http://www.youtube.com/user/LivingLandscapeAvB/videos

to explore ways of increasing landscape identity and coherence in the Lingestreek, the area along the Linge River between Arnhem and Rhenen, south of the Rhine and north of the A15. Here a traditional landscape of large dairy farms is being replaced by new modes of production based on large-scale orchard
and tree production. This has brought rapid changes to both landscape structure and rural lifeways; as yet, however, no coherent landscape narrative has emerged in response to this transformation.

Students will address this lack of coherence by designing landscape changes that provide a more legible environment for both residents and visitors, one in which the complex formal and functional relationships between global networks and local places are made explicit and visible. This will mean increasing landscape legibility and regional ‘branding’ in creative ways that begin to resolve the tension between local traditions and history, on one hand, and integration with global commodity chains, on the other. The ultimate goal of the studio is to show the lineaments of a living rural landscape for the twenty-first century, one that is economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable in the long term.

The following slideshow shows the first site visit in February. The class was able to meet with and hear the different perspectives of farmers, local political representatives working for the municipality, as well as nature conservancy and maintenance groups.

Coordinator:
Thomas Oles, Lecturer of Landscape, AvB
Collaborators:
Roelf de Boer, Agrarische Natuur Vereniging Lingestreek; Maike van Stiphout, DS Landschapsarchitecten; Jørgen Primdahl, University of Copenhagen; Marieke Timmermans, Head of Landscape, AvB Amsterdam, Jacques Abelman, Living Landscape Research Group Assistant

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Grow in Time by Evelien de Mey

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The ARCHIPEL of the Baltic States by Frank Zuilekom

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Biking Plavinu by Mathé van Kranenburg

The (un)conditional garden: Urban biodiverstiy in Artis

“About 60 percent of Dutch flora and fauna is present in urban or semi-urban areas. Yet still Dutch policy on nature is based on the contro­versy of the city versus nature, which divides both in to two separate worlds.”

“In the Artis, the Amsterdam zoo, nature conservation has been founded in 1905 with the establishment of Natuurmonumenten. More than hundred years later the time is there to take a new step in nature conservation The changed relation between man and its surround­ings demands for a new -or extended- vision on nature.

The main shift compared to the traditional nature idea is the disengagement of ecological value and its common landscape images. Surely for plants and animals it does not matter how the ecosystem exactly looks like. As long as the system answers their basic necessities of life. For instance, the common tern (Sterna hirundo) likes the vast pebbled rooftops of an industrial area just as much as the pebble beaches in the coastal areas.

The design for The (un)conditional garden searches for a new form to reveal the ecological wealth of the urban environment. On the exist­ing carpark of the zoo, a new parking garage will be build. The roof will be the base for the eventual design. The garden will be part of the urban ecological system and opposed to the other animals in Artis the inhabitants of the garden are free to migrate in and out of the zoo. For the visitor though the garden is an extension of the zoo and adds up to the Museum of Biodiversity the Artis is developing right now.

Parallel to the design work an experiment has been performed. On an urban wasteland basic soil conditions have been altered to monitor their ecological and visual potentials. After all the conditions are just a tool to compose an urban natural landscape with. Within a year the different plots showed characteristic differences, especially in image.

The findings have influenced the design process and have resulted in a design that reflects and exhibits the richness of urban ecology. A grid resulting from the architecture of the parking garage creates a landscape of containers in which a variety of conditions result in a wide range of niches (both outside and inside the garage). The grid does not just expresses the urban design aspect but also refers to the scien­tific monitoring standards in field biology.

A diverting walkway will lead the visitor through the garden, sometimes elevated, (even inside, high above the parked cars to approach the resting areas of the different bat species) sometimes lowered incised in the containers bringing the eye of the visitor to ground level.

The result is an educational garden that acknowledges the city as a valuable landscape and is thus an expression of a new nature optimism.”

This project aimed to stimulate innovative thinking about architecture and landscape urbanism through an exchange between students from Ghana and the Netherlands. The objective of the studio was to learn from the patterns of settlement and displacement that can be mapped in Ghana as a potential model to adapt and engage with Dutch spatial planning.

from  the complete project website:   ghanascapes.wordpress.com

Participating landscape architecture students from the Amsterdam Academy: Gert-Jan Wisse, Joep Meijer, Milda Jusaite

Project Teachers: John Lonsdale, Rosetta Sara Elkin, Dr. Samuel Addo, Batholomew K.Borlu

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Good fences make good neighbors by Gert-Jan Wisse

“Good fences make good neighbors”stelt de Almeerse Kruidenwijk in het perspectief van maatschappelijke veranderingen van vandaag en morgen.

