Watch our Oct. 7 Community Tour of ‘Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci’ with landscape architect Katharina Kafka. ‘Genius Loci” is sponsored by Qualico and presented by the Poole Centre of Design. #AGAlive is made possible by EPCOR and Canada Council for the Arts.Watch our Oct. 7 Community Tour of ‘Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci’ with landscape architect Katharina Kafka. ‘Genius Loci” is sponsored by Qualico and presented by the Poole Centre of Design. #AGAlive is made possible by EPCOR and Canada Council for the Arts. …
Key moments
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Land Acknowledgement
Land Acknowledgement
0:11
Land Acknowledgement
0:11
Genius Loci
Genius Loci
4:25
Genius Loci
4:25
Portland Hotel
Portland Hotel
22:23
Portland Hotel
22:23
Tiger Garden at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
Tiger Garden at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
23:41
Tiger Garden at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
23:41
Green Roofs
Green Roofs
35:32
Green Roofs
35:32
Use CTRL+F to find key words if it is a longer transcript.
0:00
hello everyone and welcome to our community tour led by katharina kafka my name is michael manson i’m the public
0:06
program and outreach coordinator at the art gallery of of alberta to start this program i would like to do a land
0:12
acknowledgement i’m currently in treaty six territory in edmonton the traditional land of diverse
0:18
indigenous peoples including the cree blackfoot metis dakota sioux earpod
0:24
zenei inuit and ojibwe salto anishinabe we acknowledge and extend gratitude to
0:30
many first nations metis and inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations and who continue to call
0:37
this place home today this is the sixth edition of our
0:43
community tour program which invites a new speaker each month to lead the tour of the current exhibition giving our
0:49
audience a unique perspective on the artwork on display we are going to be looking at the exhibition cornelia han
0:56
overlander genius loci which is currently on display at her gallery till the 17th so if you haven’t seen it yet
1:03
please check it out because time is running out uh one thing to mention is that we will
1:09
be have one thing to mention is that we will have a chat at the end of this lecture
1:14
and so if you have any questions please enter them in the q a function or you can also use the chat function and if
1:21
you are on facebook please enter them in the chat uh this aga live to me tours made
1:27
possible in part for the support from the heart and soul fund by epcor i would also like to thank the canada council
1:33
for the arts for their supported style now i would like to introduce katharina
1:39
originally from vienna katharina attained a masters of landscape architecture from the university of natural resources and life sciences in
1:46
vienna austria in 2002. katharina has over 15 years of experience as a landscape architect and
1:53
works within the full range of scale from master plans and pocket parks to civic spaces and private yards katharina
2:01
believes the design of a serious space has not only an important impact on a building but is essential to the feel
2:08
and making of place her designs are deeply rooted in their neighborhoods and their natural and
2:13
historic contexts so without further ado please welcome katharina
2:32
so hi everyone good evening and thanks for joining us um today
2:37
um i’m katrina kafka and i’m a landscape architect and i’ve been a landscape architect all my adult life i was born
2:45
and raised in austria and worked in europe a while and then came to canada to add them about 12
2:54
years ago um i first learned about cornelia han over lander um maybe
3:01
like 15 years ago and i was working in ireland at the time and planning a trip to visit an old friend in vancouver
3:08
and a colleague of mine also originally from germany said to me ah you’re going to vancouver you must go and visit
3:15
cornelia and oberlander and i didn’t even know who she was at the time so then i started to do some research uh
3:23
um look up her projects and um i went to vancouver and had a fantastic time in vancouver well i got
3:30
shy and i did not contact her she was also she must have also been in her 80s back
3:36
then time was short um but didn’t matter ever since i felt very
3:42
connected to her and to her work and you know how it is when you put your
3:47
awareness towards something suddenly she popped up everywhere and there was this project that project
3:54
and yeah so i feel very much connected to her and i think not only because of our common
4:00
germanic heritage and finding our homes in canada but also just because of that
4:07
of her work and how excellent her work is and how influential she has been so it’s a great honor um for me to be here
4:14
today and share a bit of my view and thoughts about her work
4:19
so thanks a lot michael for inviting me and having me here
4:24
so this exhibition is called genius loci which is latin for the spirit of place
4:32
that’s actually a really beautiful underlying principle of landscape architecture and
4:39
i suppose also architecture and it means like to
4:44
read the spirit of the place and that every place is unique every project is unique every site
4:50
and so um there is obviously the site location just a fauna there’s a
4:56
floor there’s a topography there’s usage there’s history and all of that
5:02
forms a certain ambience a certain spirit um that touches us
5:07
and moves us and can inspire us so i think that’s been a really underlying principle to her work that um she really
5:15
worked with the land and the place and its uniqueness and um you will as we walk through as we
5:23
