| Spring 2008 Colloquium |
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The Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Colloquium (LD ARCH 253) brings together professionals, academics, practitioners, and graduate students to present projects relevant to the landscape architecture and environmental planning professions. All are invited to attend. "Context Matters: Global Forms and Everyday Spaces" This interdisciplinary lecture and discussion series focuses on international design—concepts, profession, and practice. How do design practitioners who work in the real world understand culture and conditions that prevail in different world regions? Are there preferred, universal global aesthetics, norms and concepts, and how do these forces manifest themselves on the ground in built work, from one project to another, from one region to another, and graphically, on the drawing board? G. Mathias Kondolf, Associate Professor Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Wednesdays 1–2 p.m. Wed 1/30 Nancy L. Fleming Nancy L. Fleming Contextual Design in Yunnan Province, China The presentation will compare two recent projects in historic Yunnan Province, the most culturally rich area of China. Daguan Park, a restoration and improvement project in Kunming, addresses an existing, highly-valued public open space. The challenge was to improve and enhance the park, both aesthetically as well as functionally, while protecting and preserving the historic resources within. In contrast, the Shangri-La Conceptual Vision Plan is located south of the city of Shangri-La on what is currently undeveloped grazing land. The goal for this plan is to create a sustainable tourist destination that is steeped in the legacy of Shangri-La. Providing both a respite and an opportunity for passive recreation, visitors will become educated about the landscape, the culture, and the history of the 26 ethnic minorities that live in the region. Both projects were approached with strong environmental strategies. Nancy L. Fleming has more than 30 years of project experience in a wide range of landscape design projects for both public and private sector clients throughout the United States and internationally. In 2006 she rejoined Sasaki as a Principal in San Francisco, and currently plays a leadership role within the landscape design practice. Previously, Nancy was a Senior Associate in Sasaki's Dallas Office from 1985 to 1996, and played a significant role in the implementation and management of a number of significant award-winning projects including the DART Transit Mall and Dallas Arts District. Prior to rejoining the firm, Nancy was a Principal with the SWA Group in Houston and Sausalito where she directed Cotswold, the downtown Houston streetscape redevelopment project, and led the San Antonio River Master Plan project which won a national ASLA Honor Award. Renee Y. Chow Cultivating the Field: Five Strategies for City Building As design professionals travel, our concepts and methods move from one setting to another. Too often, practices learned in one setting are patched into others without translation, without regard for the uniqueness of place or the coherence of the city. Using case studies in Tianjin and ZhuJiajiao, the talk illustrates alternative strategies to cultivate the particular circumstances of local history, culture, building forms and spatial systems. Renee Chow is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently serving as Chair of Grad Advisors for the Master of Architecture Program and Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics. She is also Principal of STUDIO URBIS located in Berkeley, California. She received both her SBAD and MArch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Annmarie Adams Medicine by Design Annmarie Adams’ talk will draw from her just-released book, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). In the history of medicine, hospitals are usually seen as passive reflections of advances in medical knowledge and technology. In Medicine by Design, Adams challenges these assumptions, examining how hospital design influenced the development of twentieth-century medicine and demonstrating the importance of these specialized buildings in the history of architecture. Annmarie Adams, Arcus Scholar-in-Residence in Spring 2008, is William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal. Adams is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996) and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Professor Kaiping Peng is a tenured faculty member at the Department of Psychology of the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1997. Before coming to the US in 1989, he had been a faculty member at the Psychology Department of Peking University of China for five years. He is currently the head of the social/personality psychology area in Berkeley. He also directs the Culture and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley, has published four books and some 50 articles on culture and cognition, and the psychology of Chinese people. Recently Dr. Peng has been named the most cited social psychologist among his cohorts (SPSP Dialogues, 2007). Richard Walker The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area This presentation will explain how the San Francisco Bay Area is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. In the nine-county San Francisco region, 3.75 of 4.5 million acres are greenbelt and open water, and less than 750,000 acres lie beneath buildings and pavements. Almost 900,000 acres are in publicly owned open space, an area larger than Yosemite National Park. The Bay Area has the most extensive such greensward in the country. Professor Walker’s latest book, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area tells the story of how the Bay Area got its green groove. Gabrielle Bouleau One Ecological Ambition Under 25 Flags: the European Union's Water Framework Directive The European Union adopted in 2000 a masterpiece of law which sets ambitious ecological goals and demands a cost-effective planning. The EU's environmental policy has been much inspired by USEPA guidance. Terms used in the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) are very closed to the language of the Clean Water Act. Yet the EU is not a federal union and has little power for enforcement. The WFD is nevertheless binding because any citizen may sue a state in the European Court of Justice for insufficient enforcement of the EU's law. Since the WFD defines goals for all water