Living Project

During the summer I was priveleged enough to be working with a practice involved in designing a new library landscape. And though many changes have been made since that stage, this profesional model expresses the finished landscape as initially designed by myself. The model and the images are the property of the architectural practice Penoyre and Prasad, who are the designers of the new library.

www.penoyre-prasad.net

Question Time...

Is there an underlying question in design, lying just beneath the surface of realisation. A subversive tension. The two great schools of design from which all others are born are Architecture: that which shelters us from our environ, and Landscape Architecture: that which celebrates our environ, forging new connections with the natural.

Watching "The Lake House" and listening to its celebrative dialogue of Architecture in Chicago, I suddenly realised the human scale. What is Architecture? It is unique, it is one of very few things that stands entirely alien in state. But this has not always been so, it has stemmed, grown, from the deep earthen notes of dwelling as a part of our surroundings. Only now does it stand completely seperate and yet there is a constant movement to returning to its roots and not forget its beginnings. So, should the Architect continue to seek what is entirely unique or return? Should the Landscape Architect free himself from the soil and roots and seek the radical, the unknown and the utterly fresh, with no connection to his past and the earth he walks on? Should he attempt to create an Architectural/Alien landscape, previously unimagined and certainly never created? Or should he just bow to the master artisan and seek for ways to further man's understanding of what he does not see already surrounding him, thereby becoming mankinds visionary expertise?

These are questions that every Landscape/Architect must discover and resolve within themselves potentially changing for site or year. The key I believe is not to design without principle, not to design without conviction, to staunchly rise above conformity and design in the freedom of choice limited only by context. To make your choice and stand by it as principle, after all, what is wrong or right?