LANDSCAPE EXPANDED

This reproduction of an article by botanist Dr Philip Simpson - from 42 years ago - presents another look back to the NZILA’s original journal, The Landscape. He advocates for planting extensive populations of trees throughout city streets, bringing urban streams back to life and ‘greening’ the surfaces of our buildings.

Architecture NZ has reached the end of a 40+ year run. The talented team members at AGM, their dedicated contributors and all their supporters deserve a huge collective thank you for keeping the kaupapa of architectural publicity, writing and reporting so vibrantly alive.

Every decade brings new technological advances that provoke changes to everyday work practices. Courtesy of looking back on the NZILA’s founding journal, The Landscape, this article fast forwards us from the 1980s to the 2020s. (The thumbnail image above is excerpted from a 1987 cover illustration by Tony Jackman).

With the progress of RMA replacement legislation fast approaching the end of its Select Committee stage, Matthew Prasad of Harrison Grierson offers a timely independent thinkpiece on the shift to regional spatial plans, and away from 'masterplans'.

The Landscape, the first NZILA journal, ran for 54 issues - commencing in September 1976 and ending with its Winter 1994 edition. This month we start a ‘Looking Back’ series, as an opportunity to highlight past articles, themes, topics and issues.

Peter Sergel held the pencil on development of the globally recognised work done at the Hamilton Gardens across four decades. Now a movie titled The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens has faithfully documented the evolution of this ‘museum of humanity’.

The matching of Peter Sergel, creator of the Hamilton Gardens, and photographer Grant Sheehan has resulted in a not-to-miss film soon showing as part of the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival: The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens

Trees from 12 nations competed as finalists for the title of 2026 European Tree of the Year, with a tree that has witnessed centuries of autumn colours emerging as the winner and as the subject of an emotive video.

Cinema-goers and popcorn-lovers have a treat to look forward to from later this month, with the nationwide roll-out of the 15th Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival - which coincides with Resene’s 80th birthday.

Wellington-based writer and editor Susette Goldsmith has produced two companion works that ask important questions about the adequacy of our defence of trees: Tree Sense and Capital Trees.

Is going from UK Tree of the year in 2025 to European Tree of the year 2026 going out on a limb? LAA was very taken with this small story of a very tall tree, located in a busy urban street in Glasgow, Scotland.

Lincoln University academics Marcus Robinson, Professor Jacky Bowring and Dr Shannon Davis, along with Dr Sarah Edwards from the Bioeconomy Science Institute, have been researching spatial opportunities for balancing urban growth, food production and ecology.

This essay from postgraduate student Ananda Acharya argues that landscape memory is stored in repeated practices and poses a question for designers: which practices do we permit to become memory, and which do we erase?

In our final ‘book column’ for the year, LAA turns the clock back to a clutch of books celebrating their 10th and 15th anniversaries - as well as presenting a bountiful selection of large illustrated books published in 2025 on flowers, plants, our biodiversity of feathered friends and city mapping.

Quietly located among the celebrations of the centennial year of The New Yorker, was an exhibition of its famous covers that put the urban life of Parks at the centre of the storied city’s stories.

If you’re looking for a new podcast to draw insights from, the team at Te Papa Tū Whirinaki – The Landscape Foundation have released their third season of episodes inspired by the landmark book Kia Whakanuia te Whenua | People, Place, Landscape.

Aotearoa New Zealand needs robust landslide data to inform decisions on where and how we live. New public research organisation Earth Sciences New Zealand is doing its part by undertaking a major upgrade to the New Zealand Landslide Database (NZLD).

Regular monitoring of changes in our land cover is a critical piece of the environmental monitoring puzzle. It helps us understand the state of our natural and built environments and how they are being impacted by both our changing climate and our land management choices.

Given the range of conjoined events that it brings together - from speaker events to exhibitions - the NZIA’s Aotearoa Festival of Architecture is an illustration of the power of both diversity an collaboration; deserving of being captured for and promoted to a wider audience.

The foreword to Living In Paradox, written by Professor Diane Brand, reads that it is a book “that needed to be written”. Diane reckoned it “should be read as a prelude to the design of future place in New Zealand, so that that enterprise can be undertaken in context”. Some 15 years later, author Garth Falconer lays the book to rest.