On Wednesday night, 2015 A.E. Bye Fellow Giorgia Aquilar gave us a very interesting lecture on evolutionary landscapes. The lecture was very informative because Giorgia introduced A.E Bye’s ideas in a very organized way and explained them clearly.

Mr. Bye is a great landscape architect who managed to develop landscape design in a natural and artistic way. I was really impressed by some of his concept because I find them making lots of sense in architecture as well: Bye thinks that landscape is alive and is in motion. He always took natural and human conditions as the universal principles. In his design, he fully respected the landscape heritage: he chose native plants in priority and thought about all of the phenomena of nature. This makes me thinking about the site analysis and material using in architecture. In my second year, we designed a weaver’s dwelling. The site is in Bald Eagle Park. The plants on the site change condition with the season and the river dries for few months every year.”  I considered these characters as a benefit of doing something “site specific”, I used the pattern of the forest on my facades and built a dam in order to keep the water during drought period. However, when looking back after this lecture, I figured that things could have been better if the aim was to respect the site. Instead of deliberately changing the condition of the site,  I could have used the wood from the site and develop the arid area into a wetland.

One thing I cannot totally agree with is that Giorgia mentioned that “unlike architecture, landscape is always evolving, the project is never completed”. From my point of view, architecture is evolving as well, however, it happens in a longer period among varies of buildings. It has its growth and motion in an artificial way. As an art of regret, architecture is always improved from the imperfection of former projects. Maybe in the future,when architecture and landscape become as coherent as mentioned in Biophilic Design, with full respect towards the nature, we will observe an even stronger growth on both of the areas.