The Designers at the table: Palatable negotiation — LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AOTEAROA

Isthmus’ Brennan Baxley responds to an installation by Austrian eco-visionary designer Klaus Loenhart at Victoria University of Wellington, along with the lecture titled Imagine! The city as a living biome. He comments on the poetic negotiation of disciplines for our ameliorated ‘living’ spaces.

Functional and aesthetically-enticing spatial design is a dish best served well seasoned, rich of programme and sugary to the taste. Although, if you just sprinkle bits of cooperative, professional and innovative discipline then you’ve got a delectable cornucopia of solutions for inevitably big world problems.

With the optimistic undertone today, many design practices and eager academics endeavour to tackle impending issues facing our urban and landscape environments such as climate change or sustainability. With narrow focus and singular design undertakings, this can be pragmatically difficult to achieve. It, of course, remains a challenge, especially without the involvement of many integral components.

Klaus Loenhart’s Imagine! The city as a living biome installation was a series of tables, perforated with plants. Image: Thomas Sear-Budd — Klaus Loenhart’s *Imagine! The city as a living biome* installation was a series of tables, perforated with plants. Image: Thomas Sear-Budd

Austrian eco-visionary designer Klaus Loenhart primarily preaches this approach with his ‘table’ installation and his research on strategies to building with/in/amongst/between environments. To achieve a balanced rewarding design, a designer should prepare their course with numerous disciplines set to work with the existing resources and restored ecosystems. The most desirable integrated design is sometimes a table affair best attended by a solid company of hungry spatial thinkers, ready to restore living systems, built forces and human agencies.

In September 2019, Loenhart – founder of terrain.cloud and terrain: integral designs and Professor at the Institute for Architecture and Landscape and Landlab TU Graz – completed a three-week visiting practitioner programme at Victoria University of Wellington that culminated with a lecture and temporary installation for the Faculty of Architecture and Design. Speaking to all the design schools of Landscape, Architecture, Building Sciences and Interiors, this intervention, Imagine! The City as a living Biome, constructed a seemingly simple message and unveiled a deep-rooted exposé on cohabitation and companionship.

The installation occupied a large atrium space at Victoria University of Wellington. Image: Thomas Sear-Budd

What makes this optimistically focused on the pure entanglement of human and nature dichotomies was that the table was unashamedly perforated by a variety of potted native plants. It was not only about the size of the entire installation, but the smaller, more intimate scale of being seated at the table and how one might become a part of place. He described the personal exchange of sitting about this table as a negotiation: a dynamic and sensorial connection between what would be noted as a modern philosophy of mutually exclusive entities.

The negotiation is fundamentally about humans’ interest in relating with the environment, dissolving what would be a strong dichotomy of the urbane and the natural. Loenhart wishes to activate our bodily senses and integrate natural sciences to construct a space that would be a compromise to our control and the ecological pressures paramount in sustainable and environmentally sensitive systems.

This edges on sending a message that, potentially, technology and simple integrations of typical living entities might be injected and perform as a system that has far reaching effects. Consider this a scaled, toned down design of Loenharts’ fully constructed performative “urban agglomeration”, found in his built projects for large city plans and ecologically orientated layers.

The installation explored Loenhart’s philosophy, which centres around human’s co-habitation with nature. Image: Thomas Sear-Budd

According to Loenhart’s practice of multidisciplinarity – in particular in relation to the large global issues of today – he references a call to “climatecture”, or microclimates for macro-change. These hybrid, performative components of climate, landscape and architecture are means of collated components for designing. Dramatic, unwavering change instigates a socio-spatial attachment for our built and natural forms. “Climate and climate change determine not only our living conditions, but also our political, social, and built reality,” Loenhart says.

In his Airship Breathe Pavilion, Loenhart massages microclimates and air purification inside a pavilion, set to titillate the senses and keep users cool. The Gruen Erde Breathing Headquarters’ interior spaces perform as a living system by perforating the mass of the building, which acts as a natural ventilation. This not only encourages proper flow and the reduction of energy waste, but also exemplifies the built human relationship to the natural biome with some fresh air.

Loenhart rightly practices what he preaches. Just as a design should mix integral human endeavours and ecological agencies, he has developed this through his own built designs, which integrate many related disciplines that do not stop at just architecture and landscape architecture. His company agenda: “Architecture and landscape are inseparable! In this statement we are giving voice to what is apparently a self evident truth, since architecture and landscape are the material from which our environment is made.”

Innovative practice in New Zealand can fall easily into a variety of co-creative avenues, blurring the pan-disciplinary approaches to design. Quite joyfully, this comes to how each firm expects to contribute to the projective design problem at hand. For example: A trans-disciplinary practice generally designs across conventions together to achieve the project scope.

Interdisciplinary practice opens up the core of each discipline between similar design achievements, working within and about conventions. More commonly, multi-disciplinary practice involves many people, fields and components that provide a multitude of services and thorough design perspectives.

New Zealand firms such as Isthmus Group, Boffa Miskell and Studio Pacific Architecture have been performing with these guises for some years, tackling larger and more relevant complex projects.

Isthmus Group’s CEO Ralph Johns and Founder David Irwin progressively orientated the practice as a “no boundaries” approach with a fundamental opportunity in design breadth. Several firms in North America and Europe, such as Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, West8, Scape, Balmori Associates and Weiss & Manfredi also frame and shape the urban and natural entities by collaboratively checking boxes and encouraging rewarding environmental paradigms. A good portion of these services relies on scopes that address resilience and sustainability in built forms, planning, environmental resources, and ecology.

In a more sombre 2019, institutions and architects from the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand declared a state of crisis with carbonisation and climate change. Further to that signal, and in line with the Paris Agreements, New Zealand passed the Zero Carbon Amendment Bill and many design disciplines responded with interest and support: a proclamation that projects us further into necessary solution finding and cross disciplinary conviviality.

By many means, our environment, built space and our method to how we construct these, should aim to work cross-disciplinarily and involve integral components. Compromise is key; innovation is expected. Now bring your seat to the table and sit up straight.