Three individual buildings make up the church complex in the village of Lidečko. The baroque-style Churchof St Katherine of Alexandria, the 16th century clergy house and a new parish community centre, which replaced the original 1950s cultural centre. The shape of the new parish centre follows the site boundary and delimits areas for outdoor activity. The symbolism of architecture as a processional passage underlines the meaning and function of the building. It begins with the public space in front of the church, continues along the walkway next to the covered outdoor space (with the inserted community centre), all the way to the back porch incorporating the remnants of the old stone wall. The community centre itself has variable layout options, a masonry load bearing structure, and larch shingle cladding. Building the Lidečko Parish Centre was a collective effort and the whole parish participated both financially and manually.

Why is quarter-to-three a better time than four-minutes-to-five? Because at quarter-to-three, more pigeons can perch on the arrows and the digits of a city clock’s face. At least that’s the answer to this riddle-like question offered by Anna Jermolaewa’s photo series Untitled (Good Times, Bad Times). Three unpretentious photographs capture an everyday urban situation, but become unexpectedly loaded with additional layers of meaning. The series title also references a German soap opera of the same name, produced by the private television channel RTL, which has been on air since 1992 and recently surpassed 7000 episodes.

If we are to understand and develop diversity in environmental design it is necessary to reevaluate the dialectical approach to it. Not in the sense of creating and emphasising polarities, but through listening to and observing the resonance of the life-giving tensions between them. In the same way vital stability needs occasional instability, viable domestication needs a certain amount of wilding. It makes it easier to accept otherness, which doesn’t have to mean a loss of existing values, but instead can be crucial for their restimulation and updating. It can help overcome the anthropocentric approach to the environment and decolonise its impacts in favour of new ecologies of interspecies coexistence.

At a remote site with a picturesque view of the village of Peermade in Kérala, India, a silhouette of a brick vault betrays the presence of a small cowshed with a water trough. The level difference of the site is about 1 to 4 m, the surrounding vegetation, made up of many banana trees, underlines the natural character of the landscape. The climate is mostly misty and it rains continuously for nine months a year. A small drain runs through the site which helps direct the natural flow of rainwater. During construction, economy and sustainability were very important and only local materials were used. Avoiding steel or concrete, casuarinas and bamboo were used for the supports.

Some years ago, in the wake of a brutal attack on a jogger in New York’s Central Park, the New York Times published what could only be called a deliriously obscene—though also strangely beautiful—map of the crime site showing two converging vectors of entirely disparate character and movement. Though the result of the meeting of these two lines produced an outcome of great ugliness, the subsequent police interrogations and New York Times reportage brought for the first time a new formal and social substrate to the public urban imagination: the concept of “wilding.”

The diploma thesis deals with the organisational principles of landscape and its natural processes, with the aim to create a hybrid of architecture and landscape. Programmatic content of the proposal is housing, as a representation of the permanent presence of man in a landscape. The basic principle is the fragmentation of standard architecture into architectural units, their exclusion from normal hierarchies and their new arrangement according to organisational principles of landscape. Architectural units thus become landscape; at the same time the fragmentation enables nature to spread into architecture, creating a complex hybrid tissue. Structure of this tissue is divided into three layers—relief surfaces, vertical elements, and roof coverings. A model proposal is applied on three sites differing in the character of the nature existing there; moreover, for each site a specific type of housing is assigned. The Project reacts to the contemporary architectural discourse of rethinking the relationship between architecture and the environment and offers an alternative to the standard ways of city spreading by the acceptance of the otherness of nature and creation of a new hybrid landscape.

As founder of the studio Plandform and leader of the Ecological Design Lab at the Toronto Metropolitan University, Nina-Marie Lister has developed a nature-centric, interdisciplinary approach to landscape planning. Her work spans policy and practice, from animal crossings built over highways, to the wilding of her own front garden, to supporting the development of the Meadoway park system on a 16-kilometre hydro-corridor in Toronto.

This article summarises the concept of a World Park whereby instead of continuing to invest in isolated fragments of protected areas to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity targets, continuous tracts of land are connected with walking trails to catalyse landscape restoration efforts that amount to a whole that is greater than merely the sum of its parts. The article explains the rationale behind the creation of a World Park and argues for its potential benefits as a model of conservation that focuses on denuded lands in between existing protected areas and opening up the possibility of large-scale landscape connectivity that actively includes humans in its construction and management.

 LA+ CREATURE—the third in the LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture’s international design ideas competition series—asked how we can use design to open our cities, our landscapes, and our minds to a more symbiotic existence with other creatures. From a total of 258 designs, LA+ CREATURE’s eminent interdisciplinary jury awarded 5 winners and 10 honorable mentions.

Why it’s nice to have birds and bats in cities, how we can make new builds and retrofits for nesting architecturally interesting, and how to finally stop killing birds with our deadly modern architecture. All of this and more appears in the following article, which probably wouldn’t ever have been written if I hadn’t witnessed a red robin striking my window on that fateful day last April.

The Lido in Bratislava, a stone’s throw from the city centre, can serve as a model for rewilding. And, it can do so in two forms. On one hand, it brought spontaneous social and biological ecosystems back into the old riparian forest landscape, which was previously used for barracks or allotment gardens and now allows informal recreation, grey-economy practices and sheltering the homeless. On the other hand, the sort of 1990’s-style practice of denying and sidestepping regulations has returned too. In the recent South Bank international competition focusing on one part of this area, in their own take on the rewilding concept the developers decided to completely disregard the existing zoning plan regulations.

The Kleine Wildnis (Little Wilderness) in Hamburg Osdorf is a three-hectare area that has been largely left alone for many years—a fact welcomed by both local residents and the Altona district administration. The wilderness is a public park and is also part of the city’s 2nd green belt. This is why our planning process has considered the issues of traffic safety, accessibility, nature conservation and recreation. The non-intensively designed revitalisation plan brings together the conservation of biological diversity and recreation in a green space. Play and recreation areas were created as ‘nests’ integrated into the natural vegetation. Wild areas are protected by hedges made from dead wood and man-made elements create contrasting accents.

Curated by Mira Keratová, with architecture display by Petra Feriancová, the exhibition Environmental Aesthetics displays works by Slovak neo avant-garde artist Peter Bartoš (*1938), a radical figure of the Slovak art scene, whose work has still been only partially documented. Trained as a painter, Bartoš wanted to extend the possibilities of painting and make work that would be absorbed by nature. After 1979, he was employed by the Bratislava Zoological Garden (established in 1960) as a conceptual artist. He worked there until 1991. At the same time he also worked for the state construction company, Stavoprojekt, as a landscape designer for the zoo. The purpose of his employment was, with the consultancy of zoologists, to design the environments for animals and preparation of landscape projects for the zoopark.

Like the prehistoric caves that once sheltered our wild ancestors, an abandoned stone quarry can also become a human dwelling. House of the Earth (Ca’n Terra in Catalan) is located on the Spanish island of Menorca and it is a former Mares stone quarry. The found space acquired a new use with minimal interventions. All the stone surfaces were cleaned and the complex structure digitally scanned. A concrete floor was introduced in the front part of the rugged interior, as well as translucent curtains to delimit areas of intimacy and regulate temperature and humidity. Three skylights were carved in the darkest corners for natural light and ventilation.