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Cornelia Oberlander lecture on landscape architecture and biodiversity

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Renowned landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander will be giving a lecture Thursday November 18 at the University of British Columbia’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum. From the site:

The environment is not the same to a landscape architect as it is to a biologist. Cornelia Oberlander, Canada’s premier landscape architect according to the Governor General, joins us to define what the environment means to her.

Landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Cornelia Oberlander, the pre-eminent Canadian landscape architect noted for long collaborations with Arthur Erickson and Moshe Safdie among other things, designed the landscape for Erickson’s famed Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The Museum was completed in 1976, but for the past 34 years Oberlander’s reflecting pool has remained empty, partly due to the city’s concerns about earthquakes and the unstable cliffs that lie just between the museum and the beach below.

This Blog

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.

As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board."

As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more

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Book in progress: Habitat

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

Posts Tagged ‘University of British Columbia’

Cornelia Oberlander lecture on landscape architecture and biodiversity

Landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander

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