NZ assignment for award winning landscape architect intern

Winning an international design competition when he was still a landscape architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania has opened doors for Joey Rosenberg. In 2015 he and two other students from the PennDesign team won the Urban SOS student ideas competition with a project called The Third Reserve, which transformed under utilised and undeveloped land in Northeast Singapore into a new reserve where parcels are intensely programmed toward industrial scale food production.

That led to a job in Los Angeles with one of the competition sponsors, AECOM - an American multinational engineering firm that provides building, financing and operating infrastructure assets for Governments, businesses and organisations. AECOM was named one of Fortune magazine’s “World’s most admired companies” last year for the fourth consecutive year, so securing a job there was a big deal.

Los Angeles - part of the Guangzhou-Auckland-Los Angeles Tripartite Economic Alliance

And now, after two years there, Rosenberg finds himself in Auckland, one of the first interns of the Guangzhou-Auckland-Los Angeles (GALA) Triparite Economic Alliance leadership intern programme.

“I came to Auckland because I’m interested in seeing a new city,” Rosenberg said. “But also seeing how different cities deal with similar issues whether it’s housing, transportation, waterfronts or open space. And how we can have a dialogue, maybe even learn from each other and share ideas.”

Rosenberg’s doing his three-month internship at LandLAB, working alongside urban designer Henry Crothers. The pair met through the economic alliance.

“The idea behind the internship programme is to show how we all work,” Crothers says. “Los Angeles is big. They do some things really well; they don’t invest much in the public realm of the city, it’s all very development focussed and development led so they’re always quite interested in the way that we do things over here. And we are really good at doing small, creative, boutique. Guangzhou does big really well but they don’t do small very well and they don’t always do design really well.”

The strategic alliance was formed in 2014 to foster trade and political engagement between the cities. Last year Auckland came up with the idea of an intern exchange programme. Each year one of the three cities will host two interns from each of the other two cities for three months. The interns are graduates with a minimum of two years work experience in landscape architecture or design, architecture or urban planning or design.

Rosenberg studied architecture, becoming interested in the environmental aspects of design. “Initially I thought I would take landscape design and ideas and bring them into architecture,” he said. “But I got so fascinated by the vast scale and scope that landscape architecture has that I became less interested in buildings and objects.”

He says working in a multidisciplinary company like AECOM has taught him how important collaboration between different specialties is. While here he’ll work with Crothers on ideas around Auckland city’s waterfront.