My Landscape Town: 2월 2013

2013년 2월 27일 수요일

Guangzhou Fangcun Huadi Competition Winners

Source: World Landscape Architects
Written By: Damian Holmes

Image Credit | Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects

Guangzhou City Government announced that two winning entries were selected for the Guangzhou Fangchun Huadi Sustainable Master Plan competition. The two separate entries selected include the team of Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects with Guangzhou Planning Design Institute and another entry by West 8.

Image Credit | Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects

The competition entry covers a site area of 2,050 ha. (20.5km2) with wide landscape and wetland parks and residential development for over 50.000 inhabitants. The former delta with its tradition of horticultural usage will be transformed into an ecological urban landscape.

mage Credit | Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects

Guangzhou Fangcun Huadi is located in the Guangzhou Western Liwan District, Fangcun region, and between Foshan City and Guangzhou City in China. The site is a 30 minute drive from Baiyun Airport or 10 minute drive from Guangzhou South Train Station.

Image Credit | Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects

Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects Concept
The overall site concept is derived from the form and character of the dominant elements of flowers and water. A romantic, dreamy and fragrant city emerges as a new center for the region. The structure comprises one central area and seven urban groups radiating out like the petals of a flower. The site’s green space network links the Foshan ecological corridor, Pearl River ecological corridor and the Pearl River Delta into one connected system. Rivers and streams around the core area flow into and through a new water system designed to clean and filter river water. The centerpiece of the water system is the Huadi Lake and wetlands in the core area. Cleaned water from the system can be used for recreation, within the urban area and the core area, and for irrigation of flower fields and other agriculture. The concept incorporates artificial wetlands and natural wetlands to control flood patterns and intensity.

Flower fields at the expo | Image Credit | West 8

West 8 Concept
The Masterplan vision starts with the introduction of an ecological water system network. Implementing this system will rearrange the land use structure on a large scale. It consists of the main ecological cleaning machine imbedded in locations, a Primary Water Collector System, Secondary Water Connector with Water Locks (Inlets/Outlets) and Tertiary Water Network of Small Scale Ditches (canals) which will be streaming along the gridline corresponding to the Guangzhou and Fushan cities historical axis, the Canton axis.

Images Courtesy of Rainer Schmidt Landscape Architects and WEST 8

2013년 2월 19일 화요일

Artists Project Themselves on the Landscape

Source: the Dirt
Written by: J. Green

Since coming across the work of artist Jim Sanborn, who beams bold geometric shapes against the desert out west, we’ve seen more artists projecting themselves on landscapes — both urban and natural. By altering the backdrop with their light projections, they are creating new works, however momentary.

According to This Is Colossal, a great art and design blog, French artist Clement Briend recently traveled to Cambodia, where he photographed sculptures of Cambodian deities and projected them on urban trees.

On his work, Cambodian Trees, Briend writes: “Cambodian culture is inhabited by a deep spirituality. Their world is inhabited by spirits. In this landscape, a city asleep at night reveals divine figures on trees, allowing their incarnation. At night, we can touch the magic that illuminates Cambodians’ view of the world.”

Briend uses “homemade prototypes” to project his massive-scale images. He says his photographs “match reality and projection, space and surface. They aren’t flat representation of things, but a mirror of our minds.” The projections themselves almost seem perfectly designed for their arboreal manifestation: What would appear flat projected against a wall becomes amazingly voluminous against trees.

Other artists are continuing to project themselves in natural settings. Like Sanborn, another artist, Javier Riera, is beaming wild geometric patterns onto landscape scenes. Unlike Sanborn, he’s using spiral or circular patterns.

Out in the woods, the blog, Beautiful Decay, says Riera’s pieces “distort perception.”

Riera is creating images not unlike Briend’s: they also look like they could have been made by some forest deity.

Lastly, an artistic projection — an installation in Rekyavik, Iceland — by architect Marcos Zotes is called [E]mission. Zotes sees CCTV cameras and people, instead of urban trees or the forest, as the landscape that needs to be lit. He writes: “Surveillance cameras are today a common feature in any urban setting. These mechanisms of control have become so much part of our everyday life, that in a way they have become invisible to us, even if their presence is apparent everywhere. We are constantly being watched and we no longer care.”

Marcos Zotes’ work uses a projector and sensor to change the way we perceive a CCTV camera. “Every time a person passes by, the projector illuminates the camera and the building where it is attached, defining its field of vision. The space also acquires a theatrical quality; it becomes a stage, in which anonymous citizens are made aware of their role in the urban play of the city.”