walk through the exhibition now i think we will see that in a lot of her work
5:28
um just um quickly before i just wanted to touch on her biography
5:34
i think many of you will know that cornelia was born in germany in 1921
5:40
into i think rather intellectual open-minded
5:46
jewish family her father was an engineer and her mother was a horticultural horticulturist
5:52
so from very early age cornelia was exposed to gardening to botany the importance from plants
6:00
and i think at the age 11 she already decided that she would like to become a landscape architect
6:07
um and obviously she also grew up in the times of the bauhaus and the beginnings
6:13
of modern architecture and design and i think that really influenced her for the
6:18
rest of her life as well then in 1938 her father tragically passed away in an
6:25
avalanche and then her mother resisted her um fled the nazi government and
6:30
immigrated to the united states in 1938 and she then um moved on to
6:39
smith college and studied a combined course landscape architecture and architecture
6:46
and from then on she went to harvard and she was one of the first women
6:51
admitted to harvard school of design and that was led at the time by walter gropius so here again she landed in them
6:59
in the center of the bauhaus movement and modernism and
7:05
collaboration and studio and really an overall perspective on
7:12
buildings and sites and planets i want to go to her first and then she
7:18
graduated in 1947 from harvard and she started working in
7:24
the social housing sector she started to work for a landscape or he like then kylie and it was um just after the war
7:30
and so housing was in big demand in philadelphia and this is just a sketch
7:37
but it immediately is a beautiful like in my in my view it’s a beautiful painting because it’s all one
7:45
um it’s like there’s not the buildings and then there’s the landscape architecture or the site or the planting
7:52
it really stands out as one composition and throughout her whole life i think
7:57
that was another underlying principle of hers she used to say
8:02
um building and landscape must achieve a fit so they have to go together and that
8:09
starts with collaboration with a strong concept to
8:15
the grading plan and um so this was a large housing
8:20
project these um these these buildings here are actually i think 17 16 story high apartment
8:28
buildings and these are more like mid-rise um
8:34
dance housing units and um just looking at the sketch i can
8:39
immediately see like a hierarchy of planting like nestling the building in between the trees you can also see a
8:46
large common space so common areas um also kind of
8:52
semi-private areas that she had here all her they had vegetable gardens they
9:00
had small play areas in there you can also see the geometric the very rectangular shapes of the buildings and
9:07
then she has like just hinted here typical oval of kind of like to have
9:12
this touch of modern landscape architecture in here lots of pedestrian connections
9:18
and first i thought these things here are hedges but then i read that she actually repurposed
9:25
the masonry of buildings that used to stand on the site and created little walls to delineate
9:32
her her landscape and her semi-private areas and i think that’s a beautiful example
9:38
of how um kind of stay true to the genius loci of the place and repurpose something and
9:44
keep it and um yeah let that live the next housing this is a housing this
9:51
is another housing project in um philadelphia and this i think this was six city blocks like huge
9:58
um she also worked with stamped highly and you can see here in orange you’ll notice that when walking the exhibition
10:05
this is actually specifications and i never questioned specifications that was always kind of part of what we
10:11
do in our job but actually at the time they were just the first times people
10:16
wrote specifications for landscape architectural jobs and these were the first specifications she ever wrote
10:24
um as i move forward you can also see like it’s a bit blurry but one can tell like
10:30
her very analytical thinking she has a high not in her plant list not only does she have trees and shrubs and crown
10:38
covers but she also deserves between trees and small trees and she uses them and she again has kind
10:44
of like community spaces and then it’s hard to tell but i think every ground floor unit
10:50
has its own kind of open space so very kind of social responsible
10:56
planning i think both mill creek and these this housing project choco falls have only
11:03
been poorly realized and they have also been demolished
11:08
um then that was something that really amazed me when i walked through the exhibition i
11:14
mostly knew republic like kind of a public space project but i wasn’t aware of her playground design and how many
11:20
playgrounds she did and what she did so she had the opportunity to design a playground for a vacant lot
11:27
in philadelphia as well um and um
11:32
she did she did a beautiful side analysis um i think typical to her and thinking of the time but she also really
11:40
looked at the demographic and who lives in the neighborhood and what age the children are and what it
11:46
would like to do and she really um already at that playground started to
11:53
design her own equipment and her own ways and she really inspired imaginary play
12:00
so this is the only thing i found dated in the exhibition is display equipment
12:05
but other than that it’s amazingly contemporary um so if i zoom in here you can see she
12:12
designed a little mountain out of concrete using them using
12:17
concrete as you can see in a picture and that’s just like really inspiring because it allows for so much creative
