As the Creative Director team for Forecast, the inaugural AILA Festival of Landscape Architecture, we’re bringing a little bit of South Australian energy – as well as our appetite for fun and innovative events – to Brisbane in October. And we want to share it with the Architects too!
Approaching their 50th birthday and having recently undertaken major, membership driven changes in their administration, AILA is uniquely positioned right now to seize the chance to press change throughout the Institute and its programs. Having decided to inaugurate a festival, AILA has set the scene for a remodeling of the way that practitioners come together and learn from each other. For us on the Creative Director team for the Forecast Festival, it’s exciting to contribute to this optimistic shift by curating a program that elevates conversation over keynote speech, and in which the design of the social moment – sharing food and drink and collegial catch-ups – is just as important as the speaker series.
Landscape Architect’s are playing an increasingly influential role in the strategic development of our cities and regional areas, and in an increasingly challenging economic environment, Forecast asks the question – how do we celebrate and strengthen this role and ensure the future relevance of the profession? And as we continue to navigate and nurture interdisciplinary collaborations, it’s a question that invites response from all design professionals working in the built environment.
With that in mind we (with our advisor Dr Catherin Bull AM) have curated a program of conversation panels that include Architects, planners, public servants and Landscape Architects to explore a series of topics that we hope will inspire many more conversations forecasting the role of Landscape Architecture in Australia.
Having worked on a number of projects together, we have been testing ways to curate engaging discussion that enables genuine exchange of ideas. The outcomes are always diverse, they are often unpredictable, they always involve having a lot of fun, and they inevitably lead us immediately to devising the next project so we can continue the conversation. Often they lead to real and systemic change. Forecast brings these experiences together to reimagine the conference format and we hope that as many Architects as possible will join in the conversation.
For more information please visit the Forecast website: http://forecast.aila.org.au/#about
Sharon Mackay and Diana Snape
Creative Director team, Forecast Festival of Landscape Architecture