bodies, it challenges not only future development but also any previous development which impairs the achievements of a good ecological status. Member States are considered responsible for any failure in achieving the objectives. Gabrielle Bouleau will present how it challenges the domestic water policy of Member States by explaining what the situation in France is. Gabrielle Bouleau graduated in France, in agronomy in 1994 and in environmental engineering in 1995. She worked three years as an environmental planner and a rural engineer in a state office in the Drôme region. She experienced a hard time fighting against her colleagues' one-best-way attitude to assess needs and to provide villages and farmers with water. Then she shifted towards education. She has taught integrated water management in ENGREF (a famous college in France for water and forestry management) since 1998. She developed intercultural confrontations and future studies in teaching methods to foster debates in problem setting. This led her to social sciences. She started a Ph.D. in 2001 in social and professional perceptions of aquatic ecosystems. The focus of her research was the social and political categorization of water quality. This topic was profoundly changed by the European water framework directive. It resulted in a dissertation on how the WFD challenged the French river management, which she defended in 2007. She is presently in Berkeley for a post-doc to compare the California situation with the French one. Masami Kobayashi Enriching Neighborhood Quality in Multi-layered Tokyo Tokyo is a multi-layered city structured by both medieval and modern city forms. The Institue of Urban and Regional Development’s Visiting Scholar, Professor Masami Kobayashi will share new experimental urban research methods that examine complex relationships between land use, topography and patterns of cultural use that exist in neighborhoods near Tokyo, such as Nihonbashi and Shimokitazawa. Masami Kobayashi is a Professor of Architectural Department of Meiji University in Japan who actively teaches urban design theory and studio in the U.S. and Japan and tries to implement them as a practitioner. His major interest is visualizing the tangible and intangible factors in urban life and applying them to the real sustainable urban and architectural design. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo and master's degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Tokyo. The subject of his dissertation was “Typological Study on American Row Houses.” He is helping local residents to solve urban conflicts in Japan, as a local professional. Especially in Shimokitazawa district in Tokyo, he energetically works as a leader of Shimokitazawa Forum. He has his own design firm, “Archi-Media,” in Tokyo, and recently received the “Award of Architectural Institute of Japan” for the “Preservation and Restoration of International House of Japan.” He has published Tokyo Inner City Project (Gakugei Shuppan 2003), Boston by Design (Process Architecture 1991), and his monographs. John S. Loomis California Academy of Sciences Green Roof John Loomis, a graduate of the University of Illinois (BLA 1977) and a principal at SWA Group in Sausalito, California, for nearly twenty years, has recently been involved with two major living roof projects that he would like to share with LAEP: Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences Building in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and the Packard Humanities Institute’s National Audio and Visual Conservation Center recently gifted to the Library of Congress. With a focus towards design development, construction documentation, and design implementation, translating designs from the boards to reality, Mr. Loomis has unique insight and the opportunity to see projects evolve through the construction process. Mr. Loomis has worked extensively in Japan for more than 18 years on projects including corporate and residential high-rises, themed entertainment attractions, institutional and medical campuses, and retirement communities. He is currently turning his attention toward China, where improving the quality level of built projects is an exciting challenge. Stephen Few Show Me the Numbers Success in your work sometimes hinges on your ability to communicate quantitative information—numbers—to colleagues, clients, and policy makers. This ability is not intuitive; it requires visual communication skills that must be learned. Quantitative information is almost always presented in the form of tables or graphs. Unfortunately, most are poorly designed—often to the point of misinformation. Why? Because almost no one has been trained, despite how easy it is to learn. In this lecture, Stephen Few, Haas faculty member and author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, will illustrate some of the common mistakes in quantitative communication and point the way to improvements that are easy to master. Mr. Few specializes in techniques of data visualization the graphical analysis and presentation of quantitative business data and visual Narrative: telling stories with quantitative information using a mix of text and graphics. As designers are pressed to present data graphics in their everyday professional practice, the representation of data and the production of crisp graphics that communicate ideas succinctly to a broad audience become increasingly vital. A consultant who runs professional workshops on data visualization, a lecturer at the Haas Business School and the School of Information, Mr. Few has agreed to share his expertise and skill with the Colloquium. Darin Jensen Good Map: Toward a Conscientious Arrangement of Spatial Attributes A successfully designed site requires a successful graphic representation, which is only possible through an understanding of multiple scales. Explore the interrelation between the map scale, the human scale, and the page scale to create quality design drawings. Cartography instructor and Geography department lecturer Darin Jensen will share with the LAEP Colloquium main components of clearly communicating information through map-making. C. Greig Crysler Title TBA Professor Crysler teaches courses in architectural theory and criticism. His research interests include the geopolitics of architectural discourse since 1960; globalization and the social production of the built environment; and the relationship between architecture and identity. He has extensive experience in professional practice in Canada and the UK, and is the recipient