May issue of LAA out now

We’re excited to welcome our keynote speakers to Melbourne on 11 May for the
Landscape Australia Conference. We’re anticipating much debate unfolding over the course of the event, which we hope will spur further conversation into the emerging possibilities of landscape practice within Australia and beyond.

Our excitement has spilled onto the pages of this issue. On the cover we feature a project by Sanitas Pradittasnee, one of our 2019 Landscape Australia Conference keynote speakers. Pradittasnee, founder of Bangkok-based Sanitas Studio, works in the crossover between art and landscape architecture, creating designs that provoke wonder and curiosity, and offer the chance for solo reflection. The particularly evocative work highlighted by our cover image (and discussed further in our interview on page 62) captures the essence of Pradittasnee’s belief that landscape practice can be instrumental not only in progressing ideas of how to build sustainably, but also in changing minds.

We continue to be inspired by the wealth of established and emerging practices in Asia that are pushing innovation in the social and technological realms. In the work of energetic young Thai studio Shma (a keynote at our 2018 conference), Ricky Ray Ricardo finds a practice that is “not only participating in the public conversation about their city’s future, but … also leading it” (see page 55).

Closer to home, this issue presents reviews of two contrasting projects. Julian Bull visits the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre’s rooftop areas by Rush Wright Associates, to discover an array of biodiverse spaces that cater for the varying needs of their users (see page 26). Sarah Hicks drops by the National Gallery of Victoria and encounters a playful yet elegant interpretation of the building’s history in Muir and Openwork’s installation for the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission, Doubleground (see page 20).

The intertwining of the human and the natural world is a thread that unites many of the articles in this issue. Cultural geographer Tim Edensor reflects on the artist James Geurts, whose works reveal the often invisible yet potent forces around us, that we shape and that shape us (see page 42). Jock Gilbert and Sophia Pearce critique the separation of humans from nature (see page 17) and Alistair Kirkpatrick explores the potential benefits of weeds (see page 35). Together, the articles in this issue call for us to acknowledge the entangling of the human and the natural, with a view to how this might inform a more holistic – and less anthropocentric – approach to practice.

In understanding the interconnectedness and dependency that we share with our environment, we can embrace the agency of landscape practice with renewed ambition.

– Emily Wong, editor