12:24
use you can climb up you can obviously run around every step could become something different it’s seating it’s
12:30
play she also differentiated into a smaller children’s play area then all the
12:37
children’s play area and then she allowed for a lot of sports so you can read here basketball and volleyball and
12:45
body ball and all injured planted and some seating areas here she also repurposed equipment
12:52
so she really wanted to design a place a human community place for everyone i think
12:58
and move away from um very playground equipment oriented
13:04
play and that became even much bigger in this project of course
13:10
so she got invited to design um a playground for expo 67 for the children’s creative
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center and so expo 67 i think was in this period of of
13:24
kind of like an utopia living and moving a little bit away from the
13:29
automobile um dictated cities and she got invited to kind of design
13:35
the most progressive playground with the most progressive play equipment at the time
13:41
and what cornelius did is she designed a player curve but she designed
13:46
basically a natural playground and i don’t know how many of you are
13:52
kind of have children or familiar with education trends at the moment but national playgrounds i think that’s
13:58
really really really big at the moment and i was amazed to see her do it in 1964 when she designed it for the expo
14:05
1967. so instead of typical play equipment she has heels she has logs she has even a
14:15
kind of stream area running around here she has resting areas she has loose play
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equipment um where things can act where kids can actually build their own houses and
14:27
structures and move things around and she also has a lot of planting trees she
14:34
knew that this playground is going to be mainly used for urban kids children growing up in cities and
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she really wanted to introduce also kind of a natural growing nature
14:46
learning into these playgrounds and um she never saw it was never i think her playground for her was never
14:52
just to add items of a catalogue it was really to create a space and an environment
15:00
and have something for everyone and tell the story and um
15:07
it’s very beautiful in my opinion very beautiful um just the drawings almost a piece of art
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it became highly successful um they had to apparently i think they have to limit the times uh to one hour of each kid’s
15:21
staying before the ushered them out and she moved on to design 70 playgrounds
15:27
all over canada after that and so yeah here you can see this
15:32
beautiful sketches beautiful perspective she did there’s an embankment slide i mean this is now very common in every
15:39
playground a log tunnel um you have very highly creative play
15:47
um so for a long time um nature playgrounds or natural
15:53
not natural materials weren’t allowed the city of edmonton didn’t allow that for um for the playgrounds here also because
16:00
in the past they have been treated with kerosene or had splinters but maybe some of you know just like last
16:05
year they built the first natural playground in in the city of edmond river valley by the zoo
16:12
and it’s a highly successful project a very beautiful playground and um so i think we’ll just see many
16:17
more of these come in that in the near future this is in in 1953 cornelia
16:24
married her husband uh peter oberlander who was a planner and architect at ubc
16:30
and she moved us into vancouver and this is a project this is not a housing project she did in vancouver called
16:36
skinner terrace and this one is still um is still here today
16:41
still lived in and even just this sketch again it shows a nice it’s just just such a nice composition of of the
16:48
buildings here that that the green space is in between how she uses for instance
16:54
lines of trees to to create a little bit more of a quieted kind of semi-private
16:59
space here now other spaces are much more open and there’s also playgrounds in
17:05
here a strong hierarchy like it all is like in this one um
17:11
buildings and site private gardens and private estates so
17:16
over the course of her lifetime and work she has some
17:22
built many um private estates and i think in the private estates you
17:27
can really also see her like everything comes together she usually worked with well-renowned architects and mid-century
17:35
modern buildings and she could use her incredible plant knowledge and botany
17:40
she used she really also in the very beginning mainly used native plants and maybe a few exotic plants and planters
17:48
just as a point and um yeah a lot of her
17:53
kind of design almost poetic design work is apparent i find in her private states
18:00
so this is for instance a sketch for the friedman um estate which you did in the 50s
18:06
and um yeah i can see this area here that’s a little bit shaped like a butterfly
18:13
it says lawn on it and i think it later must have turned into gravel
18:18
so i learned that there was bedrock underneath and she didn’t want out and so nothing would grow on that but she really didn’t
18:25
want to bust out the bedrock because it’s beautiful to have bedrocks there and so she’s just maybe working the design and had nothing planted here but
18:33
then had her amazing shrub beds around here and i love how she has this very
18:38
rectangular straight clean lines edges pathways around the building to match
18:44
the building and then she slowly starts to fade it out into the gravel space
18:50
and then into her planting like i did like this like this paver suddenly fading out this is such a common detail
