As the park is renovated by Istanbul Metropoliten Municipality,Department of Parks Gardens and Green Fields; planting design became the main approach to the park’s new concept.

Cropped planting used with dolomites, combined with the colorful tulips.

Istanbul Tulip Festival, in which every green space becomes planted with tulips, takes place in April, 01-30.

Aquariums as land-arts are located within the park.

Also a hut to sell plants takes place within the Goztepe Park.

Limited by steel seperators, white dolomites used with grass and the vertical garden reflect the design approach of the park.

As water elements work with sound, they create an attractive place especially for children.

text&images: laud8

It is one of the world’s most congested intersections, with more than 80 million pedestrians crossing it each year. The innovative makeover allows shoppers to walk across Oxford Circus diagonally for the first time. Atkins’ design was inspired by Tokyo’s famous Shibuya crossing, renowned for allowing people to cross with ease.

Before the project:

After the project:

The solution enabled all existing barriers and street clutter to be ripped out and remodelled in order to give pedestrians the freedom to move around quickly both straight ahead and diagonally – across both Regent Street and Oxford Street.

Text: Atkins

Images: Atkins, e-architect

These are the same markers used to demarcate temporary lanes in highway work zones before permanent lane lines are installed.  Planted according to a regular grid, these raised markers delineate a pointillist expression in yellow and white.

The transformed roadway evokes a carpet of daisies while borrowing and multiplying an element from the world of automobile road culture.

The chromatic surface outlines what will become a permanent dedicated pedestrian zone in the near future, physically and visually bringing together the collection of new and old pavilions that compose the architectural assemblage of the institution.

‘TOM’ becomes a courtyard garden that merges pavement with the notion of flowers.

Project Client: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Year: 2012

Project surface: 350m²

text&images: Claude Cormier

Here is a summary of what we did in 2012.

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 170,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 3 years for that many people to see it. laud8 had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Pivoting around a sculpture dedicated to the musician ricard viñes, the design pulls from the idea of a traditional circular labyrinth to create an inviting public space out of bands of planting and brick paving.

Situated at a key junction in the city’s traffic, the 9,200 m² plaza gives the space back to the public with the core of its design centered around the movement of the pedestrian. much like a labyrinth.

The curvilinear carvings on the paving maps out a dance-like choreography on the square. the bands generate and guide a flowing  circulation that the pedestrians are free to follow, constructing a route that encourages multiple vantage points of the immediate site.

Incorporating green areas into the plan, the different zones of the plaza is defined through trees and low shrubs as well as circular benches and natural stone pavings. at night, a sculptural light source starting from one side of the circle illuminates the whole square, lending a ‘street party’ atmosphere to the public space as well as serving as a visual landmark in the city.

text&images: designboom

This pedestrian bridge, which sweeps across State Route 14 in a simple, elegant arch, also commemorates the confluence of rivers and indigenous people encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Jones & Jones’s design draws on the cultural significance of the circle, a Native American symbol often used to represent the life cycle. A walking path meanders across the bridge through an interpretive landscape of prairie, grassland and forest native plants, a rain water collection system and artworks created by the design team and native artists.

Project Facts:

40-foot-wide, earthen-covered pedestrian bridge
Federal, state and private funding
Sustainability guidelines established
Rainwater collection system irrigates native plants

Benefits:

Restored landscape continuum
Gateway to the City of Vancouver
Connects the city to its waterfront
Links regional Discovery Trail system
Historic landscape interpretation

text&images: Jones & Jones, The Columbian, Confluence Project

This project began as an idea to create a very long bench down the spine of the promenade at Littlehampton, potentially the longest bench in the UK or perhaps eventually the world. The structure sinuously travels along the promenade, meandering around lampposts, bending behind bins, and ducking down into the ground to allow access between the beach and the Green.

Like a seaside boardwalk the Longest Bench rests gently on its habitat and adapts to its surroundings while like a charm bracelet it connects and defines the promenade as a whole, underlining it as a collection of special places that can be added to throughout its lifetime.

