The power of composition

Designed form is not about creating a good appearance. Nor is it restricted to the small scale. The small scale, however, can be used as a valuable playground and laboratory for large scale landscape designs. Three case studies are compared in which similar compositional principles are used at different scales and complexities: the technical,...

Reactivating Public Life through Water. Lessons from the Forgotten Historical Canals in Guangzhou

In the heart of the Pearl River Delta, the city of Guangzhou is fast-growing and prone to flooding. In history, people constructed canals based on natural waterways to deal with water problems. The canal system not only served as an important infrastructure but was also as the backbone of urban life. The city was built around its canals; they...

Landscape Approach Greater Bay Area, China: Landscape architecture explorations in the Pearl River Delta, Beijing and Jakarta through eight MSc-graduation projects

This publication presents the results of a design lab that explores landscape-based design approaches for adaptive urban transformation in fast urbanizing deltas. While using design as a research strategy landscape architecture principles are explored that ensure water safety and inclusive socio-ecological design. The projects as presented here...

Gardens of Gelderland: Design Research Explorations into Resilient Estate Landscapes

Report of the MSc Landscape Architecture 2019 - 2020, Graduation Lab Resilient Heritage Landscapes. In this graduation lab landscape architecture students from TU Delft explored the landscape assets of private and dispersed heritage properties and developed design strategies to engage them in future-proof landscape development. The focus of the...

Visual Water Biography: Translating Stories in Space and Time

The supervision of water systems in many countries is centralised and taken over from local water management collectives of ‘water workers’ by governmental or other water management institutions. Communities are literally and figuratively cut-off from ‘their’ water systems, due to the increase of urbanisation and industrialisation. On account of...

Gardens of Interstitial Wildness: Cultivating Indeterminacy in the Metropolitan Landscape

This paper looks into ‘gardens of wildness’ that have been established in metropolitan interstitial spaces. These unused, unfunctional urban spaces could be considered as spatial-temporary interstices of the metropolitan landscape. These ‘interstitial spaces’ possess the potential to host diverse social-ecological minorities that tend to be...

Designing with Hybridity, Scalar Paradoxes, and Complex Dynamics: How Two Domestic Gardens Challenge the Contemporary Landscape Imagination

Belonging to the small-scale and private sphere, gardens are usually omitted from urban and regional landscape plans. Yet, we argue that the assemblage of everyday gardens – the garden complex – is an inherent component of the landscape metropolis that holds the potential to become a powerful landscape agency. This potential is enclosed, among...

Mapping the Evolution of Designed Landscapes with GIS: Stourhead Landscape Garden as an Example

Landscapes change because they are the expression of the dynamic interaction between natural and cultural forces in the environment. As such the landscape is a palimpsest that evidences many successive transformations by human interventions, changing land-use and management, natural succession of vegetation, but also caused by climatological and...

Landscape Approach South-Florida: Landscape architecture explorations in Miami, Biscayne National Park, Lake Okeechobee & Everglades City through seven MSc-graduation projects

The coastal landscape of South Florida faces many challenges connected to climate change and urbanization. Sea level rise, loss of ecosystems, land subsidence, aquifer depletion are some of the issues that need serious attention. Landscape Approach Florida is showcasing results of a Landscape Architecture Design Lab where seven MSc-graduates...

Towards a Landscape based Regional Design Approach for Adaptive Transformation

Deltaic areas are among the most promising regions in the world. Their strategic location, combined with the superior quality of their soils, constitute the main factors that have been supporting both human development and the rise of these regions as global economic hubs. At the same time, however, deltas face extreme vulnerability due to...

RTD in landscape architecture: a first State of the Art

The discussion regarding the relation of design and research in landscape architecture started somewhat later than in other design disciplines. But the past decade has shown a sharp rise of publications on ‘research through/by design(ing)’ (RTD). The literature has now reached a level of richness that enables a review of the State of the Art and...