“Landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm SWA was founded in 1957 by Hideo Sasaki and Peter Walker as Sasaki, Walker and Associates. Over time SWA evolved into an international practice owned completely by its employees and collaborative in nature, a “participatory group practice involving several seasoned and talented principals and associates.” This last fact is evident to a certain degree in the Infrastructure Research Initiative of SWA’s Los Angeles office, headed by Ying-Yu Hung and Gerdo Aquino, the firm’s president. As Charles Waldheim mentions in his introduction to this book collecting some of the LA office’s recent projects, the initiative carves a niche in SWA “for experimentation, risk-taking, and the production of landscape projects as cultural forms,” as well as a “kind of design think-tank.” Waldheim further explains that “by choosing infrastructure as the object of study, Aquino/Hung et al. enter contemporary discourse on landscape as a form of urbanism.” This book, a monograph of sorts, illustrates this position through fourteen case studies and contributions from others in the field, including Waldheim, Julia Czerniak, and Adriaan Geuze.
The well-documented case studies are divided into four chapters: performance, aggregate, network, and increment. . .”
Read the full review here.
Posted by GerdoAquino in Landscape Infrastructure on