Month: February 2020

Creating healthier and more enriching spaces for all. 

Towards the end of last year we attended a regenerative spaces event hosted by Azuko and Amos Goldreich Architecture. This week a video of the event and insights document were released. It was a thought-provoking event with so much passion in the room for making better, healthier and more enriching spaces. Here at Studio 31, we will always believe that landscape holds many of the answers to many of really big questions and emerging research supporting landscape’s integral role in health, wellness and climate change is testament to this but this event showed with absolute certainty that landscape is just one key element. Creating regenerative spaces is a truly multi-disciplinary task and events like these are blazing a trail in sparking cross-disciplinary conversations on these important topics. It was such a privilege to explore the inspirational work of other teams and organisations and consider how we could all work together for a greater good. Our thanks to people like Jo and Amos for bringing such a revolutionary group of people together.

Take a look at the video here.

And their Designing Regenerative Spaces insights document insights document here.

Please share their work and do head to Amos Goldreich Architecture or Azuko to join the conversation.

[Image is a still from the video of the evening so credit for this is theirs]

Hope, imperfection and our moral compass. 

On Friday we won the Prolandscaper Business Award 2020 for Landscape Architect Company (less than 10 staff). Here, we are sharing our closing statement on our application for those awards which asked us why we should win and perhaps shares a little of the values which drive our practice.

Why should we win?

• Because we are small, but we are mighty, we have big dreams and big ideas. We push every day beyond our boundaries and our size to be something more.
• Because we believe that nothing good can be achieved in isolation, it needs collaboration, communication and partnership to create change.
• Because we reach out and connect. We risk rejection and failure in order to form the relationships that will better the world.
• Because we are a company of hope, spreading a message of hope. We know the negatives but what we also know is that we are in a position to change it. We want to be the problem solvers not the problem sayers. We want to spread hope, to convert hope into action and action into change and change into yet more motivation.
• Because we understand the vitally important role of landscape architecture in shaping change.

Our ethics are not an add on but a core part of our business. This presents us with conflicts every single day. We don’t pretend to be perfect but rather perfectly imperfect. We make the best decisions we can, using our moral compass as guide. This means, we often choose to improve, rather than choosing only perfect projects. If we believe our involvement has the power to make something better, we act. We are constantly trying to be better; to review, to reflect and to react. We haven’t got exactly where we want to be yet but knowing that also means we have the flexibility to adapt our journey along the way. Why should we win? Maybe we shouldn’t, we’ll continue our course regardless but maybe winning would add a little wind to our sails and we believe they are sails worth filling.

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Thanks to the judges and team at prolandscaper for putting a big gust of that wind in our sails. As it says above, we’re a small practice with big ideas and this was a moment of affirmation and motivation to help us continue to transform those ideas into action and create real change.