Gebouwd in de hoogtijdagen van de Nederlandse bouwdrift maakt Almere het schoolvoorbeeld van de buitenwijk. Efficiënt opgezet, gericht op gezinnen met kinderen, een huis met een tuin en een auto voor de deur.
De buitenwijk beantwoordde aan een vraag uit de samenleving voor meer privacy om de individualistische sfeer te kunnen huisvesten.

Dit komt duidelijk naar voren in de manier waarop het leven zich afspeelt tussen de strak getrokken lijnen van het verkavelingsplan. De grens tussen de tuin en die van de buren wordt fel verdedigd met schuttingen en mans hoge hagen. Op het moment dat deze kuren begint te vertonen is de nood aan de man, en komt de klussers geest van de Almeerder naar boven. Nauwgezet worden deze dan hersteld, vaak op zeer creatieve wijze.

In “Good fences make good neighbors” worden deze grenzen op de proef gesteld door de regels waarop ze gebaseerd zijn omver te werpen. Het bestemmingsplan wordt gewijzigd, bouw- of kapvergunning zijn niet meer nodig en de mogelijkheid doet zich voor om ruimte te ruilen, te annexeren, van de hand te doen of te delen in goed overleg met de buren.

Op deze manier ontstaat een flexibel landschap dat begint bij de achterdeur en dat per jaar kan meebewegen met veranderende ambities en gezinssamenstelling.

De buurman ziet zijn kans om zijn hobby te verheffen tot onderneming door uw schuur erbij te huren. De overbuurman zet naast zijn tuin ook het grasveld in voor de teelt van zijn lokale, en overigens overheerlijke sperziebonen. De buurvrouw van verderop verdeelt haar tuin en verhuurt de helft samen met haar bovenverdieping uit aan een jong gezin, en de carrière man van drie huizen verderop staat zijn tuin + het onderhoud af aan het gezin met vier kinderen van vier huizen verderop.

De samenstelling van de wijk verandert voortdurend en daarbij de wensen en eisen van haar bewoners. Door de kracht van de natuur te bundelen in snel groeiende hagen ontstaan zeer flexibele erfafscheidingen die mee kunnen bewegen met de belevingswereld van de mensen aan weerzijde. Een groen labyrint van hagen, tuinen en ondernemingen vangt de spannende tijden van economische onzekerheid op in een nieuwe lokale gemeenschap. De grenzen tussen mensen worden onderwerp van onderhandeling en de achtertuin wordt de voorkant van de samenleving.

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I Need it, I Maintain it bu Milda Jusaite

In the Amanfrom neighborhood in Danyigba the people maintain the used space themselves. Because they need it, they maintain it. Sometimes as infrastructure, sometimes as crop fields or for any other reason they need it. When the space is not needed, it is left to naturalize and grow wild.

In the neighborhood of Marken in Almere all the maintenance of public space is outsourced to companies who can do this for the lowest price. The consequence of this economic policy is a neighborhood that looks the same as anywhere else. In the case a visitor from Ghana would pass by these areas, he would certainly wonder what this strictly maintained space is used for…

I NEED IT, I MAINTAIN IT is a plan to localize the maintenance. The inhabitants of the neighborhood of Marken should be able to shape their own public space. By giving them the right tools to fulfill their own needs, the neighborhood will become lively and more used. It will give more identity to the neighborhood as people shape the public space to their own needs.

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A Little Grid Revolution by Joep Meijer

As seen in Africa: the freedom to make your own urban plan!

Even in Ghana the planners had the perfect final image in their minds when they made the plans. Fortunately, not all was realised and people begun to make it their own.

Nowadays Almere looks exactly as it was once planned. It looks as how the planners had it in mind, it is the final image. But is this then the end? Is this perfection? No. Perfection is found in the transformation, the constant changing of things and the freedom that it can happen: all Almere needs is a kick start. A little spark that ignites and makes this happen.

Danyigba_GHANA: Unexpected doesn’t mean unwanted

The lively and active community of Danyigba is the direct result of not finishing the top down planning. After the plot poles were put in, people more or less turned the situation to their own benefit. The unexpected result of these poles are visible today in the choices the people of Danyigba made…

Zondagshof_almere_netherlands: Realisation doesn’t equal perfection

The neighbourhood of Zondagshof is a clear example of the top down planning that is finished till the end. A grid of clean but empty streets show no life, not even in the weekend. The people live inside their houses, well planned and build by others… Is it possible to bring the power of the pole to almere and give Zondagshof the choice of its own?

1 new grid, 2 simple rules = a little grid revolution!

Imagine the freedom when people in Almere could build in the same way as Danyigba. To build or not to build on your own plot of choice. The possibilities would be endless. New routes would emerge, new buildings, new uses. The existing can change: houses can be left, plants grow wild, roads left neglected. Ruins emerge to get new functions.. But how to start this idea without turning everything into chaos?