of project grants from the Canada Council, the Graham Foundation, Chicago, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. He has also received fellowships from the State University of New York at Binghamtom and the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada. He is the founder of a/r/c, an interdisciplinary journal of architectural theory and criticism based in Toronto, Canada, which he edited from 1990-95. His published research includes articles for the New Art Examiner, Afterimage, a/r/c, Art Journal, Journal of Architectural Education, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Representing the City: Ethnicity, Culture and Capital in the 21st Century Metropolis, edited by A.D. King. His article "Critical Pedagogy and Architectural Education" was selected for the 1996 JAE Outstanding Article of the Year Award. Professor Crysler organized an international conference entitled "Architectures of Globalization: Places/Practices/Pedagogies" at Berkeley in the Fall of 2000, and is currently developing an edited collection based on the event. His book, Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture and Urbanism, 1960-2000, is forthcoming from Routledge. He is also at work on collection of essays on the politics of professional identity in contemporary architectural culture. Susan and Michael Southworth Three Centuries of Boston’s Great Public Spaces and Private Garden Squares Boston’s great public space tradition began officially with the 1634 Common pasture. In the following centuries Boston created an encyclopedia of open space design: postage stamp squares, formal gardens, linear connectors, post-freeway transformations of lost space, monumental commemorative boulevards, and the largest continuous green park in an American city. Michael and Susan Southworth talk about some of the urban spaces in their just-published AIA Guide to Boston: Contemporary Landmarks, Urban Design, Parks, Historic Buildings and Neighborhoods. Shannon May Ecological Design and the Paradox of the Proxy: Lessons from Bill McDonough's Huangbaiyu Designed from a bird's eye view, Bill McDonough's master plan for a sustainable community in Huangbaiyu is drawn to serve as a prototype for a new, sustainable development path for 800 million rural Chinese. Sun, soil, and water are taken into account in the choice of a centralized community location and the orientation of each house. According to Cradle-to-Cradle principles, all materials used in construction are to be either technological or biological nutrients, and waste would equal food. These methods have been lauded by the popular press, and replicated in design schools across the country. But the families who already live there have seen their household incomes drop; and the families still living in their older, "inefficient" homes are hoping that the politics of sustainability will soon pass them by. If design is the signal of intention—and the design of Huangbaiyu reduces household income, prohibits the most profitable local means of income, and alters family structure—what is the intention of sustainability? At the heart of this problem is the paradox of the proxy: by using a bird, the sun, and the soil as proxy signals of the ideal human habitat to sustain the ecosystem, the Huangbaiyu master plan shifts the framework of knowledge away from the lives of the people in this valley to scalable variables that can be replicated across the globe. Shannon May is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Founder, NewGlobe Schools. She has conducted fieldwork throughout China and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work engages anthropological problems of governance, development, citizenship and community as constituted in everyday practice. She is currently writing her dissertation on the convergence of ecological and market rationalities in a project to "modernize" rural China, titled Green Dreams and Schemes: Knowledge, the Market, and Development in, of, and for a Chinese Village. Peter Bosselmann Berkeley Students Working in China on the Future of a Water Village in the Pearl River Delta and on the Grand Canal in Hangzhou Peter Bosselmann will speak about UC Berkeley students' work in Guangzhou and Hangzhou, China, in January and March of this year. In January, faculty and students from the Master of Urban Design program, together with Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning students, stayed on the campus at the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou and worked on urban design concepts for historic water villages that will be absorbed into the rapidly growing cities of the Pearl River Delta. In March, a team from Berkeley's Master of Urban Design program joined students from Tokyo's Waseda University and from the University of Ferrara, Italy, for a two-week workshop at ZheJiang University in Hangzhounear Shanghai. Hangzhou is located at the terminus of the Grand Canal of China, a 1800 km long waterway that connects Beijing in the north with the Yangtze River Delta in the center of China. The canal was completed during the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and with the invention of the water level adjusting pound lock in the 10th century the Grand Canal became China's most important economic, cultural and political north south connection. Sections of the canal are still actively used for water-based transport. The workshop focused on the changes in land uses along side the canal from the formerly industrial use to residential and recreational activities. At the same time student teams worked on designs that reversed environmental degradation and made improvements to water quality and urban ecology. Professor Bosselmann is an urban designer with international experience in planning and design of downtown areas, inner city neighborhoods and roadway projects. He has established simulation and computer visualization laboratories in New York City, Tokyo and in Milan that were modeled after the laboratory he directs at Berkeley. He lectures frequently throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. He held endowed Chairs at Tokyo University (1992), at the Sidney Institute of Technology (1994), the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2000), and the Milan Politecnico (2006-7). He received Progressive Architecture, AIA, ASLA and American Planning Association awards for his urban design work in San Francisco and Toronto and from the Chicago Urban Design Foundation for his work in Oakland, California. |
January 30, 2008