The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Thrainn Hauksson.
From “A Greater Crater” in the November 2018 issue by Bradford McKee, about Landslag’s Saxhóll Crater Stair in Iceland (winner of the 2018 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize), which provides access to a jaw-dropping volcano vista while still protecting a delicate alpine ecosystem.
The site, the Saxhóll Crater, is part of Snæfellsjökull, a volcano on a far western finger of Iceland that is the starting point for Journey to the Center of the Earth, the 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. This worn-down cone of lava, 125 feet high, is a popular stop for tourists who want to walk up to its summit amid patches of multicolored mosses, lichens, arctic thyme, and bog bilberry to see views of the Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding glacier cap, which is expected to disappear within 50 years. Tourism is up sharply in Iceland, quadrupling since 2010 to two million visitors in 2017. The wear was evident on the crater’s flank, where the path to the summit was degrading and splitting into multiple tracks, not helped by random, gabion-like treads where the going got especially rough.
The project of preserving the crater’s fragile ecology along with access to people fell to Thrainn Hauksson, of the landscape architecture office Landslag, in Reykjavík. Hauksson’s office designed the simplest thing possible— (more…)
First, here’s the news that Michael van Gessel, the Dutch landscape architect, took his time and a fair bit of teasing indirection to get out last Friday night in Barcelona: The winner of the 2014 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize is the North Wharf Promenade and Silo Park on the waterfront of Auckland, New Zealand. It was designed by Taylor Cullity Lethlean of Melbourne with Wraight + Associates of Wellington and completed in 2011.
The big announcement came late in the day, near 9:00 p.m. Van Gessel, who served as the president of the six-person Rosa Barba prize jury, sat with his feet propped casually atop a chair on a stage of the astonishing Palau de la Música Catalana—though in the handsome contemporary auditorium belowground, not the 1908 modernista marvel upstairs, designed by Lluis Domènech i Montaner, which at that hour was filling for a dance performance of the Gran Gala Flamenco. In front of van Gessel were several hundred people gathered for the prize announcement as part of the 8th International Biennial of Landscape Architecture, which ran from September 25 to 27. The audience included the designers of the 11 finalist projects for the prize; they each had presented their entry the previous day. There was also a large turnout of landscape architects, academics, and students from Europe and elsewhere.
