Richard Weller - Böcker

Time is ticking. That's what it does. Or at least that's how we represent what we don't understand. For physics, time is a byproduct of so called space-time, elastic goo created at the very moment that something came from nothing; the moment eternity stopped and the universe began. For geology, time is 4.5 billion years of compression and catastrophe. For biology time is 3.5 billion years of diversification and now the urgency of the sixth extinction. For anthropology time is 150 thousand years since mitochondrial Eve walked out of the rift valley in Ethiopia. For historians, time begins with Herodotus (484 BC) and ends, or rather doesn't, with Fukuyama's The End of History. For architecture time is ruination. For landscape architecture time is ephemerality, entropy, and growth. For all of us time is running out. Contents: Editorial by Richard Weller & Tatum L. Hands; Prisoners of Time by Mark Kingwell; Doing Time: The Art of Tehching Hseih by Tim Ingold; Territorializing Memory by Rodrigo de la O + David Escudero; Designing Dialectical Landscape by Ann Marie Schneider; Time for time by Noël van Dooren; The Consistency of Time by Valerio Morabito; Performing Drawing in Time by Fiona Harrisson + Marian Macken; Phase Shift: On Site-Specific Art In A Changing Environment by James Nisbet; Date, Painting by Daniel Rosenberg; Time, Trains, and Truth by Mark Raggat; The Circle of Time by Jock Gilbert; Three Kinds of Time in Ecological Science by Steward Pickett; Color = Space + Time by Mark Eischeild; The Time and Space to Die by Emma Sheppard-Simms; First in Time/First in Line by Casey Lance Brown; Time in Our Hands: Co-Designing a Better Anthropocene by Erle C. Ellis; The Timekeepers by Kathryn Gleason, Christophe Girot + Sonja Dümpelmann.

Vitality is liveliness, to be alive.To be alive is to have the ability to harvest energy for movement, growth, and self-replication. But without health, vitality is just mechanistic. In this issue of LA+ we explore the notion of vitality as aproxy for the health of all things. We explore how design can improve the vitality of people, cities, systems, and landscapes.Articles include:- Sara Jensen-Carr explores the intertwined epidemiology of ecosystems, cities, and human bodies.-Through the intimate case study of a 15th century Roman noblewoman, historian Mirka Benes reveals the role of gardens in maintaining physical and mental health in the early modern era.- Design anthropologist Chuan Hao Chen reflects on vitality through the metaphor of the medical emergency.- Experimental psychologist Colin Ellard explores questions about the roots of our perceptions of life and agency.- Urban designer Julian Bolleter shines a light on the practice of placemaking in contemporary Dubai.-Public health scientists Billie Giles Corti, Jonathan Arundel, and LucyGunn explain why urban design is important in creating livable cities.-Landscape architect Clay Gruber captures a case study of the potential for renewal of a rural American landscape drained of socio-economic vitality.- Designer Colin Curley surveys the beautiful ugliness of Newtown Creek, New York's most-polluted waterway.-Biodiversity conservation scientist Andrew Gonzalez explains his multi-year research into designing a comprehensive and practicable greennetwork for the city of Montreal and its hinterlands.- Landscape architect Jake Boswell offers a wide-ranging rumination on ecology and aesthetics.-Psychiatrist and urban health scholar Mindy Thompson Fullilove reflectsupon the vitality of main streets in small-town America.- Philosopher Mark Kingwell takes on artificial intelligence in a series of provocative propositions dealing with notions of life and vitality.-Architect and urban designer Christopher Marcinkoski considers Tokyo's landscape future in the face of significant population decline.- Also includes interviews with the celebrated author of Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett, MASS Design Group's Sierra Bainbridge, and The Nature Conservancy's lead scientist for global cities Rob MacDonald.

Issue 10 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ Iconoclast open design ideas competition, in which we asked designers to reimagine New York's Central Park, fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists protesting the loss of the world's forests. See what designers did when faced with the opportunity to challenge this icon of landscape architecture. LA+ Iconoclast also features interviews with jurors Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), Jenny Osuldsen (Snøhetta), Charles Waldheim (Harvard GSD), Beatrice Galilee (The Met), Lola Shepard (Lateral Office), and Richard Weller (PennDesign), as well as a critique of competition entries by Julia Czerniak.

LA+ COMMUNITY aims to explore how, over time, each of us moves in and out of multiple communities, shaping them as they shape us, and in turn shaping our landscapes and cities.

Issue 14 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ CREATURE international design ideas competition, which explored how we can use design to achieve a more symbiotic existence with other creatures.

LA+ Green explores the green spectrum from plants to politics and from art to science. Includes an interview with Noam Chomsky.

In this moment of seemingly compounding global crises and existential concerns about the future of the planet, LA+ pauses to consider the values and implications of speculation. How are speculative acts understood differently within specific disciplinary structures versus broader cultural perceptions? Whether employed as a means of influence, a method of production, a form of practice, a manner of inquiry, a way of seeing, or a motivating ideology, LA+ Speculation engages speculation and the speculative as world-shaping concepts worthy of deep and critical reflection. Guest edited by Christopher Marcinkoski with Javier Arpa Fernandez, and other contributors include: Merve Bedir, Casey Lance Brown, Stuart Candy, Paul Dobraszyk, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Daisy Ginsberg, Adrian Hawker, Souhei Imamu, Karen Lewis, Min Kyung Lee, Mpho Matsipa, Alexandra Sankova, Jonah Susskind, Ytasha Womak.

As well as showcasing the award-winning designs and a comprehensive Salon des Refusés, LA+ INTERRUPTION features interviews with jurors Fiona Raby, Martin Rein-Cano, Mark Raggatt, Rania Ghosn, and Jason Zhisen Ho, and an essay by Katya Crawford, coauthor of the The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture (forthcoming).

Through selected works this monograph showcases the design work and research of leading landscape architect Richard Weller, Chair of Landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. The book documents the evolution of Weller’s practice from small scale artworks to planning megaregions, including his latest proposal for a World Park. With essays by Jillian Walliss and Dirk Sijmons as well as his own writing, the book explains Weller’s methods and motivations; a unique window on to the ways in which the discipline of landscape architecture has matured over the last 40 years. Through a carefully curated selection of work, the book makes the case that landscape architecture is at best “art of instrumentality.The two essayists in the book are highly regarded. Jillian Walliss of Melbourne University is a contemporary landscape architectural critic and in 2017 Dirk Sijmons received the IFLA sir Geoffrey Jellicoe award, the highest international achievement in landscape architecture.