Designing for Unpredictable Urban Change

Designing for Unpredictable Urban Change

Leading international urban designers, landscape architects and architects arrive in Auckland on April 3rd to attend a conference focusing on the potential of landscape to resolve future environmental needs.

The NZ Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA) conference, which runs from 3-5 April will explore the legal and planning implications, contemporary design initiatives and changing technologies of urban design in the context of fluid and unpredictable change.

Speakers include Brian McGrath, architect and author of Sensing the 21st Century City: The Net City Close-up and Remote, which explores the possible forms the 21st century city will take.

McGrath’s multi-media work includes the web project Manhattan Timeformations, a computer model that simultaneously presents a cartographic history of the lower half of Manhattan Island alongside an exploded time line chronicling the real estate development of the high-rise office buildings making up Midtown and Downtown Manhattan’s skylines.

The model correlates 370 years Manhattan’s cartographic history with the peaks and valleys of office building speculation, and has received numerous awards from international arts, film, architecture, educational and science organizations.

Jacqueline Osty is one of the foremost landscape architects in France today.

Her acclaimed urban parks include Park Saint-Pierre in Amiens, the Grammont Park in Rouen, and the Clichy-Batignolles Park in Paris. Public place projects and urban promenades work include the Bellecour Place, the Bachut Square and the Francfort Place in Lyon, Charles de Gaulle Place in Poitiers, and, in Paris, the Richard-Lenoir promenade and the Seine River bank in front the new National Library.

Eelco Hooftman is the founder of Edinburgh-based GROSS. MAX. Landscape Architects, whose recent collaborative work with artists won three Royal Society of the Arts “Art for Architecture” Awards.

He is currently working with architect Zaha Hadid on urban projects in Leipzig, Naples and Bilbao.

Tony Wong was a founding Partner and Director of Ecological Engineering.

The firm’s ongoing active participation in research, implementation of innovative technology, policy development and strategic advice to local, state and federal government, has contributed to the establishment of a new paradigm in the planning and design of urban environments that is ‘sensitive’ to the issues of water sustainability and environmental protection.

Other conference speakers are Chris Reed (Principal and founder of StoSS Landscape Urbanism), Stephen Tupu (Principal and founder of Terrain-nyc), Penny Allan (Member of the NSW Government’s Urban Design Advisory Committee), Ngarimu Blair, Heritage and urban planner, Ngati Whatua o Orakei Maori Trust Board and Mark Fuller (Principal EDAW Gillespies Australia).

ENDS

© Scoop Media