Zirve Eki - ISTANBUL REstate

16-17 Haziran 2010
Gayrimenkul Zirvesi 10
Oturum Baflkan› : Tony Phillipson
Thank you very much Gerhard. And now I would like to introduce our third speaker, Mr David O'Brien. David has 20
years experience in master planning, design and management in a wide range of projects both in the UK and overseas.
He joined Hyland Edgar Driver in 2001 bringing with him special expertise and in urban regeneration, international
resorts, memorial parks and urban designing. David developed the landscape design for the skygarden for number
20 Fenchurch street, the famous Walkie-Talkie building in London in association with Rafael Vinoly Architects and the
royal botanic gardens in Kew. David...
David O'Brien
Hyland Edgar Driver Peyzaj Mimarl›¤›, Direktör
Good afternoon. I hope you are enjoying your trade fair and meeting
lots of people and I hope the fair is good. Well, I am a landscape
architect and I work for Hyland Edgar Driver. And I understand there
are not so many landscape architects in Turkey. So I'm quite interested
in your responses to the work that we do. And we are involved with
master planning, with the waterfronts. We build the spaces and the
squares, and the streets between the buildings. We try to get those
to have a life, have culture and have interest. This a scheme we are
doing Manchester, in northern part of England. It has taken us eight
year as to build this, because we are working closely with the local
authority, on regeneration, creating green spaces, grass, the variety
of spaces for the city dweller. And we want those spaces to be active.
We want things to happen in those spaces, to have entertainment,
Christmas fairs, you name it. There is -- in a city, you gotta have
somewhere to go. I mean, in Turkey, in Istanbul, it is highrise everywhere
and people come down, don't they, to have - to a café, meet with
friends, they take their children for a walk and so on. There is not a
lot of open space here, but there are the compensations. So we are
also working on the Olympic Stadium in London for 2012 Olympics.
Again, we do airports, design and so on. Now I am going to come
on to high rise living. What I am interested in doing today is exploring
with the parks. This is a park in Libya that we are just delivering. Now,
gardens in the air. Why should we have green spaces up in the air?
I mean, what is the point? Is it something you add? You design the
building and then put some trees in there? Is that going to be sufficient,
will it work? Is it sustainable? It is not a new idea. It has been done
for ages. Hanging gardens of Babylon, well, OK, there are reasons
why they did that, for defense. There was not a lot of land and so on.
But these were real gardens. You know, they grew fruit here, oranges,
vegetables. It was a living, breathing community. The kind of landscape
treatments that we might think of in using high level landscapes had
been done, I mean this is an agricultural landscape. It's using the slope
effectively. India, tea plantations, again you know there are technologies
which are very very old that we can start to use in high rise buildings.
This is very interesting, because this is one of the highest communities
in the world -- or it was when it was happening. And I was sitting on
the plane coming over here on Tuesday and I was sitting next to an
Indian child. And he said "Oh, look. Machu Pichu. Do you know why
people live there - or lived there?" I said "Actually no, I do not actually.
It is a mystery to me" He said, "Well, because if you look sideways,
look sideways, and look at the mountain -- here -- that is the face of
God and they wanted to be close to God and that was the reason
why they were up there". If you try and get there, you are going to
run out of breath, you almost need oxygen to live there, but they grew
plants and they are quite happy out there. Who hasn't wanted to
build a tree house, who hasn't wanted to get up and look back down
and say 'this is my castle'? Well, if I would have build that, I had lots
of money and why did they live there? I don't know. Perhaps they just
want to look down on their neighbours and say you know, and there
are some beautiful things if we can get close to nature. You know, in
woodlands. I mean why not do this? There is plenty of opportunities
for us, fantastic. In the city environments, there are a lot of stresses on
plants. In the Mediterranean region in Turkey, it is very hot, it is very
dry and you have to have different technologies, but there is, on one
side they have got a very hot dry elevation and the other side they
have got a great green elevation, it is a beautiful combination. In Paris,
again green in the vertical all helps the city to create a sense of world
being. I think that's what greening can do. They can remind you of
our origins. You know, we lived, we grew up in forests and we, you
know, decades, centuries, millenia ago that we moved from the forest
out of the open areas, and then into cities. This is a scheme that we
have completed for the new Brit Oval Square in London and I don't
know if you like cricket, this is the place to go; it is a green wall
surrounding the back of a building. Again we are using vertical greening
GYODER 99