Ravensbourne College by Foreign Office Architects. Foreign Office Architects have completed the new tile-covered campus for Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, located on the Greenwich Peninsula in London. The façade is composed of 28,000 anodised aluminium tiles in three different shapes and colours. Above photographs are copyright Morley von Sternberg. ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE. Words William Wiles “It’s the place you go to buy a bedspread,” says Foreign Office Architects partner Farshid Moussavi, explaining why this John Lewis department store in Leicester is wrapped in patterned fabric. The decorative facade, which is a double layer of glass with a mirrored frit, acts like a net curtain. Inside, the pattern on the two layers lines up exactly, so customers can see out, but when viewed at an oblique angle from the pavement, the pattern becomes almost opaque.
This transparency was not needed for the second element of the scheme, a multiplex cinema. But the cinema is still clad in a curtain, of shining stainless steel. Landscape urbanism. Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urban planning arguing that the best way to organize cities is through the design of the city's landscape, rather than the design of its buildings. The phrase 'Landscape Urbanism' first appeared in the mid 1990s. Since this time, the phrase 'Landscape Urbanism' has taken on many different uses, but is most often cited as a Postmodernist or Post-postmodernist response to the failings of New Urbanism and the shift away from the comprehensive visions, and demands, for Modern architecture and Urban planning.
The phrase 'Landscape Urbanism' first appeared in the work of Peter Connolly, a Masters of Urban Design student from RMIT Melbourne. In 1994, Connolly used the phrase in the title for his Masters of Urban Design proposal at RMIT Melbourne. A site for landscape + design + cities.