18:58
now we see it in every high-end pavers catalog and she did it in the 50s
19:04
also one can see a little bit in the legend here you know she how 3d how spatial her thinking was she
19:10
didn’t really i think plan that this is this plan and this but she went in masses
19:15
like these are the shrubs at dad height and these are the shrubs that 16 inches and then there’s the next layer of shrub
19:21
some very layered approach of thinking this is another resident she did a much
19:28
later in her life ratman residence um later got expanded so this here was the
19:35
original plan and i think the main road
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runs here and this was the entrance to the house or house um estate
19:47
and then she designed this beautiful succession of gardens like you can see here this is
19:53
very formal very rectangular i think it’s probably hard surface
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and then it steps down to a much softer but still geometric kind of ellipse
20:04
sweet probably lawn area towards the road she has
20:09
a row of small trees but i love the imbalance she doesn’t have it on the other side there’s more steps
20:15
and then here it becomes very natural a birch grove and so it becomes from very
20:20
formal to more and more and more natural to a walk through the forest
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it’s just a beautiful concept channel this is really really strong concept that she always forwards through
20:32
well her famous projects through then later she got commissioned to add an extension
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and so this is confusing because this line of the house here is the garage here
20:44
is actually that line of the house and the garage here but what you can see
20:49
as she got more space to expand here she pulled the roadway
20:55
or the driveway away from the building it was switching to the garage and suddenly could add a much more of a
21:02
purple and landscape setting here and then continued with her oval theme it’s a very beautiful conceptual
21:09
approach um okay
21:15
trying to get to the next slide yeah so this is um monteverdia states these are
21:20
20 homes it’s a residential project nestled on a slope is used to the ocean
21:26
i think in vancouver you can see how beautiful she designed this curving road and it’s an old growth
21:32
i think it’s in an old growth forest how she kind of weave the pathway
21:37
through the forest and then all the buildings are set close to the road as to minimize uh disturbance and i
21:45
think they also found a lot of bad rock um in between the buildings and they didn’t remove it and they left it as much
21:51
elimination and i find it also quite poetic that her road that mirrors and becomes a pathway
21:59
through the woods i think this is a project she did with arthur erickson and arthur erickson and cornelia han i
22:06
think spent 35 years designing together they were a really good match i did many
22:12
many many many projects together so then my next slide oh and this is a
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very different kind of project she did a little bit later in 2000 it’s called portland hotel
22:25
that is a housing project for people who are heart house um
22:30
recovering drug addicts people experience trauma so unless i think this is one of the
22:36
projects where you simply wanted to create a an oasis a healing garden introduced a
22:42
lot of planting um i think she has a waterfall
22:47
to have the noise soften create this quiet voice its meditative
22:53
speed space and as you can see here in her sketches she just
22:58
she looks at it for some sections i find that where she has this strong straight plantar bed she has even a vegetable
23:05
garden recognizing the healing nature of planting and growing your own food and
23:11
it’s all very erected lingular and then she has this beautiful weaving screamed through it
23:16
this is one of her later projects the way she approaches it we sketch and axonometry something it just shows
23:23
how thorough um her work is
23:29
so now this is a very very different scale of projects um kind of as an example of her more
23:36
large-scale public projects this is her um tiger garden at the national gallery of
23:43
canada in ottawa and i find that very revolutionary because um you would like for my kind of
23:51
capital um kind of formal kind of national gallery i would expect
23:58
some formally cut lawns some tulips some flowers
24:03
and she went and she wanted to install the landscape and she wanted to do something she wanted to complete an
24:09
environment and she wanted to showcase the canadian north in fact she became inspired by a building about a painting
24:18
perforate that is hanging inside the gallery um by
24:24
jackson of the group of seven that depicts the canadian north and so she wanted for everyone to have
24:31
access to canadian norse and luckily they also found rock at early excavations so she
24:37
designed this beautiful um kind of rock garden with native plants
24:44
of the canadian norse with stogwoods with pines with irises
24:50
um and it’s also south facing so there’s an empty future and people can in these
24:57
pathways here meander through this landscape of the north and this is
25:04
a plaza here that’s a very strong project in my opinion and it also it also started or is the
25:11
start kind of a slow start of the where she really used she called it ethno-botanical planting so she really
25:18
wanted to be rather than collecting plants from all over she really wanted to depict landscapes but also very
25:24
strong in the museum of anthropology um this is the northwestern territories
