School's Out! #54 with Peter Veenstra

School's Out! #54 - Peter Veenstra

Programme

With this lecture by Peter Veenstra we kicked off a by him and Leire Calvillo curated series of landscape lectures that will consist of speakers who have created inspiring, intimate places that showcase what our daily future could look like if we follow a path of socio-ecological transition.   

In light of climate change and global distress, many of us are trying to rebalance the ecological impact we have, as individuals, professionals, and as a society. While doing so, we are in need of inspiring examples; role models, ideas, and images. Landscape architects have been working on these ideas and places for decades, combining poetry with pragmatism, creating sustainable utopias that can survive in a world built on business cases, a world without time, with vandalism, indifferent clients, and ignorant dog-owners. Their work is not carbon-neutral or LEED Platinum, but it’s beautiful and inspiring, it brings people together and closer to nature. 

On this evening Peter Veenstra talked about the work of LOLA Landscape Architects, the well-known Rotterdam landscape firm that is working both in the Netherlands and Europe as well as China. While large-scale landscape projects can take decades to establish, gardens can be built in one season. To Peter, this allows for a more experimental creativity, and a direct connection between ideas and built form, as we can see in art or literature. For the challenges we face, the garden is the ultimate testing ground as can be seen in the LOLA’s projects.

The next edition of the series will be in February, with Robin Winogrond.

19:30 Doors open

20:00 - 21:00 Presentation by Peter Veenstra + Q&A

21:00 - 21:10 Screening of a short film

21:30 - 22:00 Drinks and aftertalk

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About Peter Veenstra

After studying landscape architecture at Wageningen University, Peter Veenstra co-founded LOLA Landscape Architects in 2006 together with Cees van der Veeken and Eric-Jan Pleijster, with whom he researches and designs spatial transitions of existing cultural landscapes. With thoughtful ideas and targeted interventions, they aim to optimize those landscapes in beautiful, healthy and sustainable places. They have an optimistic and conceptual approach and a fascination for new spatial phenomena and have the ambition to design sublime places that are beautiful, surprising and thriving.

At LOLA Peter leads many design competitions and research projects. He constantly questions the relationship between nature, man and technique. Sensory experiences of light and sound and the sense of orientation are being used to create an experience. Freedom in movement and use is always the starting point, in both metropolitan environments as open nature. Examples are the design for Marstallplatz in Hannover, Naturalispark in Leiden and Star Maze park in Tytsjerk and the installation Composed Nature in Dordrecht and Neerpelt. Peter Veenstra frequently lectures in universities all around the world, and has been part of numerous in jury's and curatorial teams. In 2013 he received the Rotterdam Maaskant Prize for Young Architects. On the occasion he co-wrote the monograph on LOLA titled ‘Lost Landscapes’ together with his partners  Cees van der Veeken and Eric-Jan Pleijster.