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Curating Landscape Spaces

ISOLA BANGALORE CHAPTER
Oct 12, 2015
3 min read

“Professionals Speak”- a platform where landscape architecture professionals of the city discussed the profession through key lenses of the discipline, was the second habba hosted by ISOLA Bangalore Chapter. The habba is meant to expose the varied engagement of the profession with the public. The event hosted in collaboration with the BMS College of Engineering, Basavangudi was targeted to provide students an overview of the landscape architecture discipline through professional works undertaken at various scales and geographies. The habba was structured to discuss on a broader understanding of the Landscape Architecture in the realm of 1. Landscape and Ecology; 2. Urban Landscapes and 3. Landscape Engineering.

Mr.Rohit Marol, principal TERRA FIRMA, was the first speaker of the afternoon, emphasizing the need for integrating landscapes as an experiential component to channelize and guide urban spaces. Mr. Marol structured his talk by collating a series of project vignettes to express the various physical and experiential connects that landscape can imbibe with the user based on typological articulation. Through his talk of exploring the potentials of landscape to give a character to urban spaces, one of the key highlights was understanding the temporal nature of urban space. His talk emphasized that though urban landscapes are designed for a specific expression, it had to have the capacity to adapt to changing demands and use of space based on user preferences.

Following this, Ms. Mahalakshmi Karnad, Associate Professor, RVCA, spoke on engineering aspects of creating these landscape spaces by focussing on 3 primary components of landscape design – Land, Water and Vegetation. Ms. Karnad structured her talk by drawing international case studies of landscape design and how engineering the landscapes have inspired contemporary architectural ideas and interpretations. Her presentation emphasised on how designers have been pushing the boundaries of design on the frontiers of technological and engineering innovation and how such an approach has inspired and supported innovative spatial design expressions across the world.

Scaling up the level of engagement, Mr. Mohan Rao, Principal and Partner Integrated Design positioned his talk to deliberate on the larger ecologies and relationships that the discipline is aligned towards. Mr. Rao addressed the idea of Landscape Ecology by focussing on the inter relationships and adjacencies of land and water. His talk ideated this relationship and its contextualization to address different capacities of projects - ranging from conservation of forests, addressing traditional landscapes, strategizing wildlife habitats and even the role of landscape ecology to structure urban habitation. His presentation emphasized on how landscape ecology should not only be positioned as an underlying necessity but should be thought of as a primary tool to articulate landscape strategies to address both environmental and social paradigms.

The presentations were followed by an interaction session with the audience that included landscape professionals and undergraduate students of the architecture as well as a group of students invited from the Faculty of Architecture, Manipal University. Due to the varied scales of intervention in each of the talks, the audience response was more oriented to grasp the extent and limitations of the landscape discipline. The audience directed their questions not on specifics of the projects presented, but more on the role of the discipline in the country and its alignment with other disciplines. Due to the very nature of scales and the issues dealt by the discipline, the audience sought to understand the capacity in which landscape architects are involved in the project and whether over the course of time, the profession has been recognized beyond its mere ‘bourgeoisie beautification’ potential. Discussions addressed concerns over not only the role of landscape professional, but also whether allied professionals have been able to recognize the potential of extracting and engaging with the landscape profession.

Such questions have now become fairly commonplace; that there is a steady increase in recognition of the profession is undoubted. But it is equally true that the profession needs to constantly grapple with limitations of its disciplinary understanding. Sustained efforts through such engagement with students at the undergraduate level is to be seen an interface for the profession, through which the discipline can build up a critical mass to reinforce its capacity both in the academic and professional sector.

Interestingly, the idea of landscape architecture being affordable only by the elite still remains an impression as expressed by an audience member, to which Ms. Karnad elicited “… if one spends lavishly on a building, the legitimacy of its affordability is not questioned. However, if one intends to develop the landscape, it is seen as a commodity and not a necessity.”