25:31
legislative assemble in yellowknife and there she took um this creating a
25:37
landscape even further um at least at the time there was no nursery in yellowknife and she also was
25:44
very clear that um she can’t just plant some ornamental plants up there and that
25:50
you really really wanted all she wanted to do is restore the scars of the construction
25:56
and the impact of construction as to set this building it sits it sits just outside of yellowknife on a beautiful
26:02
lake and it looks like it’s always been sitting there it’s like it’s so beautifully embedded in the landscape
26:08
and that’s because she just mended the scars what she actually did she asked um a
26:14
botanist and seed collector to come with her and they collected the seeds
26:20
of the plants in the surrounding areas and little plugs and took them back to a
26:26
greenhouse in vancouver and then for two years propagated the plants and then brought them back and then
26:32
wherever there was turnover and scars of construction in the rocks they planted
26:38
um those um plants back again and that’s what this project is really famous for
26:44
among landscape architects um in addition um
26:50
she also always um i think connected connectivity to the creator surroundings
26:56
um you can see here she worked very sorry she um she looked at viewpoints at
27:02
connectivity there’s a boardwalk over this lake i think to connect integrated
27:07
trail system but she she had these sore side analysis that are really inspiring
27:13
you know where viewpoints were possible resting points here hierarchy of
27:18
pathways um and also winter like how is that
27:23
going to work in winter what are the winter effects um what can we do to make this beautiful and livable and usable in
27:29
winter and that was in the early 90s and we all know that um like the impact of winter
27:35
and just the city of edmonton about five years ago published i think a winter design guidelines one is a great um
27:42
document just to have this winter awareness she did it in the 90s so very inspiring very much pushing the
27:50
status quo again in the late 80s she read the brown plant
27:59
report and that was one of the first reports um commissioned by uh
28:06
um kind of like it was one of the worst environment first environmental reports that very very very clearly stated globe
28:14
threats of global warming change of the environment and the impact that that will have on mankind
28:20
and she read it in the late 80s and it really resonated with her and she immediately changed her design practice
28:26
and she devoted i think the rest of her career maybe the 90s and
28:32
2000s um to um as much as she can to environmental
28:38
sustainable flagship projects and one of those is the vancouver public
28:43
library roof i mean this one like we are now we all love green roofs we all talk about them
28:50
they still very rarely get built but um um this one was built in 1995 i think um
28:58
she wanted to have that rooftop accessible she believed in accessible landscapes so people can use nature that
29:05
didn’t happen here but she nevertheless came up with a beautiful design
29:11
um and the blue fescue in the middle they depict the fraser river
29:16
and the the green grass is the land and the kinnick in the ground cover the
29:22
mountains and because it was one of the first green rules they studied it and actually
29:29
only 28 of the rain water that’s landing on the roof is going into the storm water
29:36
system so it’s also in very environmentally successful later she went on to even design
29:42
buildings that don’t connect to the sewer system so the last project that i wanted to
29:50
mention today is a very relatively recent project three east
29:56
schools which is a school high up in innovec and i think it just um combines many of
30:04
these underlying principles that that characterizes her work
30:10
um again because it’s so high up north they went and they collected the seeds the plugs
30:17
they propagated it there was a lot of collaboration with the architects
30:22
in positioning the building and having itself facing in mitigating the winds
30:29
and the design she designed shelter belts that are not just planted on the grid but they are planted in groups as to
30:36
mitigate the winds and this school is really like many um
30:41
schools in indigenous communities it’s really a community building it’s there to be used by the community after hours
30:48
um there was also a lot of yeah so um it has a playground
30:54
that is made solely here’s the playground and the kindergarten area that is made solely
30:59
out of driftwood so due to her principle of no-play equipment other than
31:05
natural ones on a playground and then she has a beautiful kind of simple circular area here for um
31:14
for indigenous games and ceremonies and a lot of shells are bad planting
31:21
and i think they come and also she got very much inspired by berry picking so most of the plugs and
31:28
most of the shrubs that are planted are actually edible because it’s also something she really advocated for and she was very aware
31:34
that especially us all living in northern cities that food security will become a major topic in the future
31:43
and as we all know like the farther north you go they’re more impacted by climate
31:49
change so permafrost isn’t as permanent anymore and so it also um i think really
31:56
showcases her environmental stewardship um thank you very much for listening and
32:02
being with me this evening afternoon
32:10
hi sorry i just need to unmute myself thank you so much for uh your lecture kathrina that was uh really amazing
32:17
we’re gonna head into the q a portion and before we do that i
32:22
