2025 Robert Maxwell Lecture : Architecture as Urban Intervention: Landscape and Megastructural Form

Following talks by Jeremy Dixon & Edward Jones in 2023 and O’Donnell & Tuomey in 2024, the Architecture Club’s 2025 Bob Maxwell Lecture was given by Kenneth Frampton CBE the distinguished architect, writer, teacher, and critic,

Mike Stiff the Architecture Club’s chairman opened the evening, before Keith Williams, club committee member and organiser of the Bob Maxwell lecture programme introduced Ken.

Setting the context for the lecture, Keith touched on the longstanding tradition of the club inviting leading figures in architecture and the arts to deliver an annual address to club members. Now in its 3^rd year, the revived programme is named after the leading educator, critic, architect, Architecture Club stalwart and gifted jazz pianist the late Bob Maxwell.

In a talk which swept effortlessly across time and geography, Ken introduced his audience to a rich array of highly innovative projects which largely focussed on the possibilities of major landscape intervention in the city.

Ken began with a look back at the integration of landscape and masterplan through new town plans, specifically Milton Keynes by Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier Walker & Bor, and the unexecuted project for Hook New Town by London County Council

He then took us to the USA before returning to Europe through Herman Hertzberger’s large scale monument, part sculpture, part landscape, part architecture set amidst the megastructure housing of Amsterdam‘s Bijlmermeer neighbourhood. Herzberger’s profound intervention is in tribute to those lost in the 1992 El Al plane crash, when the cargo aircraft smashed into one of the zig-zag housing blocks on take off killing 48 people.

Georges Descombes’ beautiful work outside Geneva undid the canalisation of the River Aire to “renaturalise” it by diverting the river to meander through a new diagrid pattern of berms set to one side of the former canalisation at the higher level of the surrounding landscape. The former canal is then transformed into a linear public park enriched by a series of sculptural compositions of bridges, platforms, archways and ponds giving accent and cadence points along its length.

Georges’ son Julien through Atelier Descombes Rampini, has shown how a series of platforms in Lac Leman, masterplans and public square around Geneva itself can create civic focus within the city, new spaces for leisure and social gathering, elegantly conceived and executed.

To China and the work of Kongjian Yu, landscape architect and urban planner. Yu’s concept of the Sponge City, creating huge city centre urban parks which act as giant natural sponges to absorb water run off whilst creating rich biodiverse green wetlands, is an elegant counterpoint to the vast mega cities that China is building to house its vast population. It addresses very real climate change threats very cleverly.

Delicate transformations to create the Zhongshan Shipyard Park and the exquisite Qinhuangdao Red Ribbon Park through which runs a continuous serpentine red bench perhaps 1 km long weaves uninterrupted, all showed the range of Yu’s ambition and skill.

Ending with Yu’s strategic map looking at the whole of China highlighting soil erosion risk which affects vast areas of this immense land mass, it wasn’t until the following day that we all learned of Yu’s sudden and tragic death in an aeroplane crash in Brazil, the very evening of Ken’s talk.

Acting as moderator during the extensive Q&A, to close Keith Williams drew from one of Ken’s earlier quotations..

‘Today, landscape has more to teach architecture than architecture does landscape.’ …

This suggests a shift in focus within design, where understanding natural systems and the environment is becoming crucial for architecture to create sustainable and responsive buildings, rather than just imposing artificial structures onto the landscape.

An apposite note on which to end this commentary on a brilliant lecture by one of architecture’s great thinkers.