Waiheke project making a splash on the world stage

As part of the 40th anniversary of the publication of Ian McHarg seminal book, Design with Nature, the University of Pennsylvania are organising a number of events. One of these is an exhibition of 25 landscape projects from around the world that have been inspired by the writing of Ian McHarg.

From New Zealand, Dennis Scott and Associates have been invited to be part of the exhibition and have taken the opportunity to showcase one of their best-known projects, the Western Waiheke Entrance Landscape. This is a 430 hectare landscape (we featured the project here on LAA last year) that has dramatically reconfigured the traditional kiwi pastoral monocultural landscape.

After thirty years we are confronted by a new landscape; both ecological, a massive indigenous regeneration project, and social, housings, vineyards, boutique hotels, and restaurants, a new landscape paradigm for New Zealand.

Dennis Scott’s Western Waiheke Entrance project was a winner in the Resene New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture Awards 2017.

The Western Waiheke Entrance Landscape is also the subject of an academic paper in an upcoming issue of Socio-Ecological Practice Research guest edited by Professor Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Dennis Scott has also just been invited by Richard Weller Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Meyerson Chair of Urbanism to talk about his practice in discussion with three of the worlds leading landscapes thinkers/practitioners, Nina-Marie Lister, Associate Professor and the Graduate Program Director in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University. Kongjian Yu Professor of Urban and Regional planning at Peking University, founder and Dean of the School of Landscape Architecture, and founder of Turenscape, and Dirk Sijmons, Professor of Environmental Design at Delft University of Technology and founder of H+N+S Landscape Architects.

Dennis Scott on one of his many trips to Waiheke Island for our filming last year.