• Essen

    Essen

  • Genova

    Genova

  • Milano

    Milano

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Public Realm

LAND working with water-based cities

The City of Pisa Award for Urban Quality of the Pisa Biennial 2019 goes to Andreas Kipar

by Georgina Johnston 27 January 2020 Waterfront

Andreas Kipar, landscape architect and co-founder of the international studio LAND (Milan, Lugano and Düsseldorf) received the City of Pisa Award for Urban Quality at Pisa Biennale 2019. The award is part of the reflection on the relationship between city and nature and on issues related to water that inspired the edition "Timeofwater" of the architectural review curated by Alfonso Femia.

The satisfaction for this recognition lies in its symbolic importance: the fact that we recognize the value of urban quality and care for the territory is a sign of the growing attention to the relationship between man and nature; we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way of conceiving and living the city, in which Nature enters as a fundamental theme. The challenge is to 'cultivate' the city of the future, to accompany the transformation of the Ideal City into the Ideal Landscape.

A. Kipar. 

 At the Pisa Biennial LAND presented a reflection on "Water based cities", designing work for developments in three cities: Milan, whose plot includes water as a vector of naturalness and sociality, in which the Portello Park is inserted as an example of social and natural unity and reactivation; Genoa, a Mediterranean metropolis characterized by a peculiar duality of landscape and visible and invisible water management, in which the landscape intervention of the Gavoglio Park strengthens the element of resilience; and Essen, which with the application of the "Green Rays" model, exported from Milan, becomes the European capital of greenery, with Krupp Park as an innovative method of water management and landscape regeneration. 

The approach to the concept of water is now more than ever debated, highlighting Italian and international urban agendas on how these three proposals are a sense of its enhancement as a crucial resource for sustainable development. 

Landscape architecture begins with the 'body', which is the soil, and the 'soul', which is the water. This soul is what activates public space and what conveys nature in our besieged by short-sighted urbanization.

A. Kipar.

The experience of the Water based cities is an opportunity to reflect on an architecture capable of responding to the urgent needs of Italy and of establishing a dialogue with the world. 

On a large scale, the sustainability manifesto is LAND's design and ethical answer to the complexity of urban development. 

The multidisciplinary, trans-scalar and intersectoral work aims to rethink the development of the territory by redefining the relationship between infrastructure, urban settlements and a productive, cultural and sustainable landscape, interpreting the uniqueness of each individual context, bringing them back to a unified vision, recreating a network of human and ecological connections: "reconnecting people with nature". Therefore, nature becomes a tangible reality, an engine for a productive and resilient landscape. The strategic process to create this connection is developed through the research: the LAND Research Lab® (LRL) is the LAND Group's research and innovation unit on trends, approaches and emerging technologies in landscape architecture and planning, which studies methodologies and models to make cities and rural areas more livable, inclusive, resource-efficient and resistant to the consequences of climate change.  


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