H+N+S

A lecture by Dirk Sijmons, a Landscape Architect, Co Founder of H+N+S Landscape Architects and Pieter Schengenga, a Senior Landscape Architect and Director at H+N+S Landscape Architects.

Sijmon and Schengenga shared a fourfold typology of four professional attitudes towards the Anthropocene - landscape professional, landscape activist, landscape researcher and land artist, thereby constructing a powerful 4x4 for landscape architecture to prepare our discipline for the bumpy ride of the multiple environmental crises we find ourselves in. All four attitudes were exempted by recent work of H+N+S including Room-for-the-River projects, Rebuild by Design New York, Energetic Odyssey and Noise reduction park Buitenschot.

Dirk Sijmons is one of the founders of H+N+S Landscape-architects. At the office he was responsible for regional plans and research projects. H+N+S received the Prince Bernard Culture award in 2001. In 2002 he received the Rotterdam-Maaskant award and in 2007 the prestigious Edgar Doncker award for his contribution to ‘Dutch Culture’. His book publications in English are = Landscape (1998), Greetings from Europe (2008), Landscape and Energy (2014), Moved Movement, (2015) & Room-for-the-River (2017). Sijmons was appointed first State Landscape Architect of the Netherlands (2004-2008). He held the chair of Environmental Design (2008-2011) and that of Landscape Architecture (2011-2015) at TU-Delft. He was curator of IABR–2014 themed Urban-by-Nature. At the World Design summit 2017 in Montreal he received the IFLA sir Geoffrey Jellicoe award.

Pieter Schengenga is a Landscape Architect and partner of H+N+S Landscape Architects. He combines his love of the Dutch landscape with a particular fascination with technical matters and the operation of the landscape as a system. Pieter has exceptional experience (and interest) in projects involving water and (regional) design. After his contribution to the Dutch Room for the River policy plan he was involved in the actual elaboration and implementation of the design for a number of Room for the River that include the river-bypasses (a new bedding for the river) in the cities of Nijmegen and Kampen. From 2010 until 2012 Pieter was involved in the New Orleans Water Plan team. His system design focuses on the combination of hydraulics and urban quality. In 2014 Pieter was a member of the winning Rebuild by Design competition team: “Living with the Bay” in New York / New Jersey. From 2018 Pieter works on the design for the reinforcement of the urban dikes in Zwolle. In 2019 he developed a spatial strategy for buffering fresh water in the Dutch sandy landscape.

**Organized by Columbia University GSAPP Urban Design Program.