Boston Flora

Tag: urban design

  • Thursday, November 3, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Wet + Dry: Landscapes of Resilience and Material Exploration

    The Harvard Graduate School of Design will host a free lecture on November 3 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall in Cambridge with James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie of Surfacedesign.

    Surfacedesign is a landscape architecture and urban design firm based in San Francisco, California. This internationally award-winning practice focuses on creating dynamic parks, campuses, plazas, waterfronts, civic landscapes and private gardens. The firm’s approach emphasizes and celebrates the unique context and imaginative potential of each project. The studio’s design process is rooted in asking novel questions and listening to a site and its users – a process that has led to engaging and inspiring landscapes that are rugged, contemporary, and crafted.

    Increasingly, water has become a central focus of all landscape interventions. Holistic, systems-based design thinking that actively engages water extremes—from drought to flooding/sea level rise— is at the core of Surfacedesign’s practice. Challenging the formal manifestations of municipal guidelines and standards for water management, each project engages water as an integral design element. James and Roderick will share a range of work from the residential to the infrastructural. These works celebrate water systems and explore how planting, topography and cultural narratives can reinforce water resiliency.

    James A. Lord is a founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc. James’ innovative design approach and stewardship of the firm’s design practice has established Surfacedesign as an international leader in urban design and sustainability. He leads projects in New Zealand, Hawaii, Mexico, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. James received his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and his BARCH from the University of Southern California.  

    Roderick Wyllie is an award-winning landscape architect and a founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc. Roderick has led a variety of complex projects within the office, including the Uber Campus in Mission Bay, San Francisco’s Bayfront Park, The Land’s End Visitor Center, The Barnacles at Pier 9 and Expedia Global Headquarters in Seattle. His horticultural knowledge and passion for material authenticity reinforce craftsmanship and attention to detail into each project at Surfacedesign. 

    Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

  • Monday, September 13, 12:00 noon – 1:30 pm – Robin Winogrand: In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment, Online

    The replacement of the unique and specific with the generic is a sign of our times. Cities make no exception. In the name of the modern, new and improved, the luring richness, unexpected and uncontrolled are being standardized out of our urban landscapes. The result is often a sterile built environment with scary resemblance to architectural renderings that has little to do with the unfolding of human experience.

    Robin Winogrond will show a series of her recent projects in Switzerland and Germany, most often on the urban periphery, which increasingly focus on sussing out the poetic potential of the banality of our contemporary urban landscape. What in a place engages our imagination or leaves us cold? Using a narrative approach, the projects become testing grounds to re-enchant each specific site with the power of its own inherent qualities, expressing the underestimated oddity of place that our contemporary urban landscapes contain.

    Robin Winogrond, landscape architect and urban designer, is co-founder of Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture, in Zurich, Switzerland. She was partner from 2014-2020, a period in which numerous international competitions and prizes were won, most notably the recently completed Zurich Airport Park. While continuing the collaboration with Studio Vulkan, she is working independently and internationally on projects, juries, lecturing, teaching, and publishing. She is currently teaching at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

    Robin Winogrond works on a wide variety of scales and themes, with a focus on built works as well as large-scale open space and urban design schemes, and site-specific installations. Her work, at once atmospheric and pragmatic in nature, seeks to design but also build powerful experiences of slippery matters such as atmosphere, imagination, the psychology of social space, multifaceted identity of place, and embodied experience. Combining these with the pragmatic nature of building, the projects search to understand and interpret the diverse demands, contradictions and countervailing expectations of the contemporary landscape, especially on the increasingly banal urban periphery, using this productive tension as a driver for developing innovative and experimental design strategies that interpret the conditions of the site and its users.

    The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.

    Click here to register for Robin Winogrond, “In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment”. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event.