The Landscapists Seminars are short conversations with designers and researchers working with landscape. The seminars, hosted by Ed Wall, provide insights into the unique project approaches, techniques and methods employed by leading designers and researchers from around the world.

The conversation on Thursday 29 May [9:00 BST] is by Lara Zureikat, CBSE

Find out more about the series here and register here.

Tim Waterman: Avuncular Architectures: Queer Futurity and Life Economies

In Sarah Ensor’s essay “Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity” (2012), the avuncular figure of the spinster figures a model of “queer ecocritical practice” and a “model of care that allows distance, indirection, and aloofness to persist and that transforms the vexed concept of ‘enoughness’ from a chastening limitation to a quietly affirmative state.” This talk explores how models of care involving a critical (or queer ecocritical) distance can provide a different frame of thinking for design, based in the idea of life economies and a life drive. Examples range from the 1950s new town of Harlow in Essex to Jacques Tati’s influential film Mon Oncle. 

Bio: Tim Waterman is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. This forms the basis for explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life; taste, etiquette, belief and ritual; and foodways in community and civic life and landscape. He is at work on the book Landscape Citizenships and has recently edited two others: Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert.

Date:27 May 2020 at 8am (NZST) [equivalent to 26 May: 1pm PDT (Los Angeles), 4pm EDT (New York) or 9pm GMT (London)]

Zoom Registration Link: https://vuw.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ocuiqqzkuG9UUOh3j4xmuPXmuDaPovGDc

The Landscapists Seminars are short conversations with designers and researchers working with landscape. The seminars, hosted by Ed Wall, provide insights into the unique project approaches, techniques and methods employed by leading designers and researchers from around the world.

The conversation on Thursday 21 May [19:00 BST] is by Chris Read, STOSS.

Find out more about the series here and register here.

‘Thinkers and Doers’ aims at bringing together practitioners, scholars, students and the wider community of landscape architecture and affiliated built environment disciplines to share ideas and to hear the latest innovations in the field. This online series brings together nationally and internationally renowned experts through an initiative between the Tuia Pito Ora – New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA) Wellington Branch and the Landscape Architecture Programme at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). Lectures will be 30 minutes long followed up by 10 minutes of Q&A. This series happens fortnightly at 8am (NZ time) to allow speakers and guest from across the globe.

The first speaker is Hannah Hopewell with “The Urban Intertidal and other scopic apparatuses”. This lecture is scheduled to happen on Wednesday 13 May at 8am (New Zealand Time).

To attend this lecture, please register through this weblink: https://vuw.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqduqopjgrHdFOBDyVpAnaLNBSq0e9zTHf