landscape - a landscape which is pioneering the cultivation and 'greening' of the urban asphalt fabric of our city.

Photo and inspiration courtesy of Mark Skiba.

Paradise in Plasticine

In May 2009 James May embarked on the ambitious task of creating and exhibiting a garden entirely made of plasticine at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the pinnacle annual event of English gardening. Luckily for me I was able to watch the whole process unfold from beginning to end as part of James May's Toy Stories program on SBS. Enlisting the help of many volunteers to create plasticine flowers and other components of the garden, the project gradually took shape to form a whimsical, fairy tale landscape. Predictably the Paradise in Plasticine garden caused a significant stir among the other exhibitors, judges and the public at Chelsea - this was particularly due to the lack of real plants! However, the garden had people enthralled, winning the RHS Peoples Choice award for 'Best Small Garden'.

Paradise in Plasticine had me spellbound with its child-like landscape filled with colour and joyous creativity. Sure, from a Landscape Architecture perspective the design of the garden didn't appear particularly well researched or developed, but it had me asking the question: what truly defines a garden as a garden? When does landscape become sculpture?

Photo taken from The Guardian.

Today is Friday.

So it's the end of the week, there is a long weekend on the horizon, and I have a design package due today. Whilst on the verge of destroying my computer, and hunting down the creator of vectorworks to have some stern words with how to create a better more functional program, I had to look for 'happy' things to keep me calm.

I came up with:

Now this lovely decked out bus shelter was designed by a Mark Reigelman, he has done lots of nifty little things with urban intervention that will put a smile on any grumpy face.

Check out an interview with him on Inside Out.

Also if you want to read a funny blog by a New Yorker about bikes click here, there was a rant about bike paths and the use of said bike paths for parking, by the local constabulary.

Design-orama - next AILA Fresh event

The next AILA Fresh event is going to be a good one including team-based design-tastic challenges! Come along and join in the design activities, meet other AILA Fresh people and generally have fun!

Green eggs and ham

Searching for inspiration recently, I came across the book Avant Gardners by Tim Richardson, former editor of Wallpaper Magazine. The book is focused on conceptualist landscape design, a term used to describe a group of designers whose work is characterised by an idea which informs all aspects of the landscape. This photo is of Nip Pasage's Virage Vert (Green Shift) project in Montreal, a fun and cheeky exploration of the importance of being green - with colour, texture and artificial materials at the forefront of the design. The large green balls function as a play space for children, seating and an art installation.

Avant Gardners details landscape designs from 50 Designers and Landscape Architects from around the world, including essays about the theory of conceptualist landscape design.

Image source: Avant Gardeners photo slideshow by Time Magazine.

Snake and ladders anyone?

This is a cool space by Cigler Marani Architects.

Link via buzz beast

Post Garden
A creative mob in the UK have designed this nifty little Post Card Garden, all you need to do is write on it, stick a stamp on, throw it in the post box, and the lucky reciever gets a little fold out postcard with the seeds to grow a little desktop garden.

Link via Postcarden

Be small to do big.
This here is an interesting article on the microclimate and ecosystem of termite nests, and how architects/designers could learn to produce sustainable dwellings and spaces.

It really is amazing how little bugs can produce such an effective natural system to survive, and yet us with our years of education without the need to fight for survival, cannot produce a similar system.

Link via New Scientist