Global Design New York University: Spotlight: GroundLab

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Spotlight: GroundLab - "Flowing Gardens"

Xian International Horticultural Expo

The International Horticultural Expo has become the instigator and hub for the redevelopment of a large area between the airport and the centre of the ancient city of Xi’an. The city is known as the home of the Terracotta Army of the Qin Dynasty (210 BC) and is also a major business centre for the vast interior of the Chinese mainland.

GroundLab, in collaboration with Plasma Studio, were successful in winning this international competition following invitation, with a radical self-sustainable vision for the future. The project entitled Flowing Gardens creates constant functionality using water, planting, circulation and architecture harmonized into one seamless system.

Flowing Gardens - Xian

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."