Architecture and Urban Planning
American-born Charles Jencks is a landscape architect, theorist and critic best known for his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, Scotland, and his writings on post-modernism. He has designed landscapes projects around the world, including Parco Portello in Milan, Northumberlandia near Newcastle, England and Wu Chi at the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing. Jencks is also co-founder of the Maggie's Centres - a series of cancer care centres designed By leading modern architects, named in honour of his late wife Maggie Keswick. In this talk, Jencks discusses his recent project Holding the Eco-line, a landscape design for the Suncheon Bay expo in 2013. He explains the development of the design and his Korean hosts' reaction to it, as well as the importance of symbolism in his work, and his latest creation the Crawick Multiverse, inspired By cutting edge theories of the origin of the universe.
Keith Bradley is senior partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, based in Bath, UK. Bradley led FCBS's best known work, the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Housing Project in Cambridge. He's also worked on major urban regeneration schemes, public museums, galleries and academic buildings. In this talk, Bradley explores FCBS's Manchester School of Art extension building, completed in April 2013. He discusses the evolution of the design, which includes a vertical gallery space where students can showcase their work, an interactive hybrid studio intended to foster creative collaboration between students from different disciplines and triple height columns with a relief cast decorative detail inspired By the textiles of Lewis Day, who taught at the school a century ago. Manchester School of Art was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize.
Influential Danish architect Jan Gehl argues that we can build cities in a way which takes human needs for inclusion and intimacy into account.
50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, by 2050 it will be 80%. Cities have become the primary human habitat. According to revolutionary Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, if we are to make cities sustainable and livable for people we must re-imagine the very foundations of modern urban planning. Rather than examining buildings and urban structures themselves, Gehl and his team meticulously study the in-between spaces of urban life, the places where people meet, interact, live, and behave.
How do the spaces that surround us enhance or disturb our interactions with others? How can we make our streets more accessible by foot or bike? Through his world acclaimed work, Gehl has been leading a revolution in urban planning that has been transforming cities worldwide. From the expanded pedestrian spaces in New York's Union Square, to Copenhagen's famed bike lanes, to the rebuilding of earthquake devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, Gehl's team bring real solutions that promise a more humanistic dimension to cities where people are not displaced by congested streets, skyscrapers, and the car-centric urbanism of the 1960s and '70s.
Stunningly photographed, THE HUMAN SCALE travels around the world to explore how Gehl and other like minded designers, city planners, and urban activists have begun to transform such cities as as New York, Beijing, Christchurch, and London.
Awards
~ Green Cross Award, Planete Doc, Poland
~ Child & Family Award, Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival
~ Best Feature Documentary, Kinookus Film Festival, Croatia
~ Youth Award, Bergen International Film Festival
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