just want to say thank you to the alberta association of landscape architects and in particular todd reed
32:28
who has connected us so that’s one of the reasons why catherine is here is because um we decided to collaborate on
32:36
this program together so thanks again to that organization so if you have any questions please
32:41
enter the questions in the chat or on facebook and so basically since while we wait for
32:49
people to put some questions in i’m gonna ask a question and my question is a little bit about uh
32:57
cornelia’s legacy something i noticed during your lecture is that so many of these older projects
33:03
from 60s and even from the 70s and 90s uh they still seem really relevant and
33:09
new can you speak a little bit about her legacy
33:15
yeah it’s something it’s something that really amazed myself like how other than maybe this one’s playground sculpture
33:21
how contemporary her work is and i think it’s i think a lot it goes back to
33:27
genius lucy loki to really really read the place to
33:33
really have a server-side analysis to really be aware of the needs and use
33:38
relative simple forms and i think in general her approach that form follows function
33:46
rather than the ornamental borders um it’s really the function first and i
33:52
think that’s been highly highly successful and also i i think she must have been a very tenacious person i
33:58
think she kept pushing she didn’t give up she didn’t settle she advocated and
34:03
advocated and really was able to to push the boundaries and so much is possible
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and i think that’s something that for me i want to take away that to not give up too quickly
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push and to push especially on a sustainable and environmental um
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and in because we all know we are running out of time so if if we don’t take the most environmental approach we
34:28
can take now when are we going to do it yeah definitely uh i have a question from carla
34:35
and the question is what’s the name of the report that inspired cornea to build the vancouver library group
34:42
okay hold on one second i wrote it down um it’s called where do i have it because i have
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a messy it’s called brunch brand land in b-r-u-n-d-l-a-n-d-t
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brunt land report and its title is our common future
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and it was a report of the world commission on environment and development a global agenda for change
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and i think that fell in time with the first um world climate um
35:21
uh summits that’s very interesting um
35:26
that kind of that leads me to another question you briefly and this might be an aside but you
35:32
mentioned green roofs and we showed uh the green roof uh that cornelia made and you said something like
35:38
the fact that they’re they don’t get built very often i was just really curious if you could expand upon that a little bit about
35:46
green roofs because that was something that was really intriguing to me when i saw that
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um in my opinion there’s only two points that speak ever against green roofs and that’s maintenance and cost
35:59
and unfortunately i mean a lot and also very understandably a lot of our development is cost driven
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and then also um landscape has this unfortunate element that it’s last in the timeline
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um so it comes at the end of a project and it’s very tempting when you run over budget or on very close to budget to cut
36:20
landscape or a green roof it’s just one of those things that um uh like i’ve seen it like they get
36:27
really built about above arcades that’s a very common application
36:32
but there’s so much so much more we could do and i think we would all love to see it it’s just a matter of
36:37
prioritizing it i think yeah definitely yeah because one of the things that we were
36:43
chatting about is like climate change and climate change being such a major issue so
36:48
uh speaking from your perspective as a landscape architect like is that is that the number one issue
36:55
that people are speaking about or what are the issues in in this field that people are confronted with
37:02
uh you mean like roof talks to double or no just just in general just um because
37:08
we were just talking a little bit about climate change and i’m just curious from your perspective
37:14
is that one of the major issues well i think it’s an is it’s it’s a it’s
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an issue that gives the profession a lot of the profession of landscape architects more weight
37:25
um it also might push it a little bit more into the greenery field i think what i
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hear the conversation that i hear a lot among landscape architects particularly in alberta as
37:37
an element of recognition it’s not a very it’s not a you know of course as a landscape
37:44
architect my opinion major development should be run by landscape architects and employee architects and planners but
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it’s the overarching it’s like actually the overarching tying several things together it’s usually the other rounds
37:58
um i think at busier cities like vancouver montreal they have embraced um
38:06
the public spaces the public realm um yeah i guess i’m talking about the
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public space much more um but it’s also um it’s a beautiful side effect i’m seeing
