Latest News
LI Seminar
The Department of Landscape hosted an evening seminar by the Yorkshire and Humber Branch of the Landscape Institute; well attended by Practitioners, representatives from local authorities as well as staff and students from the department.
The seminar focussed on Green Infrastructure by showing examples from the UK, Bermuda and China. Speakers included Catherine Cairns, Chair of the Cambridgeshire Green Infrastructure Forum and Peter Wilder, Wilder Associates.
***Celeb watch***
The BBC series ‘Bees, Butterflies and Blooms with Sarah Raven’ will start transmission on Wednesday 8th February at 8.00pm for three weeks on BBC2.
The first part focuses on the rural meadow, then towns and finally cities that James and Nigel have been involved in over the past few years. Quite a lot of their work is discussed in Episodes 2 & 3, including the Olympic Park project.
The PhD Symposium was held last Thursday and reflected the wide breadth of subjects and disciplines within the Department. There were some lively discussions and very interesting presentations.
Department Hosts Green Infrastructure Seminar
The Department of Landscape hosted an evening seminar by the Yorkshire and Humber Branch of the Landscape Institute; well attended by Practitioners, representatives from local authorities as well as staff and students from the department.
The seminar focussed on Green Infrastructure by showing examples from the UK, Bermuda and China. Speakers included Catherine Cairns, Chair of the Cambridgeshire Green Infrastructure Forum and Peter Wilder, Wilder Associates.
Marie Curie-funded Green Roof Systems Interim Workshop
19th January: the Department hosted the Marie Curie-funded Green Roof Systems Interim Workshop in the Arts Tower. The 52 delegates came from as far a field as Finland, Spain, Denmark and the US, with guest speaker Dr Brad Rowe flying in from Michigan State University to give the Key Note speech. The workshop theme was the activity and progress of the Marie Curie project in both Sheffield and at ZinCo GmbH in Germany.
Department of Landscape Research Symposium - 26 January 2012
Everyone interested in research or what students of the Department of Landscape are doing is welcome. Click here for full details.
Urban Wildscapes Symposium on 5th March
Timed to coincide with the publication of Urban Wildscapes, published by Routledge and edited by Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan, this symposium at the Garden Museum continues to develop the themes found the book. In particular, the symposium aims to examine diverse past attempts at ordering the city, ranging from twentieth century Modernist Housing utopias to Christiania in Copenhagen and the projects of the Urban Pioneers in Berlin; and the contemporary landscape architectural projects that seek to encourage wildness and disorder in urban landscapes; as well as aiming to explore the range of attitudes towards urban ruins and wilderness that provide the social context for urban rewilding.
Speakers include Anna Jorgensen, Steve Dobson,
Alice Mah, Sam Vardy, Dougal Sheridan
and Catherine Heatherington.
Registration fee £50 | Concessions £20
Lunch, refreshments and Urban Wildscapes book launch included.
Book online at http://www.gardenmuseum.eventbrite.com
or call 020 7401 8865 to book by telephone.
This year’s Urban Landscape Design module concluded in celebratory style with an open studio giving an opportunity for level one students and MLA/MA2 to share their experiences of model making. Not only were we extremely impressed with the quality of work produced this year, helping again to advance current aspects of Experiential Landscape research, but also with the welcome return of the vibrant, cooperative and creative studio culture which has often been hard to achieve in recent years – a fitting outcome for the new Arts Tower studio spaces.
NEW BOOK ADDED TO THE ‘SHEFFIELD BOOKSHELF’!
Small Green Roofs: Low-Tech Options for Greener Living by Nigel Dunnett, Dusty Gedge, John Little and Edmund C. Sondgrass is published by Timber Press. This is the first book to focus on the small-scale green roofs, calling on case studies of projects from around the world.
NEW BOOK ADDED TO THE ‘SHEFFIELD BOOKSHELF’!
Urban Wildscapes, edited by Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan (published by Routledge), is one of the first edited collections of writings about urban ‘wilderness’ landscapes. Evolved, rather than designed or planned, these derelict, abandoned and marginal spaces are frequently overgrown with vegetation and host to a wide range of human activities. They include former industrial sites, landfill, allotments, cemeteries, woods, infrastructural corridors, vacant lots and a whole array of urban wastelands at a variety of different scales. Frequently maligned in the media, these landscapes have recently been re-evaluated and this collection assembles these fresh perspectives in one volume.
Congratulations to Dawei Li, Lin Wang, Jie Lian, Roisin O'Riordan and Jia Yuan who were overall 2nd prize winner of the Canary Wharf Landscape competition and receive £1,000 between them.
