CITY TALKS: Martí Franch — Peculiar Ecosystems and Martin Bryant & Penny Allan — Afterword: Action and subtraction

Urban and Rural Landscape projects in Spain and NZ
City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square
Monday 19 October, 6pm
Free entry

City Talks is an ongoing series initiated by the New Zealand Institute of Architects Wellington Branch and presented in partnership with City Gallery Wellington.

This October we welcome Catalan landscape architect Martí Franch to the stage, alongside Wellington locals Martin Bryant and Penny Allan, to discuss urban and rural landscape projects in Spain and New Zealand. The night will open with Martí Franch dissecting current and past projects, key actions and topics within his landscape projects sited in the antipodal landscape of Spain. Followed by Martin Bryant and Penny Allan who will frame the talk around the idea of subtraction in landscape and how the act of editing reveals landscape as seen through some of the most fascinating, recent work by landscape practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Martí is the founder and principal of Estudi Martí Franch (EMF), a cross-disciplinary practice whose work favours a direct experience of landscape over any attempt to interpret or symbolise it. Spanning scales from urban micro-interventions in Barcelona through to parks, gardens and what is possibly the biggest restoration project in the whole of the Mediterranean basin, Martí will discuss the opportunities and limitations of working with living material in dynamic environments illustrated by projects including their work at Club Med, Cap de Creus, Girona; Tancada Salt Fields, Tarragona; and Can Framis, Barcelona.

Martí Franch is an award winning Catalan landscape architect who has studied in Barcelona and Greenwich, England and trained in the offices of Buro Keifer in Berlin and Buro B+B in Amsterdam. Franch established his office Estudi Martí Franch (EMF) in 1999 to independently pursue his interest in designing the landscape. Presently, EMF is composed of landscape architects, architects and agricultural technical engineers and works on projects spanning a wide range of scales, clients and functions.

Martin Bryant and Professor Penny Allan are landscape architects with experience both in practice and in academia and currently teach at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Architecture. Their project work includes multi award winning projects in Australia and New Zealand. Their published research addresses topics such as resilience in urban design and urban ecology.

The talk will be followed by refreshments.

Martí Franch’s visit to New Zealand is supported by Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Architecture. For more information on Martí Franch and EMF please visit: http://www.emf.cat/new/index.php?idioma=eng.

ENDS

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