15 October 2002 Landscape students' public exhibition opens

Lincoln University's landscape architecture graduating class presents a public exhibition of its work in Christchurch this week. Titled "Text, Lies and Landscape", the exhibition is in the Otago School of Medicine at Christchurch Public Hospital.

The official opening is at 7.00pm on Tuesday (15 October) and the exhibition is open to the public from Wednesday through to Saturday (16-19 October), 9.00am-5.00pm daily. Admission is free.

Over 40 students are displaying innovative landscape designs for sites throughout Aotearoa/New Zealand in the new millennium.

Sites and designs range from new realism in Parakai, north-west Auckland, and another interpretation of Auckland's controversial Britomart development, through to an exploration of the revitalisation of Christchurch's forgotten industrial fabric and explorations at the interface of tourism and nature in Fiordland with its surrounding support structures.

The students have prepared all aspects of the exhibition from the budget to the installation of the exhibits to the publicity.

"This year's class has been especially keen to challenge the public perception of landscape and how landscape architects and their role in society are viewed," says class member and exhibitor Tania May from Southland.

"It's this challenge which has given rise to the title of the exhibition – 'Text, Lies and Landscape'."

The Acting Head of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, Dr Jacky Bowring, says that landscape is written in many languages.

"Some are design formulas, some are laws and regulations. The challenge is to work critically and creatively with these languages and to be conscious of our own landscape utterances.

"We have to learn to 'read' the landscape as much as to 'write' it," she says.

Plans, models and drawings featured in the exhibition focus on both the macroscopic and microscopic and range from broad scale planning (some of the sites dealt with cover more than 10 kilometres) to elements no bigger than nuts and bolts but which still reveal the designer's intentions.

Community Diary is produced by Lincoln University's Communications Group.