Forests are dense ecological assemblages, cultural symbols, and contested territories of resource, refuge, and imagination. They have been framed as wilderness, as economic stock, and as sites of myth or national identity. In contemporary discourse, forests are both critical carbon sinks and zones of deforestation-driven crisis. For design and theory, forests embody the entanglement of ecology, politics, and cultural meaning.
In December this year, the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation will start to apply to medium and large operators and traders. For micro and small enterprises, the same rules will apply next year. This means that if a commodity, such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soya, rubber, or wood, and products derived from those commodities, […]
The book reads like a crime novel for landscape architects. It contains much of the stuff we don’t dare to look into, true – mostly because forests fall under the domain of forestry. Designed Forests: A Cultural History uncovers human entanglements with forests as a design metaphor through a series of gripping stories Dan Handel researched in serious depth, not leaving room for much romance. Taking us on a global journey through projects that involve forests as a point of departure, Handel catches us in our preconceived ways of thinking, traversing the undergirding ideas, cutting to the stem of those lines of thought. The book is not an answer to what a forest is, yet we might get an idea of how forest metaphor gets instrumentalized in discourse in spatial design practices and what this metaphor lacks.
Mnemosyne walks on a Forest Wall What if rural areas took center stage in the movement for resilient, secure communities—getting the same attention as urban environments? What if seawalls and groynes weren’t just lifeless barriers but thriving ecosystems, forests, walking routes for storytelling, art trails and canvases for culture and nature? The growing impact of […]
The book Forest Urbanisms brings together underlying ideas, the concept of forest urbanism, and global practices and research that engage with forests through a critical and nuanced lens. Using the world is forest as the guiding principle, the authors put the forest in a central role of the spatial organization across regions, scales and quantities – from a solitary tree to an interplay of buildings and trees. This expanding notion of forest expects new morphologies and typologies of forest urbanism. The authors open the controversies regarding humankind’s relations to forests and offer thinking tools past the greenwashing paradigms.
Forests are ecosystems, usually acknowledged as spaces with the least human intervention, however, not many of us have been in touch with a virgin forest and its feralness. For most, forest means recreational or urban woods in the vicinity where we stroll and unwind or a mountain forest where we hike or climb. People growing […]
Collectively, all humans experience 8 billion days in 24 hours. That is about 22 million years lived in one day.
When one starts to think about time in that way, it seems inevitable to envision the collective impact of human life on Earth.
This article by Kelly Shannon and Donielle Kaufman was first published on 9 January 2018. With the recent fires around Los Angeles, we are bringing it into focus again in early 2025 as it sheds light on processes and hidden corners of the context that brought about California’s ‘wildfire epidemic’.
Caio Reisewitz has created an artistic intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, titled “Suspendre el Cel”. To Suspend the Sky is the artist’s reference to activists shamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, alluding to Indigenous practices and beliefs of Amazonian people that the earth is made out of the sky, so the sky […]
FOREST ENCOUNTERS: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, essays The European cooperation project FOREST ENCOUNTERS is looking for representations of different encounters with the forest from both human and non-human perspectives. The FOREST ENCOUNTERS project explores and proposes diverse imaginaries, concepts, and practices around the following questions: What and how can we learn with and through […]
IFLA Europe organizes a 3rd online event ‘Talk with Prof Ása L. Aradóttir on Restoration of native woodlands and sustainable forestry, on the 22nd of March 2024 at 13h CET Registration is required in advance for this event by following this link. The guest in this third Talk is Prof Ása L. Aradóttir, Professor, Department […]
Awarded the prestigious 2023-2024 International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, the Espacio Escultórico in Pedregal de San Ángel, Mexico City, is celebrated for its blend of art, nature, and history. This accolade, orchestrated by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, shines a spotlight on spaces that embody extraordinary qualities of creativity, historical depth, and natural particularities. […]
The Harvard Graduate School of Design organized a two-day conference titled Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? It is open to the public and available via streaming. Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide—at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban […]
We continue with French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his 1967 speech to an architecture audience, he introduced the concept of “heterotopia”. It was published in 1984 as an essay, Des Espaces Autres (Of Other Spaces), and it deals with the nature of space and its relation to society. Heterotopias are unique spatial entities that challenge conventional notions of space and compel reflection on the social, cultural, and ideological matters of our world.
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
Alvar Aalto, one of the most important architects of modernism, was born 125 years ago. He grew up in Jyväskylä in central Finland. The opening of the Aalto2 museum hub occurred on 27 May as the highlight of the anniversary year. It combines two Alvar Aalto-designed edifices, the Museum of Central Finland (1956-61, 1991) and […]
Every landscape architect should be well-aware of the role of forests both in environmental and social sense. Forests are dark and seem wild, so clearings feel liberating and secure. Visibility is low which makes forest misterious or even terrifying. One can get lost pretty quickly, so paths are of paramount importance. For landscape architects forests may be attractive as there are more tools for playing with the natural light and volumes.
