HKU Division of Landscape Architecture
Spring 2023 Public Lecture Series
“ASSEMBLING FUTURES”
Triple A: Ancestor, Activist, Accelerator
Lecture Abstract:
In times of crises, chaos, and radical change, the natural landscape is an undisputed safe haven, worth protecting, restoring, and integrating into our architecture, infrastructures, and daily lives. Yet while we are creating our own climate-adaptive paradises, the real catastrophes are taking place elsewhere. Are we doing enough? For this year’s International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Peter Veenstra focused – together with three co-curators – on the question of how architects, landscape architects, and urban planners can act as ‘effective altruists’ when it comes to climate change and its repercussions. The lecture explores the creative tension between green guilt and green pleasure, and the landscape works that result from it.
About the Speaker:
Peter Veenstra is landscape architect and co-founder of LOLA Landscape Architects (Rotterdam, Shenzhen). LOLA is an acronym for Lost Landscapes, which is born out of a fascination for the adventurous fringe, poetic leftover space, and spontaneous nature. At the same time, the growth of the office led to large projects like the adidas HQ campus, and Shenzhen Bay Park. With self-initiated design research and curatorial work, he keeps on working on topics that deserve more attention in the field of (landscape) architecture. Recent research focused on post-disaster landscapes, carbon positive land use, afforestation, and climate adaptation in the urban environment. In 2013, he received the Rotterdam Maaskant Prize for Young Architects, in 2014 the TOPOS landscape award. He co-wrote LOLA’s first monograph, ‘Lost Landscapes’, and the second, ‘In Search of Sharawadgi’. Last year, he co-curated the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, titled ‘It’s About Time – The Architecture of Change’.
About “Assembling Futures”:
The DLA Spring 2023 Lecture Series “Assembling Futures” brings together distinguished academics and professionals in the fields of landscape architecture and heritage conservation to discuss recent works concerning environmental futures. Although landscape and heritage practices have long engaged with the regeneration of existing environments for future use, the precise relationships between such works and the future remain underexamined. Lectures in this series explore landscape architecture and heritage conservation as future-making practices that condition how future environments are managed, valued and imagined. By attending to how different projects reassemble the relationships between human and non-human agents and evolving socio-material engagements across different scales, the series encourages critical reflections on the competing visions of building future worlds in the face of growing uncertainty and unfolding environment crises.
All lectures are open to the general public. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
CPD Credit Hours are offered to members of the HKILA.
For further information on the talk, please visit https://www.arch.hku.hk/event_/triple-a-ancestor-activist-accelerator/
For further information on the “Assembling Futures” Public Lecture Series, please visit https://www.arch.hku.hk/event_/landscape-architecture-spring-2023-public-lecture-series/