UWA School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts Studio Juries

It’s always a pleasure to be invited to UWA School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts to participate in Studio Juries for landscape architecture students. These are opportunities to view student design and share insight into the way projects are formed and developed. They are essential forums for education in the discipline, covering a broad range of thought, ideas and expertise as a foundation for landscape architectural design and understanding of current landscape discourse.

Over the past few years our Principal Landscape Architect, Francis, has attended crits for the More Than Human Studio run by the talented Rosie Halsmith which works on bushland areas in Perth’s inner metropolitan suburbs and has sought to reframe our relationship with this unique landscape by designing for the fauna that has evolved here for millennia before our relatively short occupation. The studio is a refreshing shake-up of conventional principles, encouraging students to broaden their perspectives of who our clients are. The work points to design for preservation of the natural systems that face fragmentation, water scarcity and a warming climate. It is always thought provoking in it’s approach to these shared challenges and engaging in presentation of the biosphere that we are part of.

As landscape architecture is concerned with stewardship, guidance of students charting their initial forays into planning and design is part of the collective responsibility of practitioners. Participation in the studios is highly rewarding as forums for imagining the speculative and renewing an understanding of our work.