WA New Website Goes Live

WA Website Intro Video

Wilder Associates breaks into an entirely new look which is much more video-enabled. We'll be posting video updates on projects, field trips, conferences and events and keep a look out for our upcoming WA Movie! We'll be hosting some live broadcasts from our Youtube Channel and we'll also make these available on our blog post section. 

Please feel free to join the discussion and subscribe to our channels. We promise to keep the content fresh and relevant. www.wilder-associates.com

Walking the Golden Mile

A Visit to Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s Floating Piers in Italy

Stretched out in the bright Sulzano sunlight, Christo’s golden mile leads from the lake shore to the island of San Paolo. An installation, conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1970, provides the small community around Lake Iseo with a unique journey to the tiny island and the journey doesn’t stop at the lake edge, but continues through the streets of Sulzano and Peschiera Maraglio.

People experience the installation in different ways. Some marvel at the logistics of the 3km walkway made up of 220,000 polyethylene cubes others at the stark contract between the orange fabric and the blue skies.

“Those who experienced The Floating Piers felt like they were walking on water – or perhaps the back of a whale,” said Christo. “The light and water transformed the bright yellow fabric to shades of red and gold throughout the sixteen days.”

Despite the 7km walk to get to the site and the 5 hour wait in queues I was undeterred to experience the walk for myself. Though people are encouraged to keep walking I managed to find a moment to sit and contemplate the view.

We are often deterred from the use of bright colours in the landscape, but examples such as this and schemes like the Superkilen project in Copenhagen  prove to us that bright colours are something that people are drawn to. This has given us the confidence to integrate bright colours into a new urban design we are developing on the Creekside in Deptford. Colours which reflect the red brick of old warehouses and the green of the nature taking over derelict buildings and vibrant pink representing performance arts at the Laban Dance Centre will be expressed in a variety of materials in the paving and the building facades. We should sometimes remember that landscape is not just a technical exercise but also a piece of art, able to be experienced in different ways by those who use it.

By Kaja Jedrzejczyk

Rowan Road Revisited

Nearly ten years after the completion of our Rowan Road scheme in Merton, we returned to film the site from the air. Our sister company Survey Drone set out to capture the attenuation ponds in the afternoon sun and to show just how amazing London can be when the sun shines.

design for manufacture

In 2005 the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott launched a competition to design and build a sustainable home for under £60,000 construction value. The buildings had to have high insulation values, passive ventilation and low carbon materials using modern methods of construction (MME). The Sixty K consortia of Crest Nicholson, Kingspan, Sheppard Robson, Arup and Macfarlane Wilder won 3 out of the nine available sites up for grabs. Rowan Road Merton was the first scheme that approached a net carbon zero footprint with its innovation buildings and stormwater wetlands set in 2.6Ha of public open space.

See more images of the scheme here.

Betteshanger from Above

Our newest piece of technology, the Inspire 1 UAV, was out on patrol recently and captured an aerial perspective of Betteshanger Country Park. The new drone captures 3D data from sites and turns them into highly accurate models that we can use to assess hydrology, site context, elevation data and built structures and is invaluable in the preparation of LVIA reports. Look out for an upcoming article in this months Landscape Magazine on Drone technology in Landscape Architecture, written by Peter Wilder.

Walking in the Sky

Wilder Associates recently visited the in Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street nicknamed the ‘Walkie Talkie’ due to its distinctive shape.

As the doors of the very fast elevator opened and we were greeted by stunning views over South London and no sign of smoldering cars below. The space is incredibly open, with a high atrium housing a café at the lower level and a restaurant perched precariously above hanging gardens that flow down over a series of terraces. The space is ambient, so the plants here are protected from frost, but not tropical. This is what separates it from many other internal spaces in London that are like greenhouses within the corporate atmosphere. Here the plants are lush, almost primeval, with cycads and tree ferns dominating the upper canopy and a range of colourful groundcovers beneath. This is what we had come here to see as a precursor to the primordial forest that we are creating at the Natural History Museum in London. Amongst the gardens, a number of small terraces nestle amongst the vegetation and one can imagine this as a welcome retreat in the summer. The only thing lacking in the space was some animation, either through water or wildlife amongst the planting.

The café terrace does, however, offer the sport of people watching set against the backdrop of London’s South Bank. The building, like many of London’s recent additions, competes for the most ostentatious form. So it seems that we now have a series of platonic solids scattered about like a still life painting in the City.

So one can now relax feeling bird like amongst the leviathans of London’s ever changing skyline, sipping our small skinny latte amongst the City elite and pretending that there never was a recession. The Sky Bar lives up to its name and is set to be a popular eating and entertainment venue, if only for the tourists.

By Valya Kerisheva