38:18
through the pandemic but caused by the pandemic that people embrace the outdoors they embrace our river valley
38:24
they embrace the parks every picnic table is taken every picnic table seems sight seems full
38:30
and we you know i think we used to meet in our little homesteads in our little yards and now there is
38:37
a nice embracing of public outer space yeah that’s very cool um
38:43
i’m just wanna oh there’s another question from carla
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and i’ll just read it out this might take me a little bit of time i think it’s very interesting to see how cornelia seemed to be seem to
38:55
demonstrate so much faith in her forward thinking ideas around natural play places and also green roofing and i
39:02
wonder if there’s any specific way if you know that she went about advocating for these uh cutting edge ideas it must
39:09
have been difficult to change people’s existing ideas do you have any comments about that
39:18
that’s a very good question um i don’t know i’m just drawing an
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assumption here that she was very well known and very well connected and she
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worked with excellent architects who understood her and i think uh in that case she
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like for instance i think that’s why her collaboration with arthur erickson was very successful and so when you have then your architect
39:47
on board and then you have like then then there’s again more weight um how she convinced people for the expo
39:55
i’m not so sure um and she also used a lot of um science to back her up like for
40:02
instance i heard that um she did a building with renzo piano the new york times um courtyard and i just heard that
40:10
um when the piano wanted to have birch trees all over the courtyard and cornelius said you can’t do that because
40:17
they will only grow in one certain section well it’s very hard to just say to renzo piano you can’t do that
40:24
so what she did she commissioned a microclimate study and then she had to study
40:30
to really show look that’s where the daylight falls in in there there’s no daylight in your courtyard anymore if
40:37
it’s like high-rise surrounding and so she made it very clear um i think she
40:42
backed up her thinking like this is an example that comes to my mind um
40:48
yeah that’s not playground specific but and i think she was yeah she i think she
40:53
didn’t hold back to really really make her cause yeah from my understanding it seems like
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she was always uh really headstrong with with
41:08
yeah okay so i’m just going to give it another minute for any questions um
41:15
hold on don’t turn the light on okay fair enough
41:21
yeah this has uh been really nice to learn more about this uh this exhibition
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and uh landscape architects sure from your perspective i’m also i’ll just have
41:32
one more question i’m curious about just like we’re we’re seeing all these drawings i don’t know
41:38
very much about them but i can see there is a big shift from hand-drawn works to
41:43
more digital work like is can you talk a little bit about like the technology
41:48
that cornelia was using in the in her later projects is this technology that architects still use today
41:57
it isn’t that it is not like um you can see in her earlier project she she used a lot of sections she cut through it she
42:04
used sections to draw it was hand-drawn um later on it was um uh archicad like
42:10
um autocad like drawn on the computer and nowadays i think the move is really towards um
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build like bim modeling building and landscape integrated systems where you
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you don’t draw lines and there are a wall you actually draw a wall and you give this wall um character and um
42:29
parameters and everything is automatically in 3d uh that’s a little bit more difficult
42:34
with landscape and that’s also the beauty of it because it’s not as as like it grows there’s a fourth
42:41
dimension to it it’s not as as quantable as furniture or architecture but
42:47
i think people want to see things in 3d and that’s the easiest way nevertheless if
42:53
if um you can generate like a certain view in 3d and then you would photoshop
42:59
over it but what i see is a beautiful hand-drawn sketch or perspective can go a very very
43:07
long way and sometimes what i find if i draw if i personally in my practice draw something
43:13
very quickly on the computer it is easily perceived as that’s it that’s how it’s going to look
43:20
and if you use a hand sketch it leaves open like it’s very clear this is weird
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this is conceptual this is schematic please give me your input so there’s a
43:30
little bit of a beauty in there too okay well that’s very cool wow do you have anything uh any last-minute
43:37
words you would like to say before we say good evening and goodbye yes i want to thank you for putting on
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the exhibition because i think it’s just one of the many great ways to bring landscape architecture in general
43:52
um to a greater public and i think that’s wonderful so um thank you
43:59
okay well thank you again for your presentation uh and thank you to everyone in the audience for listening
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it’s been truly wonderful so i hope everyone has a nice evening goodbye for now
44:10
bye bye
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