IFLA Europe 2017

The 2017 IFLA EUROPE Conference & General Assembly “(UN)LIMITED LANDSCAPES: NO FENCE, NO OFFENCE” will take place between 1 and 4 June 2017 in Bucharest, Romania. This event is the annual meeting of all IFLA Europe members – 34 national associations of landscape architects across Europe.

The 2017 event has 2 parts, one open to the general public and one close for the general public:

NO FENCE 

1 June 2017 –  IFLA Europe 2017 Conference “(UN)LIMITED LANDSCAPES: NO FENCE, NO OFFENCE” is dedicated to all professionals in the field of landscape architecture and to all those having an interest related to the landscape topic. For more details please visit the Conference section. 

2 June 2017 – IFLA Europe 2017 Cocktail & Pecha Kucha session including the presentations made by the delegates of the 34 national associations. For more details please visit the Program section. 

This year’s event will be also linked to a POSTER exhibition with the theme “(UN)LIMITED LANDSCAPES: NO FENCE, NO OFFENCE”. The aim of the exhibition is to bring in front of the large public, the professionals from related fields and the public administrations’ representatives, projects and demarches that reveal the landscape architect’s profession specificity.  The POSTER exhibition will be on display on the fence of the Old Princely Court Museum (Curtea Veche) from 31 May to 7 June 2017. For more details please visit the Posters section.

NO OFFENCE

3-4 June 2017 –  IFLA Europe 2017 General Assembly is open only for IFLA Europe participants (delegates, national associations’ representatives, guests and accredited observers). For more details please visit the General Assembly section.

ORGANISERS:

International Federation of Landscape Architects, European Region (IFLA Europe)

IFLA Europe is a not-for-profit, professional federation formed to serve the mutual interests of its landscape architect members, to promote the profession throughout Europe and to respond effectively to the many challenges of our built and non-built environment.

IFLA Europe main aims are to the promote the profession of landscape architecture at a European level, to represent the profession to the institutions of the European Union, the Council of Europe and to other pan European bodies and also to provide an active framework for spreading information about landscape architecture both within and outside the profession, with specific reference to maintaining comparably high standards of education and professional practice.

The organisation collaborates with the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) and with the European Landscape Architects Students Association (ELASA) and aims to work closely with other related pan-European professional bodies, such as the Architects Council of Europe, the European Council of Town Planners and the European Council of Interior Architects.

IFLA Europe represents 34 national associations and, respectively, 15,000 landscape architects across Europe.

For more information regarding the organisation please visit IFLA Europe’s website http://iflaeurope.eu

The Romanian Landscape Architects Association (AsoP)

AsoP is the professional association representing Romanian landscape architects both at national and international level. Founded in 2004, the organisation is a nongovernmental, apolitical, democratic and independent body established as a natural result of the endeavour for supporting the practice of landscape architecture profession as well as promoting the principles outlined by the European Landscape Convention at the national level. In its over 10 years of activity, AsoP was able to established some essential grounds for the profession.

By becoming, in 2009, a full member of the European Region of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA Europe) AsoP committed also to establish, support, and promote the landscape architectural profession across Europe. Among other goals, the organisation strives to establish high standards of professional practice and also to promote educational and professional international exchange of knowledge, skills and experience.

Together with the other 33 national associations within IFLA Europe, AsoP is currently working on improving the education field within the landscape architecture domain. The endeavour to create educational standards across the European Union aims to assist with increased mobility of landscape architects in line with EU Directives. Such standards are not targeting to create uniformity across teaching programmes, but to strive for creating recognised core teaching modules in landscape architecture education allowing and preparing students to respond appropriately to the challenges of modern society.

HOST CITY:

Bucharest

Bucharest is a city often described as an “in-between orient and occident”. And so it might be considered, as it is a European city with an un-usual structure for both space and building traditions. The Bucharest landscape is dominated by collage, by strange juxtapositions of striking modernity, bucolic tradition (king of rural bourgeois space), concrete totalitarian cuts, sub-urban half improvised neighbourhoods and Parisian ersatz. Its tissue is an amazing outcome of a, already traditional, “cut-and-run” urban politic. It is a hard-to-see city, hidden for the inpatient tourist’s eye and who needs tender and long strolling to reveal its soul.

Its huge patched body it’s scattered by green spots. Some of them are parks “à la française”, some of them are “communist-modern” parks, lot of derelict areas full of mystery and, most of them, cosy private gardens filtered by more or less indiscreet fences. This green structure is also a result of mixing logics. While the old core of the city full of little courts and gardens came from the historical development of a rather oriental city, the main parks are a result of 19’s Century French model both from spatial logic and design point of view. The flatness of its site is crossed by two watercourses. The first is the very central Dambovita, which became, in its long history, from a wild branched and full of vitality river, a sordid canal in concrete with dirty brown water. In the North side Colentina had a different destiny as its muddy water was transformed in the ‘30s in a lakes chain which structure a green urban flow.

Today, this rich urban landscape seems to be threatened by a blind passion for commercial architecture that slowly covers what rests for the old beautiful Bucharest. Urban politics seems to ignore (except theories and discourses) all idea of landscape, patrimony or beauty. The logic at work is one of (too) late modernism, recalling all huge western mistakes of the ‘50s or ‘60s. Narrow functionalism is still on and green space is considered as space and money-consumptive urban function and non-profitable in a city that seeks to show its “western nerve”. But people begin to regain the public space, to use and transform it. The Bucharest chance seems to be more in the vital vernacularism than in the rigid old-fashion planning, at least for the moment …

PARTNERS:

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Last Night In Bucharest