Sheffield University was also awarded the University prize of £500 in the Canary Wharf Landscape competition as the panel recognised a consistent high standard of entry from our students.
Year out student Jotaro Tokunaga's won the Landscape Institute’s Future Vision award
From Jotaro: “The submission essentially took a modified model of my final 3rd year project, and applied it to the context and criteria of the brief, taking particular care to highlight the social, economic and environmental issues which were already 'built in'.
I took the impact that economic decline was having on the streets of Sheffield, and essentially created parts and whole streets which acted as stalled, temporary spaces. They incubated the motives and opportunities that would benefit its immediate and wider context until it would be financially and culturally possible to start doing so. The highly stylised presentation was used to abstract the plans from reality, to make it an idea-driven submission rather than designing a particular site itself.”
1 day green roof workshop, 19th January in Sheffield
see www.thegreenroofcentre.co.uk/article/news/1_day_green_roof_workshop for more details.
Fully Funded PhD Opportunity - WindNet: Integrated Impact Assessment of Urban Wind Turbines
Former undergraduate and diploma student Kate Shearer (nee Passant) from LDA Design delivered this week’s Department lecture. She talked about the design process of the London Olympic Park and its implementation.
7 Guys Named Mo
7 Guys Named Mo - well more accurately 7 members of the Landscape Department who participated in the Movember campaign. Student and members of staff grew moustaches throughout the month of November to raise awareness of men's health issues. Money was raised and more information can be found at http://uk.movember.com/
Nigel Dunnett's Latest Book Shortlisted for Award
Nigel's latest book 'Small Green Roofs' has been shortlisted for 'book of the year' by the Garden Media Guild, for their 2011 annual awards.
Journalist, Author and Critic Tim Richardson Talks to Sheffield Students
Tim Richardson, critic, journalist and author of Futurescapes: Designers for Tomorrow's Outdoor Spaces, gave last week’s Department lecture. It was a lively talk which challenged the US focus on landscape urbanism. He called on a wide range of projects in Slovenia, India, Singapore and Germany among other places.
The Landmark talk on Thursday 24th November was by MLA students Will Pendred, Peter Robinson and Lori Boulter about their year in practice and advice on how to develop a portfolio.
Henrik Sjöman from Alnarp University Speaks at Department Research Seminar
The Department's research seminar on Thursday 17th November was by invited speaker Henrik Sjöman from Alnarp. He discussed his research and experience in widening the diversity of trees suitable for urban use.
Professor Nigel Dunnett has been invited to provide planting proposals for a new garden to be opened at Buckingham Palace for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee next year.
Ex-students give Landmark Society Guest Lecture
Ian Wale from Spacehub and Nat Daniels from Homeless International provided contrasting experiences in practice at this week's Landmark guest lecture session on Thursday. The numerous projects discussed gave the students a real flavour of the diversity of the types of project that they might get involved in and the wide range of skills needed to do this effectively.
Landscape Institute Visits Sheffield Students
Steve Cole, Education and Careers Executive at the Landscape Institute came in on Tuesday lunchtime to raise awareness of LI among the students, along with representatives from the LI Yorkshire and Humber branch, SLIC and ELASA.
Professor Eckart Lange Awarded Fellowship at LI Awards
Prof. Eckart Lange was elected as the first ever Academic Fellow of the Landscape Institute and was awarded Fellowship at the LI Awards, held in London on 17 Nov. Also, at the LI awards ceremony Sheffield graduate Helen Cummins received a commendation for her thesis on The Effect of Provenance on Winter Cold Tolerance of Western South African Species. Sheffield student Jotaro Tokunaga was the winner of the Future Visions Award in the category Future Open Spaces.
Professor Eckart Lange & Professor James Hitchmough give keynote speeches at the Chinese Society of Landscape Architecture conference
Profs James Hitchmough and Eckart Lange, along with Charles Waldheim, the Head of Department of Landscape Architecture from Harvard, were invited as the only international speakers to present at the Chinese Society of Landscape Architecture conference in at Nanjing Forestry University from 28-30 October.
