Events Calendar

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About

Join us for this instalment of the Urban Group International Speaker Series, where we hear from Karoline Liedtke-Sørensen.

Huge thanks to Urban Group for making this series possible. 

20 Years of COBE: Rethinking Nature in the City
A talk on landscape architecture from Copenhagen, and the future of design

COBE is a Copenhagen-based architecture office transforming cities, landscapes, and buildings across scales and typologies. Rooted in the Scandinavian design tradition, COBE works across scales and typologies, driven by a belief that architecture is built for life, shaped by context, and designed to stand the test of time. COBE is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and in this talk/webinar, Karoline will dive into the "evolution" of the office through the years, looking at how landscape architecture became a bearing column in COBE's interdisciplinary approach across all of its projects. We'll take a closer look at how the office's approach to working with nature, and how we perceive nature in the city, has changed over these years.

Karoline will trace the historical separation of nature and city, and introduce new concepts of nature in the city, such as Novel Nature. How do these concepts reframe the designer's task going forward? From producing fixed, finished landscapes to setting ecological conditions and steering ongoing change, treating plants as habitat structures rather than visual elements, and maintenance as selective steering rather than suppression of change. We'll try to frame and formulate this changing role of the landscape architect.