Littlehampton, West Sussex is a town on the South Coast at the mouth of the River Arun. The promenade runs from the harbour eastwards towards Worthing and beyond. The site follows a redbrick wall which accompanies the promenade for over half a kilometer  terminating at the East Beach Cafe.

The Longest Bench is made from thousands of hardwood bars reclaimed from sources including old seaside groynes (including Littlehampton’s) and rescued from landfill. This simple component is arrayed to accommodate the complex shapes called for by the form of the wall and the activities which take place along it. The variety of reclaimed timbers are interspersed with splashes of bright colour wherever the bench wriggles, bends or dips.

As Studio Weave says: “to inspire and develop the Longest Bench, we worked with Connaught Junior School. The children showed us how they use the promenade, what they think of it, and what it means to them, giving us insights into the site we would never otherwise have. Two important incidents along the length of the site are the two shelters. The children told us they felt these were dirty and unsafe. They were dividing rather than connecting the green and the beach.”

“The old shelters have been replaced with new Shelter Charms, each made of a strip which forms a simple opening by looping around once. The bronze-finished twisted monocoque forms reach out to both sides, making no front or back. The bench stretches as it approaches a loop and then inside goes a bit haywire, bouncing of the walls and ceiling creating seats and openings. The loop contains the haywire stretch of bench and frames the views each way. These two shelters, along with the East Beach Cafe, form the initial charms. The Longest Bench unfolds a series of individual playful spaces and like a charm bracelet, we begin with a couple of charms and more can be added as birthday presents later.”

“The Longest Bench was granted CABE’s “Sea Change” funding, a capital grants programme for cultural and creative regeneration in seaside resorts. Through CABE’s Sea Change programme and a private donation from Gordon Roddick as a tribute to his late wife Anita (founder of the Body Shop which is based in the town), Littlehampton now has a very very long bench, the longest in Britain! The bench is also engraved with hundreds of personal messages from supporters which has helped it stretch a little bit further!”

text&images: Studio Weave

In 2004, Gignac Associates and Sasaki prepared the overall master plan for the Corpus Christi bayfront—spanning from McGee Beach in the south to the ship channel in the north. The approved master plan called for the relocation of Shoreline Boulevard in order to accommodate new green spaces along the water’s edge, thus creating the vision for the new North Bayfront Park. Situated next to the American Bank Center Arena, North Bayfront Park is the first of a series of parks to be constructed from the master plan.

The relocation, reduction of two travel lanes, and removal of the 80-foot-wide median of Shoreline Boulevard recaptured the bayfront land and allowed for the creation of North Bayfront Park. Traffic trables, intersection neckdowns, and reduced lanes curtail traffic and improve the public realm for pedestrians. North Bayfront Park is designed to accommodate festivals and events such as Buccaneer Days. Shoreline Boulevard is closed to traffic for these events to make space for performances, vendors, and pedestrians.

A key feature of the park includes an interactive fountain to attract children and families. Parents can sit at the adjacent café in the park, protected from the wind with glass windscreens, while watching their children play in the fountain. The café is shaded by fabric stretched between posts while groves of palms and mesquite trees will grow over time to provide shady spots in the park.

An arbor is designed to support colorful Bougainvillea planting that shade a walkway leading to the fountain. The arbor fronts a parcel identified for a future restaurant included in the design to activate and program the park.

The park includes 35-foot-tall wind turbines along the waterfront that are designed to produce energy that goes back into the grid. The wind turbines are also a form of kinetic art, with sculptural qualities derived from the shape and colors of conch shells that expresses the city’s distinctive setting on the bay. The turbines will serve as iconic landmarks on the waterfront as well as providing renewable energy to the park. The introduction of wind power production also makes a cultural and historical connection by harnessing potentially harmful winds.

