The conferences will continue on February 22 with speaker Christian Gausepohl, architect at West 8, the award winning international office for Urban Design and Landscape Architecture based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The conference will take place at the Galeria Luis Serpa Projectos, Lisbon, Portugal from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
With a multi-disciplinary approach to complex design issues, West 8 has extensive experience in large-scale urban master planning and design, landscape interventions, waterfront projects, parks, squares and gardens all over the world. The approach of the production of nature happens in two different - but characteristically Dutch - ways. First, by taking a classic civil engineering approach for creating landscape - a logic based on utility and necessity. Second, by being Dutch, West 8 is part of a landscape tradition that confers identity and, therefore, understands the need for creating symbols in the production of landscape. This method envisions a new nature, a 'second nature' of constructed landscapes that respond to pragmatic demands (water management, population growth, traffic congestion) and also reinforce the culture to which they belong (identity, symbols, expression).
In a departure from the old demolish and install engineering methodology, or the current preserve and protect model, they are adding and expressing new natures. Being convinced that the real future in today's debate about sustainability lies not in a political or philosophical dialogue about what we are protecting or how we are going to sustain" it, West 8 focuses rather on how to actively create new ecologies. Creating land and then painting it: in many ways, this is the soul of Dutch culture.
