Category: Themes

Caracas, Venezuela: The Informal City

The documentary Caracas: The Informal City, directed by Rob Schröder, follows the Caracas-based architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. The documentary is a couple years old (released in 2007), but remains a fascinating sample of the challenges that exist in mega-cities across the world. It shows the informal urban development that can be seen in many developing countries …

Japanese Flowering Cherries, the standard book by Wybe Kuitert (free online book)

With the cherry blossoms in full bloom it is a good moment to point out that the standard reference book on Japanese Flowering Cherries by Wybe Kuitert, with Arie Peterse, with a foreword by Roy Lancaster, is now free and authorized available online. Japanese flowering cherries have inspired gardeners for more than twelve centuries. They are closely …

Nesting Instincts

This article highlights a winning Art + Habitat design by Atelier Anonymous in partnership with Mike Seymour, and which features in the Spring 2015 issue of Landscapes|Paysages, the Canadian Society for Landscape Architects’ journal. For Barn Owls (Tyto alba), life can be precarious. Indeed, in many areas of the world, including British Columbia, they are threatened or rare, in large part …

A Non-Urban Approach

The World’s Societies have become largely urban; nearly everywhere, land has been occupied or colonized. Where once identity and community were linked to the land and to natural systems, the landscape is being stripped away, new layers added. During this process of transformation, society has become accustomed to an ‘urban approach’: a reliance on interventions that …

The Zen Garden & Why Use the Word Zen?

Prof Wybe Kuitert of the Seoul National University explores in this article the subject and origins of the “Zen Expression” in the garden art of Japan. He investigates how the theme and expression of Zen appears to not be found in old Japanese Garden texts and neither in early twentieth-century literature on the subject of garden …