Blog

My Backyard Photo Competition

My Backyard Photo Competition invites photos from Festival delegates of their backyards, past or present. From childhood tree houses, cubbies and swinging tyres to urban balconies, manicured lawns and rural estates. Read more.

New Techniques

The rapidly unfolding implications of the Anthropocene call for new design approaches from all disciplines of the built environment. General principles of sustainability and ecology are now challenged by demands to demonstrate a greater level of complexity and performance. This emphasis is accompanied by a vast volume of Big Data which is increasingly informing the future planning and design of our cities. Read more. 

New Views

50 years ago, when AILA was established, industrial infrastructure’s impacts on landscapes were major environmental concerns. Landscape architects were activists in conservation matters, including protecting Australian landscape identity. These were heroic times. It is chastening to realise that 50 years on, human impact on the planet has become worse. Read more. 

Making a Cider Fountain at the Festival

Crisp apple cider, served via an Arqua Fountain, equals good nights ahead at the International Festival of Landscape Architecture. Street Furniture Australia’s production team have been working on the Batlow Cider Fountain to tour to Canberra this October. Read more.

New Cities

Cities are the points at which our effect on atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric systems is most pronounced, and where solutions to many of the resultant problems will need to be put into action. For too long the prominence of Australian cities in global liveability rankings has obscured issues, many typical of the Anthropocene, which are not being comprehensively addressed in planning. Read more. 

New Stories

In the softened rhetoric of ‘place making’ master planning appears to recognise the value of human attachments in the production and maintenance of sustainable designed environments. The drive to privatise public space and control public behaviours appears to retreat in favour of multi-actor engagements with sense of place, while broadly ecological models of integration appear to offer an attractive program for community involvement and environmental literacy. Read more. 

Win a Conference pass with Autodesk

Win one of five tickets to the 2016 International Festival of Landscape Architecture by purchasing a twelve month subscription to AutoCAD LT.  Read more.

New Natures

The New Natures international and multidisciplinary panel consists of ecologists, scientists, climate change experts, planners and landscape architects, who will explore and question the way we conceptualize and transform landscapes from an ecological perspective. The session begins with the proposition that the denatured conditions of Anthropocene call into question the very idea of Nature as we know it. Read more. 

Call for 2017 Festival Creative Director

AILA is seeking expressions of interest from individuals, practices, schools of landscape architecture, or collaborative teams to take on the role of Creative Director for the 2017 Festival of Landscape Architecture which will be hosted in Sydney in October/November 2017. Read more.

 

New Practices

We are now entering into an unprecedented age where rapid urbanisation and the need for social cohesion and equity are at a tipping point with post carbon futures and urban liveability. There is a need to invent new forms of practice that build ethical futures where economic and cultural capital centre on social cohesion, transactions are marked by reciprocity, trust and cooperation. Read more. 

New Signs

It's said that the Anthropocene epoch began on July 16, 1945 with the Trinity atomic tests. Captured at 24 fps on a Mitchell 35mm Movie Camera at a distance of 9140 metres from Ground Zero, there could be no more succinct and terrifying image of the Anthropocene. In silent frames we see a new sign emerging full of fear and ingenuity, violence and horrible beauty. Read more. 

Richard Weller Announced Creative Director

At the 2015 International Federation of Landscape Architects Asia-Pacific Regional Congress Closing Ceremony in Indonesia, Richard Weller was announced as the creative director for the 2016 International Festival of Landscape Architecture. Read more