A new garden and play area for a woman’s refuge
Over the summer six undergraduate and postgraduate students from the Landscape Department volunteered one day a week to improve the outdoor space attached to a local woman’s refuge. The refuge houses women and their children who have escaped from situations of domestic violence. The group did a range of consultation events with staff, mothers and children at the hostel, refined the brief, developed design proposals and implemented the work on site. The key aims were to make the space less of a yard and more of a garden, provide relaxing quieter spaces for mothers and staff, and to increase the potential for interactive and creative play. The group created new planting areas with herbaceous plants, bulbs and trees (mostly donated by department staff and from the ECLAS conference), refurbished a derelict playhouse, and put in new seats for both quiet chats and social gatherings. The residents and staff are delighted with their greener and welcoming garden, and look forward to growing some of their own vegetables over the next year. The project also included a research element, with Morag Macgregor funded by the Student Undergraduate Research Experience to research restorative landscapes for women’s refuges.
Team: Morag Macgregor, Moazama Hussain, Robyn Friesner, Ruth Morgan, Libo Zhang, Amanda McDermott, Clare Rishbeth (staff co-ordinator).
Undergraduates shortlisted in RIBA national design competition
Congratulations to Dom Lewis and Max Aughton (undergraduate students on our Landscape Architecture and Planning course) for being shortlisted in a national design competition run by the RIBA. The competition, ‘Forgotten Spaces Sheffield’ asked for proposals that would reclaim and enliven currently neglected places within the city. The pair impressed the judges with their proposal for ‘The Porter City’ where they demonstrated that opening up of the culveted River Porter by the station could create benefits for wildlife and a recreational resource.
Their submission was developed from work undertaken in a second year module ‘Conceptual Design Studio’. The studio tutor, Clare Rishbeth, says “It’s a great reflection of Max and Dom’s fresh ideas and professional presentation that their work can hold its own competing against professional landscape architects and architects”.
The shortlisted entries were exhibited earlier this month in the Crucible Theatre, and can be accessed on the ‘Architects’ Journal’ website: http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/forgotten-spaces-sheffield/
Latest Images of Planting at the Olympic Site
The departments Professor Nigel Dunnett and Professor James Hitchmough are overseeing the planting at the London olympic site. Click here to go to our Flickr site to see how it's progressing so far.
We've Moved!
We're back in the newly refurbished Arts Tower.
Click here for our new contact details and how to find us - http://www.shef.ac.uk/landscape/contact_us
We've also posted some pictures on Flickr of our new home - Check them out here
Photos from 2011 Landscape Architecture Exhibition
Each year our 3rd year undergraduates and Masters students exhibit their final projects to potential employers, family friends. This year we were delighted to hold the exhibition in the recently refurbished Arts Tower, which we will be returning to in July this year. The accompanying images include examples of student work and also the stunning views from the studios and exhibition space. Emeritus Professor Paul Selman opened the exhibition and awards were presented by Professor Carys Swanwick, Steven Warren, (Landscape Institute) and Ian Houlston (Landscape Design Associates and a Sheffield landscape alumni). More information about the prizewinners and their projects can be seen in the accompanying images.
Click here to see all the photos from our 2011 exhibition
Her Majesty the Queen visits Sheffield´s award winning garden
Her Majesty the Queen visited a garden created by Professor Nigel Dunnett from the University of Sheffield's Department of Landscape at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this week (Monday 23 May 2011).
The Chelsea Flower Show is the world's premier garden design showcase. Professor Dunnett's entry, the New Wild Garden, won the Silver Gilt Flora Award in the prestigious Show Garden category.
Students from the University's Department of Landscape helped to create the garden, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada and delivered in collaboration with York-based landscape architecture practice, The Landscape Agency.
The students created sculptural elements of the garden in Sheffield before installing them at the show in time for the opening. The garden uses Professor Dunnett´s main research areas to showcase features such as a green roof, water conservation, rainwater recycling, biodiversity and cutting-edge horticulture.
Out of hundreds of entries at the show, the Queen only visited a select number of gardens. Professor Dunnett was honoured to be in the chosen few, saying: "The Queen visiting our garden was a huge honour as she only sees five or six from the whole show. It was wonderful to meet her and to see how much she appreciated our entry. We're also really happy to have won the Silver Gilt. What means the most is the overwhelming positive response from all the visitors to the show, with many of them saying it was their favourite entry."
In 2009 Nigel was awarded a Silver Gilt medal at the Chelsea Flower Show for his garden called Future Nature. This garden was partly supported by the University's Alumni Fund and has since been relocated to Sheffield where it was formally opened this month as part of a news artist's studio complex on the Green Estate at Sheffield Manor Lodge.
To find out more about the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, visit:
RHS Chelsea Flower Show
Text taken from http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/mediacentre/2011/queen-visits-sheffield-garden.html