To prevent chaos, a new polar grid is applied on Almere. Because the city is build along the grid of the polder of Flevoland, interesting crossing points will land on places where we can not predict them. We can see the result in the model of Zondagshof. It is from these crossing points, that the new urban grid revolution will begin.

THE REVOLUTION

This plan is not made to predict the future, but as the firestarters land on places such as houses and in the middle of the forest, things start evolving. Within in the new framework of the grid endless possibilities will emerge from these simple elements.  New functions are found and made around the firestarters. Some will never be used while others create whole new neighbourhoods. Anything is possible and it is up to the people of almere to take this freedom.

The city’s commercial decline, due to new Atlantic routes and the industrial development of later centuries, meant that Venice would gradually lose its ability to represent itself through its territory and that it would cease to understand itself as a metropolitan system. The city attempted to become one with the only seemingly feasible model of development: the main island was linked to terra firma by a bridge and journeying through the lagoon, which was now revealed to be too slow, rendered its islands useless. The lagoon itself came to be seen as an enormous empty space available for the implantation of an industrial agglomeration.

Due to these conditions the site asks for a re-consideration in order to rehabilitate the urban idea of the lagoon as a complex network of communications and settlements, through a hypothetical re-colonization of the territory of the lagoon, the decentralization and atomization of a program of uses, and the rehabilitation of the idea of the lagoon as an urban constellation necessarily integrated in its natural environment.”

Project Teacher / Docent:  Silvia Lupini  (loopdesign.eu)

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The Park of the Third Landscape in the Lagoon of Venice

by Simona Serafino

“The third landscape is made by all the places abandoned by man, parks and natural reserves, big uninhabited areas of the planet but also smaller and common, almost invisible spaces: former industrial areas, brambles and scrub, the grass in the middle of a traffic island. They are spaces different in shape, size and functions, which only share the absence of any human activity but which as a whole are essential to keep biological diversity.”

G. Clement, The Manifest of the Third Landscape, Paris 2004

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SERENISSIMA

by Jacques Abelman

THE ETERNAL CITY?

Due to faster than expected sea level rise, scientists project that even the drastic intervention of the M.O.S.E. sea barrier project will only delay the permanent flooding of Venice by 100 to 200 years. In this future vision of drastically altered climate conditions, coastal cities such as Venice will have to physically and economically reinvent themselves in order to survive.

After the M.O.S.E. sea gates stop functioning, Venice will once again face imminent danger. Concurrently, sewage pollution will increase exponentially because the sea barrier will increasingly close the lagoon which will no longer be renewed by the tides. Venice has never maintained a main sewage system- for this reason, a large portion of the wastes generated in the historic center of Venice have always been discharge directly into its channels. Water quality, particularly near the city, is extremely poor.

AN EMERALD BELT: LONGTERM PROTECTION FROM CLIMATE CHANGE

The Serenissima plan proposes to augment the existing underwater topography of the lagoon with a readily available and sustainable material: sand from the floor of the Adriatic. The sand is gathered by large boats called Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers. The sand is projected into the lagoon shallows, progressively forming a dune barrier with an inner zone of sand flats and tidal marshes. This process is similar to the coastal reinforcement and climate proofing strategies of Northern Europe, for example in The Netherlands.

A system of locks connects the dune sections, allowing ships into the city. Opening the locks allows fresh sea water into the heart of the city, flushing water outwards into the tidal marshlands on the edges of the dune zones. The large surface area of these wetlands, which contain a gradient of salt to brackish water, is sufficient to cleanse the water. Organic waste is turned into plant biomass, which also functions as a large-scale carbon sink, thus working against climate change.  Wetlands are considered the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems; they are biological engines that can be adapted to waste water treatment as well as agricultural purposes. They are vital to the large populations of migrating birds that visit the lagoon. This will in effect create an enormous nature reserve around the city and preserve the specificity of the lagoon environement.

The widest dune section functions as a water purification plant. Water is pumped through the dunes, the sand acts as a filter. Lightly brackish water can further be purified to provide fresh water and stored in reservoirs. Recreational paths, camping sites, wildlife zones, Mediterranean maquis shrubland and dune vegetation ecotopes are some of the essential elements that inform the program of the dune barrier.

This designed land will function as a hybrid territory of landscape identities and new urban growth. Residential and business zones set into the emerald necklace will create a thriving future city, with the jewel of old Venice at its heart. The edge of the city will extend to the dunes and beaches facing the New Adriatic. Finally impervious to the elements and transformed into a new island nation, Venice will once more be married to the sea.