The park is sited atop the fill material behind the seawall constructed after the hurricane. Rainwater from the site is directed to a linear rain garden planted with native coastal meadow plants that filter stormwater contaminants and allows water to infiltrate into the ground.

The coastal meadow serves as a reminder to visitors of the coastal landscape prior to the sea wall construction and offers environmental education of the native landscape ecology of the bay.

text&images: sasaki

Designed by FJMT, Darling Quarter is a true integration of urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture toward the creation of a public place within the City. “We have sought to enhance the joy and beauty of Darling Harbour, one of the most popular public places in Australia, and to do so in a way that imbues it with a sense of quality and permanence” says FJMT.

Darling Quarter is where the western edge of the City and the Park meet and is celebrated in a series of defined public spaces, including a pedestrian boulevard, parklands, gateway, children’s playground, and activated edges lined with cafes and restaurants. It is a place for everyone, for city workers at lunchtime and in the evenings, families, children, the young and old, visitors and locals. This is a very different type of office building in a very special location.

It is an architecture of human scale, natural materials and of a warmth of character appropriate to this very public parkland location. The long gently curving facade defines and enhances the public realm with a warmth and transparency unusual in any commercial building. The mullions are made of natural timber and irregularly spaced like rows of trees in a forest. Between these deep, profiled posts are adjustable timber louvres that control heat and glare automatically adjusted in relation to the position of the sun. Importantly this composed use of natural timber in layers behind very transparent glazing also creates a soft and warmth backdrop to the tree canopies of the parkland.

The curves of Tumbalong Park and a ribbon-like connection with the waterfront of Darling Harbour have determined the primary geometry of the architectural form. Split at it centre, the new buildings frame and define a new pedestrian street, the Civic Connector, that links Darling Harbour South via Bathurst Street with Town Hall and the very centre of the City.

The different scales of the east and west wings of the project respond to and reflect the varying scale of the park and city, united and resolved through the curved roof that draws natural light to the interior. These long forms of timber and glass, capped by the gentle curves and the scalloped apertures of the roof, create a background to the parkland and a foreground to the rising city beyond, uniting the two in a new public place, Darling Quarter.

Above the restaurants, cafes, bars and promenade are the work environments of the building, centred around day-lit atriums. Lobbies on Harbour Street and escalators bring visitors and workers to the dramatic floor of these atriums. The asymmetry of the workplace floors and atriums, edged with stairs, bridges, breakout areas and glazed lifts creates a stimulating and collaborative campus environment.

An important aspect of the project’s innovation and sustainability in design is not simply in the point score that reaches the highest levels of sustainable accreditation, but the focus on occupant well-being and the creation of an enabling, supportive, human and ultimately inspiring place to work, generate and exchange ideas.

text&images: archilovers

The design of the house itself began, as a point of departure, with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of demolished warehouses. The beams were of different lengths and cross sectional dimensions, and had astonishing proportions—some as long as 20 meters, some as deep as 90 cm.

As OAO says; “It was agreed that the beams were sacred artefacts in their current state and that we would not manipulate them or finish them in any way. Because the beams were of different lengths and sizes, we needed to commit to a geometry that would be able to accommodate the tremendous variety in dimension, while still allowing the possibility of narrating legible spaces. We settled on a triangular geometry.”

“Reclaimed beams were used to assemble triangular frames; these were folded to create a roof which would act as a secondary artificial landscape, which we draped over the gentle slope of the site. We manipulated the creases to create implicit and explicit relationships between indoor and outdoor space, such that every interior room had a corresponding exterior room.”

“In order to maximize ambiguity between interior and exterior space, we removed definition of one significant corner of each room by pulling the structure back from the corner itself (using bent steel columns in some cases), and introducing an accordion door system, such that the entire façade on both sides could retract and completely disappear.”

“We developed a detail that would allow the beams to define not only the ceilingscape of each interior room, but also to read strongly as elements of the building façade.”

text: OAO, images: archilovers