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Sposalizio della Terraferma

by Japer Hugtenburg

The lagoon, a way of living with nature

Venice and its lagoon have a long and strong tradition in coping with the forces of nature. The islands and marshlands of the lagoon has always provides safe and rich habitats. And when the harbours of Torcello silted up in the 14^th century, people moved to other islands that were created by that same natural process; sedimentation. From this point of view, the large-scale engineering of the Renaissance that diverted the rivers like the Brenta and the Piave around the lagoon were a crucial mistake in Venice’s history. These interventions deprived the lagoon from the sediment that is today so desperately needed to allow the islands and marshlands of the lagoon to keep up with the rising sea level.

River sediment as a fundament for sustainable development

Islands are made of sediment, so a steady supply of sediment is a first requirement for this strategy. In this delta area, the most reliable sources of sediment are the rivers that come down from the Alps. A first step is thus to redirect these rivers back into the lagoon.

This development will however take time, and people are notoriously impatient. This project therefore focuses on speeding up the process of sedimentation in order that the ‘Sposalizio della Terraferma’ (marriage of Venice to the mainland) can soon be celebrated!

Speeding up the development of islands

Sedimentation is speeded up by connecting the high sediment concentrations in the main river channel with the shallow areas that surround it. This is done by installing groynes; rows of poles that guide the sediment to the shallow areas where the velocity of the flow is low and the sediment is deposited.

A landscape park that connects Venice to Terraferma

In this proposal, the recreational perspectives for celebrating this new overland connection between Venice and Terraferma have been investigated and designed. The result is a wetland landscape park that extends La Giudecca to San Giorgio in Alga and Fusina. The park design is inspired by the Renaissance reclamation of the Veneto and especially the way that Andrea Palladio’s villas are situated in this rural landscape.

Building in the park

When sea level rise pushes through, and the lowest parts of Venice are permanently flooded, the axes of the park will be further developed to form the main streets of new residential areas. This demonstrates how the development of Venice can be sustained on new and higher islands. In the long run the islands of the lagoon will follow the rise of the sea level and chances for development will be available throughout the lagoon.

This city vision entry proposes a strategy based on natural processes to secure the sustainable development of Venice and its lagoon. Not by protecting the island of Venice as we know it today, but by promoting the development of new islands on which new and equally unique cities can be built.

You can have a closer look at these innovative projects on www.emila.org

The symposium marks the opening of a ten day international workshop in the Netherlands.

The symposium is free and open to the public.

please see EMILA.org for more details.

Download Symposium Poster

Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula in Macedonia, Greece. A World Heritage Site, it is home to 20 Eastern Orthodox monasteries and forms a self-governed monastic state within the sovereignty of the Hellenic Republic. The daily number of visitors entering Mount Athos is restricted and all are required to obtain a special entrance permit valid for a limited period. Only males are allowed entrance into Mount Athos. Only males over the age
of 18 who are members of the Eastern Orthodox Church are allowed to live on Athos, either as monks or as workers.

Spiritually, Mount Athos comes under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Today Greeks commonly refer to Mount Athos as the “Holy Mountain” Agion Oros/Hagion Oros). The peninsula, the easternmost “leg” of the larger Halkidiki peninsula, protrudes 50 kilometres into the Aegean Sea at a width of between 7 and 12 kilometres and covers an area of 335.637 square kilometres.

The actual Mount Athos has steep, densely forested slopes reaching up to 2,033 metres. The surrounding seas, especially at the end of the peninsula, can be dangerous. Though land-linked, Mount Athos is accessible only by a single boat, the St. Eshpigmenitis.

The subject of this studio was to design a botanical garden for the Holy Monastery Koutloumousiou on mount Athos;

A project instigated bij Rieks Bulthuis, Pilgrim of the Koutloumousiou monastery.

Twelve students work in groups on designing the garden for the Holy Monastery. At the beginning of the project students visited and studied the site and listened to the conditions and requirements, which formed the basis for the design. After eight weeks, all students delivered a design on
the gardens. After this first design period students worked further on the materialization of the plan, on planting and detailing of the conceptual ideas. After again eight weeks they presented their detailed plans. The plans were combined into a booklet and presented to the monastery.

What follows is a selection of ideas, sketches, and proposals from each group.

PROJECT 1

by Niek Heijboer, Matt Colby, Judith van der Poel

PROJECT 2

by Inge Vleemingh, Anna Sobiech, Gert-Jan Wisse

PROJECT 3

by Milda Jusaite, Joep Meijer, Katarina Tlachova

PROJECT 4

by Lissa Jeffrey and Donald Marskamp

We are currently working on a book of all the designs that will be posted here in the coming months; what follows is just a glimpse.